Employee engagement – Page 14 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 18, 2022

Octopuses

Humans keep most of their brain cells in their heads.

Which means that our bodies, sensing the world around us, have to send messages ‘up the line’ and wait for instructions before they can act. That’s an exaggeration of course, we have automatic reflexes. But on the whole, if I want to move my legs, my brain has to tell them to do it first.

Octopuses have a different model of intelligence. Most of their brain cells are in their tentacles. Which means that each tentacle has its own ‘brain’. Tentacles are autonomous, able to operate independently of the head-brain, and of each other, yet also connected. Tentacles can even have different ‘personalities’ – some are ‘shy’, some are ‘bold’, and so will react differently to the world around them- enriching the information collected and minimising risk to the organism as a whole.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. Over their 155 million years of evolution, octopuses have mastered the art of effective delegation. For them ‘The Boss’ has all but disappeared. 9 brains are better than one.

We could learn something from them.

January 17, 2022

Chains

Here’s Peter Drucker talking about management chains, way back in 1954:

“Every additional level makes the attainment of common direction and mutual understanding more difficult. Every additional level distorts objectives and misdirects attention. Every link in the chain sets up additional stresses and creates one more source of inertia, friction and slack. Above all, especially in the big business, every additional level adds to the difficulty of developing tomorrow’s managers, both by adding to the time it takes to come up from the bottom and by making specialists rather than managers out of the men moving up the chain.”

There’s a good chance that these observations reflect your reasons for setting up on your own – so you could focus on the customer rather than your boss(es), and so you could have complete autonomy over how you serve those customers.

But as you grow your own business from just you to more than a few, how do you stop yourself replicating the structures you found so constricting?

Simple.

Make everyone a manager – not of other people, but of the process every business runs – making and keeping promises to the people it serves:

When everyone’s a boss, there’s no need for chains of any kind.

Thanks to Michele Zanini for the prompt.

January 12, 2022

The stories we tell others

If you visit a National Trust property, every person you meet is likely to be a volunteer. An individual providing this service in their spare time, for nothing. Yet the experience is remarkably similar across hundreds of houses and thousands of volunteers.

How do they achieve this? There are no scripts. Nothing is prescribed, apart from some simple Covid-19 distancing notices. Every volunteer performance is unique.

What every National Trust building does have is a story. The story of the building and the people associated with it – usually the famous one who commissioned it, built it or lived in it.

Every volunteer (whether they are a room guide, a shop assistant or a gardener) is expected to know this story, to research around it and to tell it. But they can do all of that in their own way, including details and providing context as they see fit, tailored to the visitors in front of them, in their own personal style.

The most basic ‘customer experience score’ is the story everyone can tell. For a business it’s the story of how you make and keep your promise to the client.

What’s your story?

Can everyone in your business tell it?

How do you help new people learn it?

December 3, 2021

It’s me they want

It’s a trap many founders of service businesses fall into. You start off as the technician, doing everything, and at first you love it.

Then you grow your client base, and with it a team to help you serve them. Yet it seems, no matter how much you reassure them that your team is capable, no matter how much extra you charge them for the privilege, clients insist that you are the one that looks after them. Or, they insist that it’s a particular member of your team that looks after them. You get overloaded, and your team lose out on the chance to grow.

The answer is to make sure a new client or a new project starts with one of your team, not you. Perhaps random, perhaps thoughtfully matched to each others’ working styles. That means making sure everyone knows how to make and keep your business promise as well as or better than you, from start to finish. And that means articulating what that experience looks like.

There’s nothing wrong with being relationship-based – I’m all for connection between people – but the deepest relationship you want to forge is one between the client and your business, where the client’s experience will be consistently outstanding, no matter who delivers it. Not identical, consistent.

The more you enable your team to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!“, the more clients you’ll be able to delight, without killing yourself or your team in the process.

November 30, 2021

Reconciliation

You run a business with a partner. One of you hates not knowing what’s going to happen, the other loves that. One favours planning, the other seeing what happens. This is a source of much tension.

How could you reconcile these opposites to get the best of both worlds?

Simple.

Give yourself a safety net. A floor below which things cannot go. Or as Mr Nassim Taleb would have it, protect yourself against the downside.

Design repeatable processes that ensure ‘the least that should happen’. The planner will be much more comfortable with possibility when you’ve ruled out the worst. You can both be open to the upside.

When you find it, move the net up, and repeat.

This doesn’t only work for partners, it can help everyone who works with you to reconcile their individual appetites for risk.

November 22, 2021

Indispensable

It feels nice to be wanted. To be the fount of all knowledge . To be the one everyone turns to when they have a question. To be deferred to in all day-to-day decision-making. To be the person every client or prospect enquiry is referred to.

But beware. Making yourself indispensable is the passive form of being a control freak. An indispensable boss may not actively seek to control what others do, and how they do it, but somehow nothing much happens without being run past them first. The approach is different, but the result is the same.

It isn’t productive. It isn’t very liberating for the people with day-to-day decisions to make. It can easily become a trap for you. And it soon becomes a constraint on the growth of your business.

The solution is to enable people to answer their own questions, make their own decisions. Not from scratch, but with all the benefit of what you already know. As a Customer Experience Composer, not the boss.

Write them a score. Let them rehearse their part before they have to perform in front of a live audience. Get everyone together for regular practice at playing together. Review the score. Adjust if necessary.

Free your team to bring more of themselves to the job, free yourself up to deal with everything that isn’t day-to-day, free your business up to fly.

The music in your head is the start, not the end. Get it out there.

November 1, 2021

New tunes

“Research carried out by Oxford Economics found that it takes recently hired professional workers 28 weeks to reach optimum productivity – which has an attached cost of £25,200 per employee.”

Why is that?

Because even if your new hire has worked in your industry for years, they haven’t worked in your business before. They don’t know what you know, don’t believe what you believe, and don’t do things the way you do them.

You may have started out as a one-man-band, doing covers. But by now you play your own music, nobody else’s. That’s why your best clients love you. That means that no matter how experienced, every new person that joins your team has to learn new tunes.

Maybe it’s time you got that music out of your head? So others can learn to play it more easily and more quickly. Bringing their own personality and flair to the performance right from the start.

And you can spend less time telling them where to put their fingers.

October 27, 2021

Rotations

Circles are an interesting form of organisation. Like King Arthur’s famous Round Table, nobody is ‘above’ or ‘below’ anyone else. All are on a level.

A circle can be the basis of useful mechanisms for sharing work fairly, without the need for discussion, consensus building or command.

For instance, if you all work in an office, someone has to open up each day. Often it’s one person’s job. What happens when they don’t turn up?

You could decide to give everyone a key, and it’s simply the first to arrive that opens up. But if you are the habitually early one, you might start to resent being the only one who has to do this in practice.

Or you could create an ‘opening up ‘ circle (which could include everyone) and do it by rotation. You might even use a single set of special keys to make the mechanism visible, perhaps even more like a game.

There are probably more jobs that could be organised in this way. You could rotate delivery drivers through different routes or rounds, to give them a change and to introduce customers to more of your team. You could rotate people through networking events in the same way. You could even rotate people through Roles to expand their experience and get clients used to the idea that anyone in your business can help them equally well.

The beauty of a circle is that you can start anywhere, and go clockwise or anti-clockwise. You can choose whatever frequency you like for the rotation. It can even accommodate absences – you just jump the gap if today’s person is missing. Best of all, there’s no room for argument. Everyone takes their turn, then forgets about the job until it comes round again.

No need to write up complex rotas, just draw up your circles, put them somewhere visible, and set them going.

How powerful a signal it would be if everyone, including the boss, took their spot?

October 14, 2021

Earworms

My husband works best when there is background noise. Mostly talk radio, but often music. I’m the opposite. I find talking and songs incredibly distracting. I end up listening to the words instead of paying attention to what’s in my head. It’s a good job we can work in separate rooms.

The thing I find worst of all though, is catching earworms – those snatches of song that run through your head repeatedly and with annoying frequency, sometimes recurring for weeks after I’ve heard the original.

I don’t always have to hear the whole song to get an earworm. A few notes will do, or seeing a word that reminds me of it, or feeling an emotion I associate with it.

I find earworms intensely annoying, and avoid catching them if I can. I play only instrumental music in my car, work in a quiet room, avoid radios.

But maybe earworms could be useful? Even desirable?

The vision you have for how your business makes and keeps its promise to the people it serves, is like music – your music that you’ve created. For others to play it, you need to get it out of your own head. So you write it down in a Customer Experience Score.

But where you really want it is in your team’s heads. So they don’t have to constantly refer to the score. So they can create a personal interpretation of it that suits the human being in front of them right now.

Finding a way to generate earworms from your Promise of Value might be the answer.

October 12, 2021

Down with management

I’ve talked before about the application of pin-factory thinking to work that requires empathy, creativity, imagination, judgement and flair. This kind of thinking reduces management to supervision, control, and reporting. Activities that are easily automated, but add little value.

No wonder we have an employee engagement problem, an innovation problem and a productivity problem.

Because we have a management problem.

People don’t need managing. We are perfectly capable of managing ourselves, and do so every day.

We don’t need supervision and reporting. We need communication – a vision, a score to follow, feedback on how we’re doing.

We don’t need to be controlled. We need freedom – to make mistakes, learn from them, correct ourselves, improve how we do things.

We don’t even need to be led. We can lead each other – the right leader, at the right time to deliver what’s required.

Down with management!

Long live responsible autonomy!

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee engagement