Responsible Autonomy – Page 45 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

October 23, 2020

Watching other people work

I must confess to having a bit of a thing about phone answering services. Not because I dislike them, but because I think they are one of those things that can really enhance the customer experience when done well.

You can always tell when someone is using an answering service, because you get asked more questions that you often would, and you can tell there’s a process going on. That’s a good thing, something more businesses that answer their own phones should learn to do. It would save a lot of miscommunication.

When someone providing this service does it really well, I have a genuine conversation. I am allowed to ramble a little about why I’m calling (the person I want to speak to knows I’m due to call and why), but they still get from me (not necessarily by asking me) the information they need to pass on the message – my name (including how to spell it), my business name, why I’m calling and who I want to speak to, and finally how they can get hold of me.

I can even have a separate conversation about the fact that they provide the service, which is how I found out who they were.

Its a pleasure to participate in someone doing their job with commitment intelligence and humanity. Its an enjoyable experience for me as customer, prospect or supplier as well as for the person doing it.

That’s why your Customer Experience Score^TM needs to cover everything.

PS the company was Take My Calls. When my current credit runs out, I’ll be switching to them.

October 22, 2020

Playing A Role

I’d heard of ‘The Method’ – a way of acting designed to help actors deliver more ‘authentic’ performances by mining their own emotions – “to plumb past trauma, joy, grief, euphoria, and relive those feeling states each night on the stage.”

Until yesterday, when I read this article by William Justice Bruehl, I hadn’t heard of the person who originally came up with it – Constantin Stanislavski – and certainly hadn’t heard that he revised his ideas in later life.

His new idea was much less emotionally draining for actors. Simply put, the idea is to “study the text and articulate what their character struggles to achieve – the character’s ‘objective’ – throughout the whole play, in every scene, and then to simply note what the character should feel along the way.” In other words, to put yourself in the character’s shoes, and follow the logic of the story they are telling themselves. Different interpretations of the character’s underlying objective will lead to different interpretations in performance – even though the words stay the same.

This seems to me to be a useful and doable approach for non-actors playing a customer-facing role too. A combination of discipline (the text) and freedom (to divine the ‘objective’ of the person in front of me right now), that makes for a more fulfilling experience for both sides.

You need a text though, otherwise nobody makes sense.

PS I recommend Psyche as a source of interesting things to read.

October 21, 2020

This was last weekend’s reading.

Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.

October 20, 2020

One percent

The very best question I know for improving your process for making and keeping promises is this one:

“How can we make this 1% better today?”

1% seems like a pathetic target for improvement until you realise it compounds.

Compounding works in any direction of course, so it helps to frame the question in the direction you want without tying down the ‘how’. This takes some thinking about, but is well the effort.

Hiut Denim (who gave me the idea) has this one, for example:

“How can we reduce the environmental impact of our jeans today?”

Tiny, daily, incremental improvement are easy to start, easy to keep going as a habit, and add up sooner than you think to a ‘better’ that’s far bigger than you could ever have dreamt of.

What would your question be?

October 9, 2020

What if it works?

What happens if it works?

Every improvement we make to our business doesn’t just change the business. It changes us too. And that is a truly scary thought. What if we don’t like our future selves? What if other people don’t like them either?

We forget of course, that our self has changed with every improvement we’ve ever made, and yet we are the same person we’ve always been.

Composing your Customer Experience Score won’t make you a different person. It will simply enable more of the real you to come out.

And by bringing your whole self to bear on composing it, you’ll do the same for everyone that plays it, and everyone that experiences it.

October 8, 2020

I’d lose control

The only way to scale a business that is built around you is to embed the ‘you’ into the way the business works, so that everything about it reminds your prospects and clients of you, even when you are not in the room.

That means enabling and empowering other people to do what you do, as well as or better than you do it. That isn’t losing control, it’s just putting the control in a different place – into the fabric of the business, instead of one or more people’s heads.

Perhaps what’s really behind the worry of ‘losing control’ is the fear of becoming less important to the business. After all, if it can get on perfectly well without you, where does that leave you, the founder, the originator of the vision? The irony is of course, that the more you dig your actual self into the business, the less able it will be to survive without you. All too often, an amazing little business fizzles out with the life of its founder. To my mind, it’s almost criminal to let that happen.

Done well, composing your Customer Experience Score puts you right where you belong – embedded into the heart and soul of the business, without actually having to be present day to day. It’s not just your prospects and clients that will be reminded of you every time they interact with your business, your people will be reminded too. Even those who haven’t joined yet.

Dale Carnegie has been dead a long while, but the business he founded carries on as world-wide empire, with his vision and philosophy firmly ensconced at its heart.

Isn’t that something worth giving up hands-on control for?

October 7, 2020

No one else is doing it

Of course ‘Nobody else is doing it‘, is really an observation about risk, not isolation. Most of us don’t like to go first, for fear of looking stupid. Unlike my beloved, who, faced with a marquee-full of Cornish pasties and cream teas at the grand opening of the Eden Project, boldly stepped forwards with the words “My mum would expect it of me” – and broke the ice for everyone else, hesitating hungrily on the periphery.

So the real answer to ‘Nobody else is doing it‘ is ‘What’s the worst that can happen?‘. The best that can happen is that you get results that the waiting others couldn’t dream of, and you get them first.

If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get what everyone else gets, maybe less. Provided the downside isn’t too damaging, it’s worth taking the leap. Then the very best that can happen is that you break the ice for the others, and everyone benefits from your lead.

October 6, 2020

I have really good people

Of course, you’ve surrounded yourself with really good people.

How are they actually spending their efforts? Delighting clients, or dreaming up new, better ways to deliver on your Promise of Value?

Or are they re-inventing the wheel? Teaching new recruits the ropes? Trying to remember what they did the last time that rare, but surprisingly regular occurrence cropped up? Finding ways to get around the software system that actually makes their job harder? Looking for another job?

Every member of an orchestra knows how to play their instrument. They don’t need to be told where to put their fingers. But they do appreciate having a score to follow. A score means they don’t have to think too hard about 80% of the job, freeing up energy and imagination to deal with the 20% that makes all the difference to performance. That 20% is what keeps clients happy, loyal, willing to pay extra and eager to tell their friends about you.

But the real power of a score is that it enables your team to bring their whole selves to bear – time after time, performance after performance.

And that’s what keeps your team engaged, aligned and proactively taking responsibility.

Really good people can be even better with a score.

October 5, 2020

It would take too long

We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that changes have to be big, hairy, audacious, and fast. Sometimes that is what’s needed. But most often it’s not. Long-term change takes a different kind of energy. A crash diet is disruptive and hard to stick to, and if you’re not careful leads to the loss of more muscle than fat. Much better to lose half a kilo a week for a year, changing your eating habits along the way, so you live better for longer.

On average, a business has around 50 business processes that make up its Customer Experience Score, depending on how many different services are on offer. It’s tempting to make that a big deal, to throw everything up in the air while change is going on. To disrupt the status quo before you have anything to put in its place. A ‘big bang’ is dramatic, but as we all know, it rarely leads to real change.

It would be possible to re-engineer a business in 6 months, but I’ve always found it better to go for a steady ‘one-process-a-week’ approach.

I usually start with the simple, uncontested, but often forgotten process of opening and closing for business each day. It’s a good warm-up to get everyone used to working together, an introduction to the notation, and a gentle way to get thinking about how much what happens every day can contribute to the process of making and keeping promises to clients:

When does the day really start? When does it really end? Who opens up? Who closes up? When are the phones tested? When is the internet tested? What happens if they fail? Where do the kitchen provisions come from? How do we make sure we don’t run out before a client meeting? How do you set the scene for visitors? How are they welcomed?

Each week, my job is to ask the stupid questions, get people thinking about the things they take for granted, hold the processes to account against the business’s Promise of Value. In essence to get the business delighting its clients on purpose, systematically, repeatedly.

Once we’ve started there’s a rhythm to it. Review last week’s captured process (always wrong the first time round), then start the next most important process. We move forwards steadily, with the simple aim of making the business work the way you really want it to. The way you would want it to work if you were a client.

Like dieting, the benefits accrue right from the beginning. The change in lifestyle is gradual and relatively painless, relatively easy to stick to. Until suddenly, by the end of a year, you realise you’ve made a radical change. You’re a new business, more confident, more energetic, more fun to be around and able to look forward to the expected lifetime of a Galapagos tortoise, rather than a hare. And looking back, it didn’t seem to take long at all.

Making deep, lasting change is a marathon, not a sprint. And even marathons go more quickly than you think.

October 1, 2020

I don’t have time

The only way to make time is to invest it in setting up systems that mean you use less of it.

The later you leave it, the more time you waste.

Or, as someone once told me:

“Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Responsible Autonomy