Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee engagement

Lynchpin – from the other side
September 1, 2023

Lynchpin – from the other side

Being a lynchpin in someone else’s business is a good career strategy.

If you are the someone else whose business it is, you might want to think about whether it’s a good business strategy.

A Customer Experience Score isn’t just for capturing your expertise, although that’s where it usually starts.

It can get you up from over that barrel too, by capturing others’ expertise.

Then you can make everyone a lynchpin in your business for the right reason.

Because of what they do, and how, rather than what they know.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

Lynchpin
August 31, 2023

Lynchpin

You are the expert.  The one everyone turns to for answers to the difficult questions.  When you’re not there, the team notices.   They’re always pleased to have you back.

Being a lynchpin in someone else’s business is a good career strategy.

Being the lynchpin in your own business is dangerous.

When it’s your business, your dent in the universe, the last thing you want is to keep your expertise to yourself.

Share it with a Customer Experience Score.

Make everyone a lynchpin.

Grow your dent.

That’s what the universe needs.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

Daring
August 30, 2023

Daring

 

“10 times is easier than 2 times” by Dan Sullivan and Dr Benjamin Hardy is by no means a how-to book, but it is a very useful book.

I’ve heard of the basic premise before – that radical change is paradoxically easier than incremental change, because it makes you think completely outside the box about how you might get there.   For me, that intersects nicely with Category Pirates thinking, where you stop competing with everyone else in a particular category, and create a completely new one for yourself.

What was new for me was the idea of applying this thinking repeatedly in your life and in your business.  And not just you.  Your team too.   Which reminded me of Derek Sivers’ story of recruiting his own replacement for a job, before he announced his intention to leave.

This might seem a long way from my idea of a Customer Experience Score.  A well-documented and well-rehearsed ‘what we do round here’.

It isn’t.

Creating the Customer Experience Score for your business unlocks the first 10x, because it reminds you what your business is here to do; it forces you to think about Roles (which goes even further than ‘who not how’), and it makes you think completely differently about how you manage it.

It enables you to Disappear as a Boss.  It makes you create a self-managing business.

Once you’ve done that,  it’s easier to 10x through rapid growth (say 40%) per year, or by creating 10 instances of the business (by franchising, for example).

And now you have a Customer Experience Score written down it becomes easier to 10x again.

All you have to do, is ask at every Group Practice: ‘How do we make this 10x better?‘

The Score will show you what to change and how.  Which makes doing the change even easier.

 

Discipline really does make Daring possible.

The hard part is daring in the first place.

 

Letting go of the tiger
August 16, 2023

Letting go of the tiger

During that tiger-riding phase of growing your business, when you’re growing fast, when new opportunities are coming at you thick and fast, and it feels right to take as many of them as you can; it can feel like everything is out of control.  It can feel like nothing is working as it should, so you have to be everywhere, supervising everything, checking everything, or the tiger will run away with you.

You might think that this would be the worst time to start writing down your Customer Experience Score.

You’d be wrong.

Because, by giving yourself space to get your music out of your head, you also give yourself space to think about how ‘doing things right’ can be made easier to achieve.  Sometimes ridiculously so, with a ridiculously simple change, such as creating a Prop for others to use that literally helps them see through your eyes.

Because, as you write down what till now has only been playing inside your head, you see how the part you wrote for the violins is very close to what the violas will need, and the oboes, and with a few more tweaks, the clarinets.  Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is much smaller than you thought.

And because, as you write the first few parts, and see how easy it is to get your Orchestra to play them beautifully, even when you’re not in the room, you realise that the next part you write is likely to work just as well, and the one after that, and the one after that.   Suddenly, the job of getting it all down is far less urgent than you thought.

And so you realise that you can loosen your hold.  That the tiger isn’t going to run away with you.  That you can spend time building her a generous and beuatiful reserve in which she can flourish.

You’ll never be done of course, but now you know how easy it is, you can enlist your team to help you.

And once they know as much as you do about how your business should work to make and keep its promises to customers, you can step back and enjoy watching your tiger become a streak.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

It also makes it easier.

Ask me how.

 

 

 

All in it together
August 11, 2023

All in it together

Mintzberg’s continuum of management

Of course the fundamental problem with adopting any of these ‘nicer’ forms of management, is that the underlying asymmetries of power, earnings and value productivity are all still there.

And when push comes to shove, it most often turns out that we’re not ‘all in it together’.

Workers are not ‘family’.

We can be thrown out on our ear.

So it’s no surprise that many people distrust the language of ‘nice’ management.

No surprise that I’m a firm believer in employee ownership.

No surprise that I think the best way to prepare your team to own your business is to get them running it alongside you first.

And that the best time to start is while you’re still small enough to adapt.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Getting people to do what needs doing
August 10, 2023

Getting people to do what needs doing

When I was in infant school, I used to play with my friends.  We’d pretend to be characters in a story, then play-act the story, making it up as we went along.    We’d decide who was going to be who, then start with a scenario from our story.  We never knew how the story was going to end, or even where it would go next.   We’d discuss that between ourselves as we play-acted – ‘what if you do this, then I’ll do this, and she can do that’.  We always agreed on something mutually satisfying to all parties, and so ended up with a very satisfying play, that would often extend over multiple playtimes.

We played other, more formal games too – skipping – with two people turning the rope, and everyone taking a turn to jump in and do tricks; or French skipping, where we each took turns to make a kind of cat’s cradle out elastic held taut between two people’s ankles.

Whether though consultation and improvisation, or by using a shared set of rules, we collaborated to produce a shared outcome we were all happy with.

What we didn’t realise, couldn’t realise at that age, was that what we were actually doing was getting each other to do what needed doing.

In other words, management.

Nowadays we tend to think of management as a mostly top-down affair.   Imposed in the belief that people a) won’t work unless they’re made to, and b) need to be surveilled to make sure they do. “Getting [other] people to do what needs doing”.

That’s a very 18th century view, based on a fundamental and very apparent asymmetry of power.

The asymmetry is still there, but many organisations have found more equitable ways to get people to do what needs to be done:

And seems that the further to the right, the better the performance as a whole.  Although most organisations I’ve worked in, have barely made it past a ‘participative’ style.

Personally, I think this diagram should look more like this:

Which is why The Disappearing Boss is actually about making everyone a Boss.

But then, I never did like games where someone was ‘in charge’.

Not even when it was meant to be me.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

HT to Seth Godin for the prompt.

I never thought I’d say this…
August 9, 2023

I never thought I’d say this…

“I enjoyed hoovering this morning.”

Perhaps it’s because I’ve had months of things being a bit upside-down, a bit chaotic, not running as smoothly as I’d like.

Of having too much to do.

But then I sorted things out.

And today it was good to get back to low-level but regular interventions.

 

Perhaps you don’t think you’d ever say this:

“I’m enjoying being away from my business most days.”

If you’ve had years of things being a bit upside-down, a bit chaotic, not running as smoothly as you’d like.

Of being too much in demand by your team.

Of bearing all the responsibility for what your customers experience.

 

Writing down your Customer Experience Score will get everything sorted out.

So you can get your team running your business alongside you, and move on to low-level but regular interventions.

And enjoy them too.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

They are not you
August 4, 2023

They are not you

There’s a very good reason why, as a Boss, you might balk at writing down your Customer Experience Score.

It’s not your style.

As the founder of your own small business, there’s a good chance you are a proactive, internally motivated, independent, options-oriented person.  You probably hate the idea of following someone else’s instructions.   After all, that may be a good part of why you set up on your own in the first place.  To follow your own rules, do what you think is right, try out different ways of doing things.

Your style is brilliant for setting up a new venture, you’re happy to experiment until you get your offer and your customer experience right.  And as long as its just you delivering it, things are fine.

The problems start to come as you take on new people, not to do the things you probably shouldn’t do, like bookkeeping or HR, or health and safety, but to act as if they were you in looking after prospects and clients.

But they are not you.

They don’t know what you know, they don’t have the history of how you got here, they don’t have your muscle memory of how to do things, and they almost certainly don’t work in your style.

Some of them will be more reactive than proactive.  Some will be more procedures-oriented – they will be more comfortable following a process.  Some will be more externally motivated – they will care more about what others think of them, about what you think of them.

None of this means they can’t do the job of looking after customers as well as you.  Some will do it even better than you.   It just means they won’t do it in exactly the same way as you, and they can’t learn how to in the same way you did – by working through it.

So, since like most of us, you are probably also a ‘my rules for me, my rules for you’ kind of person – what’s good for you is good for them – you assume that your people will just get in on with it.   That having seen you do it, they’ll be able to do it themselves – exactly as you do.   That they won’t want ‘to follow other people’s instructions’.  And at the same time you worry that they will want to put their own spin on it, to do it their own way, not yours.

And that your clients wouldn’t like it if they did.

But that’s just not true.

This is not a judgement on you.  This is just how it is.  People are different, in interesting ways that can enhance or diminish the experience for your clients.

You want to minimise the possibility of diminishing, but with ‘my way or the highway’ you minimise the possibility of enhancing too.

A much more satisfying approach is to get your vision of your ideal customer experience out of your head, and onto ‘paper’, not as ‘instructions’, but as a guide, like music, what I call a ‘Customer Experience Score’.

A Score that doesn’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, or tell people what to do in excruciating detail.   That doesn’t dictate their every move, but tells them clearly and simply, visually, what has to happen, when, for the customer, leaving the details of execution to them.

The good news is that as an options person, you quite like setting up processes, you just don’t like following them.   So this job is perfect for you.

And when you’re done, you can share the work of caring for customers with more of your team, safe in the knowledge that they won’t go wrong, but they can be more right.

You’ll all be happier for it.

And so will your customers.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.