Employee Ownership – Page 7 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

June 14, 2022

Dictatorship

“This is not a democracy, it’s a benevolent dictatorship.”

As kids we occasionally questioned the benevolence. My mother must have questioned the dictatorship. Often.

Because more often than we sullenly submitted to some arbitrary (to us) command, we found ways to do exactly what we wanted. Mostly by simply doing them out of sight.

Looking back, its clear that much of this dictatorship came from inability, not unwillingness. We simply couldn’t afford stuff. But talking about this would have meant explaining why we couldn’t afford it, which in a nutshell was because there were too many of us for the income. And my parents never wanted any of us to feel unwanted or unloved.

Still, a bit of participatory democracy might have made things easier. We could have come up with ideas for saving money and priorities for spending it that we all agreed on.

It’s often said that small businesses are like families. And as ‘The Boss’, it seems easiest to run things as a ‘benevolent dictatorship’. But how much is going on out of your sight? How many good ideas are you losing? How much help are you missing out on?

Dictatorships, no matter how benevolent, aren’t just unfair. They’re inefficient and fragile. And in the long run, unsustainable.

Participation makes daring scalable.

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?

November 4, 2021

Gen Z

Gen Z are demanding what every generation before them has always wanted – #autonomy, #purpose #agency #mastery #community.

Good for them!

Give it to them. And watch your business scale.

August 16, 2021

Chippendale

In the pre-industrial age, the only way to grow your business was through apprenticeships. Teaching aspiring masters everything you knew one-to-one, or one-to-few.

Once they had mastered their craft those apprentices went off and repeated the process in their own workshops. A few might stay with you if you could get enough work to employ them.

The downside for customers was that everyone tended to make the same, tried and tested stuff for the same local customers. If you wanted to make your mark by producing something different, it was impossible to grow fast enough to keep up with demand.

Thomas Chippendale knew what his gentleman customers in London wanted. He knew that there were similar markets in towns and cities across the country. He couldn’t serve those markets himself, but he could enable other cabinetmakers to do so – with a pattern book that could be sold to both cabinetmakers and gentlemen.

The pattern book specifies the end product – what it should look like, dimensions, some key details. Chippendale knew that of course any master cabinetmaker would know how to construct the pieces. He didn’t need to tell them that.

The result is that each piece produced from the pattern book reflects the skills of the cabinetmaker who used the pattern as inspiration, tailored to the sensibilities of their local gentlemen customer.

‘Chippendale’, but not by Chippendale. A halfway house between handcrafted and factory-made.

Not a bad way to scale your unique approach.

August 11, 2021

What’s wrong with being a boss?

A boss is someone who tells you what to do. Often they also tell you how to do it. A boss’s job is to get more work out of you than they are paying you for.

On the whole, we don’t like how it feels to be on the receiving end of either of these things, which is why we leave big corporates to become ‘our own boss’.

But when we have to work with other people, we have to become ‘the boss’. And it doesn’t matter how much you dress it up as leadership, the job is the same – getting more work out of others than we’re paying them for, telling them what to do and how. It’s uncomfortable. It feels wrong. Especially when we’re a small team that feels more like family. You don’t do these things to family.

It’s also frustrating, because your team know what a boss is, and what a boss does. and they don’t like it any more than you did.

Turning yourself into the thing you hoped to leave behind is not inevitable. If you build a system that enables every person in your enterprise to lead, and rewards them accordingly, you avoid the discomfort and frustration of being a boss. Ironically, it enables everyone to get more work done too. So if you’re focused on impact rather than profit, this is the way forward.

When everyone’s a leader, the boss can happily disappear.

August 2, 2021

The devil is in the detail

Except when it isn’t.

Often, the devil is in the big picture. The model you’re working to. Unquestioningly, perhaps even unconsciously.

That’s what Julian and Andrew realised at Matt Black Systems. After a decade of attempts to turn around their business, with LEAN consultants, re-organisations, and efficiency drives, none of which worked, the devil wasn’t in the fine detail of processes, nor was it in the employees. It was in the model the business was built on – top-down, hierarchical, siloed into specialisms, command and control.

Alternative models aren’t necessarily easy, but they give you the opportunity to choose your problems:

“The organisational design you adopt will determine the set of problems you have to live with. Often the design is considered a ‘given’ its problems unavoidable. We chose to change our model because the problems we had were threatening our business. We wanted a better set of problems.”

Once Andrew and Julian had realised this, it took just 18 months to transform their business to the point where productivity had increased by 500%; customers were delighted, and staff found their work rewarding personally and financially, without killing themselves in the process.

Julian and Andrew could leave the building, never to return.

Of course, business-threatening problems are a great spur to radical change. But you don’t have to wait till then.

You could pick your problems early, and walk out of your business when you choose.

July 21, 2021

Double bubble

What could be more energising than knowing that every action you take contributes directly to a customer’s experience? Nothing superfluous, nothing bureaucratic, nothing but the relationship being created or maintained between you and the person you are serving.

So the perfect marriage of customer experience and operational efficiency, turns out to be the perfect marriage of employee engagement and operational efficiency too.

Double bubble.

What’s not to like?

June 29, 2021

Planning to disappear.

It’s well known that being employee-owned is good for a business.

But why stop there?

Why not make your business employee-run too?

Enable every employee to be ‘a Boss’ with a Customer Experience Score.

You business will be scalable, replicable, durable.

And you can plan to disappear.

May 4, 2021

Piracy

Pirates were a threat to the 18th century establishment. Not only because of their predations, but because of the alternative organisational model they offered.

Here are the Articles for Revenge, a pirate ship captained by John Phillips pictured above:

Every Man shall obey civil Command; the Captain shall have one full Share and a half in all Prizes; the Master, Carpenter, Boatswain and Gunner shall have one Share and quarter.
If any Man shall offer to run away, or keep any Secret from the Company, he shall be maroon’d, with one Bottle of Powder, one Bottle of Water, one small Arm and Shot.
If any Man shall steal any Thing in the Company, or game to the Value of a Piece of Eight, he shall be maroon’d or shot.
If at any Time we should meet another Marrooner [pirate], that Man that shall sign his Articles without the Consent of our Company, shall suffer such Punishment as the Captain and Company shall think fit.
That Man that shall strike another whilst these Articles are in force, shall receive Moses’s Law (that is, 40 Stripes lacking one) on the bare Back.
That Man that shall snap his Arms, or [smoke] Tobacco in the Hold, without a Cap to his Pipe, or carry a Candle lighted without a Lanthorn, shall suffer the same Punishment as in the former Article.
That Man that shall not keep his Arms clean, fit for an Engagement, or neglect his Business, shall be cut off from his Share, and suffer such other Punishment as the Captain and the Company shall think fit.
If any Man shall lose a Joint in Time of Engagement, he shall have 400 Pieces of Eight, if a Limb, 800.
If at any Time we meet with a prudent Woman, that Man that offers to meddle with her, without her Consent, shall suffer present Death.

A pirate ship was governed by the Pirate Council, who deliberated on decisions until a consensus was reached. A Captain was only elected for engagements, and could be anyone.

A far cry from life on a Navy ship, where the Captain’s rule was absolute, and his share of booty determined by him.

As Colonel Benjamin Bennet wrote: “I fear they will soon multiply for so many are willing to joyn with them when taken.”

No wonder they were crushed.

February 2, 2021

Hegemonic Narratives

I learned a new concept today: ‘hegemonic narrative’. In plain English, a ‘dominant story’ about why things are the way they are.

Dominant because more or less everyone subscribes to it.

Story because it’s made up.

In fact human history could be said to be one long sequence of hegemonic narratives, each one displacing the previous one, not necessarily for the better. Often benefiting one group of people over others. Beneficiaries therefore have an incentive to keep their story dominant.

They are psychologically useful, because they help us live with contradictions. But they are nevertheless made up.

Much better to try and resolve the contradictions, and create a story that works well for everyone.

The good news is that inside your company at least, you are free to do just that.

For a long, but very interesting article on how such stories work, check out this article: “Explaining the Persistence of Gender Inequality: The Work–family Narrative as a Social Defense against the 24/7 Work Culture“. It’s a fascinating read.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Employee Ownership