Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss

The Disappearing Bosses Club
August 22, 2023

The Disappearing Bosses Club

It’s taken a little while, but The Disappearing Bosses Club is finally here.

If you’re an overloaded, purpose-driven small business employer, who wants to make an even bigger impact within the next couple of years, this might be the club for you.

If you’re planning to sell your business in the next couple of years, and want to maximise the value you get, and minimise the strings attached, this might be the club for you.

If you know you want your employees to own your business, and you want to help them learn to run it without you before you go, this might be the club for you.

The Disappearing Bosses Club opens its doors in September, to 7 participants.

Check it out, and register your interest here: https://www.thedisappearingboss.com/the-disappearing-bosses-club

I’m Kirsten Gibbs, Boss Disappearer, and I can help you write your Customer Experience Score , to make your business easier to run, easier to grow, easier to sell if that’s what you want, and easier to build into a legacy you’ll be proud of.

Discipline makes Daring possible

A special thank you to the lovely Phoebe Weston for making me make this.

 

A soft system
August 21, 2023

A soft system

Your system for making and keeping promises looks self-contained:

disappearing boss course card

but of course it isn’t.

The processes that form it’s skeleton are firm, and the Promise that drives them changes rarely, but like any living system the edges are soft and sensitive.   The skin of your business interacts with the outside world and with other systems – buildings, computer networks, prospects, clients, suppliers, collaborators, family, friends and community.

This is the frontline of your business.  This is where it learns what it needs to do to adapt.

Listen to it.

Absorb its teachings into your bones.

Grow.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Between 3 and 300
August 17, 2023

Between 3 and 300

It’s a classic story of how many small businesses grow, and then shrink again.

As the founder, you do everything.   You do the sales and marketing to get clients, you enrol them, and you deliver the service to them once they’re on board.   Gradually you refine your hand-crafted offer into a customer experience that is uniquely yours.   That most of your clients really love.  That you become known for, even though you aren’t the only person or business offering this service.

 

So you decide to scale up.   You add other people – employees, or just as often, specialist freelancers – to help you with delivery.  So you can service more clients.

Handing over means systemising the parts of the process other people can do for you, but you retain control of the parts that matter – where the process interfaces with clients.   The heart of the customer experience.  After all, you are the face of the business.  People buy people, and that means you.

At first this is great.   You can handle more clients than before, make more profit than before.  So you take on more collaborators.

But all too soon, it becomes too much.  Suddenly you are working harder than anyone else.  You feel obliged to keep your collaborators fully occupied, but that means overloading the backbone – you.

You can’t take holidays, you can barely take weekends.  And when you do snatch a break, either it gets interrupted by collaborators or clients, or you come back to extra work.   Because nobody else can fulfill your role.

 

So back down you shrink.  Not quite to the one-man band you started as, but to essentially a one-man band with specialist accompaniments, dealing with a limited number of lucky clients each year.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with this.  Of course not.  It’s your life, your business, you decide how you want to live it.

 

But if you dream of making a bigger impact, you might like to know there is another way.   That doesn’t involve ‘going corporate’.  That doesn’t mean building a machine, losing the personal feel of your business completely.

The choice isn’t between 3 people and 300.  Between being a freelancer or being a tycoon.  Between being human and being corporate.

It’s possible to systemise your personality, your values, your unique customer experience into a small business that can scale without losing its humanity.  And without killing you in the process.

You just have to go about it in a different way.

By building your business as a system for making and keeping promises to the people you serve.  A system run by and for humans, not machines.  A system that enables everyone to be a Boss, so that any one of you can take a break when you need to.

Luckily for you, I’ve worked out how to do this over a year-long programme.  My clients have reaped the rewards.

It’s called The Disappearing Boss.

And from September you’ll be able to do it yourself, as part of The Disappearing Bosses Club.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Who do you know that’s suffering from ‘Founder’s Syndrome’?
August 15, 2023

Who do you know that’s suffering from ‘Founder’s Syndrome’?

‘Founder’s syndrome’ – some extracts from the Wikipedia definition:

“The organization is strongly identified with the founder”.

“Obsessive leadership style”.

“Founders tend to make all decisions without a formal process or feedback from others.”

“little meaningful strategic development, limited professional development. little organizational infrastructure in place”

“Higher levels of micromanagement”

“no succession plan.”

“recruits find that they are not able to contribute in an effective and professional way.””

“The founder becomes increasingly paranoid as delegation is required, or business management needs are greater than their training or experience.”

 

To me, much of this looks like the classic, painful transition from one-person-band, to few-person-band, to full-blown company.

Which in the rather smug and contemptuous view of the writers of this Wikipedia entry, is all too often the transition from a small, personal, impact-driven, human-scaled business to a large, impersonal, money-focused capitalist corporation.

The founder wants to keep things personal and true to their original vision.

New owners or new management want to make things efficient, corporate money-oriented, and therefore impersonal.

In other words, as far as the founder is concerned, they want to make it ‘someone else’s business’. (https://gibbsandpartners.com/blog/2021/09/design-your-business-or-it-will-be-designed-for-you/)

Of course the founder resists.

So would I.

 

There is a preventive for ‘Founder’s syndrome’:

 

Become a Disappearing Boss.

 

Embed the founding vision and personality into the operating processes of your business before you try to scale, with a Customer Experience Score .

You’ll be able to scale without managers, without investors – other than the people you serve. Without going corporate.

The best of both worlds: personal, true to the original vision and magnifying your impact.

Even better, once its built into the way your business works, your Score takes on a life of it’s own, nurtured and improved by everyone in the business.

It becomes harder for anyone to interfere – even you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

The Disappearing Boss is currently available as a ‘done for you’ option and a 1:1 coaching programme.

From next month it will also be available as a DIY option as The Disappearing Bosses Club.

I’m looking for 7 founders of unique and amazing impact-focused businesses, employing between 3 and 9 people, who want to magnify their impact without losing what makes them unique, to help me test and refine my design for this part of my business.

It will be a 3 month committment, at a pioneer price, that will add value to your business, or your money back.

DM me if you want to know more.

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.

Where this blog title came from
August 8, 2023

Where this blog title came from

Christmas, 2014.  I was listening to The Reith Lectures on Radio 4.

As usual, I hadn’t taken much notice of who was behind what I was listening to (I didn’t find out who played my favourite ever dance record until 30 years later).  Then the speaker said something that galvanised me.

“Discipline makes Daring possible”.

After that I had to follow up on it.

The lecture was the second of a series on “The Future of Medicine”.  The speaker was Dr Atul Gawande and the episode title was “The Century of the System”.

It “tells the story of how a little-known hospital in Austria managed to develop a complex yet highly effective system for dealing with victims of drowning.” – specifically in freezing water.  A system that could be triggered by the receptionist.

The story came from Gawande’s book, “The Checklist Manifesto“.   I tracked down a copy, bought it and devoured it in one sitting.

I thoroughly recommend it.   Not just because it shows how something as simple as a checklist can save millions of lives, also because it shows how resistant ‘professionals’ are to any kind of systemisation.

Which fed nicely into my fascination with finding that fine balance between systems and humans that makes for consistently rich and evolving customer experiences, as well as consistently rich and evolving employee experiences.

If discipline is what makes daring possible, how little of it can you get away with?

How much daring can it enable?

I don’t know.

But I’m still enjoying finding out.