Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee engagement

The others
April 18, 2023

The others

I’ve been reading this book over the weekend, and I have found it absolutely shocking.

Not for any of the revelations around the females of various species, but for the fact that it’s taken about 100 years since Darwin for anyone to actually start looking at them!  Even longer for findings to be taken seriously.

Only 56 years ago, Desmond Morris could opine that the reason women have breasts is because men missed the ‘fleshy hemispheres’ of their bottoms once they switched to face-to-face sex.   And this is science.

Your prospects don’t know what you know, they don’t necessarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.

Your team don’t know what you know, they don’t necesarily believe everything you believe, so they make assumptions.

And so do you.

Most of us are not scientists, we don’t have time to run meticulous experiments, but we could radically improve our understanding of each other by regularly asking 1 simple question:

What is it be like to be them?

Followed up by a bit of finding out.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

An injection of capital
March 21, 2023

An injection of capital

In looking for an injection of money capital that would break their employee-owned business model, John Lewis Partnership is in danger of squandering a far more precious form of capital – the goodwill invested by partners and customers over decades.

Goodwill that other department stores  and supermarkets just don’t have.

Goodwill that could help them out right now, if they had the courage to ask.

Once you decide to be like every other player in the market, there’s no reason to for anyone to invest in you rather than anyone else for the long term.  And every incentive to join in a short-lived asset-strip.

Hold firm John Lewis and Partners.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Thinking together
March 20, 2023

Thinking together

“Think for yourself, but not by yourself.”

My ear caught the phrase on Radio 4 this morning and I was intrigued.  It’s from Julian Baggini’s new book “How to think like a philosopher”  (on my shopping list already, of course).

I don’t know about you, but I am all too often guilty of thinking by myself.   Working things through on my own, running off down blind alleys, diving into rabbit holes, only to end up at a conclusion I could have looked up.

I’d have got there much quicker if I’d talked to other people.

It’s not that other people necessarily know more than I do, it’s that they might, and even if they don’t, going through my thinking out loud, to a group of people with shared values and different perspectives is bound to clarify my workings.

Luckily, when you run your business with a team, you have that like-hearted thinking club ready-made.  Encourage everyone in it to think for themselves, then do your important business thinking together.  You’ll like the results.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Republic
March 16, 2023

Republic

Nowadays we seem to use the Athenian word ‘democracy’ to describe something more like a Roman republic.

In the Roman system, a few ‘responsible’ (and very wealthy) men decided what was good for everyone.

The mass of men (plebs) were eventually represented, but they never got to vote or join in, even though they and their families did all the work.  There was a view that plebs didn’t even need to know the laws by which they were governed.

As usual, women, children and slaves didn’t count at all.

Sound familiar?

You probably left one of these to create your own fair, agile and democratic utopia.

Take care you don’t unconsciously reproduce the republic as you scale.

You can avoid it.

Ask me how.

Giant leap
March 9, 2023

Giant leap

Once your team are running the business alongside you, it’s time for them to own it alongside you too.

Discipline makes Daring and Longevity possible.

Ask me how.

Big step
March 8, 2023

Big step

Repeat your Baby Step and Next Step until your entire Customer Experience Score has been written down and can be played as well as or better than you by everyone and anyone in your team.

This will take time, but the payoff is huge.

Your team will be happier and more engaged with the business.   Supported by a clear framework for the least that should happen, they can dare to delight more.  It will feel more like their business.

Your clients will notice the difference.

You’ll be able to disappear when you need to and grow the business further.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Next step
March 6, 2023

Next step

The more people who know how to do what up to now only you could do, the better.

So, once you’ve got your first section of Score written down, get the person who helped you to teach everyone else how to play it too.

Then, once everyone is familiar with it, get them to take turns performing it for real.

Collect their suggestions for improvement.   After  week or so, discuss them with your team, and apply only those that enhance your Promise of Value for the people your business serves.

That might mean automating some piece of drudgery that enables the team to spend more time with clients.   It might mean un-automating something to make a client/team experience more human for both of them.

Repeat until you have a section of your Customer Experience Score that truly lives up to your Promise and that anyone can run as well as or better than you.

You don’t have to do this alone.

Once your team are running the business alongside you, it’s time for them to own it alongside you too.

Discipline makes Daring and Longevity possible.

Ask me how.

Transforming knowledge into know-how
February 27, 2023

Transforming knowledge into know-how

“Once you publish something, the convention is that whatever you wrote was what you thought before you wrote it. These were your ideas, and now you’ve expressed them.

But you know this isn’t true. You know that putting your ideas into words changed them.

And not just the ideas you published. Presumably there were others that turned out to be too broken to fix, and those you discarded instead.” Paul Graham

This is why composing your Customer Experience Score matters, and why it works.

You aren’t simply transferring your ideal Customer Experience onto paper, you’re (re-)defining it. And then sharing it.   And what you create can be further refined and honed – re-designed if necessary if it doesn’t work or when circumstances change.

That thing you currently carry around in your head can become a tool you and all the people you employ can use to make your business 100 times better than it is now.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

Impacting people
February 16, 2023

Impacting people

If what everyone really wants is something like this:

  • 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.

Then your impact on people is about how much you help or hinder them in their quest to achieve it.

Do you enable people to earn enough to rise above meeting basic needs?  Do you free their time to focus on finding and following their purpose?  Do you help them to master skills and capabilities that will increase their agency and autonomy?  Do you help them connect to a community that values them?

How could you measure these things?

A good place to start might be to look at what changes when it works.   What are the symptoms of that change?  How few of them could you measure to tell you the effect your business has had?

Of course you’ll want to measure these things for your clients.

Remember to measure them for your team and yourself too.   You’re all involved.

Make everyone a Boss
February 9, 2023

Make everyone a Boss

Once you’re all working beautifully from the same Score, there’s no real need for one of you to bear all the responsibility for the performance.   That heavy load, shared among many, becomes lighter for everyone.

Especially you.

There’s more than one way to become a Disappearing Boss.  Maybe the best way is simply to blend yourself in?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.