I really liked this piece, shared as part of a brilliant masterclass on doing nothing by Laurence McCahill at this morning’s Like Hearted Leaders.
So as it’s Friday, and nearly the week-end, I thought I’d share it with you.
https://ideas.ted.com/the-7-types-of-rest-that-every-person-needs/
Or, if you prefer, 7 ways to avoid the criminal waste that is Muri.
Re-pose.
I shared a post on LinkedIn this week about World Kiss Day.
It turns out I got the day wrong. Apparently it’s July the 6th.
Hey ho.
I still think this film clip is worth sharing, and watching, from one of my favourite ever films:
When supermarkets first opened (the first as early as 1916), customers were delighted.
Suddenly, they were in control. No more queueing at the cheese counter, the deli counter, the fish counter or the meat counter. No more being at the mercy of the person behind the counter for the cut you received. No more waiting around to be served. You could serve yourself with whatever took your fancy, and simply pay for it all at the end. How convenient!
Over time, this style of shopping spread to other kinds of shops, until browsing, shopping around, even window shopping became ‘the new leisure’. Supermarkets expanded their ranges to capture as much as possible, even including cafes, so you could spend all day if you wanted – literally, for a short while, as 24-hour shopping became allowed.
No more.
In-person shopping is dying – and not just because of Covid-19. Long before the pandemic hit, supermarkets had decided that shoppers should stay at home, order online and take what they were given.
Back to the bad old days, only this time without the personal interaction.
It seems that supermarkets don’t want customers any more. Only their custom.
I don’t think you can really have one without the other.
There are two ptarmigans in the picture. Did you spot them?
There’s more than one way to disappear.
The obvious way is to take yourself out of the picture. The less obvious solution is to blend in.
Not by matching yourself to the background, but by making yourself indistinguishable from the others around you.
What if, like Spartacus, you could enable and inspire everyone else in your team to behave as if they were you, the original? You would no longer stand out. In fact you’d no longer even have to be there.
It starts by thinking differently about what your business is.
Issue 2 of The Disappearing Boss is out today.
Working away from the office has been uncomfortable for many people. Not least leaders.
We’re so used to the panopticon of open plan, together with the richness of non-verbal communication that enables ‘management by walking about’ – the ability to dip in and help where it’s needed with feedback and encouragement.
Remote working has made leading feel like a game of blind man’s buff.
It feels like we should become more like old-fashioned managers – telling people what to do then trying to assess where they really are through regular progress reports or software. None of these things tell you what you really want to know – whether people are struggling, or have misunderstood what’s required, or are simply missing something – all the things you used to be able spot really quickly when everyone was together in the office.
It’s an interesting problem, that existed long before before lockdown and work from home. What do you do when people struggle but don’t ask for help?
For some the answer is more surveillance, and more checklists. For others it’s mandating a return to the office. But I wonder if framing the problem differently might work better?
What if we looked at our people as students, rather than workers? What if instead of asking ‘How do I know they are where they should be?’ we asked ourselves ‘How do I know they are learning?’.
The answer to that question would I’m sure lead to a different way of organising how teams are supported.
And from my experience we could do worse than look at how Akimbo does it.
“Freedom … is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating” ‘The Utopia of Rules’, David Graeber 2015
Without rules, we get nothing done.
With only rules, we get nothing done.
The interesting challenge is to create a set of rules that enable the creativity that will in turn makes new rules necessary, while at the same time ensuring that each cycle of new rules never becomes stifling.
It seems to me that’s only possible when everyone shares in the work of creating the rules and breaking them.
The team you’ve built for your business will have things in common. There are reasons you decided to hire them and they decided to work with you. There are reasons that you’ve stayed together.
Some of those reasons will be around shared values, behaviours and principles. Some of them will be to do with an alignment of vision and purpose.
Some will be entirely to do with their own personal preferences, aims and desires – perhaps proximity to home, an easier commute, a less demanding job or even friendships formed.
Are those reasons enough for you to entrust them with the client experience? I hope so.
But it might be better to be explicit about the values, behaviours, principles, vision and purpose.
That way you’ll both know for sure. And be able to act accordingly.
Sometimes, a process that looks like it could be a pattern isn’t.
If the same thing happens in the same way every time, and it’s performed by the same Role using the same Props, then what you have isn’t processes that are alike. You have the same process, repeated exactly as part of several larger processes.
As an example, take dealing with a visitor to your office. Often this is the responsibility of a particular Role. They greet the visitor, take their coat, show them to a waiting area and offer them a drink. It makes no difference why the visitor is here, what happens afterwards or who deals with them next, the process is exactly the same whether the visitor is a client, a prospective employee or a tax inspector.
In this case, it’s better to define the process once, and include it in the Customer Experience Score wherever it occurs. You could call it ‘Receive Guest’, define it the first time you identify it (for example as part of your ‘Enroll Prospect’ process) then refer to it elsewhere (for example, in Handle Tax Inspection, Recruit Team Member, Hold Social Event).
Identical twins, triplets, even quintuplets are a wonderful thing in humans. We don’t mind that they make more work because they’ll each grow to be unique human beings.
You don’t want them in your Customer Experience Score though. The extra work they create there is pointless.
When designing your Customer Experience Score, you often uncover processes that follow a specific pattern.
For example, you want a client to have a similar experience every time you request information from them – perhaps you send an email, then immediately follow up with a phone call or a text, or both. Perhaps you call, then follow up with an email. After a while, you might remind the client if they haven’t responded. There might be a limit to the number of times you do that.
However you want the experience to be, you want that experience to be consistent across all the information requests you might make, so it’s tempting to lump all these different processes intoa single catch-all process.
That’s a mistake. Although the pattern is the same, each individual process turns out to be slightly different. The information being requested is different, the purpose is different, the priority, urgency and timescales may be different. The Roles involved may be different. The Props will definitely be different.
These differences will out, and somewhere in the depths of what looks like a simple process, you’ll end up having to include some way of spelling out what actually happens in each case. It usually involves a complicated list of “If you’re dealing with A, do B; if you’re dealing with C, do D;…”
And so on.
The key is to remember why you’re writing your Customers Experience Score, which is to enable someone else in your team to perform the process as well as or better than you. That is best achieved by making each process self-containedly easy to follow, without cluttering it up with decisions about alternative possibilities.
When Google gives you directions for getting from your house to that beauty spot you love, it gives you full directions for each and every route, even though most will start with the same turn out of your street, and end with the same turn into your destination. Imagine trying to find your way with directions that say “If you’re following route A, turn right at the next roundabout. If you’re following Route B proceed straight across. If you’re following Route C, turn right.”
You’d take longer, annoy fellow drivers along the way, and probably get lost a few times. You might even give up and go home. That’s the last thing you want your team to do when they’re delivering your Promise to clients.
A pattern is a pattern, nothing more. Use it to design in consistency that reinforces your Promise of Value.
A catch-all, on the other hand, makes everyone work harder, for no extra benefit.
Every now and then, my husband has a big bonfire in the garden. I must admit they make me nervous. I find myself compelled to watch them well into the night to make sure they’re properly out before I go to bed. I’ve been known to resort to water, just to be absolutely sure.
I much prefer an incinerator. Contained, controlled, slow-burning but often more intense, an incinerator gets the job done with less risk and almost no need of supervision.
For me, on purpose beats all-out, every time.
Whatever Easter means to you, enjoy the break.
See you Tuesday.