Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The team’s view.
September 8, 2023

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The team’s view.

‘The Boss’ is a monster.

It makes us Hyde when we want to be Jekyll.

It makes us owls when we want to be flowers.

It makes us angry and resentful when we want to please.

It makes us defensive when we want to improve.

It makes us sullen when we want to co-operate.

It makes us passive when we want to be proactive.

It makes us jobsworth’s when we want to take responsibility.

It makes us dot i’s and cross t’s when we want to be making a dent in the world. A dent that matters.

We can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. We spend all day watching it, second-guessing how it feels, how it will react, covering our backs by passing jobs up. It feels like we care more about ‘The Boss’ than we do about our clients.

It’s everything we hate about being employees – the workflows, the time-sheets, the endless check-ins, the inability to fix things we know are wrong, never getting to see the big picture – everything that gets in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stops us focussing on what really matters – the client.

No wonder we can’t wait to get away of an evening.

‘The Boss’ is a monster.

 

We know exactly who it is.  And we don’t care who knows it.

 

It’s not a monster.

It’s just a gap.

When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.

And everyone will be free.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The founder’s view.
September 7, 2023

What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The founder’s view.

‘The Boss’ is a monster!

It makes me Hyde when I want to be Jekyll.

It makes me owl when I want to be flowers.

It makes me angry and distrustful, when I want to inspire.

It makes me nit-pick when I want to mentor.

It makes me micro-manage when I want to delegate.

It makes me control when I want to lead.

It makes me focus on the day-to-day when I want to make dent in the universe. A dent that matters.

I can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. I spend my evenings and weekends wrestling with it. It won’t let me leave. I can’t go on holiday – not properly. My body may be on the beach but my head is wondering what the monster’s up to while I’m away. I’m often on the phone or laptop, checking in.

‘The Boss’ is everything I hated about working for someone else – the workflows, the time-sheets, the pointless meetings – everything that got in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stopped us focussing on what really matters – the client.

Everything I swore I’d never become.

‘The Boss’ is a monster.

Shhh.

Sometimes I think it’s my team.

 

 

It’s not a monster.

Its just a gap.

When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.

And everyone will be free.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Two heads are better than one
September 6, 2023

Two heads are better than one

If you’re lucky, you start your business with someone else, or maybe even as a trio.

Two heads, three heads are better than one.

Being a co-Boss helps you share the hard work of getting going, gives you a sounding board for ideas, and brings additional valuable resources to the business – whether that’s talents, time or even money.

But good things do come to an end, often perfectly amicably.  People grow, their circumstances change, their talents call them to new things.

That’s fine, if people need to move on, they need to move on.

The problem lies with what they take with them, locked inside their heads, no longer accessible to the business they’ve left.

Perhaps they were the operations person, who just made everything work.  Perhaps they were the sales wizard, effortlessly charming clients aboard.  Or the finance pilot, keeping a firm hand on the money tiller. Or perhaps they were the ideas person, driving the forward movement of the business.

Obviously, if you’d known this was going to happen, you’d have found a way to pull all that accumulated know-how out of their heads before they went.  But if not, how do you reconstruct that missing part?

 

The good news is that although what your co-Boss knew is still inside their head, it’s actually also inside the heads of everyone else in the business, and, crucially, inside the heads of your clients.

It may not be written down, but it is there, and can be re-constructed into an explicit Promise of Value, along with the Customer Experience Score that follows from that, turning buried knowledge into a practical, usable, evolvable asset.

Only, once you’ve dug it up, don’t keep it to yourself.  Share it with everyone in the business.  Then share the work of living it so everyone can become your co-Boss.

Because many heads are always better than one.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Even if a Boss has already disappeared.

 

Ask me how.

 

 

Moving on
September 5, 2023

Moving on

If you want maximise your chances of selling your house, you have to de-clutter and tidy it up.  Obviously.  It pays to make sure it’s in good repair too.

But in order to make it as attractive as possible to as wide a range of buyers as possible, you may well have to re-decorate and re-style it too.

To show off its potential.

To take the ‘you-ness’ out of it.

To make it look like you’ve already left.

 

The advice for selling a business is similar.   De-clutter, tidy-up, make sure it’s profitable, show it has growth potential, take you out of it.  Make it look like you’ve already left.  Go corporate.

But what if it’s you that makes your business amazing?   What if that’s what keeps your clientele coming back?  What if that’s what drives the recurring revenue?

My advice?

By all means take you out of the business, but keep the ‘you-ness’ in.

Go further, embed your ‘you-ness’ into the business so firmly that only like-minded people would want to buy it.  They’d love it so much they’d pay extra for the ‘you-ness’, because for them it’s also ‘me-ness’.

Become a Disappearing Boss.  Build the ‘you-ness’ (actually the ‘we-ness’) into the fabric of the business, into the way it works, so that it can never ‘go corporate’.  Not even as it grows.

Go even further, don’t sell at all.  Let it instead.  To people who love it the way it is and can see how to take that unique potential forward as your legacy and theirs.  Who will want to keep it in good condition, and even replicate its success in other locations.

By then, you’ll have those people in your business already.  They will have helped you build it.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.

4 rules for conservation
September 4, 2023

4 rules for conservation

This weekend’s lesson from “Braiding Sweetgrass” was a lovely one for me.

4 rules for conservation:

  • “Only take what you need.”
  • “Never from the first you see (it might be the last one).”
  • “Never take more than half.”
  • “Only take what is given.”

That last one is the kicker.   Sometimes the universe knows what you really need better than you, and tells you so.  If you have to wrest what you think you need from the earth, break branches to pull it from the tree, if it feels like dragging blood out of a stone, whoever you’re asking isn’t ready to give themselves yet.

The only thing to do in that case, is to think about what you need, not what you want.   Better still, think about what that being you’re asking to give really needs.

Then come back and try again.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

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.

 

3 books for a bank holiday weekend
August 29, 2023

3 books for a bank holiday weekend

I made the most of this Bank Holiday weekend, and got some reading in:

Left to right: “The Paradox of Debt” by Richard Vague; “10 times is easier than 2 times” by Dan Sullivan and Dr Benjamin Hardy and “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  I haven’t finished this one yet, it needs a slow, meditative read.

 

They are 3 very different books, all highly recommended, and despite very different content, all share a common theme:

 

When you watch the wrong things, the wrong things happen.

 

And the right things to watch have been there all along.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

The sweet spot
August 23, 2023

The sweet spot

One of the things that puts Bosses off writing down how their business should work, is that there is just so much to know.

When it’s all whirling around in your head along with all the ideas for new ways to delight your clients, and all the everyday housekeeping for your business, it’s almost impossible to work out where to start, or how much to write down.

Where to start is easy.  I like to begin with how you open for business.  It’s a good warm-up exercise, usually fairly straightforward, and immediately useful.  It also gets you starting to think about how responsibilities are shared.

As you write your Customer Experience Score, it pays to remember that you’re writing for competent human beings, professionals, who know what they are doing.

You don’t have to spell out the bits they are experts at – whether that’s making a testimonial video, coming up with ideas for a marketing campaign, preparing a set of accounts, or handling a quartet of dogs in the park.    These bits can be jazz: “film cool stuff“, “produce 3 ideas – one for the client, one for us, and one off the wall“; perhaps with a few pointers, “practise recall, play catch, give them a good run“.

In general what a Customer Experience Score is doing, is documenting all the bits around those core activities that have to happen in order everything to run smoothly, and in line with your Promise.

These are the bits that you do unthinkingly, because you’ve internalised them, but which others have to learn to do, and need to refer to when an activity is infrequent.  These are also the bits we can bring even more into line with your Promise, to make the experience unique and even more compelling.

These bits can be a bit more spelt out, but as no more than bullet points.  As prompts, not instructions.

By the time you’re done, often all people need is a look at the high-level diagram to remind themselves, they already know the steps by heart.

So, how much to write down depends on you, your team, and your Promise of Value:

What level of detail will give you confidence that clients will always get the customer experience they deserve?

What level of detail will give your team the confidence to ad lib, personalise and embellish in order to make that customer experience even better?

The sweet spot lies at the intersection of these questions.

And the best way to find it is to start writing.

 

Discipline makes Daring possible

Ask me how.