Delegation – Page 8 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

December 7, 2022

Supported Display

I took a lot of photos on my visit to the Museum of London at the weekend. Some, because I liked the thing I was looking at, this one because I liked the way the display system worked.

It’s a very simple system. A regular grid of holes at the back allows supports to be positioned in a variety of ways to suit what’s being displayed, from a single bronze shield found in the Thames, to a mix of bronxe daggers and swords, to these flint hand tools. It’s highly structured, yet flexible and very effective.

But what I really liked about it was the way it’s been designed to foreground the objects, providing each one with reliable support, allowing them to seem to float; putting each one in the spotlight, so that you can appreciate the differences between them as well as the similarities.

You know where I’m going with this.

With the almost invisible support of a Customer Experience Score, your people too can shine in the spotlight – both as individuals and as part of the whole that is your business.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

This I just liked, because it reminded me of Geraldine McEwan.

November 30, 2022

Where energy goes

As humans, we spend our energy and our creativity on the things that matter to us. For you, as the boss, that’s your business. For your team? Well, they may prefer to grow perfect peppers.

So the challenge for a business owner is how to infect the people you work with (and indeed the people you seek to serve) with the same enthusiasm as you have. Because that’s the only way they’ll agree to put in anything like the same energy and creativity.

Coercion doesn’t work. Reminding them that they are dependent on you for survival doesn’t work either. Money doesn’t work that well once people have enough, and giving them less than they need or what seems fair just dampens any enthusiasm.

So what does work?

Giving them the means to achieve what they really want as human beings in work as well as outside of it:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
- Status – to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

All the things you wanted when you set up your business then.

Make everyone a boss. Blend yourself in.

November 15, 2022

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier

The people you want to serve – the clients you’d like to have – don’t know what you know. They don’t believe what you believe. They look at the world through different eyes, a different experience and with a different mindset.

That’s what makes marketing hard. Especially if you are offering something different from the norm.

It’s the same for the people you work with. They don’t know what you know. They don’t believe what you believe. They bring their own experience and mindset to the way they see the world.

That’s what makes running a business – serving clients through other people – hard.

The difference is that the people you work have to do what you tell them, don’t they? After all, you’re paying them. They need a job.

Except that all too often what actually happens is that you spend more time on watching over them than on the business. Micro-managing. Because your unique definition of ‘customer experience‘ is entirely in your head. Which is frustrating for everyone, and constraining for the business.

So you delegate the micro-management to someone else. Who doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t necessarily believe what you believe. Who sees the world through different eyes, with a different mindset. Who tells your people what to do, based on what’s in their head. Sure it takes a load off your back, but will your unique customer experience survive the change?

I believe there is a better way. Which is to document the customer experience in your head and make it available for everyone in the business to follow.

Not ‘what to do‘, but ‘what has to happen‘.

Not ‘how to do it‘, but ‘how it needs to feel for the client‘.

Not just ‘this is how we do things round here’ but also ‘this is what we believe‘.

So that you are not just handing over the ‘donkey work’, but also the emotional labour of delivering the business’s unique customer experience – the part that really matters to the client, the part they pay extra for, the part they refer their friends to.

Then work out and document how that customer experience is maintained, how you make sure that everyone who works with you knows what you know and believes most of what you believe, so that you know you can trust them to use their own history and mindset to make that customer experience even better, in line with the beliefs you all share.

It’s quite a job to get all this in place*. But once you have it running and growing your business gets easier and easier. Because everyone working the business is standing in for you. Everyone’s a boss.

And not a manager in sight.

*That’s what I do. Talk to me.

November 1, 2022

Delegating care

Long, long ago, a young hominid female let her mother look after her baby while she went off and hunted, opening the evolutionary pathway to homo sapiens.

The ability to trust other people with our precious babies is literally what makes us human. The result is big brains, grandmothers and a propensity to collaborate.

Delegating the care for your Customer Experience should come naturally.

So what’s holding you back?

October 4, 2022

A watched pot

Decades ago, my older brothers were given the job of breaking up concrete in the back garden so my dad could lay a new patio.

They did a morning’s work, had lunch and started again in the afternoon. After an hour or so, my mum thought “They’ve been at it a while, I better see if they need a cup of tea.”

Then walked into the breakfast room to find nothing but a cassette player running.

They’d carefully recorded themselves in the morning so they could bunk off in the afternoon.

Corporate Rebels shared a Bloomberg article today:

“More than two years after remote work and hybrid jobs became widespread, there’s still a stark divide over how it’s going: About 85% of managers worry they can’t tell if employees are getting enough done, while 87% of workers say their productivity is just fine.”

With this admonition from Microsoft: “Don’t Spy on Employees to Ensure They’re Working,“

This is the 21st century for goodness sake.

Have we not learned to measure results rather than “activity”?

I can’t help thinking it’s management that needs an overhaul.

Hint: If you’re a micro-business employer I can help you with that.

June 30, 2022

Love/Hate

There is much about being in charge of a company that every owner loves:

being part of a team,
working towards a common purpose
camaraderie
feeling that you’re not on your own
seeing ideas come up from others – better than any you could have dreamed up
seeing people grow and develop as a result of working with you – not just at work
Seeing your vision come to life.
The feeling of ‘I made this’.

There is also much about being in charge of a company that every owner seems to hate:

telling people what to do
making sure that they are doing it
worrying about whether they will do it properly
checking that they have done it properly
doing it again yourself when they haven’t
telling them they didn’t do it properly
telling them (again) how you want it done
dealing with disappointed clients
performance reviews
finding and hiring the right people
seeing them go
being the last to leave
being the last to have a holiday
being the last to be paid
not getting to do any of the ‘real’ work

What if you could have the bits you love, without the bits you hate?

You can, if you think about where the bits you hate come from.

If you were building an office block, or putting on a play, or making a film, you would have something that told people exactly what it is you’re trying to create. You’d have plans, a script and stage directions, a storyboard. If you were writing a symphony you’d have a score.

These things don’t just describe the outcome, they document how it is arrived at.

It’s not the bricklaying or the carpentry you’re worried about, you know your team know how to do that. What you’re worried about as an owner is the look and feel of the thing, the experience the audience – your client – will have of the finished article.

When you started your business you lovingly and painstakingly handcrafted the client experience yourself, in collaboration with the people who ‘got’ what you can do for them.

You expanded your business first by freeing up more of your own time – by handing over specific jobs that require specialist skills – bricklaying, joinery, accountancy, hr, phone answering. These are generic jobs, with their own rules that specialists learn. But there comes a point where you have to hand over parts of the customer experience itself, whether that’s sales or delivery.

This is where the problems start.

The solution is startlingly simple.

Create a description of the customer experience and how to deliver it, that ensures everyone starts from the same level of understanding as you.

That way everyone gets what they love.

June 14, 2022

Dictatorship

“This is not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

As kids we occasionally questioned the benevolence. My mother must have questioned the dictatorship. Often.

Because more often than we sullenly submitted to some arbitrary (to us) command, we found ways to do exactly what we wanted. Mostly by simply doing them out of sight.

Looking back, its clear that much of this dictatorship came from inability, not unwillingness. We simply couldn’t afford stuff. But talking about this would have meant explaining why we couldn’t afford it, which in a nutshell was because there were too many of us for the income. And my parents never wanted any of us to feel unwanted or unloved.

Still, a bit of participatory democracy might have made things easier. We could have come up with ideas for saving money and priorities for spending it that we all agreed on.

It’s often said that small businesses are like families. And as ‘The Boss’, it seems easiest to run things as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But how much is going on out of your sight? How many good ideas are you losing? How much help are you missing out on?

Dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, aren’t just unfair. They’re inefficient and fragile. And in the long run, unsustainable.

Participation makes daring scalable.

April 6, 2022

The entertainers and the sinking cruise ship

I’ve just caught the last half of ‘Life Changing’ on BBC Radio 4.

It’s a thrilling and hopefully infrequent illustration of why hierarchy sucks and free-playing, experimental and autonomously responsible human beings are the best.

After their cruise ship was holed, the captain hid and the senior managers ran away.

The entertainers worked out something was wrong, then, worried about the customers and the rest of the crew, did something about it. They initiated processes that saved all 581 people left on board, including themselves.

Maybe they were able to do that precisely because they weren’t on the org chart?

March 30, 2022

Almost impossible

I loved Seth Godin’s blog post yesterday.

In it he talks about the gap in customer service between one person in your team and another – or even between the same person on a good day and a bad day – and how you might address it.

One approach is to nail everything down so much that delivery of the experience is exactly the same, no matter who is giving it. Another is to leave it to a great person doing the job, giving them “room to shine. With all the variability that entails.”

“It’s almost impossible to have both.”

Almost, but not impossible.

Hire great people, give them a Promise of Value and a Customer Experience Score, that creates a floor, but no ceiling, then set them free to interpret it in their own way.

Variations on a theme. The best of both worlds.

February 16, 2022

Are there too many managers?

That was the question asked on ‘The Agenda with Steve Paikin’ the other day.

Of course it’s the wrong question.

One real question is “How do you build an organisation that takes individual competences and creates an organisational capability”. In other words, how do you co-ordinate the activities of different people into a consistent, repeatable business activity?

Another is “How do we create organisations that are as capable of as the people inside them?”. In other words, how do you make sure that individual capabilities are not stifled/wasted in the process?

If you want your business to achieve its purpose effectively and efficiently, you have to find a way of managing that addresses both of these questions.

Managers are a solution, but they aren’t the only one. And they may not be the best.