Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee engagement

Deep and deliberate delegation
May 4, 2020

Deep and deliberate delegation

I re-read this book by Dave Stitt over the weekend, and frankly, it made me jealous.

It is just so good.

Clearly and simply written, sharing tools and techniques I’ve never seen before, it delivers a really powerful combination of thought and action, insight and how-to, theory and process.

All of which makes it a much deeper, more thought-provoking read than most business books, yet still one that prompts you to get on and have a go for yourself.

If you are taking stock of how you delegate in your business, with a view to doing it much, much better, I thoroughly recommend this book.

Deep and deliberate.   Pretty good rules to do business by.

Community (and status)
April 30, 2020

Community (and status)

Humans are tribal.  We know that.

We like to hang around with other people like us.   Who share our beliefs, values and ideally, our sense of purpose.

We can belong to many different, overlapping ‘tribes’ – when I was a student in Manchester, I could take you to more pubs than anyone else I knew, because I belonged to several separate tribes, who each had their own hangouts.

We also like to know where we fit within our tribes, our status.

Status doesn’t necesarily mean being at the top.   We might indeed be a ‘leader’, but we could equally be an ‘elder’, a ‘wise one’ or a ‘poet’.  We might be the ‘one everyone goes to for information or advice’.   We might even be ‘the weirdo’.   Status simply means knowing our position in the tribe, and knowing that everyone else knows it too.

Of course, our tribalism isn’t always a good thing.   And like our other motivations, if we don’t find it at work, we look elsewhere.

So maybe we should offer it at work?

And not just for the team, for customers, suppliers and associates too?

Purpose
April 29, 2020

Purpose

If there is one thing that human beings like better than making their own individual dent in the universe, it’s being part of something that promises to ma

Mastery
April 28, 2020

Mastery

Humans love learning to the point of mastery, where we can start to pass that learning on to others.

We can’t help ourselves.  If we don’t get the opportunity in school or at work we make our own opportunities.

Don’t believe me?

I challenge you to pick anybody in your circle who has not mastered something well enough to be able to teach you what they know.

You may not think it a skill worth mastering, but it is mastery nonetheless.

Maybe we’ve got work all wrong?   We’re making people seek mastery outside work instead of helping them to find it in their work.

Why is that?

Agency
April 27, 2020

Agency

On Saturday, I found a really good definition of ‘Agency’:

“People are ‘conscious, reflecting initiators of acts in a structured, meaningful world.’  They are not simply programmed to follow scripts defined by roles; they instigate actions, often with considerable intelligence, creativity and improvisation.”*

We see this all the time outside work.   People restore whole canals, railways, buildings.  They run clubs for all sorts of activities.  They learn difficult skills as a hobby.  They volunteer to do boring or ridiculous, dangerous things for charities.    Even more so during a crisis, as now.

It seems that people can’t help themselves.  Given the smallest chance, they spontaneously create value, as long as they feel they have a ‘structured, meaningful world’ to do it in.

Of course a workplace can be a ‘structured, meaningful world’, in which people can behave as ‘conscious, reflecting initiators of acts’, but far too often, it isn’t.

Why is that?

 

 

*Erik Olin Wright, quoting Goran Therborn.

Managing blind
April 3, 2020

Managing blind

If you know about Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), you’ll know that people have preferred channels of communication and expression.   Some people lean towards images, others towards words, others towards feelings.

Not surprisingly, these preferences apply to how people take in the information that convinces them of something, for example, whether or not someone is doing a good job.

Try it.  Ask yourself  “How do I know someone’s doing a good job?“

Is it by seeing them do it?  Is it by reading a report they’ve produced?  Is it by hearing someone tell you?   Is it by doing it with them?

The preferred channel isn’t the whole story though, we also have a preference that relates to time and frequency – how many times we need to experience the signals of a job well done, in order to be convinced that the person doing it can be safely left to themselves.

Some people are immediately convinced, they only need to see/read/hear/do once, and they are happy to let the person carry on.

Others need a few instances before they are convinced.

Yet others need to keep receiving the evidence because they are never quite 100% convinced, no matter how many times they see/hear/read/do.

Clearly this has implications for what might be appropriate roles for the individuals in your team, depending on the kind of business you do.   And there are dangers in it, as I’ve talked about before.

It is of particular relevance if you are a manager or business owner, when one or more of the usual channels are not available.

The first part of the answer for most businesses, is to switch to measuring outcomes, not work.

The second is to run spot-checks at a reasonable frequency, which can take different forms.

For example you could arrange to ‘accompany’ someone as they perform their job.   You give notice, so they are prepared, because you are not so much checking what they are doing as monitoring the reactions of the people they interact with as they do it.

Or you can ‘mystery shop’ – the non-creepy equivalent of observing covertly, from a distance.   Better yet, get a professional to do it for you on a regular basis.

And you can give everyone a stake in success, by truly sharing ownership.

The point of this post, and some of the others I’ve written this week, is to show that there may be reasons beyond the immediate crisis that are making you and your team feel uncomfortable and demotivated.

Of course the priority now is get set up just enough to survive.

But there is no need for things to be worse than they are, and soon you will have some time to invest beyond survival.

By taking the time to understand individual working styles, so you can work with the grain of every member of your team (including yourself), you’ll come out of the other side stronger.   And you’ll have showed your team you care.

Here’s the book reference again: “Words that Change Minds”, by Shelle Rose Charvet.    Check out the website too.

Variety
April 2, 2020

Variety

Many years ago I had a job interview for Booz Allen.   Almost the first thing the interviewer said to me was “You’re a bit of a butterfly aren’t you?”

They were wrong.  I was just following a normal pattern for someone with my appetite for change.

In work,  I’m motivated by evolution rather than stability, and every 3-5 years or so I feel the need to make a big shift.   I’m not unusual, that’s how most people like to operate at work.

My interviewer was possibly in a different camp.  I asked them how long they’d been with Booz Allen.   “20 years.”  Clearly in the ‘I like things to stay the same over a long period of time’ preference.  Or perhaps their motivational kicks came from working with an international consultancy firm – if the job involves the required level of variety, there’s no need to switch jobs to get it.

I’ve also met people at the other extreme, who are motivated by constant change and uncertainty, and who will pivot almost every year.

The point here is that even without a crisis, it’s worth understanding your own and other people’s appetite for change.  People will be de-motivated, under-perform and eventually leave if they aren’t getting what they need from the job they are in.

In a time of crisis and uncertainty this is even more important.  A few will thrive on it.   Most will find it uncomfortable, unsettling, but bearable.  A few will find it almost intolerable.

Bear this in mind as you shake down to remote working.  Of course the priority is to get things working and keep going.   But if this situation lasts, or you decide to change your way of working altogether it’s worth adjust things in line with these preferences.

It may well be that moving people into different roles will help them and you get through it better.

PS the man swapping hats with Charlie Chaplin is Harry Lauder, a music hall (variety) star in his day, and according to Gibbs family tradition, a relation of ours.

Switching focus
March 31, 2020

Switching focus

It’s been amazing to see how quickly many businesses have been able to switch to some sort of online delivery model over the last week or so.

Continuing my musings on ‘Working Styles’, here’s something to bear in mind though, especially for your sales team.

To be good at sales, or customer service, or support, people need to be get some of their motivation from other people – they need to be externally focused.

So far, so good.   But the context of sales can vary, and individuals can have very different working style preferences and still be excellent sales people – as long as the context they are in remains congenial.

For example, a good salesperson can have a reactive preference – that is, they act on things that happen, rather than initiating events.   That’s perfect for physical retail, where customers don’t want to be pestered, yet want attentiveness when they ask for it.      People with a proactive preference, on the other hand are more suited to a field sales role, where they have to go out and find clients, or for pulling in customers through promotions outside the premises.

Bear these preferences in mind as you switch to online.   Working against the grain of their preference will be more difficult for both proactive and reactive people.  You could, for example have the reactive people man your chatlines and customer service lines, while the proactive people do online networking and phone calls.

To find out what preferences the people in your business have, I recommend “Words that Change Minds” by Shelle Rose Charvet.   I’ve used this approach many times, to help with franchisee recruitment, and to help individuals identify what they should be looking for in a job or career.   It can be done in 20 minutes, via a telephone interview.

Now would be a great time to find out what makes your people tick.

Learning together – online
March 20, 2020

Learning together – online

Following on again from yesterday’s post, if you know your business is going to be quiet for the next few weeks or months, here are some courses I recommend (I’ve done most of them, some of them more than once).

They could be for you or for your team.

A whole bunch from Akimbo Workshops (Seth Godin and friends)

The Bootstrappers Workshop, ideal if you are still getting your business idea off the ground (which in my case was 5 years after I’d started!)

The Marketing Seminar, will make you think really hard about who you are for, and what you really do for them.  Highly recommended.

The Podcasting Workshop, a brilliant thing for graduates to do instead of an internship, and for experts too. (I haven’t done this one, you can probably tell!)

The Freelancers Workshop, Seth calls himself a freelancer, so you’re in good company.

The Story Skills Workshop, with Bernadette Jiwa, a master of daily storytelling.

And if you’re really looking to use this downtime to hit the ground running later, there’s the AltMBA, as it suggests a leadership and management workshop, that is more intense that the others.

You’ll never be the same after any of these workshops.   And the brilliant thing about them is that you aren’t doing them alone.  The format requires you to interact with your fellow students, to help each other, constructively critique each other and encourage each other.   By doing so, you learn far more yourself.    And they are not expensive.

If you prefer to work on your own, many of these are also available on Udemy.

Last but by no means least, here’s something a little more local, but equally good: Seeds to Success from Anwen Cooper, of Get Fruitful Marketing starting April.  I’ve been working with Anwen for about a year now, and the difference she has helped me to make is enormous.