Discipline makes Daring possible. – Page 23 – Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

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.

Ask me how.

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.

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.

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.

August 7, 2023

Express yourself

Starting a business is largely about you. Expressing your passions, your purpose, your vision.

But it can’t be only about you.

The secret is to express yourself in a way that resonates with other people. That allows them to express something about themselves too.

Some will want to be customers, others will want to help you do more of it, still others will want to bask in the glow of your success.

Your business starts with you. But it mustn’t end there.

Building it as a system for making and keeping promises is an excellent way to remind yourself of this.

Discipline makes daring Possible

August 4, 2023

They are not you

There’s a very good reason why, as a Boss, you might balk at writing down your Customer Experience Score.

It’s not your style.

As the founder of your own small business, there’s a good chance you are a proactive, internally motivated, independent, options-oriented person. You probably hate the idea of following someone else’s instructions. After all, that may be a good part of why you set up on your own in the first place. To follow your own rules, do what you think is right, try out different ways of doing things.

Your style is brilliant for setting up a new venture, you’re happy to experiment until you get your offer and your customer experience right. And as long as its just you delivering it, things are fine.

The problems start to come as you take on new people, not to do the things you probably shouldn’t do, like bookkeeping or HR, or health and safety, but to act as if they were you in looking after prospects and clients.

But they are not you.

They don’t know what you know, they don’t have the history of how you got here, they don’t have your muscle memory of how to do things, and they almost certainly don’t work in your style.

Some of them will be more reactive than proactive. Some will be more procedures-oriented – they will be more comfortable following a process. Some will be more externally motivated – they will care more about what others think of them, about what you think of them.

None of this means they can’t do the job of looking after customers as well as you. Some will do it even better than you. It just means they won’t do it in exactly the same way as you, and they can’t learn how to in the same way you did – by working through it.

So, since like most of us, you are probably also a ‘my rules for me, my rules for you’ kind of person – what’s good for you is good for them – you assume that your people will just get in on with it. That having seen you do it, they’ll be able to do it themselves – exactly as you do. That they won’t want ‘to follow other people’s instructions’. And at the same time you worry that they will want to put their own spin on it, to do it their own way, not yours.

And that your clients wouldn’t like it if they did.

But that’s just not true.

This is not a judgement on you. This is just how it is. People are different, in interesting ways that can enhance or diminish the experience for your clients.

You want to minimise the possibility of diminishing, but with ‘my way or the highway’ you minimise the possibility of enhancing too.

A much more satisfying approach is to get your vision of your ideal customer experience out of your head, and onto ‘paper’, not as ‘instructions’, but as a guide, like music, what I call a ‘Customer Experience Score’.

A Score that doesn’t dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, or tell people what to do in excruciating detail. That doesn’t dictate their every move, but tells them clearly and simply, visually, what has to happen, when, for the customer, leaving the details of execution to them.

The good news is that as an options person, you quite like setting up processes, you just don’t like following them. So this job is perfect for you.

And when you’re done, you can share the work of caring for customers with more of your team, safe in the knowledge that they won’t go wrong, but they can be more right.

You’ll all be happier for it.

And so will your customers.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Ask me how.

August 2, 2023

What if it works?

The flip side of yesterday’s question – what if that step into the unknown works? What will Disappearing from my … Read More “What if it works?”

August 1, 2023

What if it doesn’t work?

It’s hard to Disappear from the business you started – although not as hard as you might think. After all, for a long time, you aren’t ‘gone’, you’ve just blended yourself in. The disappearance is gradual, so everyone has time to get used to it. Including you.

It’s probably better to say it’s hard to get started on Disappearing.

Why?

Because it’s step into the unknown. And what if it doesn’t work? What if this is the wrong choice? What if there is something better out there?

To which in all honesty, my answers have to be: ‘It might not work for you. It might be the wrong choice for you. There might well be something better out there for you.’

But if you know you want to change your relationship with your business, there’s only one way to find out what the right solution for you is.

And that’s to take a step into the unknown.

My job is to make taking that step as easy and as comfortable as possible. To show you as quickly as possible that what we do together will give you what you need. To make sure that even if you decide to stop, you still feel you’ve gained something worthwhile.

I can tell you till I’m blue in the face that it has worked for most of the people who tried it. In some cases spectacularly. Nobody lost by it.

But me telling you, or even me showing you, isn’t going to be as convincing as you having a go for yourself.

For that reason I’m going to start a club.

It’s called The Disappearing Bosses’ Club.

It will start in September with a 3-month experiment to find out what you really need, and put that in place.

I’m looking for pioneers to help me do that.

Let me know if you’re interested.

Thank you as always for being there.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

July 31, 2023

Succession

“My demonic drive to overcome or destroy any barrier certainly helped Riverford up to a point. But since we became employee owned, I’ve come to appreciate that dispersed power & consultation lead to better, safer, less impulsive decisions, & they don’t have to come at the price of bravery & responsiveness. Watching governance develop at Riverford makes me realise we need to give those with emotional balance, who shout less & don’t need power to bolster their fragile egos, a route to leadership & influence.” Guy Singh-Watson.

As the entrepreneur, the original Boss, you are the pebble that got the ripples going, the source of the vision that made the business take off. But as we know, that doesn’t necessarily make you the best person to take it further.

At least, not on your own.

But for a founder, it can be incredibly scary to cede control, to hand over responsibility for that precious customer experience to someone else.

The answer is to take the ‘governance’ – the way your vision drives what the business does, and how it does it – out of one head (or a few), and build it into the business itself.

So it can be a firm foundation for leadership and influence; a springboard for bravery and responsiveness, accessible to everyone.

A bit of Discipline from you, the original Boss, makes Daring possible. Everyone can become a Boss.

There’s no better way to ensure that your legacy will ripple on.

Ask me how.