Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee engagement

Now share the work
February 8, 2023

Now share the work

Your second job as ‘composer’ of your Customer Experience Score is to enable your ‘orchestra’ to play your lovely music as well as they possibly can.

To help them surface all their habits, and consciously choose to keep the excellent ones, improve the ‘good-enough’ ones and ditch the bad ones.    To show them how you can all do even more for your clients, or do what you do 10 times or a 100 times better.    To help them make sure that your music truly reflects your Promise of Value.

Your Score is a great tool for helping you to achieve this.  But your team will also need plenty of practice and rehearsal before they will feel confident enough to do it by themselves.

And it’s in performance that you’ll find the flaws in your Score.

Nevertheless, have confidence that it will all come together and it will, sooner than you think.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

“Having the framework of Share Promise, Keep Promise in particular has helped me stay on target and be confident that there is a destination.”

The perfect employee
January 30, 2023

The perfect employee

“Creative action, one might say, is at any level encompassed within a larger system of actions in which it becomes socially meaningful – that is in which it takes on social value.

All creative action is to some degree revolutionary; but to be revolutionary to any significant degree, it must change that larger structure within which it is embedded.

At which point one can no longer imagine one is simply working on objects, but must recognise that one is also working on people.” David Graeber

In other words, the ‘perfect employee’ is made by how you choose to employ them.

Reproduction
January 16, 2023

Reproduction

The reason why voter ID is such a bad idea, is that any physical object capable of serving as a ‘unique identifier’ can by definition be forged.  If the technology exists to create it, the technology exists to forge it.

The same is true of a physical product or service.   Almost anything about it that you can consider as ‘unique’ can be copied, reverse-engineered or reproduced by someone else.

And will be if you are successful.

The processes around your product are harder to copy, but not impossible.  Otherwise franchises wouldn’t exist.

But the values, emotional labour and personality you put into making and keeping the promises around your product or service are uncopiable.  Especially if you allow everyone in your team to bring their own self to bear too.

Consistency, not uniformity, is what you’re after.

That’s what makes scaling safe.

Ask me how.

What do you really want?
January 9, 2023

What do you really want?

What do you really want?

I’m willing to bet that it’s something like this:

  • Agency – to make your own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
  • Mastery – to learn and master (even teach) new capabilities and skills.  So you can grow as a human being.
  • Autonomy – to be free to choose how you make your dent.  To do it your way.
  • Purpose – to do this for something bigger than yourself.  Otherwise it doesn’t feel like much of a dent.
  • Community – to do all this with ‘people like me’.
  • Status – to know (and for others to know) where you stand in your communities.   That doesn’t by any means have to be at the top.  What you really want is recognition.

 

You can build a successful business by delivering this for your clients through what you give them and the way you do it.

You can build a sustainable business by delivering this for your people through the way that you enable them to deliver to clients on your behalf.

Do both, and you’ve sorted yourself out too.

Fake progress
December 19, 2022

Fake progress

The Mechanical Turk was hailed as a miracle, a step forward in progress, the bleeding edge of innovation.  But at it’s heart was a big, fat exploitative lie.

The same is true of many of our current everyday miracles – free delivery,  just-in-time manufacturing, ultra-cheap food, computers that fit in our hand.

As yet we have not discovered a way to get something from nothing.  Which means that always, someone, somewhere has to do the actual work to make that everyday ‘miracle’ happen.  Wearing out their own car at 50p a parcel.  Sewing designer clothes in a sweatshop somewhere.  Getting paid to vet Facebook posts in a refugee camp – one at a time.  Destroying unusable PPS in a prison, or down a poisonous mine extracting the cobalt for your phone.

Just because they’re hidden away in the bowels of the machine doesn’t mean they’re not there.

They shouldn’t be.   We don’t need these everyday miracles.

We can work much better ones.

Merry Christmas.

See you in the New Year.

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.
December 16, 2022

Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss and where everyone’s a leader.

“In six months, 300 volunteers from 41 countries worked asynchronously to produce a best-selling book. The Carbon Almanac is now in ten languages. The almanac for kids, Generation Carbon is in 17 languages. There are more than 88 podcasts, a photobook, and a daily e-newsletter.”  From Fast Company: “Lessons from a project with no managers, no boss, and everyone’s a leader.“

And dozens more spin-offs too.  The enterprise is still going strong, and still growing.

The Carbon Almanac was created this way.

With no managers, no boss.  Everyone’s a leader.

Maybe that’s also how Stonehenge was built?  And Çatalhöyük or Knossos?

Maybe that’s naturally how we build worthwhile things?

Maybe you could take the load off your own shoulders and reframe your small business into something longer-lasting that way?

Making everyone a boss unleashes amazing energy.  Especially when you also give them a lovely firm but springy floor to bounce off.*

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

*That’s where I can help.

I’m an anarchist. I’m in good company.
December 15, 2022

I’m an anarchist. I’m in good company.

“My strongly held belief is that we do not need to operate our organizations with a single strong all-powerful leader perched precariously at the top of a pyramid or power operating in politically-minded ways. Instead we can create a setting in which everyone is expected to think and act like a leader.

Can this work? Commonly held beliefs in most companies would say “no!” Many would argue that having “too many bosses” will inevitably create chaos. It’s often, inaccurately, called “anarchy.” Ironically, the idea that everyone thinks and acts like a caring collaborative leader is exactly what anarchism is all about. Anarchism, despite the popular misconception, is all about organization.

When we do get people to think like leaders, to engage in the difficult work of collaboratively figuring out the right things to do, they begin to choose freely to participate in creating the organization of their future.”

That’s Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses.

A man after my own heart. Who helped Zingerman’s to scale from a single deli to a $65 million Community of Businesses by applying anarchist principles to capitalism.

Check out the Zingerman’s Press website.  Or get a taste from this article from Corporate Rebels.

Their newsletter is well worth subscribing to.

If you’d like a little more ‘anarchy’ in your business – whether that’s to enable it to scale or simply to make it a happier place to be, give me a call.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Supported Display
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.

A medieval carved head of a smiling woman in a wimple.

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

Where energy goes
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.

Human Feedback 3 – suggestions
November 28, 2022

Human Feedback 3 – suggestions

If you make it easy for people to log ideas as they go, you’re more likely to get useful ideas for improvement, because its when they’re actually doing the job that people feel the friction.  This could be as simple as a shared google doc, or as fully functional as Slack or Trello.  Whatever works for you and your team.

Logging ideas is just the first step of course.   The next is to review them.   This is where its helpful to have dedicated time set aside.   Get everyone together to review, ponder the consequences and choose which ideas to incorporate next.

Then create a schedule for implementing these improvements, seeing how they affect things, and rolling them out or back as a consequence.

If this is starting to look a bit like software development, that’s because in a way it is.  Like software, your business is a system – for making and keeping promises.

We’ve learned a lot about how to improve software systems while customers are actually using them.  It makes sense to apply that know-how to your Promise System too.

It involves building in good habits of observation, selection and listening to feedback.   And like admin, it works best when it is as much as possible a side-effect of doing the job.

Discipline makes Daring possible.