Discipline makes Daring possible.

Indispensable

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.

Three Freedoms

Three Freedoms

What is freedom, really?

Here’s a possible definition, not mine*.  Three freedoms, each building on the one before.

  1. The freedom to walk away, knowing that you will be taken in elsewhere by other people who see you as one of them.
  2. The freedom to disobey, knowing that you can ‘vote with your feet’.
  3. The freedom to create new and different forms of social reality.

The third can’t happen without the first two.  Not without becoming tyranny, anyway.

These are big ideas, but since our businesses can be anything we want, we can practise them small.

 

 

*In the sense that I didn’t think of them.  They come from “The Dawn of Everything” by David Wengrow and David Graeber.

Creating bandwidth

Creating bandwidth

Apparently human neurons are strikingly different from those of other mammals.   Neurons are the building blocks of our nervous system – our internal communiactions system by which we percieve and react to the world.

All neurons communicate with each other and with other cells through electrical impulses, produced by ‘ion channels’.   In general, the larger the neuron, the more ion channels it has.   Until we get to humans.

Our neurons have far fewer ion channels than expected.   We still need ion channels, but somehow we are able to get by perfectly well with less of them.

The hypothesis is that by evolving a ‘lean’ neuron model, human brains became more efficient, able to spend less energy on the basics, freeing some up to spend on more interesting things that other mammals don’t do, such as imagining.

That makes sense.  The less communication you have to do to support the usual, the more bandwidth you leave to deal with the unusual.   Or to imagine a new usual.

Our businesses could learn something from our neurons.

Standards

Standards

I’m not sure the plumber appreciated me hanging around to watch.  Not to begin with anyway.

But by the end of the afternoon, he was glad of it.   Because by then I’d seen for myself how everything went wrong, and more importantly, I knew he was not to blame.

It wasn’t his fault the ducting wouldn’t go through the hole.   That was my fault for buying the wrong size – to fit the cooker hood, but not a ‘standard’ hole.  Although to be fair I didn’t know that a) there was a standard hole size and b) that my cooker hood had been built to a different standard.

It wasn’t the plumber’s fault that the old tap was so hard to remove.  That was because for some reason the old tap fixings couldn’t accommodate a standard worktop depth, so the previous fitting had been slightly bodged.

It wasn’t his fault that the new tap would have to be slightly bodged in the same way, since it was identical, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that the lever came off in his hand as soon as he tested it.  That was down to tap manufacturers observing no quality standards at all.

So all in all, what should have been a straightforward job, turned into a bit of a nightmare, involving the purchase of yet another (different) tap, some new hose, plus additional reducers and fixings, and of course more of the plumber’s time and skill (not least that of being a contortionist).

Will, the plumber, is only young, but even he complained that ‘in the old days’, everything was manufactured or imported to a British standard, which meant you could rely on the fact that one thing would work seamlessly with another.  You could get most jobs done easily, only the really unusual was tricky.

That’s what standards are for.  To make the usual easy, so you can have imagination and energy to spare to deal with the unusual.

Having a choice of standards opens up different possibilities.  That’s great, as long as everyone states which standard(s) they are working to at any one time.  Otherwise, all you’ve done is turn the usual into the unusual.

No wonder we have a productivity problem.

Gen Z

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.

New tunes

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.

 

 

Leadership?

Leadership?

At this morning’s Like-Hearted Leaders gathering we had an interesting discussion around what leadership is or could be.

It was an interesting, intricate, circular discussion.

But in the end, I think what leadership could be might be best summed up in the LHL values:

  • Real conversations, even if they are difficult.
  • Courage to be vulnerable.
  • Growth & Learning comes through thoughtful feedback.
  • Freedom of expression, where everyone is worthy of contributing.
  • Amplify others.
  • Trust grows in balanced relationships of give and take.

It’s an interesting question though.

What does leadership mean to you?

What does it mean to whoever you lead?

Earworms

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.

Down with management

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!

Sharing the work

Sharing the work

George Stephenson built his steam engines without drawings.  He didn’t need them.  As both designer and maker, he could keep everything in his head, using rules of thumb, jigs and tools to speed up the making.   Every engine was hand-crafted and unique.

His son, Robert Stephenson, set up the first railway drawing office.  He separated production from design so that both activities could be scaled.  The drawings communicate the design to the people who build.

When we first set up in business, we behave like George Stephenson.  We hand-craft each and every user experience.  We learn from each iteration what customers really want.

And when we scale, we expect our team to be able to use the rules of thumb, jigs and tools we created along the way.  We assume that they have in their heads what we have in ours.   So we get frustrated that they don’t do things ‘the way they should be done.

That’s unfair.   They don’t know what we know, haven’t learned what we learned, didn’t design the jig, tools and rules of thumb we expect them to use, don’t know to get the most from them.

We forget to give them the equivalent of drawings – our design for a customer experience, on paper, for them to deliver.

The good news is that most of us aren’t generating thousands of designs, but a few.   Even better, because we’re dealing with human interactions, a certain amount of sketchiness makes things more effective, not less.   The best news is that once our initial designs are out there, everyone in the business can improve on them.

Before you share the work, share the design behind it.

P.S. I thoroughly recommend the book this picture came from.