Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Efficiency

Overhead
March 25, 2019

Overhead

When you add a manager to a business, you add overhead. So the first effect of hiring someone to replace yourself as manager or supervisor – so you can work on your business instead of in it – is to take a real hit in profitability.

What if, instead of appointing someone new to manage your people, you appointed them to manage themselves? You could use the saving in overhead to invest in them instead, building a supporting framework, coaching, mentoring, training, and of course a fair share of the rewards.

When you want to expand to serve more customers or clients, you can simply add more people.

Those who’ve taken this approach have found the return on this kind of investment to be well worth it.

Work about work
December 20, 2018

Work about work

This graph comes from a 2012 article by McKinsey, on improving productivity for ‘interaction workers’ through the use of ‘social technologies’ for example, collaboration tools such as Slack etc:

The diagram shows that about 60% of what these people do is what McKinsey calls ‘work about work’.

But I also wondered what an ‘interaction worker’ is. Here’s a useful definition I found:

“These include managers, salespeople, teachers, and customer service reps, as well as skilled professionals whose jobs require them to spend a lot of their time interacting with other people. These interactions are with other employees, customers, and suppliers, and involve using their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions.“

The implication of the McKinsey article is that by making these interactions easier and quicker, the ‘work about work’ is reduced, and enormous productivity gains are possible.

I’m sure that’s true, but I think there’s are a couple of deeper questions worth asking:

Which of these interactions are truly productive – in the sense of adding value for the customer?

Which could we strip out altogether?

For me, the obvious answer here is management.

People who routinely ‘use their knowledge, judgment, experience, and instincts to make complex decisions’ can usually manage themselves.

So the really productive question is how to enable that?

Practice makes perfect
December 19, 2018

Practice makes perfect

Too often we train people ‘on the job’ – which means they only experience whatever they encounter during training.

A much better way to train is to work out the likely scenarios and practice responding to them.

By thinking through likely scenarios first, you can capture the essentials you need your processes to cope with before you design them.

Then your team can get used to responding to them before they have to do it for real too.

This means that people can build up real experience systematically and very quickly.

And if you’re already comfortable with what’s likely, it’s much easier to deal with exceptions.

Complexity
November 2, 2018

Complexity

How do you eat an elephant?

“One bite at a time!”

“From a very early age, we are taught to break apart problems, to fragment the world. This apparently makes complex tasks and subjects more manageable, but we pay a hidden enormous price. We can no longer see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole.” – Peter M. Senge “The Fifth Discipline”

If you only look at your business in bitesize chunks, you’re likely to miss the elephant in the room.