Employee engagement – Page 23 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

September 3, 2019

Gassaku

Gassaku, or ‘joint work’, is, unsurprisingly, a Japanese concept, where each collaborator’s contribution is celebrated and acknowledged, while recognising that the completed work transcends all of them.

In the west, we’ve become so used to the idea of the lone artist, the single originator, the star founder, that we are almost blind to joint work. Except perhaps, when we watch a film, and see at the end the enormous numbers of people that helped to make it.

Yet all work is joint work. We achieve nothing alone.

Everything we do is built on the work of others – not just those around us now, but those who have gone before. Not just work that directly contributes to our achievements, but the work (not always paid) that built and continues to build and maintain all the infrastructures that enable them.

Time we acknowledged their contributions.

August 30, 2019

Stakeholders

I found this on the Corporate Accountability Network‘s site the other day: “The Corporate Accountability Network thinks that every company, … Read More “Stakeholders”

July 30, 2019

Good feedback

Good feedback is:

Objective. ‘You’re crap at this’ doesn’t help. “You tend to pull to the left” does.
Specific. “Try harder” doesn’t help. “Try aiming to the right of where you want to land” does.
Enabling. “Like this” doesn’t help. “Let me put your arm in the right place so you can feel how it should be” does.
Timely. “A week ago you threw short” doesn’t help. “That last throw was only out by an inch” does.

Feedback is good when it tells the recipient something about the process, because the process is what you have to change to improve the result.

Feedback is even better if it can come from the process itself, because then the person running the process has autonomy as well as responsibility.

A cattle-prod, physical or emotional, isn’t feedback. It’s just bullying.

July 29, 2019

Effort

I saw a great demonstration years ago, which is quite fun to try for yourself.

One of your team sits in a chair, facing away from the rest of the team. Somewhere behind the chair, between it and the rest of the team, place a waste-paper bin.

The aim of the exercise is for the person in the chair to get a ball into the waste-paper bin without looking at the bin. They try first on their own. Then they try again.

This time, the team gives them feedback on how they did. First of all, the feedback is just “You missed”.

But after a couple of goes, the team get the hang of it and start giving more helpful feedback – “Too far right”, “About a foot short” etc. This gives the person in the chair information they can actually use to adjust the only thing they can control – how the ball leaves their hand.

The next thing you know, the ball lands in the waste paper bin.

Effort, with feedback, is what actually gets results.

So if you want to improve results, it makes sense to improve the effort that goes into them. And to do that you need to know where you can make adjustments, and get the right kind of feedback on any adjustments you make.

“You missed.” doesn’t cut it.

Thanks to Graham Williams for the memorable demonstration.

July 24, 2019

One year later.

Aged 11, late on a Tuesday night, and into the morning, I watched my dad run the payroll for the civil engineering firm he worked for.

I learned two things on that ‘take your daughter to work’ evening.

First, that computing wasn’t scary or even difficult, and the interesting bits were the bits the men did. Second, how fairness trumped everything for my dad.

My dad did this weekly overnight run for years, on his own. Not because it was scheduled that way, but because his peers always gave him the information late.

But no matter how late the inputs came in, the output was the men’s pay packets, and they needed them on Thursday morning, come what may. And as data processing manager, my dad saw at as his responsibility to make sure that happened, come what may.

Now of course, I question some of this. What did he do to try and improve the schedule? Did the company see him as a mug? But still I think of his favourite question – “What would be fair?”

What lessons did your dad teach you?

What are you teaching your daughters?

July 22, 2019

What makes the best process? Everyone.

The best process is one that everyone will use and improve of their own accord, because it helps them to achieve what they want:

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master 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’.

The easiest way to achieve that is to involve them in its design, right from the start.

July 19, 2019

What makes a good Process? Let the person be the judge

A good process is a prompt, not a prescription. Like a musical score, or a set of building drawings, it tells people what to produce, not how to do it – they already know that, that’s why you hired them.

That means you can leave the details of execution and judgement to the person running the process. You don’t need to spell out every decision, or identify every possible scenario, or include every last detail of the ‘how to’.

You’re not programming a robot, you’re supporting an intelligent human being to take responsibility and use their own skill, experience, empathy, creativity and judgement to deliver what they, as a part of the business, have promised to the people the business serves.

So to recap, a good process is:

clear about the outcome it is designed to achieve
the responsibility of a single role, ensuring all required resources are available when and where they are needed
both map and compass, helping the person running it to get to the right destination in all circumstances – even those you couldn’t predict
a prompt, not a prescription

These things make for a process that people will actually use; that doesn’t need to be changed with every new piece of software or equipment; that is easy for new people to learn and even internalise, that allows the person responsible to ‘just get on with it’.

A process that is as simple as possible, but no simpler.

June 21, 2019

Why do I need good people if I have process? Evolution.

Why do I need good people if I have process?

No process can be designed to deal with every possible scenario, exception or eventuality.

Without good people a process-based business gradually fossilises and becomes irrelevant, or worse, gets completely out of step with its environment.

Good people can handle exceptions appropriately when they occur. They can also identify when those exceptions are due to environmental changes that need to be dealt with by adjusting the process.

Good people spark off constraints (such as a process), they ad-lib, improvise, invent workarounds, dream up ridiculous scenarios that open up new opportunities.

With a solid framework to play in, good people bring a business to life – they make it human.

June 20, 2019

Why do I need process if I have good people? Detachment

Why do I need process if I have good people?

As Japanese businesses know well, process embodies the ‘thing’ a group of people are working on – whether that’s a play, a car, a building or a service.

This allows a certain level of separation between ‘what I am trying to achieve’ and ‘who I am’, which makes it much easier for everyone involved to discuss and agree improvements, because it’s ‘the thing’ that’s being judged, not ‘me’.

Free from the fear of personal criticism, your good people can eagerly look for ways to make things better.

May 16, 2019

Oh no! What have I done?

I thought, as the Head of Research completed his 20 minute rant on why he hated the IT department; how he thought we were all a waste of space and how he would only use us because he had no choice.

It was my second day in my new job, as part of the IT team supporting the Research Division. I’d already had to find my desk from the gloomy basement of a building half a mile away, then bring it back to the portakabin we called an office.

And now this – our customers hated us!

But in the next breath the Head of Research taught me one of the most valuable lessons of my working life. He gave us an overview of the process by which his team worked to discover a new drug.

My Head of Research was very public in his rant, but thankfully he was equally public in setting context.

“If that’s what you’re trying to do”, I thought, “I can see where I can help.”

A more common reaction by a business leader to her team’s inability to do things ‘the way she wants’ is to micro-manage them, imposing an ever more detailed level of instruction that is expensive to implement and leaves them feeling squashed, hampered and resentful, and herself no more satisfied than before.

The answer isn’t more detail, its context.

Most people in a job know how to do that job well. What they lack is the context in which they are doing it – where a particular day-to-day activity fits into the process of delivering a promise to a customer. In other words, why they are doing it, why they are doing it then and how that fits with what the rest of the team are doing.

Given the context, and responsibility for their part in delivering it, people will go further than delivery, they’ll find ways to improve things that you would never have thought of.

Of course, human beings can’t operate without context, so left without one, they’ll create their own.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee engagement