Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss

Human Feedback 3 – suggestions
November 28, 2022

Human Feedback 3 – suggestions

If you make it easy for people to log ideas as they go, you’re more likely to get useful ideas for improvement, because its when they’re actually doing the job that people feel the friction.  This could be as simple as a shared google doc, or as fully functional as Slack or Trello.  Whatever works for you and your team.

Logging ideas is just the first step of course.   The next is to review them.   This is where its helpful to have dedicated time set aside.   Get everyone together to review, ponder the consequences and choose which ideas to incorporate next.

Then create a schedule for implementing these improvements, seeing how they affect things, and rolling them out or back as a consequence.

If this is starting to look a bit like software development, that’s because in a way it is.  Like software, your business is a system – for making and keeping promises.

We’ve learned a lot about how to improve software systems while customers are actually using them.  It makes sense to apply that know-how to your Promise System too.

It involves building in good habits of observation, selection and listening to feedback.   And like admin, it works best when it is as much as possible a side-effect of doing the job.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Level 5 Leadership
November 25, 2022

Level 5 Leadership

One of the things I love about LHL Fridays is that I always learn something new.

Today Tim Bicknell told me about ‘Level 5 leadership’, so of course I had to google it.

And then I found this in the Harvard Business Review:

“When you look across the good-to-great transformations, they consistently display three forms of discipline: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”

Discipline makes Daring possible.

And you don’t have to wait to be corporate to apply it.

Just talk to me.

Can’t wait to find out more.

How to do big business with a tiny company
November 22, 2022

How to do big business with a tiny company

I loved this post from Jason Fried on company size.   In a nutshell, his company (37Signals) serves about the same number of clients as others in this space, at about a tenth of the workforce.

How can he do that?

Here are some ideas.

First, build a product and service that makes your users so awesome they tell all their friends and colleagues about it.  Then make it easy for them to tell their friends and colleagues.   Do this and you can ditch the marketing department.

Second, let your people manage themselves.   After all, they are able, enthusiastic humans who revel in taking responsibility.  Self-managed doesn’t mean unsupported though.  Like an orchestra, give your players a Score so they know what they are trying to achieve, a Conductor to give immediate feedback on their performance and Rehearsal Time to improve and innovate.   Do this and you can ditch the managers.

Next, get rid of ‘admin’.   Admin is simply about getting the right resources into the right place at the right time.  Build it in to what you do for clients, automate the boring bits that become drudgery for humans and you’ve made it a side effect of doing the job.   Do this and you can ditch the admin department.

Fourth, enable every player in your team to deliver the whole end-to-end service.  In essence make them a one-person instance of your business.   Do this, and every new person you add is a profit centre.

Finally, share the benefit of this new superproductive business with everyone in it.  Reward must follow responsibility.  Ownership must be real.  Do this and you’ve created a sustainable legacy to be proud of.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

After the complaint
November 16, 2022

After the complaint

After the complaint has been handled; once you’ve addressed the customer’s problem and left them more than happy with the result – so happy that they’ll tell their friends about what went wrong and how you put it right for them so well.   After all that, there is one more job to do.

Make sure you update the way you Keep your Promise so that you don’t get the same complaint again.

Amend your Customer Experience Score.

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier
November 15, 2022

Why running a business is hard, and how to make it easier

The people you want to serve – the clients you’d like to have – don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe. They look at the world through different eyes, a different experience and with a different mindset.

That’s what makes marketing hard.   Especially if you are offering something different from the norm.

It’s the same for the people you work with.   They don’t know what you know.  They don’t believe what you believe.   They bring their own experience and mindset to the way they see the world.

That’s what makes running a business – serving clients through other people – hard.

The difference is that the people you work have to do what you tell them, don’t they?  After all, you’re paying them.  They need a job.

Except that all too often what actually happens is that you spend more time on watching over them than on the business.  Micro-managing.   Because your unique definition of ‘customer experience‘ is entirely in your head.  Which is frustrating for everyone, and constraining for the business.

So you delegate the micro-management to someone else.  Who doesn’t know what you know, doesn’t necessarily believe what you believe.  Who sees the world through different eyes, with a different mindset.   Who tells your people what to do, based on what’s in their head.    Sure it takes a load off your back, but will your unique customer experience survive the change?

I believe there is a better way.   Which is to document the customer experience in your head and make it available for everyone in the business to follow.

Not ‘what to do‘, but ‘what has to happen‘.

Not ‘how to do it‘, but ‘how it needs to feel for the client‘.

Not just ‘this is how we do things round here’ but also ‘this is what we believe‘.

So that you are not just handing over the ‘donkey work’, but also the emotional labour of delivering the business’s unique customer experience – the part that really matters to the client, the part they pay extra for, the part they refer their friends to.

Then work out and document how that customer experience is maintained, how you make sure that everyone who works with you knows what you know and believes most of what you believe, so that you know you can trust them to use their own history and mindset to make that customer experience even better, in line with the beliefs you all share.

It’s quite a job to get all this in place*.  But once you have it running and growing your business gets easier and easier.  Because everyone working the business is standing in for you.  Everyone’s a boss.

And not a manager in sight.

 

*That’s what I do.  Talk to me.

Dividends
November 8, 2022

Dividends

My interest in documenting how things should work came from my years in software development.   To me, it always seemed sensible to work out what you wanted your software to do before you built it, or bought it.

And even more sensible that it should reflect the way you do business rather than an average of hundreds of other firms.

Writing a customer Experience Score before you commission software has other benefits too.

It gets everyone thinking about change – ‘how we really want it to work’ rather than simply ‘how we do it now’.

It gets everyone thinking a level up from the day-to-day, about what has to happen when rather than how it happens.

But most of all it gives everyone, including you, the chance to reframe your business from a management hierarchy to an easily replicable system for making and keeping promises.

And the benefits keep coming after you’re done.   Once you can demonstrate that your unique system for making and keeping promises works consistently, people will ask you to do more of it for them.  And you will find it easy to scale up on delivery.

Like many a human enterprise, the hard work is all up front, but worth it for the dividends flying in later, almost effortlessly.

And isn’t that just what it means to be an entrepreneur?

Delegating care
November 1, 2022

Delegating care

Long, long ago, a young hominid female let her mother look after her baby while she went off and hunted, opening the evolutionary pathway to homo sapiens.

The ability to trust other people with our precious babies is literally what makes us human.  The result is big brains, grandmothers and a propensity to collaborate.

Delegating the care for your Customer Experience should come naturally.

So what’s holding you back?

Keeping it personal
October 25, 2022

Keeping it personal

When you’re a one-man band it has to be personal.  Conventional wisdom has it that you can’t keep it that way if you plan to seriously scale.  It’s almost a definition of ‘corporate’ that ‘I’ becomes ‘they’.

I believe that this loss of the personal is part of what puts many micro-business owners off growth, not the ‘lack of ambition’ ascribed to them, by government reports.

Conventional wisdom is not wrong – as the business founders insert layers of hierarchy and function between themselves and their customers, the relationship between business and customer can often feel impersonal, transactional.   A brand, no matter how great, isn’t a person.

What’s wrong is the assumption that introducing functions and hierarchies is the only way to scale.

What if, at that point where 10-ish people work with you, you decided to make them all ‘the boss’- each one of them capable and authorised to deliver on your promises the way you do?

What if, instead of splitting the customer experience into separate functions, you kept it intact from end to end and made each and every person in the business responsible for delivering it to their clients?

What if, instead of introducing layers of management to distract your team from your customers, you gave them a Customer Experience Score to follow and let them manage themselves?  With responsbility for the consequences of course.

You’d scale your business and keep it personal.  It’s just that the person your clients deal wouldn’t have to be you.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

 

Intrigued?  Ask me how.

Scaling
October 20, 2022

Scaling

If you’re a micro business looking to serve more people well, consider this before you add the next person to your team:

Are you trying to make your music louder or more complex?

Getting louder is simple.  Just let each new person follow the score you play from, alongside you.   On a different instrument maybe, to give richness to the sound.  Or give them a copy of your score so they can play elsewhere or in a different timezone.   It’ll still be your music, still a personal experience for customers, only nearer to them.

Once you’ve mastered louder, making your music more complex gets easier too.  Write a new score for the new thing you want to offer, teach new or existing people to play it, and put them wherever you want, to harmonise or contrast with your existing musicians.  Better still, make sure every player is able to play every variation, in case they need to.   So you can make your complex music louder.

It’s hard to do both at once without confusing your musicians and your audience.

So if in doubt, I’d start with louder.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

The sound of the sea
October 19, 2022

The sound of the sea

I’m back.  After 5 days of walking, 4 days of talking, and 2 days of chilling and walking.  In places where the lanes are narrow, the sea is everywhere and it’s often impossible to get a signal.   A short holiday in a remote location, followed by a conference in an even more remote location.

What have I learned?

That gathering ‘the news’ intermittently via intermittent access to twitter is good enough.

That gathering people together to share how they’re changing a system far bigger than themselves is amazing.  When everyone realises they are actually doing it, the changes just get bigger.  And more people join in.

That the sound of the sea is a good thing to fall asleep to.

It’s great to be back.