The Disappearing Boss – Page 30 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

January 14, 2022

Take back control

One of the things that puts business owners off growing, is the fear of losing control. They’ve handcrafted a customer experience that works well. They have built up a clientele that loves what they do and the way that they do it. They are concerned about diluting that.

The answer, as every composer knows, is to take the music that is in your head, and write it down, so that others can play it. Put the control into a score, not a person.

That way, your customer experience lives on through others, not in spite of them.

At first, you will have to conduct this music yourself. But after a while, your people won’t even need that. With a good score, they can conduct themselves.

And that removes the real limit to growth – you.

December 17, 2021

Unfreedom

If you need to have a job in order to live (and most of us do), then work all too easily becomes a series of power plays, tests of will between worker and supervisor, supervisor and manager, manager and director. Between subordinate and superior.

Power plays that can get nasty, because there is no way out, no safe word you can say to signal ‘Stop, I’ve had enough‘.

When everyone but the person at the top feels too afraid to disobey, and is unable to walk away in protest, what cascades down is unfreedom. Or as we might have called it in earlier times, slavery.

How much worse then, if it turns out that what you are in thrall to isn’t even human, but AI. Statistics generating targets that take no account of actual conditions on the ground – a pandemic, a storm, a tornado – with no possibility of being overidden by an intelligent human.

As a result 6 people died in this Amazon warehouse, picking stuff people don’t need, made using resources that could be better used elsewhere (or not used at all) to make money Bezos doesn’t know what to do with.

Work should not be this way, need not be this way.

Stop. I’ve had enough.

And I know where and how to change it.

December 3, 2021

It’s me they want

It’s a trap many founders of service businesses fall into. You start off as the technician, doing everything, and at first you love it.

Then you grow your client base, and with it a team to help you serve them. Yet it seems, no matter how much you reassure them that your team is capable, no matter how much extra you charge them for the privilege, clients insist that you are the one that looks after them. Or, they insist that it’s a particular member of your team that looks after them. You get overloaded, and your team lose out on the chance to grow.

The answer is to make sure a new client or a new project starts with one of your team, not you. Perhaps random, perhaps thoughtfully matched to each others’ working styles. That means making sure everyone knows how to make and keep your business promise as well as or better than you, from start to finish. And that means articulating what that experience looks like.

There’s nothing wrong with being relationship-based – I’m all for connection between people – but the deepest relationship you want to forge is one between the client and your business, where the client’s experience will be consistently outstanding, no matter who delivers it. Not identical, consistent.

The more you enable your team to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!“, the more clients you’ll be able to delight, without killing yourself or your team in the process.

November 30, 2021

Reconciliation

You run a business with a partner. One of you hates not knowing what’s going to happen, the other loves that. One favours planning, the other seeing what happens. This is a source of much tension.

How could you reconcile these opposites to get the best of both worlds?

Simple.

Give yourself a safety net. A floor below which things cannot go. Or as Mr Nassim Taleb would have it, protect yourself against the downside.

Design repeatable processes that ensure ‘the least that should happen’. The planner will be much more comfortable with possibility when you’ve ruled out the worst. You can both be open to the upside.

When you find it, move the net up, and repeat.

This doesn’t only work for partners, it can help everyone who works with you to reconcile their individual appetites for risk.

November 22, 2021

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.

November 19, 2021

Three Freedoms

What is freedom, really?

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

The freedom to walk away, knowing that you will be taken in elsewhere by other people who see you as one of them.
The freedom to disobey, knowing that you can ‘vote with your feet’.
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.

November 16, 2021

Pinning things down

When we want to examine something closely, it helps to take a snapshot of it, to capture it at a point in time, to pin it down and look at it as a specimen. This makes it easier for us to analyse its composition and construction.

This is a useful way to gather some information, as long as we remember that for all systems, including our businesses, the natural state is to be moving, changing and renewing.

For most things worth investigating, static means dead.

November 11, 2021

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.

November 8, 2021

A market of one

I’ve been known to wax lyrical (or just go on about) about how your Promise of Value drives the way you design your business, so that it can’t help but deliver on the Promises you make.

But what does that actually mean in practice? How do you actually do that?

Let’s follow a thread of an example.

Your Promise of Value contains 3 sets of qualities – behaviours (the way you do things, which shades into your values), what you do (what you do to deliver benefit to your clients) and what you are (the relationship that is created between you and a client as a result).

Let’s say that one of your behaviours is ‘honest’. Among other things, that might mean that you always tell the truth. That has implications for your Share Promise process. For example, you may decide to never make claims you can’t substantiate. That might mean that for you ‘Showing Up’ is essentially about presenting the substantiation. Your 60-seconds is a story of a happy client, or your social media feed is full of testimonials, or that your website contains a live feed showing the positive impact you’re having. Or maybe the negative impact, reducing?

Always telling the truth has implications for your Keep Promise process too. It affects how you deal with a complaint, or the advice you give a client. It implies that before either of these situations arises, you must have a process for gathering as much ‘truth’ as you can. That might translate into a separate process each time (receive a complaint, research it, then get back to them), or it may mean building a process for continuously recording data you might need, as a side effect of doing the job.

Your Promise of Value isn’t just for prospects and clients, it also drives how you design your Improve Process – how you organise or re-organise the resources you have to serve your people better. How you design your measurement systems, your appraisal systems and your recruitment systems. For example, how could you test that a potential team member is ‘honest’? How would you build ‘always telling the truth’ into feedback mechanisms?

There will be other options. The form your processes take depends on other aspects of your Promise of Value – not everything all at once, but the behaviours that are most important to you and the people you serve. How does your business combine a behaviour like ‘honest’ with ‘kind’, or ‘professional’ or ‘cutting-edge’?

By embedding your Promise of Value into what you do and how you do it, your prospects, clients, employees, suppliers – all your stakeholders – experience who you are, and what you are here to do in a very concrete way. You’re showing, not telling. What you are, is what they get. And what you are is unique. You’re now in a market of one.

November 4, 2021

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.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: The Disappearing Boss