Managing the Monkey Cage

Task and Relationship

2012-01-29T23:41:00.002-06:00

A technically excellent worker at a design company knew his stuff. Unfortunately, he seemed to delight in finding fault, in criticizing others on the team and continually provoking coworkers and managers. His repeated comments like "they should have..." or "why didn't they..." made it hard for anyone to feel safe - he could find fault with anyone. Success needs to balance task and relationship. He focused on task above all else, and damaged relationships without ever realizing the importance of building them. Eventually, management let him go. He didn't understand why.

Two Bags Full of Expensive Cost Savings

2012-01-08T14:48:00.003-06:00

A grocery store switched to a new supplier for the clear plastic bags which customers use for fresh produce. While selecting some lovely Ambrosia apples, the bag burst, dropping eight shiny apples on the hard floor - eight apples, bruised and ruined. The produce clerk says, "We're telling everybody to use two bags now, because these bags are so much thinner and keep breaking."

So, the company is trying to save money by buying thinner produce bags, but the bags are breaking, produce is getting damaged, staff is having to do more cleanup, and customers are using two or being inconvenienced. A misguided attempt at cost saving.

Three Blind Managers

2011-12-01T20:48:00.001-06:00

A restaurant had three owner/managers that shared duties on different nights. They all had different management styles, and didn't make any attempt to coordinate their approach to employees.

One waitress received consistently positive feedback from Manager One. Manager Two was often critical, taking her to task for some of the same things that Manager One praised her for. After a few months on the job, she asked Manager One for a raise. He said that she'd see an increase on her next cheque, but that didn't happen. When she asked Manager Two about it, he told her that none of her work justified a raise.

It's always difficult to report to more than one Manager. It's especially difficult when Manager One and Manager Two don't communicate with each other or even try to get on the same page. Managers often don't see how this stuff drives employees crazy.

Too Soon, Too Eager, Too Pushy

2011-11-16T22:45:00.001-06:00

A few incidents observed at a networking event this week demonstrated some frequent communication mistakes:

Too Soon

A sales guy was introduced to an executive from a key potential client, a new contact with whom he had no previous relationship. Very early in the conversation, the sales guy asked directly for a meeting to talk about becoming a supplier. The executive visibly winced and his body language completely changed. Within a few seconds, the executive cut short the conversation and moved on to talk to someone else.

Too Eager
The owner of an industrial supplier was introduced to a possible client, who asked a simple question about what the supplier does. Grasping the opportunity, the owner started listing off all of his company's capabilities in considerable detail. The client's eyes soon glazed over, and then started to search the room for someone else to talk to.

Too Pushy
Another business owner started grilling an executive with aggressive qualifying questions designed to lead the executive down a sales path. The executive tried repeatedly, with decreasing civility, to deflect the conversation to more general conversation, but the owner doesn't hear or see any of the signals, and continued to push his agenda.

Don't Just Say No

2011-10-31T19:39:00.002-06:00

"Just Say No" is good advice when asked to do drugs or to vote for Sarah Palin. But when you're responding to suggestions from employees, from your direct reports, from students, or from anyone over whom you have authority, resist the temptation to "Just Say No."

A couple of incidents this week revealed two common responses to a boss figure who just said "no":

In one organization, a very enthusiastic, top-performing employee brought a suggestion to management and was shocked that it was abruptly dismissed, with comments like "that would be totally inappropriate", "that's unacceptable" and "this stops here." The employee felt completely shut down and disrespected, and it was pretty obvious that the boss wasn't receptive to further discussion on the issue. Despite this, the employee was convinced that the idea would be very good for the organization. So, with a positive yet rebellious spirit, the employee went underground and worked to implement the idea anyway. The boss soon found out, and came down hard with disciplinary action. Things got ugly. Relationships got damaged. Motivation plummeted.
In a second organization, employees had gotten quite used to their suggestions being dismissed, with some variation of "we tried that before" or "that wouldn't work here". Over time, the employees completely stopped voicing their suggestions. When management then ran into a problem that they couldn't solve and asked employees for help, nobody would volunteer solutions. Subsequent third-party interviews with staff revealed that they had many ideas that might have been helpful, but were resentful and hurt enough to "let management figure it out for themselves, since they're so smart."

In both cases, the boss said no. In some cases, there was attempt at explanation, as in "we tried that before." But, in neither case did the boss invest any time in dialogue with the employee to gain common understanding.

In the first case, dialogue with the enthusiastic employee might have allowed the boss to see the value in the suggestion, or allowed the employee to see why it validly needed to be modified to be effective in the organization. If they could have gained common understanding of each others' point of view, they would have been able to come up with a modified suggestion that would have been truly fantastic. Even if the boss had been able to leave a door open for the employee to present a modified suggestion, the toxic ugliness could have been avoided.

In the second case, dialogue with the employees could have helped them see why their suggestions actually wouldn't work, or it could have helped management see how the ideas might work now where they wouldn't have before. Without dialogue, the employees felt ignored and rejected, and stopped volunteering any of their creative energy, even when asked.

So, when subordinates bring ideas to you, invest some time in dialogue, and make it clear that you value their suggestions. If you have to say "No", work to gain common understanding, and draw out and validate the employee's reactions and emotions, leaving the door open for future suggestions and creative input.

When it comes to employee suggestions, just say no to Just Saying No.

Counting the Hours

2011-10-30T12:05:00.000-06:00

We tend to think of counting as a straight-forward activity - one, two, three, how could anyone disagree? Yet many organizations have tension and disputes over how to count, especially something as seemingly simple as counting the number of hours somebody worked.

An engineering office had a 37.5 hour work week. Staff were expected to be in the office 7.5 hours per day working, not including lunch. From staff and management interviews, here are six areas where the company was experiencing a lot of tension:

One work group had gotten into the habit of taking coffee breaks mid-morning. During these breaks, they'd chat about a variety of things, including work. Their manager felt that this was productive time, since it helped build relationships and staff often came up with creative solutions to work issues during the relaxed interactions over coffee. Other managers didn't feel that coffee breaks should be allowed, and their employees were not allowed to count coffee time as work time. Dispute arose over whether the coffee-breakers should have to work longer days to make up for the time "lost" during coffee.
As part of their regular work day, some field staff would be required report to the central office, then drive ninety minutes out to a job site for the day. The drive TO the work site was considered part of their work day since they first met at the office, but the ninety minute drive back was "on their own time" since they were just driving home from work. Staff that stayed in the office worked for 7.5 hours. were productive for 7.5 hours and were paid for 7.5 hours. Staff that worked in the field put in 9 hours, were productive for 6 hours and were paid for 7.5 hours.
Other staff were required to travel to a nearby city, usually flying in and flying out the same day. The morning flight left at 6am, and their end of the day flight returned home at 7 pm. Counting the time from when they arrived at the terminal in the morning to when they left the terminal at the end of the day, their workday was 14.5 hours. They were paid for 7.5.
Yet other staff were required to travel to more distant cities, with four to six hours flying time, and usually with an overnight stay on Saturday to get cheaper air fares. Some staff loved this time away, others felt resentful that it took them away from their families, and wanted time-off in lieu for the time they were required to be away. Management paid them for the days they were working in the other cities, but didn't compensate in any way for the time away from home. Flight time that was outside regular work hours also wasn't considered work. Lots of tension and disagreement over this.
A few staff were able to work from home because of the nature of their jobs. Tension mounted from in-office staff who's requests to work from home had been denied; they felt their driving time to work should now be paid for, since they couldn't do anything else during that time and the work-from-home people were not required to commute as part of their jobs.
Managers would take staff out for lunch and dinner occasionally. Some managers would allow their staff to count this as work time, some would not. Tensions mounted.

These situations show how difficult it can be to count something as simple as hours of work. How much more difficult is it to measure more complicated tasks in ways that everyone can agree on?

Convincing More Convincingly

2011-10-12T10:53:00.002-06:00

A food-processing company was preparing a communication plan to help with the rollout of some new processing equipment. As part of this effort, management considered all of the methods for getting the word out to the employees; the comprehensive plan included monthly newsletters, informative emails, personal conversations and staff meetings, and management felt confident that the plan would effectively tell employees what was happening. The wording chosen for all of these messages was positive and upbeat, emphasizing the benefits of the new system, with carefully selected quotes to show how good everything would be.

This is typical of many communication plans:

Figure out the message you want to convey, to executives, to middle managers, to staff, to customers.
Spin the message so it's unfailingly positive and enthusiatic
Choose media for delivering that message.

This is also typical of why many communication plans, and many change efforts, don't work all that well.

Whenever things are changed in your organization, it affects people. So, in good faith, we try to prevent resistance by improving communication, by keeping people informed. We increase the quantity of information that we send out. We focus on the positive aspects of the change. We try to convince people that the change will be good. We do more and more talking, in whatever form, to try to be more and more convincing.

To uncover and address resistance to change, we need to acknowledge that change truly does impact people. Very few changes are all butterflies and rainbows. The people doing the jobs are the experts at their jobs, and will have valid suggestions, valid fears, and valid concerns. Communication plans should focus as much on making sure people are heard as on keeping people informed.

As managers, we need to learn to listen to our people, to uncover and validate their concerns. Consider H.B. Karp's Positive Approach to Resistance, which is founded on two well-supported assumptions:

Resistance is real. People will always resist, knowingly or not, those things that they perceive as not in their best self-interest.
Resistance needs to be honored. It must be dealt with in a respectful manner or it will resurface.

As part of your communication plans, consider learning and implementing Karp's positive approach to resistance. This includes four separate steps, each of which should be completed before moving on to the next:

Surface the issues. Make it safe to voice concerns, and use active listening and interviewing techniques to draw out all the concerns.
Honor the resistance. Make it clear that it is OK to resist, it is natural to resist, and that surfaced concerns are legitimate.
Explore the issues. Strive to fully understand what the concerns are, rather than discounting them or explaining them away. Try to truly see what it looks like from the others' point of view. Then ask for help to figure out how to move forward in a way that would be least distressing, and most positive.
Recheck. Close the loop and re-examine the feelings and concerns about the issues, and about the path forward. Often, the resistance issues are no longer important, because they have been heard and understood. If not, rechecking sets a new starting point for followup sessions, in which you can continue to explore and resolve the resistance positively.

If all this mumbo-jumbo is Greek to you, consider the words of Epictetus (Stoic Greek Philosopher) - “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Your communication plans should include more listening than talking, surfacing the issues rather than pretending that they don't exist.

What We've Got Here is a Failure to Communicate

2011-10-03T19:44:00.001-06:00

Why do our organizations get off track? Why do our projects go off the rails? Are the reasons technical - problems with the actual mechanics of doing the work - or is something else going on?

Looking at projects with themes as diverse as software implementation, change management, time management, business development, strategic planning, efficiency, and retention, a little digging reveals that "what we've got here is a failure to communicate" - Cool Hand Luke (1967)

Five examples:

Management of a 200-person service organization regularly issued a newsletter to employees, and considered this adequate notification of important strategy and policy changes. The reality was that less than 30% of staff actually read the lengthy newsletter, and the writing style was long-winded and hard-to-understand. Uptake of key messages was only running around 10% of personnel, so very few staff knew what was going on and morale was very low. Still, management ranked themselves "very good" at communicating with their staff.
The new CEO of a non-profit hired a consultant to help with strategic planning, and invited the board of directors to the facilitated sessions. The chair of the board aggressively disrupted the first session saying "Why are you wasting our time? We already have a strategic plan!". The CEO was shocked - he had been trying to find the organization's plan continually since being hired a few months earlier, without success.
Very high turnover in a 30-person technology company was concerning management, and they decided to review their wage policy since competitors were "obviously poaching [their] best employees." Retroactive exit interviews revealed that several people had left because they were convinced that the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Rumours had circulated months earlier about some significant financial troubles. The rumours had actually been true, but the company had since restructured their debt and essentially eliminated their cash flow problem. There was no open communication with employees about "shareholder issues". With no communication, the rumours escalated, and contributed to several key people leaving.
Leaders of a transportation company held focus groups to gather employee input on an upcoming technology change. When the change was actually implemented, none of the employee suggestions had been incorporated. Morale plummeted and, despite management's well-intentioned attempt, the consensus among employees was that "They never listen to us. They ask us for our suggestions, but then they just shove [their original #%$^&* plan] down our throats."
The relationship between a sales agent and the manufacturer she represented went septic, and accusations flew wildly back and forth. The manufacturer accused the sales agent of not adequately representing them, and decided to withhold commissions on numerous accounts. The sales agent felt cheated by this apparent breach of contract by the manufacturer, and ended up starting legal action against the manufacturer after discussions failed. One key factor that emerged was that the sales agent did not do any reporting of her considerable business activity to the manufacturer, so the manufacturer had no idea how much work she was actually doing. Another factor was a product weakness that had affected most of the reference accounts to whom the company routinely referred new prospects. The company and the agent were both unaware of these problems. So, the reference accounts were giving poor reviews, weakening the agent's ability to sell.

More and more, I'm seeing problems resulting from failures in communication, rather than failures of a technical nature. And, many of the technical failures seem to have communication failures as their root causes as well.

I'm not saying that technical problems don't happen, but I'm clearly seeing the value of investing considerable time and effort in thorough, relentless, two-way communication and clarification.

Friendly, But Not Friends

2011-09-16T16:31:00.000-06:00

At a meeting of our Masterminds Breakfast Club for business consultants, we were talking about how to develop repeat business with clients, something of interest to all businesses, not just blood-sucking parasites (er, I mean, consultants). In addition to the somewhat obvious need to provide true value and keep in regular contact, the notion of relationship came up. And, the idea of being "likeable" or "well-liked" arose. A lively debate ensued.

Is it important for your customers to like you? Personally? Should you strive to be buddies with your customers? Should you hang out, go to the bar, go for dinner, and go to hockey games? How important is the personal relationship, the friendship, to the business relationship?

Everyone agreed that if customers don't like you, they will be less likely to want you around. But there were a lot of opinions on how close you should get. At some point, you will need to collect money from them. Or charge them for something they'd like for free. Or tell them something they don't want to hear. Or fire them as a customer. Or be told that your services are no longer required.

And, the question again came up: Do you need to be liked? Or, instead of being liked, is it more imporant to be respected? And, though we certainly don't want to be dis-liked, perhaps we don't really want to be friends?

Scott, from Abonar Business Consultants suggested that maybe "You want to be friendly, but not friends". In other words, behave courteously. Be polite. Be positive, supportive, and friendly. But maintain enough separation so that you can effectively manage the business relationship.

It's the same in an employer/employee relationship; be friendly towards employees, but maintain enough separation so that you can do what needs to be done to effectively manage the company. If you are always socializin' with the staff because you want to be liked and be their friend, how do you let one of your friends go when their performance just isn't adequate?

The lively debate continued, and no one imagined that there is one right answer that applies to every situation and every personality. But, if what you're doing hasn't been too effective, think about what you might change so that you can be friendly, without being friends.

Why We Need More Coffee Breaks

2011-09-13T12:51:00.000-06:00

A manager in a municipal government was lamenting the policy change that drastically limited the time allowed for coffee breaks. Not because he really loved coffee, or didn't want to get back to his job, but because he noticed that communication within the organization had gotten worse since the change.

In the good old days, people from different departments would get together casually over coffee, in groups, in pairs, and just chat. Inevitable, there would be a lot of talk about the Riders, but there was also be a lot of talk about what's going on in the office. "What's happening with you?" and "How's your project coming along?" were explored in a casual, relaxed setting and a lot of information was exchanged.

Now, that process is outlawed. Instead of a thirty minute coffee break with 15 minutes on football and 15 minutes about what's going on at work, they now have 15 minutes on football, followed by a 90 minute meeting to discuss what's going on at work.

When it was suggested that you could have a meeting and just make sure there was coffee, he wisely pointed out that it's not the same. A meeting with coffee is structured, formal and often unproductive. Coffee with some shop talk is unstructured, relaxed and often very productive.

Could more coffee breaks actually make your people more productive?

Training Isn't The Problem

2011-09-12T14:06:00.000-06:00

In a time management seminar for a large organization, there were managers from 10 different departments in the classroom. As we explored their issues and frustrations, a common theme emerged: all of them were spending a significant part of their days trying to find the information they needed on the corporate network. They unanimously agreed that the network was poorly organized, and had slow, inefficient search capabilities. "I start a search in the morning and check to see if it's done in late afternoon, often it isn't!" They just couldn't find what they needed.

So, since it was very hard to find information, when they did finally find it, they would make their own copy. And, since most of these managers were below the level that were issued laptops, they would have to print out the documents so they could take them into the field or bring them to meetings. And, since most of these managers were below the level that were issued bookshelves and filing cabinets, they didn't have any place to store these printed copies. So they'd either pile it up on their desk or the floor, or throw it out. Either way, they'd end up searching for it all over again the next time they needed it. Often, the printed paper versions would end up being out-of-date the next time they used it.

The design and usability of the company network was out of their control. The lack of access to laptops for portable access was out of their control. The capacity to file and store printed documents was out of their control. But, instead of addressing those issues, the solution that was implemented was to train these people on time management.

The system you're working in largely determines your capacity to get results. In this case, the system made it very hard for people to get the information they needed when they needed it. In situations such as this, training isn't the answer. No matter how well trained, the system would keep holding these people back.

Is Avoiding Failure the Same as Success?

2011-09-02T10:10:00.002-06:00

Looking through a Request for Proposal for help with a technology implementation, I'm struck by the fact that less than half a page, out of twenty, is dedicated to the scope, to describing what it is they hope to accomplish. That's less than 3% of the document dedicated to defining success, to defining what the desired outcome is for the project.

The other nineteen and a half pages are filled with "Thou shalt do this!" and "Thou shalt not do this!" commandments; the impression I'm left with is that this organization has probably had a lot of problems in the past and they're trying to prevent those same problems from occuring again. Now, that's fair enough; learning from past problems is a key part of improving a process.

The problem is, in the half page that deals with the scope of work, it's not really clear what it is they are trying to achieve. More than 97% of the document is trying to prevent failure, but the document never really manages to define success. Even if none of their anticipated problems happens, the odds are pretty good that the project won't really meet their goals, since little effort has been made to communicate what their goals really are.

When you're trying to get somewhere, sure it's important to avoid accidents and mechanical trouble. But it's even more important to have a clear vision of where you're trying to get. How much of your RFP process should deal with scope, and goals, and vision? I don't know, but probably a lot more than three percent.

How's Your Work-Life Balance?

2011-07-03T09:04:00.001-06:00

With a fabulous Canada Day come and gone, the real start of summer is finally here. And, the short Saskatchewan season of Non-Winter poses a simple question that tests work life balance - "How much time are you spending with your family this summer? At the beach? On the lake? In the back yard?"

If the answer is "not enough," then you might need to rethink your approach to management.

Do you need to create sustainable systems that can function without your daily attention? Do you need to engage and trust your employees? Do you need to invite initiative and allow your employees to truly take on responsibility, which is what they want anyway?

If your family is truly precious to you, this is really the time to show it - with focused together time, relaxed recreation, and without constant interruptions from your work. Turn off your phone, don't answer emails, and really spend time with your family.

Enjoy the summer. See you in September.

When You Need to Get Hit By a Bus

2011-06-18T11:05:00.000-06:00

A colleague recently had a family medical crisis, and was amazed at the clarity that this brought to his life. This guy is a passionate business owner and a bit of a workaholic. He confesses to always feeling a bit behind, certain that without his daily presence his "business would go to hell."

In the midst of the crisis, all the niggling details at work fell away, and he was amazed that "people just handled it." As the family pulled together to deal with the crisis, he found himself turning off his cellphone and ignoring the constant stream of emails, for hours and even days at a time. When he did check messages, he was amazed at how quickly he was able to evaluate which phone calls and issues he truly needed to handle, and which could be left for another day, another week.

In managing our time and our business, we talk about prioritizing, and planning, and doing the right thing. But sometimes, we need a crisis to drag us away, to give us time to think, to detach from the daily churn.We often worry about getting hit by the proverbial bus - the unexpected catastrophe that takes us out of the business. But sometimes, there's nothing better than getting hit by some virtual bus, some crisis that gives us clarity about what is truly important.

Kicked Out of the Wolf Pack

2011-06-09T15:26:00.000-06:00

The image of a lone wolf stirs the heart; the strong, independent hero fights injustice and, against all odds, saves the day. Picture Jason Bourne, Dirty Harry, or almost any movie starring Bruce Willis.

In reality, the odds actually do catch up to the lone wolf, as shown in research on ostracism across many species and social groups. In Born To Be Good, Dacher Keltner describes how "wolves who have been kicked out of their group for excessive aggression and an inability to play are less likely to reproduce and more likely to die."

Isn't that a good description of some of the difficult people in your organization? Excessive aggression and an inability to play! As you consider who to keep in your wolf pack, and who to kick out, doesn't it make sense to kick out the ones who are overly aggressive and who don't get along with others? If someone is just in it for themselves, and isn't committed to the others in the group, they can bring down the whole group. And that is exactly why wolves and other social species kick out the toxic ones. The group, the mission, the organization is more important than any one individual.

And, the mean parts of our own personalities can take some comfort from the fact that the ones that we do kick out are also then less likely to reproduce and more likely to die :)

Home Concerts and Productive Conversations

2011-06-01T22:31:00.000-06:00

In the music business, many musicians like Kim Fontaine and Jay Semko of Saskatoon are doing more home parties rather than bar gigs, preferring the intimate casual exchange in someone's home to the performance feel of a public gig.

Similarly, it seems that more and more of what I'm doing is based on conversation rather than presentation. Interviews, interactive training, facilitation - all of this is heavy on conversation and dialogue, rather than one-way output of information. I've come to prefer this, as have clients.

Building on this, I'm introducing a new service today: Ten Conversation About Productivity, For Leadership Teams. This is a series of ten in-depth, facilitated conversations about improving productivity. With the management team from an organization, we explore the leading approaches to "getting more done", and discuss how they fit with your organization. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to do this without just demanding more from your already hardworking employees.

Many Employees Don't Want Goals

2011-06-01T07:38:00.000-06:00

Point #1 - About 5% of people regularly make goals for themselves. About 10% of people think about making goals but generally don't. And, the other 85% just don't tend to make goals.

Point #2 - When people set goals for themselves, their motivation and their results increase. This is well-proven and well-supported both in the lab and in practical reality.

Point #3 - When goals are imposed on people, the effect on motivation and results is negligible. In fact, motivation often decreases, and the tendency to cheat and misreport results increases significantly.

Point #4 - When we do performance management at work, we generally insist that 100% of our employees make goals and strive to achieve them.

So, if only 5% to 15% of our employees like to set their own goals, yet we insist that all employees set goals, we are obviously imposing goals on the other 85%. Even if we wrap it up in nice encouraging words, we are still imposing goals on them, and this just doesn't drive performance.

The Most Important Idea

2011-05-30T23:48:00.000-06:00

"Our challenge, like many small organizations, is prioritizing among the many issues we're involved with. We need some help in prioritizing goals and developing a concrete strategy and action plan for staff to follow."

This recent inquiry about strategic planning services reflects a common and timeless problem, universal to all kinds of organizations. There's usually no problem coming up with many excellent ideas, especially in a group of passionate and creative people. There usually is a problem, however, with choosing what ideas to focus on first.

An unlikely source for a similar situation is found in Vologorov's Trotsky about the notorious Russian revolutionary. Speaking of a colleague, Trotsky said "Martov has always had many ideas, brilliant and subtle ones, but he had not the one idea that was more important than any other: he did not know what to do next."

That's one of the biggest values of a strategic planning retreat: not just coming up with ideas, but coming up with what you should do next. That is the one idea that is more important than any other if you are hoping to take action that makes progress towards your goals.

A Specialist, But Not at Communication

2011-05-24T16:07:00.001-06:00

An elderly patient was referred to a specialist for a medical consultation. The specialist was obviously knowledgeable about his profession, but was sadly lacking when it came to communication. His use of medical jargon made it essentially impossible for the patient to understand what he was trying to say.

Precise medical terms like "residual thrombus burden", "recanalization" and "inferior vena cava" mean specific things to doctors, but mean nothing to the general public. If he'd talked about a hardened blood clot, about re-opening bloodflow through a vein, about a large vein that carries blood back to the heart, the patient might have had a chance.

Communication is not about using impressive, precise, technical words. Communication is not about presenting an idea the way you think it should be presented. Communication is about helping someone else hear the message, about presenting the idea in a way that they can understand it. This means using simple language, appropriate to the audience, and asking open-ended questions to make sure they understand it.

Become a specialist at communication, and you will become far more effective at whatever else it is you happen to do.

Survival of the Nicest

2011-05-17T17:39:00.000-06:00

Few people know that Charles Darwin wrote another book, The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin discovered, and others have supported it with further research, that emotional displays (rather than words) form the basis for trusting relationships, teamwork and community.

We tend to dismiss emotion in the workplace, and downplay the significance of niceness in the business world. But, it turns out that Survival of the Fittest is less accurate than Survival of the Nicest when it comes to human evolution - being nice, being social helped humans thrive more than being big, tough and strong. We have evolved an "acute tendency to care, by highly-coordinated face-to-face social exchanges." When dealing with others, we are in tune with, and guided by, emotional displays. We are attracted to nice, to people who are committed to our well being.

According to Dacher Keltner in Born to be Good, "we find that it is not the domineering, muscle-flexing, fear-inspiring, backstabbing types who gain elevated status in the eyes of their peers. Instead, it is the socially intelligent individuals who advance the interests of other group members who rise in social hierarchies."

In the last two days, I was pleasantly surprised by two exciting new business opportunities that were presented to me. Both were the result, pure and simple, of positive, nice, trusting relationships. While occasionally, nice guys do finish last, in the long and continuing run of human evolutionary history, it's the nicest people that survive and thrive.

So, like Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86 of Control, choose the forces of goodness and niceness, instead of evil and nastiness. Work on your smile and on being nice. Because it works.

We Tried Cooperating Once

2011-05-16T16:08:00.001-06:00

The owner of a small bio-processing firm had tried to collaborate with a competitor once, but swore never to do it again; the other company had taken advantage of the partnership, and hadn't shared anything in return.

Many people use this kind of story as justification for avoiding collaboration - "once burned, twice shy" as the old saying goes. Yet research and evidence from the real world and the lab clearly show that cooperation is a more efficient strategy for success.

Companies look for market niches, areas where they can avoid the high costs of competition. Companies work to create industry standards, so everyone can agree on the basics and move forward efficiently. Companies form consortiums, to share resources and achieve things together that they'd be unable to do on their own. Judged purely by self-interest, greedy strategies tend to do very poorly in the long run while more altruistic strategies do better.

Perhaps a better approach to being "once burned" then is the tit-for-tat strategy - the most successful strategy in the fascinating Prisoner's Dilemna Game. In this approach, you assume the other person is "nice" the first time you play. Then, if they act greedily, you reciprocate and act greedily in your next encounter. If they then play nice, you can again play nice. In this way, you are open to the mutual benefits of cooperation, but protect yourself from an abusive, greedy partner.

So, don't let one failed collaboration turn you off. Work together, whenever you can, and use a tit-for-tat strategy to protect yourself from companies that don't know how to play nice.

The Commitment Problem - Part 2

2011-05-16T10:08:00.000-06:00

If your employees are not committed - to your company, to your cause, to you - there's certainly a chance they'll embezzle millions as described so eloquently in The Commitment Problem. But it's more likely that, when employees are not committed, they'll just toe the line and give you exactly what's required of them, but no more. They won't go beyond the line, they won't offer extra effort to make the company great, they'll grumble when you ask anything extra of them.

Every moment of the work day, employees have the choice of giving to the company or taking for themselves, of thinking about the long-term or of living in the moment and thinking about what's-in-it-for-me. If your employees tend to choose the long-term more often than the short-term, things are probably pretty good. If they tend to choose what's-in-it-for-me more often than not, you're probably feeling the frustration.

When exploring the personnel policies of several companies that suffered from low commitment, it was interesting to see areas where the companies demonstrated the same lack of commitment towards their employees. A few example:

The minimum vacation allowance in Saskatchewan, by law, is three weeks per year for up to nine years of service, four weeks a year for ten or more years of service. One company never considered allowing anyone more than the legal limit of vacation, no sabbatical options, no leave-of-absence options, no flex for an extended holiday. Not very committed to long-term work-life balance.
In Saskatchewan, you're not required to pay people who are off sick from work. One company had a policy that said, if you're visibly or audibly sick, don't come to work, but they also wouldn't pay for sick leave. A bit of an impossible choice for employees. Not very committed to the financial well-being or health of their workers.
Another company had very rigorous time-tracking methods, requiring employees to account for every 10 minutes of their day and allowing no overtime unless pre-approved. In plain words, they would pay for exactly the legal work day, but not a penny more. Yet, the owners were repeatedly surprised when employees would resist attending a company function in the evening or on the weekend - "on their own time". Not very committed to the ideas of mutual generosity, of helping each other, of give and take.

So, if you find that your employees do not seem very committed to your company. Take a deep look at whether your company is really committed to your employees, and make sure you look at it from their point of view, not yours.

Maybe You Don't Need a Plan

2011-05-05T18:44:00.001-06:00

Working on business development for a company selling industrial LED lighting into the Saskatchewan market, their sales manager felt there was no need for a plan. "It's simple. Show a sample of the product. Do an energy audit. Ask for a pilot project. Then it'll sell itself. We don't need marketing. We don't need a plan. We just need someone to get out there, roll up our sleeves, and get to work."

That does make good sense and there is truth to the idea that you don't need a plan to succeed. Clearly, if you don't get out there to sell, the chances of success are very small. So, if you do get out there to sell, the chances of success are much better. But, if you do get out there to sell, and you also have the support of good marketing materials, and you know what your competitors are offering, and your prospects already have a warm feeling about you because of your local advertising and communications and sponsorships, and your sales people are approaching the most lucrative markets because you've identified them in your plan, then your chances of success are MUCH better.

So, maybe you don't need a plan. You can just roll up your sleeves and get to work. But if you come up against a competitor who's rolled up their sleeves AND also has a plan, they'll likely whup your pasty white tush. And, in business, that's not as fun as you might imagine.

So, yes, roll up your sleeves and get to work. But do it with the direction and support of a great plan. It's more efficient. It's more effective.

Enough With the Standing Ovations!

2011-05-05T18:16:00.000-06:00

At an investment company's recent Client Appreciation Night at TCU Place in Saskatoon, the entertainment was good, but not great.

The warm up act was Jimmie Walker, who played Kid Dynomite (J.J. Evans) on the seventies comedy show Good Times. For some reason, Jimmie kept mentioning Moose Jaw as Saskatoon's main rival (it's Regina), went on for a while about the imminent post office strike (it's a teachers' strike, dude), talked about the lousy economy (while Saskatchewan has been booming). A little out of touch with the local scene! There were a few chuckles and smatterings of applause, but noone seemed to really get into it.

The main act was Michael Winslow, the cool sound-effects guy from the Police Academy movies. He made some pretty remarkable noises with just his mouth and a few effects pedals (the Jimi Hendrix solo was great), but also spent a whole lot of time on lowbrow "man walking out of theatre footsteps" and "man taking a leak" bits. Again, a few chuckles, a few impressive moments, but mostly mediocre filler.

Yet, at the end, the crowd of a couple thousand feet was up on it's feet for a standing ovation! Why? Why is it, that no matter how average the event, we feel obligated to honor the performers with what used to be reserved for only the best? Why pretend it was excellent when it wasn't? Don't we value excellence anymore? Have we lost our ability to identify excellence?Are we trying to be so darned nice that we never criticize mediocrity?

I've been noticing this in the world of business awards lately. Now some award recipients are truly deserving, and I mean no disrespect to those individuals and companies who are honored for their accomplishments over the years. Just staying in business for 25 years is actually a pretty amazing accomplishment.

I'm more concerned with all of the awards competitions that are mostly about "Ain't We Great". Three companies apply, or are nominated, and one gets the award as the "best this or that" in the city, or the province, or even the ENTIRE COUNTRY! One Saskatoon technology company proudly displayed an Excellence in Quality Management Award in their lobby, yet the company was a chaotic mess, with inconsistent products, huge turnover and terrible morale. They looked good on paper, and had a great award application, so with this public award as the supporting evidence, management was vocal and proud of their track record.

Not all management approaches are equal, either, nor are they all excellent. Bullying isn't good management. Winging it isn't good management. Loudership is not good leadership. And chaos is not really a business strategy.

So, don't give an ovation unless the show was truly excellent. And don't pretend that your management team is excellent, if it ain't.

The Commitment Problem

2011-04-29T23:05:00.000-06:00

Do you eat the chocolate, or do you stay on your diet?

Do you take a drink, or do you stay sober?

Do you have an affair, or do you stay faithful to your spouse?

Do you choose immediate, pleasure-seeking self-interest, or do you stay commited to your ideals and relationships?

That's the Commitment Problem. It's a big part of life. It's a big part of business as well.

When you hire a new employee, will they be committed to the success of your company? Or will they dip into the till, steal office supplies, and embezzle millions at the first opportunity?
When you promote someone into management, will they work for the betterment of the group or get seduced by their position, abuse their underlings, and embezzle millions at the first opportunity?
When you try to collaborate with someone, will they share with you in good faith, or abuse your trust, steal your ideas, and make millions in the marketplace that should have been yours?!

Thomas Schelling identified the Commitment Problem in the The Strategy of Conflict back in 1963. Dacher Keltner revisited it in his recent book, Born to be Good. Now, these books are not easy reads, and they don't result in simple three-step formulas for business success, but they do get one thinking.

How do we figure out who is committed to us, who is inclined to value long-term bonds with us, who is likely to be faithful and caring towards us, towards our cause? How do we figure out who is likely to lie, cheat, or sacrifice us for their own benefit? How do we avoid being exploited, to avoid being fooled?

No easy answers, to be sure, but important enough to try to figure it out.

The Motivation Seesaw

2011-04-27T01:41:00.000-06:00

I think all business owners have experienced swings in their level of motivation, their level of interest, and their confidence in the success of their business. It's different for each person, based on their personalities and the nature of their particular business, but I think it comes as a surprise to many entrepreneurs when they find that their confidence, their purpose, their motivation and their interest in the business ebbs and flows, sometimes dramatically.

Owners of one software business were just about ready to give up after four years invested in marketing their product. They decided to stick with it for another six months, and if things didn't improve, they would put the company in maintenance mode and go on to other ventures. The market cracked wide open (in a good way) after a few more months and they went on for five more years before selling to a larger firm for a tidy sum.
Owners of another software business continually felt that they were on the verge of success, that the breakthrough sale was just around the corner. For several years, they kept on marketing, continued development, and maintained a high cash burn-rate, but despite their confidence, they ran out of money, shut the doors and layed off all staff.
The owner of a successful construction company was surprised to find himself bored, despite the great success of his company. Even though business was better than plan, by far, he found that he had lost all interest in the company and decided to move onto something else.
The owner of another successful construction company also found himself bored. Considering his options, he decided to just be bored for a while and see what developed. After about a year and a half of very low motivation and interest, his interest suddenly rekindled and he found renewed motivation for what he was doing.

Don't expect that your motivation will be constant. Don't expect that your interest and certainty about your venture will be steady and true. Everything varies, including you. If you expect it, you'll deal with it more effectively.

Technology Drives Breakfast Group Crazy

2011-04-22T10:58:00.000-06:00

At a meeting of our Masterminds Breakfast Club for business consultants, we featured a topic about CRM and online collaboration software. The eight professionals present, between us, used thirty-four different software packages and online helper services, ranging from Salesforce, Mail Chimp and Constant Contact, to DropBox and CrashPlan to Wufoo Form Builder. While all of these technologies are exciting in themselves, most of the consultants at the table visibly drooped with the daunting prospect of researching, learning, selecting and implementing the various solutions. And, many expressed frustration that the process of learning about these solutions is actually four or five steps removed from actually doing any work for clients, or building the business.

When we tried to decide on a platform to use for inter-group collaboration, we had eight different opinions, all valid, and thirty four software options, all valid. And that's just scratching the surface of what's available.

So, there's lots of innovation going on out there in the market and the selection is almost endless. But, it's also extremely inefficient when there's no generally-accepted standard. And, it's tiring and cumbersome to collaborate with different groups, when each group has adopted a different set of solutions or a different platform.

Variety may be the spice of life, but our businesses are wasting too much time on choosing the spices and not enough time on preparing and serving the main course. If the market could cooperate more and decide on some standards, our lives could get a whole lot easier. And, our businesses would get a whole lot more productive.

Don't Waste Your Money on Placing an Ad

2011-04-19T10:36:00.000-06:00

Many out-of-province suppliers are trying to make inroads into the busy Saskatchewan mining and resource industries, and many are not finding much success. So, to create awareness of their company, they decide to (wait for it...) PLACE AN AD. Then, they try to figure out where they should place it. Then, they invest $400 or $1,500 or $5,000 and sit back to wait for the orders to roll in. And they sit. And sit. And sit. And wait. And nothing happens.

Many companies think about advertising as an event; something you do once - you PLACE AN AD. And, they've heard that you have to measure results, so if that one ad doesn't produce results, they come to the conclusion that advertising is a waste of money. And, when approached as an event, it largely IS a waste of money. Placing one ad is generally a waste, an expense. Not an investment.

Instead, we need to think about what we would do, not to create awareness, but to maintain awareness of our companies. To maintain awareness, we need repeated little touches with the people we want as customers. They need to see us in a magazine, read an article about us in the paper, see our name as a sponsor at their industry golf tournament, see us speak at a conference, and get the feeling that we're part of the fabric of their industry, and their community.

To maintain awareness, we need to think of advertising as a continual process, a series of touches, nudges and reminders. We need people to know that "We're here! Remember us when you need ..."

Don't waste your money on an advertisement to create awareness.

Do invest your money in a methodical campaign to maintain awareness.

Is Work the Opposite of Life?

2011-04-18T19:03:00.000-06:00

A quick Quiz from the Canadian Mental Health Association triggered some thoughts about the HR buzzword "Work-Life Balance."

Why is it that we talk about balancing Life on the one side, against Work on the other? Isn't Death the natural opposite of Life? Perhaps our work is so much like Death, that we need to make sure we don't get too much Work in our lives.

Consider these quotes from recent staff interviews, in various industries:

This job is killing me!
I don't know how much longer I can survive here.
I feel so drained, so depleted, at the end of the day.
It's sucking the life out of me.
I just turn myself off, like a zombie.

It's no wonder that we need to talk about balance, when our work is like this. We can try to put a limit on the damage work does, on the hours we put in, but it's like trying to paint over the rust on a car - the rust is still there, it's just that the optics are better.

We need to think about why work is so death-like? Why does it drain the life out of our people? Why do we separate life from work? Why not make work life-giving instead of deadening?

Work can be the most fulfilling thing we do. Through our work, we can achieve great things together, we can solve problems, we can build deep relationships, and we can help people. If we find purpose in our work, if we make work a satisfying part of life, we no longer have to worry so much about the struggle for work-life balance.

For confidential staff interviews and workplace productivity assessments, contact Assessments@SwiftFoxConsulting.com

Why is the Landlord Business Different?

2011-04-05T13:17:00.000-06:00

In response to one Regina apartment owner giving their tenants notice of a 70-100% rent increase, the Saskatchewan government is considering a longer rent notice period, currently set at six months. The intent would be to prevent "unacceptable" rent increases, whatever that means.

It's curious that the business of being a landlord is targeted for such regulation, while other businesses are not.

If you own a restaurant, you can set your prices however you want. If you set them too low, you'll lose money and go broke. If you set them too high, you'll lose customers, and go broke. If the cost of bacon, lettuce and tomatoes goes up, you'd better raise the price of a BLT or you'll go broke. If the price to own a restaurant building doubles, you'd better raise your prices or you'll go broke.

The same is true whether you sell groceries, gas, clothing, cars, or diapers. Charge too much, and people won't buy your product. Charge too little, and you won't make any money.

Why are the owners of residential properties singled out for this kind of regulation? In any other business, even if they deal with the necessities of life, companies are free to increase their prices. If they increase it too high, people will stop buying from them.

If a landlord increases the rent too much, tenants will stop renting from them. Tenants will move out. If the owner of the property is willing to risk losing their tenants, how is that different from any other business that decides to raise its prices? If a landlord can charge more rent, and still keep their building full, doesn't that mean that the price is not too high?

Why is the business of being a landlord so different?

What's Your Problem?

2011-04-05T10:56:00.001-06:00

If you're in business, you need to know what your problem is; what is the problem that you are in the business of solving?

T. Harv Eker, high-octane creator of Secrets of The Millionaire Mind, says that an entrepreneur is someone who solves problems for a profit. Good definition. The more problems you solve, the more profit you make. The bigger the problems you solve, the more profits you make.

When you realize this, and look at your business in terms of solving customer problems for a profit, you can't get to problems fast enough. Bring them on! Seeing problems as opportunities for profit is quite a bit different from seeing customer problems as a nuisance to be avoided.

One household appliance company kept hearing laments from their customers about how hard it was to get rid of their old clothes washers and dryers. Apartment dwellers especially had a problem, with no place to store their old appliances until they could hire someone to eventually haul it away. While the company had ignored this customer problem for years ("We're in the new appliance business, not junk hauling!"), an employee suggestion led them to consider the opportunity it presented.

They were delivering the new appliances anyway. They had capable staff onsite with the equipment needed to move appliances. They had space on the delivery truck, since they had just unloaded the new appliances. The staff were returning to the truck empty handed. The truck was returning to the depot empty. The company decided to offer a removal service, charging a small but highly profitable fee to haul away the old appliances at the same time as they delivered the new ones. They built a relationship with a recycling organization and a used-appliance outlet to get rid of the old equipment. The customer problem was solved, the company's profits increased.

How many more problems might they be able to solve?

Customers have a problem unpacking, installing and connecting the new appliances. It's often pretty complicated and needs a good handy man to complete. Solve that problem with some cross training and a few tools, and you have an on-the-spot installation crew. More profit opportunity.
Customers have another problem getting rid of all the packaging and large cardboard boxes from the new appliances. Solve that problem by taking the packaging back in the mostly empty truck. More profit opportunity.

So, next time your customers complain, or share a problem with you related to your business dealings with them, think about how you might solve that problem and turn it into profit. Because that's what entrepreneurs do.

Do You Feel The Spirit?

2011-04-04T19:37:00.001-06:00

All work is spiritual, often deeply so.

All things that people do involve and affect their spirit, and all things that people do for others involve and affect their spirit as well. We're not talking religion here, we're talking spirituality. Spirituality deals with the parts of life, the parts or work, that are related to the human spirit or soul, not just to tangible or material things.

Many companies and many jobs feel like bleak, soul-sucking cesspools of drudgery and despair. Well, maybe not that bad, but most people you ask (and I've asked quite a few) certainly don't get a deep sense of positive satisfaction from their work. Does work drain your spirit? Is spirituality something you get on Sunday, or from volunteering, or from communing with nature, but not something you ever get from your work?

There's a classic story, with a hundred variations, of asking three tradesmen what they're doing - the first says "I'm carrying sand", the second says "I'm building a foundation", and the third says "I'm building a cathedral". Cute, and inspiring, but it doesn't quite go far enough.

When you really embrace the spiritual nature of work, a fourth tradesman might say something like "I'm bringing comfort to people in their times of joy and sorrow." That's the spirit, the true purpose, of what their work is all about.

It's easy for most people to get the idea of spirituality when talking about a church organization, or anything to do with religion, but this applies to all organizations.

A mid-size engineering company was working on the design of a large plant to produce a zero-calorie sweetener for foods. The piping and structural designers and engineers had embraced the idea that they were helping people lose weight while still enjoying their food. They talked about this in their daily work.

Note that these people weren't selling the sugar. They weren't putting the sugar into food products. They weren't producing the sugar. They weren't even building the plant that was producing the sugar. They were five steps removed, designing the plant that would produce the sugar. But, they really understood how their work would ultimately help others. They had a noble purpose.

When you understand the spiritual purpose of your company, and it's almost always some form of helping others, it makes a difference throughout the organization. It helps you choose which people to hire. It helps you make decisions. It gives people something to get excited about, a noble purpose in which to get engaged, a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to work together.

For a kitchen cabinet company, are you just shipping boxes or are you creating a new heart for a family's home? In a machine shop, are you building roll-over protection or helping mine workers get home to their families every night? Are you making an in-vehicle video player or are you helping young families enjoy the long drive to the mountains?

What's the spritual purpose of your organization? What are you doing to truly help people? Do you know? Do your people know? Is it noble and inspiring?

If the answers are no, either you're not looking deep enough, or you're in the wrong business.

Do Some Homework Before You Make the Call

2011-03-30T21:27:00.000-06:00

A salesman called the busy CEO of a midsize technology company to say "I'm going to be in your city and would like to come and see you." The salesman wouldn't say what his company did, and didn't know anything about what the technology company did.

So, the CEO clarified, "You won't tell me what you do, and you don't know anything about us, but you want to meet with me when you're in town? You should have done some homework - don't call me again" and hung up.

If this is your cold calling approach, you'd better get used to a whole lot of rejection.

The people you're calling on are busy. Do your homework, present your value proposition, and don't waste their time.

You've Got to Listen

2011-03-29T08:09:00.000-06:00

A small SK software company has a truly great product that could save large industrial companies millions of dollars. The company has made great efforts to convince some large customers that their product is truly great. They've sent out information about their product, they've done presentations, and they've itemized the benefits of their software. But the company has not made any significant sales.

The company has truly failed to communicate. They've "spoken" lots, but they've truly failed to listen. That's four truly's so far (five now), and I truly mean every one of the them (six!).

This company, as personified by its founder and owner, actually seems incapable of listening to others. Have you dealt with people like this?

Suggestions from salespeople on how to improve the sales model are brushed off as whining;
Suggestions from customers on how they'd like to test the product before buying are brushed off as cheap;
Suggestions from colleagues on how the company might better present the solution are brushed off as unnecessary.

In the owner's mind, the product speaks for itself, and is perfectly suitable, as is. The sales people should just get out there and sell it, and any customer that doesn't buy it ain't too smart.

There is still a chance that this company will succeed. But there's a greater chance that this company, and this great product, will become obsolete without ever making the impact that it should.

No matter how smart you are, make sure you learn to listen.

It is truly the most important part of communication, and the most important part of running a business.

Truly (eight!)

Swimming Upstream

2011-03-28T10:56:00.001-06:00

Do you ever despair about the effort it takes to make changes in your organization? To get results? Whether you're an economic development agency trying to attract businesses to your city, or a business owner trying to motivate your staff, do you sometimes get the feeling that there is some greater force that's trying to prevent your success? Are you swimming as hard as you can, but not getting anywhere?

We all work within systems, and our systems are part of larger systems. While our focus is usually on what we ourselves are responsible for on a daily basis, sometimes we need to expand our attention to the larger systems of which we are a part. Two examples...

In Northern Ontario, economic development agencies have struggled to attract and keep major industrial customers that are heavy users of electricity. The energy policy of Ontario sets electricity rates higher than neighbouring Quebec and other jurisdictions, so major industries like Cliffs Natural Resources ferro-chrome refinery are finding it hard to justify locating in Ontario. Even though other technical reasons might make Ontario an ideal location, the larger system of provincial energy policy makes it unattractive because of the electrical costs. So, while particular communities might have excellent economic development initiatives, they're swimming upstream against the province's power rate policies.

Similarly, the owners of an otherwise vibrant 25-person Saskatchewan company have been continually frustrated by employees who won't give that little bit extra to get jobs out on time. Their company, their payroll policies and their management approach operate within the larger system of Saskatchewan's labour standards where any work beyond eight hours per day is overtime, to be paid at time-and-a-half.

Applying this diligently, the company has required all overtime, no matter how small, to be approved in advance. The hassles of getting management micro-approvals for every little extra effort has evolved into a culture of clock watching, with everyone leaving when the official day is done. The managers are trying to foster teamwork and cooperation, but their staff have been swimming upstream against this inflexible administration of overtime, agains inflexible administration of Saskatchewan's labour standards.

When local economic development agencies identify provincial policies that affect their ability to attract companies, they need to work with that larger system to address those issues - in Ontario, the hydro energy policies. In the Saskatchewan example, when the small company's strict application of the eight-hour work day damages their entrepreneurial culture, they need to give some attention to the larger system of Sasktchewan's labour standards. They need to identify alternatives, either informally adding flexibility to the work day, or formally applying for a permit to average hours. They need to work on the larger system that's making it all but impossible for employees to willingly give that little bit extra.

In any case, recognize that all of your work takes place within some larger systems, and those systems can have large effects on your results. If you find yourself swimming as hard as you can and not getting anywhere, look outside your day-to-day operations to the larger system that you're working within. It's easier to make progress if you're not trying to swim against a strong current.

Standardize to Reduce Effort

2011-03-25T15:12:00.000-06:00

While some heavy-handed implementations of standards like ISO9001 can seem like a whole lot of extra effort for not much gain, standardizing the daily work can dramatically reduce your daily effort. By deciding in advance the best-known-method for handling a repetitive task, you reduce the time required to figure it out each time. A few simple examples...

What do you do with a business card from a new contact? You can just pile them up and then, a few months later, try to figure out who all those people were. Or, you can have a simple, standard handling process that you always do with a new contact. If you have a CRM system that can automate this, or at least automate reminders for this, so much the better, but I've seen people handle this well with no technology other than a set of dated file folders. Perhaps you:

Add it to your Address Book
Send a "Nice to meet you email"
Schedule a "Here's something you might find useful" contact in five weeks
Make a "Hey, how you doing" phone call four weeks after that.
Add them to your mailing list for periodic contact after that.

How do you decide what kind of advertising and marketing to do? A marketing calendar, that standardizes your message and outlines what you will spend, when, on what, can dramatically reduce the effort required to get the word out. With a standard calendar, you then just need to make it happen, and don't have to waste your time and your mental energy on every opportunity that arises. And, if you measure which methods are producing results over time, you dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to create your marketing plan for the next year too. One small company decided on the following schedule, and successfully built their business for more than seven years with this simple plan:

six magazine ads a year
classifieds ads every week
sponsor one industry golf tournament, and one industry curling bonspiel
a public speaking engagement each quarter, shared among three business development people, and
one networking event each month for each of the three business development people.

What do you offer your customers? If you can do "anything for anybody", every sale requires starting from scratch. Can you bundle your offerings into a package? Can you calculate standard pricing in advance? Can you make it easier for your salespeople to tell customers what it is you do? Simple stuff, but these simple things can drive the costs and complexities of each transaction way down.

Whatever you do over and over, look at how you can standardize the work, the individual steps, the information flow, and the output. A little investment in standardization can produce significant reductions in effort, and significant improvements in results. In all areas of your business.

Tired of Email Newsletters?

2011-03-24T09:23:00.003-06:00

It seems like everybody and their duck is sending out an email newsletter these days. It's cheap, it's easy, and it's getting annoying. Yes, you can track the click throughs, and see who opens it, and yes that's all valuable. The same applies to Facebook, and Twitter, and all the other super-efficient electronic ways to get your message to your target audience.

But when people get eight, or eighty, of these things a day, it gets a little tiring. And, it gets to be that your constant contacts, on top of everybody else's constant contacts can become constant irritants. Do you really want to be part of what irritates your clients and customers?

The success of most organizations is still built on personal relationships. If you really want to be noticed, and really want to connect with people, I'll suggest three radical new technologies - picking up the phone, mailing an actual letter, and going for lunch.

Not to say that technology isn't useful. But when everybody's doing the same things, with the same technologies, you can stand out by using less technology to build more personal connections.

You DO Make Widgets

2011-03-23T11:34:00.001-06:00

As you strive to explain why your business is different, have you ever found yourself saying "We don't make widgets here!" Do you feel that your business is more complex, more demanding than the simple manufacture of products?

Especially in service organizations, the tendency is to think that production of a product is "so much simpler than what we do here!"

But the reality is that every organization makes widgets, every organization makes products, and products are the only things that you can provide to a customer.

A quality manager at BMW's South Carolina plant got it right when he said "Of the 58 products BMW creates at this plant, only three are vehicles. We also create Invoices, Purchase Orders, Plant Tours, Dealer Seminars, Audits, Phone Conversations, Warranty Claims ... everything we do results in a product, and every product has a customer."

When you define your output as a product, you can identify who your customer is for that specific product. Then, knowing that customer, you can start to become customer-focused, continually making your product better and better, from the customers' point of view.

So what are your products?

Robin Lawton of International Management Technologies presents a useful model for identifying your products. A product must be:

A deliverable [ie. must be a noun, not -ing]
Very specific
Packaged in countable units
Made plural with an “s”

So, though you might be looking for coaching, coaching itself is not a product. Though coaching is a noun, nouns that end in -ing are not useful product definitions. You can't count the number of coachings and you can't make it plural with an "s" - "I would like three coachings please" doesn't make any sense.

So, the actual product you might be interested in is a weekly coaching session. You can count the number of coaching sessions, you can discuss what a productive coaching session might look like. You can define your expectations for a weekly session, and you can identify features and benefits you'd like to see in a coaching session.

As part of coaching, a followup call might be a related product. You can count the number of followup calls, and you can identify what makes a good followup call. Similarly for an agenda, an assigned task, a task list, or a productivity suggestion. These are all products.

To get you started thinking about the products you produce, about your widgets, consider this list:

Advertisements, Answers, Blueprints, Campaigns, Contracts, Courses, Decisions, Deliveries, Diagnoses, Greetings, Innoculations, Invoices, Interviews, Job Postings, Plans, Policies, Prescriptions, Procedures, Product Returns, Recipes, Repairs, Reports, Schedules, Shipments, Strategies, Surgeries, Visits,

Learning to think of your output as a product, or widget, can be very helpful on your path to improved productivity and improved quality.

You DO make widgets. Be proud of that!

Thanks, Now Get Out!

2011-03-22T12:11:00.000-06:00

What would you expect from your manager when you're leaving a position after twenty good years on the job? Maybe a little gift? Maybe a going away party? Maybe a thank you?

Two long-time nurses recently left positions in the Saskatoon Health Region after twenty and twenty-eight years respectively. What did they get?

Upon giving notice, the first nurse heard, "That's OK, we've got people lined up to take your job." For the second nurse, the message was, "You know you aren't allowed to contract back anymore?"

Neither heard a "Thank You."
Neither heard a "We'll miss you."

Neither heard anything remotely like the public promise of the health region: "...to create a positive experience in the way we treat and care for people, in how we work and interact with each other, and in how we deliver quality service. We promise to seize every opportunity."

Values, mission statements and promises are great; they help to align and inspire people. But often they're just attempts to "fix" the workers, to get them to do something different. When the first two stated values of an organization are Respect and Compassion and you have managers treating long-term employees like this, it's just sad.

Sure, you can clarify your vision and values. Sure, you can write out a promise statement. But, sure as s$%*t, managers and leaders need to actually embrace the values, live the values, and VALUE the values, or they're not worth the webpages they're written on.

Does Your Communication Fail Safe?

2011-03-18T10:31:00.003-06:00

We often need to communicate important information to other people in business. As we try to prevent problems and improve reliability of our processes, it's interesting to look at what happens if our communication fails. Does it fail in a safe way? Here's an example from the medical profession...

Patients at risk of blood clots often end up being prescribed Warfarin, an anti-coagulant, commonly but inaccurately called a "blood thinner". When a patient is taking Warfarin, they need regular blood tests (called INR tests) to make sure the dosage is right, with an INR value between 2 and 3. If the INR is too low, say 0.5, there's a high risk of dangerous blood clots. If the INR is too high, say 5, there is a high risk of dangerous bleeding. So, the patient needs feedback from their doctor based on the results of these regular tests. Usually this amounts to "stay on the same dose", "reduce the dose by X mg/day", or "increase the dose by Y mg/day". And, here's the process, at least in parts of Saskatchewan...

1. The doctor recommends a schedule for regular INR blood tests, say about once a week.
2. The patient goes to a lab when it's convenient, and gets an INR blood test done.
3. The lab sends the results to the doctor.
4. When the doctor receives an INR test result, they check the INR number. If it's too low or too high, the doctor phones the patient to adjust the dosage.

Simple enough, right? If there's a problem with the test result, the doctor makes an adjustment. When there's a problem, we deal with it. When there's not a problem, we do nothing.

One patient had a blood test done (and it turned out the INR value was 4.8 putting them at a high risk of dangerous bleeding). But, the lab either failed to send the results to the doctor, or the doctor's office lost or misfiled the test results. Whatever the reason, the doctor didn't get a test result, so the doctor didn't check the results, so the doctor didn't inform the patient.

Since the patient was only expecting a call if there was a problem, the patient thought everything was OK.

Since the doctor only responded to lab tests actually received, the doctor thought everything was OK.

Since the lab thought they'd sent the results to the doctor, the lab thought everything was OK.

As designed, this communication process did not fail safely. There was no guarantee that a problem result would get attention. There wasn't ever a confirming message sent to say "the test result were received and are OK."

To fail safely, one possible strengthening of the process would be to ALWAYS notify the patient with results within 1 day of the test, (dosage OK, increase dosage by X, or decrease dosage by Y). So, if the patient had not heard back within one day, they would not assume that the dosage is OK, they would assume that something went wrong with the communication process. Many other remedies could also help this process,

The point is, we can apply this thinking to many types of reporting and communication. If we only get a "signal" when there is a problem, we never know for sure if everything is actually OK. Someone might just have failed to communicate the signal. And that's not safe.

Trying Harder Loses the Championship

2011-03-17T19:46:00.000-06:00

Bantam hockey. Pretty good season. Team working together. Team having fun. Team starting out strong in the playoffs.

Then, a few rabid hockey parents throw in a bunch of comments...

"This is the most important game of the season."
"You better be motivated for this."
"Damn right there's pressure!"
"Make me proud!"
"Quit fooling around, think about the game ahead."
"Be a winner."
"Give it all you've got, this is the playoffs."
"Try your hardest, the whole team's counting on you."
"Get serious."
"You've got to win this one."

Watch all the kids try to be heroes. Watch all the kids "try their hardest" to score a goal. Watch the team collapse.

Watch the team stop passing. Watch the team get down on each other. Watch the team stop joking and laughing. Watch the team stop enjoying hockey. Watch the team get serious. Watch the team become ineffective. Watch the team lose.

If the team had played the way they usually played, in a fun, relaxed enjoyable way, working together without real concern for fame or the Big Win, they probably would have also won - they had the skills, they had the track record, they were the better team. But when they were all corralled into thinking that being serious, being individual heroes, being individual winners would somehow be more effective than good, fun, relaxed team play, they crashed and burned.

In hockey, in business, if you've built a culture of relaxed, engaged teamwork to get you where you are, don't suddenly think that serious, individual heroics will somehow work better when things get challenging. Use what's worked. Good teams are more successful, and more enjoyable, than a bunch of heroes.

Know Your Mission

2011-03-07T16:58:00.000-06:00

Whenever possible, a leader tries to balance so that the needs of the mission and the needs of the people are both met. But there are times, when the needs of both can not be met. You can not balance. You have to choose one over the other. In these few situations, and you must make them few, MISSION MUST COME FIRST. These are the few times when leaders will not, can not, and should not be “fair”. The whole purpose of the organization is to fulfill its mission.

It is here that leaders, young and old, most frequently fail. Common sense would tell us that happy, satisfied workers will get the job done better. So, we assume that if we can somehow keep our people happy and satisfied, they will be more productive, more likely to get the mission accomplished. But the cause and effect of leadership just doesn’t work this way. Thousands of studies and thousands of real-world lessons in leadership prove that this natural, common-sense assumption is precisely wrong.

Mission accomplishment builds morale and esprit far more often than the other way around. When people and departments get done those things that people and departments are supposed to do, that’s when morale and esprit get highest.

Mission accomplishment builds morale.

So you had best know your mission.

Adapted from Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach.

Planning Paralysis

2011-03-04T09:24:00.000-06:00

How many projects are sitting on your desk, unstarted, because you can't find the time to make a plan?

In the ideal world of project management, you create a plan listing all the steps needed, in order, to get you where you want to go, with timelines, responsibilities and required resources all figured out down to the last nickel. (And a nickel might mean 5 cents, 5 hundred bucks, or 5 grand, depending on the size of your venture). In the real world that most managers live in, they can't find the time to make this comprehensive plan, so the project sits, unstarted, for weeks, months, years.

For some projects, like building an oil refinery in 18 months, you'd be crazy to start without a solid project plan. But for many projects that are sitting on manager's desks throughout the world, a comprehensive plan is not that important. The important thing is to start.

So, figure out the first thing you could do to make some progress on the project. Call someone, gather one piece of information, take one small step, give direction to one minion. You need a general idea of where you're going, but more importantly, you really need to start making progress.

Then, after you take that first step, you see if it's taken you closer to your objective, or if it's a little off target. Based on what you learn, you adjust your direction and take the next baby step. This simple breakdown of a journey into little cycles of Step, Adjust, Step, Adjust, Step, Adjust can take you through to completion of a project, without ever having to define an intricate, detailed, step-by-step project plan. This works surprisingly well.

So, take a look at your desk, figure out which project would make the biggest difference to you over the next weeks, months, years, and take the first step. It's time to get started.

Just Say No To Inflexible Software

2011-03-02T16:43:00.001-06:00

A company purchased a business management software package. Their expectations were whipped into a frenzy by the sales material and hype, with high hopes that it would streamline their work processes and gain huge efficiencies. It was "integrated", "specific to [their] industry", "web enabled" and "customizable".

Unfortunately, in retrospect, these terms mean:

"integrated" within itself, and only well-suited to a company that happens to run exactly the way the software is designed to work. No integration with other packages, limited import-export functionality, and no automation capabilities.
"specific to [their] industry" but not nearly as advanced and flexible as the software that most other industries are using. If it's a choice between industry-specific and flexible, choose flexible.
"web enabled" means they have a web-browser based interface to do specific, limited tasks. The interface is not customizable, and is clunky and user-unfriendly.
"customizable" means that you can pay them to customize it, but can't do a darn thing with it yourself.

State-of-the-art for modern software is easy-to-use with flexible customization and seamless web and mobile interfaces. If software can't match the way you do business, you're going to have to create all kinds of workarounds, you're going to be writing down all kinds of clunky step-by-step manual procedures, and you're going to hate it. You're not going to get the productivity gains that the brochures lead you to expect.

Work on your processes first, get rid of the waste, the overprocessing, the handoffs, the defects, then find some software that can automate it. If you do it the other way around, that clunky old dinosaur software is going to bite you.

How Do You Get Customers?

2011-02-24T10:16:00.000-06:00

The owner of a small startup company was looking for advice on how to get customers. She had bid a few jobs and dropped off business cards at a few offices but hadn't yet gotten any clients. Her basic questions were "How do I get customers? Why won't they give me business?"

She had been on staff at a commercial cleaning company, had imagined all the money that the owner was making, and had taken a leap to make her own fortune with a commercial cleaning company of her own. Her answers to some basic exploratory questions showed a real lack of preparation:

What services do you provide? - "We can do anything."
Who needs these services? - "Every business needs us."
What do you charge? - "Fifteen hundred dollars a month."

Why should someone hire you? - "They need to hire somebody."

While desperately hoping that someone would give her business, she was making it very difficult for anyone to buy her services. She couldn't tell me, or a client, what services she offered. She didn't know how big or how small a client she could handle, or what kind of companies and buildings she'd be able to satisfy. She quoted a price, but without defining what services she would provide. And she couldn't give any reason why a client should hire them as opposed to someone else.

On the surface, this seems naive and ridiculous. How could a business owner be so unprepared?!

But, working with larger established companies, this type of answer is remarkably common:

What services do you provide? An industrial machine shop claimed that they could do any kind of fabrication and repair for customers in any industry. No job was too big or too small! Really? You do jewelry repair AND build steam generators for nuclear reactors AND stamp out automotive body panels AND make surgical implants AND erect structural steel for commercial buildings? Define what services you do, define what services you want to do, and communicate that clearly to your customers.
Who needs your services? A book keeping service was confident that every business could use them. The reality was that many of the companies they were talking to were either too small to afford them, or too large to need external help. The company advertised widely on the web, yet were really only familiar with the tax structures and regulations in their home province. Some companies are your potential clients, and some are not, whether based on size, geography, industry, or even philosophy. Figure out what kind of companies you want to work for, and go after them, don't waste your time with everybody else.
What do you charge? Do you sell products, services, or productized services? Are your rates fixed or negotiable? Do you give discounts? Do you charge based on results, or based on hours worked, or based on a fixed fee? Is it clear to your customers what you will do for the price you'll be charging? Are your prices comparable to other service providers? Are you trying to be cheaper than everyone else, the same as everyone else, or do you price your services at a premium? If you don't know your prices, how do you expect your customers to understand them? How do you expect your customers to buy from you?
Why should someone hire you? People don't generally give you business. You need to convince them that you can provide them with something more valuable than the money they will be paying you. They need to trust you, to believe that you can do what you say you will. The small cleaning startup had not prepared any references, marketing literature, price sheets or list of services. There couldn't provide anything that showed why they were different, why they were better, or why someone should hire them. So, no one was hiring them!

You can certainly try to be all things to all people. You can choose to keep your pricing vague and unpredictable. You can hope people will give you business. But you'll probably be better off if you figure out what it is you do, who it is you do it for, how much you charge for it, and why you're better at it than anybody else.

Does Fear Really Work?

2011-02-22T09:42:00.000-06:00

The owner of a small print shop had six pretty happy employees and a thriving little business. As things got busier, the owner brought his wife in to help run things. She was a bit of a tyrant, and was a fan of the good cop, bad cop approach to management. She was the bad cop.

As the work environment deteriorated, several of the employees quit. The remaining employees were unhappy, and one expressed concern to the bad cop, saying that everyone was afraid to make a mistake, afraid to try anything new, afraid for their jobs. Her response was that "fear works for me," she was OK with having fearful employees; that was part of her strategy, her management philosophy.

Within months, all of the previous employees had left. Within a year, the company had folded. The bad cop manager, to this day, still laments the difficulty of "finding and keeping good employees."

Does management by fear really work for you?

Ten Improvement Models for Leaders Who Don't Know How To Improve

2011-02-08T08:40:00.001-06:00

If you want better results from your company, but you really don't know how to systematically make things better, here are ten models you can use to flail away at improvement:

Get people to work harder. Generally done through some combination of begging, bullying, and bribing.
Work longer hours. Crank up the number of hours that you and your people work.
Hire more people. Throw more bodies at the problem.
Downsize some people. Growth and profits through emaciation.
Add some technology (the mythical silver bullet). This gizmo ought to fix things.
Set targets and hold people accountable. I don't know how to improve things; maybe they'll figure something out.
Set big bold stretch goals. And then hope some magic happens.
Work smarter, not harder. Which isn't insulting at all to those who've been experts at their jobs for fifteen years.
Fire anyone who makes a mistake. Only for perfect managers or hypocrites, of whom I've met several.
Hire only the best. We need a hero, because we don't know how to succeed without heroes.
Reorganize. Changing who people report to will somehow fix what we do.
Counting. Make decisions based only on the numbers you can measure.

I realize that was twelve, not ten, but there are so many of these desperate-feeling improvement models that it's hard to stop. These models all seem powerless, relying on hope and wishful thinking, relying on "something" happening; something magical, or lucky, or wished for. Yet these models are all used. Commonly. Ineffectively.

When the temperature outside goes above zero again (it's -40 today with wind chill), we'll look at ten improvment models used by leaders who DO know how to improve.

Better Maps To Help You Get Lost

2011-02-04T06:21:00.000-06:00

The boys had an out-of-town hockey tournament and, thanks to advanced online maps (Google Maps, Expedia Maps, MapQuest, and GPS) , ten out of fourteen parents made goofy travel mistakes.

Four got lost, taking wrong turns, taking nonsensical routes, and ending up in different towns as they meandered down snowy back roads on their way to Dinsmore, SK. Six got there either way too early, or way too late, having planned their travel based on the online estimates of travel time. Our Google Map predicted a two hour drive; it took a little over an hour. If we'd bothered to think about the actual mileage, we'd have realized the time was way off, but the tool presented Estimated Travel Time as the most prominent number, and we just went with it.

Now, most of these hockey parents are intelligent, capable people, yet we all relied on these amazing new tools, and we all failed to think. In ancient history, before 2005, we would have all had paper maps in the car. We would have looked at how many kilometers away Dinsmore actually is from Saskatoon, and planned our route and our travel time accordingly. We wouldn't have collectively ended up touring through Outlook and Milden. Now, without exception, we all trusted these expert tools to do our thinking for us, and in this case most of us got bad results.

We do this all the time in business, coming to blindly believe our information technology, our dashboards and reports, our visible numbers and the awards we win. It gets to the point that we stop thinking about what's really going on.

A recent StarPhoenix circular about Saskatchewan's Top Employers for 2011, cited "SIAST passes with flying colours", quoting a bunch of SIAST managers on how happy their employees are. At the same time, there's a bitter labour dispute going on and interviews of several SIAST instructors shows deep animosity and terrible morale. The SIAST leaders have awards and information that make them think they're heading to Dinsmore, but they're heading in the opposite direction and are probably going to miss the tournament.

Take the time to think, and if your tools start to mislead you, think about whether they're helping you or hurting.

Caution - Low-Fat Organization!

2011-01-28T21:58:00.001-06:00

To better "manage", we cut costs and pursue efficiency. We slash away at budgets and resources. We reduce staff, reduce maintenance, and reduce everything, as we try to run our organizations with less. Always with less.

And, as we pride ourselves on running a tight ship, we keep our organizations so close to the edge that they become vulnerable, fragile, with no padding to handle even the smallest bumps and bruises.

A small sales center finally got staffing levels to an "optimum" (read "minimum") level, with everybody trained and functioning pretty well as a team. Then, diapers and disability reared their ugly heads. One person left on maternity leave, one on paternity leave, and one on long-term disability, taking three skilled staffers out of the pool of twelve for about a year. Already scrawny, the team was now in crisis. "I don't know what we were thinking; how could we not have planned for this," lamented the owner.
Organizations cut infrastructure maintenance, putting it off to next year. Always to next year. The University of Saskatchewan now has a maintenance deficit of $617 million. "There's no way we can continue in this fragile environment," says Colin Tennent, the U of S architect and facilities management division associate vice-president. Not unique to any one institution, this seems to be a global consequence of modern "cost-cutting" management, with a global maintenance deficit estimated at Two Trillion Dollars (!) per year.
A manufacturer went on a crusade to reduce WIP (work in process), and slashed the "allowed" inventory between steps in the production line, to cut costs. They quickly found out that their machines were not very reliable, their job instructions were not very accurate, and the variation in production times at each step was huge. The plant suffered painfully for a year, never meeting shipping schedules, before they rolled back the arbitrary cost-cutting target and started focusing on improving the work instead.
A services company had a demand level that fluctuated between 3 and 15 hours per day per person. Due to the nature of the work, only one person could work on each task. So, on some days, the demand called for 3 hours each, and the next day, the demand required 15 hours each, out of a regular day's work. Everyone was going crazy, nobody could consistently complete their scheduled work, and morale was terrible.

People do get sick. Couples do have babies. Key people will leave. Anything we create will need to be maintained. Every step in our process will occasionally fail. And you can't really squeeze 15 hours out of an eight hour day. We need a bit of fat in our organizations to be healthy and resilient. We need some buffers to handle the inevitable variations, the bumps and bruises.

So, don't reduce your organization to the point of inadequacy (Karl Menger's 'Law Against Miserliness’). Don't run a scrawny company. Excess capacity can be a very good thing.

Too Much on Your Plate?

2011-01-27T12:02:00.000-06:00

You're a busy executive, and you want to be effective and powerful, creating positive change in your organization. But lately it seems that there's just too much to do. There aren't enough hours in the day, and you never see your family because of all the work-life balance seminars you've been attending.

Here are a few time-management morsels for you to chew on, as you struggle to bite off the daunting pile that's on your daily plate:

Can We Just Stop Doing It? When a problem arises, we often add additional tasks, approvals, reporting, and steps to our processes to deal with that problem. Then, when the problem goes away, we keep on doing those extra steps forever even though they're adding no value. One executive had started personally reviewing all purchase orders when his company was in financial crisis, but had continued this practice even after the crisis had long passed and the system had been dramatically improved. The reviews were cumbersome, acted as a bottleneck, and didn't add any value, but he kept on doing it. Then he stopped, freeing up hours of his time each week, and eliminating the bottleneck.
Can We Change How We Do It? You've prided yourself on always answering your phone quickly, to show that you're focused on your customer and on providing good service. Unfortunately, you end up constantly being interrupted, even during meetings and important matters that need your undivided attention. The loss of productivity is huge, but you've "always done it this way!" One sales executive was able to go from frantic to calm, simply by training himself to turn off his phone (yes OFF, not Vibrate) and turn off his computer (yes OFF), when he needed to focus. He was shocked at how quickly people adapted to his slightly slower responses, and at how much more he could get done in a day.
Can We Do It In a Different Order? One work process required an initial two-minute approval, a walk to the photocopier, then some additional work by another department, then another three-minute approval. The result was three little inboxes, with three little piles of work waiting for the next step, and three little handoffs. Some minor changes allowed the photocoying to be included in a previous step, and allowed the two approvals to be combined into one three-minute approval. This saved one little inbox, one little pile of waiting work, one little handoff, and some walking. Multiplied by a hundred repetitions a week, this saved the approving manager an estimated five hours a week.
Can Someone Else Do It? A small insurance company would divert a certain type of policy to a senior manager rather than moving it through their regular process, because it needed "specialized knowledge". Since the manager was busy doing management stuff, these policies would sit and wait, weigh on his mind, and then he'd do a marathon session to get through it. By teaching the "specialized knowledge" to the people who did the regular policies, they were able to process these just as effectively, and without delays. The change saved hours each week for the manager, reduced failure demand on the regular staff - customers used to phone repeatedly to check progress on these special policies. Everybody won, including the customers.

Ask a few of these questions about all the tasks that you're juggling, and see if you can't free up a bit of time.

Good luck with what's on your plate.

You Shouldn't Always Get What You Ask For

2011-01-25T10:09:00.000-06:00

A 12 person non-profit asked to do a Strategic Planning retreat. Before taking on the work, we interviewed the management team individually and discovered that the entire team was very closely aligned on vision, direction, and the method to be used for getting there. They already had a strategic plan, but didn't realize it. It turns out that what they really needed was coordinated marketing, customer relationship management software, and dramatic improvements in their work processes. So, they asked for a Strategic Planning retreat, and didn't get it, and that was a good thing.

Costs Don't Matter

2011-01-19T15:19:00.000-06:00

Two comparable business owners were looking to purchase the same software package.

One focused extensively on the cost of the software, aggressively negotiating price, challenging the vendor's recommendations for training, and doing everything in his power to keep the costs down.

The other focused extensively on what the software could do for his company, looking at how it could free up time and resources, add capacity, and improve efficiency. Really looking at how much more money they could make by using the software.

Both ended up buying the software, but the second had far greater success with the implementation, even though he paid more for both the software and the training. Sure, it's important to manage cash flow, and not spend foolishly. But if a purchased solution is going to help your business earn ten times the cost of the solution, the question shouldn't be "got anything cheaper?" but "how soon can we start?"

The cost of a solution doesn't really matter. The value of the solution, in comparison to the cost, is what we ought to focus on.

Leadership Not Loudership

2011-01-10T20:02:00.000-06:00

A military commander with thirty years under his belt described the huge changes in how the Canadian military manages its people.

"When I joined up in the 1980's, it was all about Loudership, with officers yelling at you, spit flying, veins popping. Terrifying really. And that's how I learned to manage, that's how they taught us to lead."

"That's not OK anymore. Now, it's all about leadership, about talking, and listening. There was NO listening before - it was hard to listen when you were screaming at someone. It's way better now, but it was a hard change."

"Discipline is different, it's less now, and that's a little harder, but performance is way up, retention is way up. It's better."

When The Boss Isn't a Very Good Worker

2011-01-07T10:22:00.000-06:00

The owner of a 30-person company would often pitch in, taking on some jobs within the organization to help out. With a desire to stay involved in the day-to-day operations, this owner would take on administrative and sales tasks, similar to what other employees in the organization had to do.

Unfortunately, the boss would hold himself to a different standard than employees doing the same job. So, if a reporting task needed to be done every day by 2 pm, employees would be expected to meet this goal. But the boss, doing the same task, would often miss the deadline "because he was busy on more important tasks," sometimes getting weeks behind on these daily activities. The resulting frustration and rippling consequences were having a significant effect on productivity and morale throughout the company.

As an owner, or manager, or team leader, or [insert other boss-like title here], if you take on some jobs to "help out," realize that you are no longer wearing your "boss" hat. When you pitch in to help out, you are wearing a "worker" hat, and need to hold yourself to the same standards as you would hold an employee doing the same job.

Sure, as an owner or manager or team lead, you need more freedom and flexibility in your day, and have more widely ranging responsibilities than your employees. But, if you take on the job of entering job status data by 2 p.m. every day, you bloody well better enter your job status data by 2 p.m. every day. If you can't do that reliably, fire yourself and hire someone that's more competent and reliable for the job.

Then, you can focus on leading, instead of mucking up the works by "helping out."

Does Good Service Mean Self-Service?

2011-01-04T19:37:00.002-06:00

A recent Saskatchewan health care experience prompted thoughts about what "good service" means. I got good service, in the sense that the problem was diagnosed, medications were prescribed, and lab tests were performed and interpreted. But, when compared with what happens when I take my car in for service, or when I order food at a restaurant, or when I recently had a house built, I'm shocked at how much management and execution I was required to do myself.

If the "good service" of health care were applied to the others, it seems like I would be asked to buy and install parts in my car, peel potatoes and cook the steaks at the restaurant, and whittle my own kitchen cabinets from a block of wood. Well, it wasn't that bad, but still surprising.

I don't say this to bash health care, since I'm very grateful for the caring assistance I received. But to anyone who thinks that Saskatchewan health care has come anywhere close to truly providing good service, I'd have to disagree.

Perhaps the best health care can aim for is to provide good technical expertise, preferably with a cheerful disposition, while requiring the patient to do things that they really don't have the expertise, experience or even the ability to do. But I think we can do better than that.

I Had No Idea How Complicated It Is!

2010-12-22T16:33:00.000-06:00

After a morning session to map all the steps in a small administrative process, the manager of the area was shocked to see what went into getting this job done. "I had no idea how complicated it is!"

The same information had to be entered into seven different places, including computer programs, a wall calendar, a web page, and a couple of binders and note books. There were six different handoffs between staff members, and several different ways to keep track of the calendar events, yet there was no way of knowing if each job actually got done. Everybody just hoped and assumed that things would work out.

After redesigning, the process went from about thirty manual steps, down to about nine, saving everyone time and frustration, and allowing them to easily process several times the volume, with far less effort.

Is Technology REALLY Making You More Efficient?

2010-12-16T23:26:00.000-06:00

As we strive to improve productivity, we embrace technology. And it's great, we get so much faster and more efficient! Life is grand! Until something goes wrong. Simple, small-scale case in point...

Love my Blackberry. Love the integration of my calendar and contacts with Microsoft Outlook. Love the integration of Adobe Acrobat with Outlook and with everything else. Life is grand. But then...

Installed a routine update to Blackberry Desktop Manager.
Suddenly, my Blackberry wouldn't sync to Outlook.
Suddenly, Outlook wouldn't connect to my email account.
Checked all Outlook settings. Fine. No change.
Checked all Blackberry and desktop software settings. Fine. No change.
Uninstalled and reinstalled Blackberry software. No change.
Uninstalled and reinstalled USB drivers. No change.
Reinstalled Outlook. No change.
Uninstalled Outlook and Blackberry software and reinstalled. No change.
Hard reboot of Blackberry. No change.
Reboot computer again.
Outlook working! Magic!
Blackberry still won't sync.
Adobe Acrobat integration with Outlook lost.
Reinstall Adobe Acrobat. Acrobat working.
Blackberry still won't sync.
Technical support? No solution.
etc, etc, etc.

Now, in our little office, this is nuisance and a headache, and caused hours of frustration. Multiply this by a couple hundred staff, and throw in an IT department and fifty more integrated software applications, and you start seeing the cost of all your "improved productivity".

Technology always makes great claims for productivity improvements, and it delivers, as long as it works. It always comes with a cost, and it always comes with the need for specialized technical knowledge. As we embrace more-and-more technology, we make most of our staff more-and-more powerless when things go wrong.

So yes, look at technological options when searching for solutions to your problems. But don't believe the brochures, and don't ignore all the real, inevitable complications and costs that come with any technological solution.

Intimidating Supervisors Get Better Results. But...

2010-12-16T22:09:00.000-06:00

Do intimidating supervisors produce better results? Do nasty bosses who agressively hold their people accountable for mistakes get better performance than more enlightened, respectful leaders? Yes. But...

A health-care study by Amy Edmonson (one of many she's led on fear and silence in the workplace), examined the error rate in eight different nursing units, and looked for a correlation between the number of errors and the style of leadership. The hypothesis was that units with aggressive, intimidating leaders would produce more mistakes, while the units with enlightened, supportive leaders would make less.

The researchers were shocked to find that the units with the best leadership (enlightened and supportive) reported TEN TIMES as many errors as in the more fear-based units. The bullying worked - aggressively holding people accountable for their errors resulted in one-tenth the number of errors! Hooray!

Unfortunately, if you'd like to use this evidence to justify your evil-boss philosophy, you're out of luck. The research also showed that, in the units with more aggressive leaders, people were scared to report any errors because they knew they'd be criticized, belittled, and humiliated. So, they only reported errors if they absolutely couldn't avoid it. In the supportive units, nurses felt free to report mistakes, with a common focus on finding root causes and improving patient safety. So, they reported all errors, without filtering them to protect themselves.

So, the numbers were dramatically better in the units with nasty, intimidating supervisors. But the numbers did not reflect reality. The numbers in the units ruled by fear, were distorted by that fear, distorted to minimize the exposure to the supervisor's wrath.

There is ample evidence to show that supportive, positive leadership produces better results. That a more civilized workplace produced better results. But if you don't care so much about results, and just want better measurements, you might try being an aggressive, bullying, fear-based, nasty, intimidating boss.

For more on this, check out The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton, a quick read that led me to this interesting and revealing research.

Is There Really a Top Priority?

2010-12-14T14:20:00.000-06:00

How do you do time management in a real, messy company? In a real, messy management job?

Do you sort your tasks into A, B and C priorities, and then choose one of the A tasks and start hacking away at it? Then, when that one's done, you start hacking away at the next one. Or, more likely, you get interrupted by a crisis and get drawn back into the world of daily fire-fighting before you've made much progress on any top priority items.

One assumption that many people make is that they can somehow identify the top priority task, as if there is some universal rule that states "There will always be a single top priority." Unfortunately, that ain't the way it works.

It is very likely that there are two or four or five equally important areas you need to work on, four or five comparably-important tasks. The consequence of this is that you need a time management strategy that isn't based on finding the one top priority, but one that allows you to effectively make progress on several important priorities at the same time.

Think about it.

Five Bucks per Goal

2010-12-13T13:46:00.001-06:00

Do you use incentive programs to get people motivated? Do you use rewards as the path to excellence? Have you ever had unintended consequences from your reward systems?

A kids hockey team had enjoyed some early success in the season, but it was largely due to the heroic efforts by a few of the better players. As the season progressed, the individual heroics were not enough, and the team started losing repeatedly to other teams that were becoming more cohesive, more organized, more cooperative.

So, in practice, the coaches worked on passing drills, on positional play, on group tactics. In practices, the team became very effective, with good understanding of their roles, and really effective team tactics. In practice, the team worked well together. But in games, they completely fell apart.

In games, the players reverted to their heroic ways; trying to stick-handle the puck from one end of the ice to the other, taking wide angle shots with no chance of success, and generally playing desperate, selfish, ineffective hockey. The team was getting demoralized. They continued to lose. What was going on?

It turns out that the main problem was the kids' parents. In their desire to help their kids succeed, many of the parents had offered their kids cash rewards for scoring goals - one kid would get five bucks from his dad for every goal he personally scored. Don't get me started on how distorted this is (whatever happened to playing a game just because you love it and want to have fun playing hard with your friends!?), but think of how damaging this "reward" system was to the team, and the kids.

In game situations, most of the kids were thinking only about themselves, about how they, personally, could score a goal. Not how the team could do well, or how the team could score, but how "I" could score. Because of this selfish thinking, the team was not playing as a team, they were losing out to teams that were, and they were on a long, painful downhill slide. The kids were stressed, the parents were stressed and on their cases, and the kids had to choose between two opposites - either play as a team and be effective, or play selfishly to try to please their parents and get the cash rewards. It ended up that this strategy wasn't making them much money anyway, since they weren't scoring very many goals against teams with better collaboration.

Rewards hurt. They damage internal motivation, and replace it with a dangling carrot. That in itself is reason enough to be cautious. But rewards inevitably produce unintended consequences, distortions and distractions from what you'd really like to have happen. Why not work on developing the love of the game, on the joy of working together to face challenges, on the intrinsic pleasures of a job well done, of becoming excellent. The research shows that this approach produces more success anyways. So next time, keep your five bucks in your pocket, and enjoy watching your kids' team play hockey. And, in business, keep your dangling performance incentives in your pocket (slightly disturbing image?), and work instead on helping the team enjoy their work, pull together, and win - together.

Apologize, Forgive Yourself and Move On

2010-12-10T16:22:00.000-06:00

What do you do when you screw up? Do you beat yourself up when you make a mistake? Do you expect perfection from yourself?

A consultant colleague was hosting her first half-day workshop, and did an excellent job of preparing, planning, rehearsing, and making checklists to make sure she had all her ducks in a row for the 8:30am start. On the morning of the Big Day, she got up early, got everything ready, then started to putter on some odd jobs around her home office. Then, before she knew it, it was already after 8:00am and she still had to get across town to the hotel. Needless to say, despite all the preparation, she was not there on time, walking in to a room full of registrants who'd made themself comfortable and were wondering where the facilitator was! Awkward, embarassing, but she handled it with grace, apologizing, moving on, and facilitating a good workshop.

Another experienced speaker was introducing two female speakers at a business meeting. And, in an unfortunate slip, accidentally combined “She'll take it from here” with “She'll start it off”. The resulting “She'll take it off” had a rather different and unfortunate connotation. Awkward, embarassing, and not my proudest moment. Oops, I mean, not the afore-mentioned anonymous speaker's proudest moment. So, all there is to do is apologize, accept and share the humour of the situation (if any), and move on.

We all make mistakes. We can practice and prepare to try to minimize them. We can create systems that help minimize them. We can use Root Cause Analysis, and Six Sigma, and Statistical Process Control, and Human Error Prevention, and Behavioural-Based Safety and [name your preferred brand of magic here], but errors will still, inevitably, occasionally happen.

When they do, accept your humanity, embrace your good intentions and apologize. Make restitution if any real damage was done, and then move on. Nobody's perfect.

The Struggle to Let Go

2010-12-07T01:14:00.000-06:00

Whenever you delegate a task, hire an assistant, create a key new role, or transition your job or your company to a successor, there is always a struggle to let go. Here are five things that make it difficult, and some possible ways to address them.

They don't know how to do the job as well as you. This is a certainty, especially at the beginning. There is always a learning curve when someone new is brought in to do a task, but often the problem is not with the new person, but with what you've given them to work with. Do you have documented Standard Operating Procedures (SOP's)? Have you really captured the approach that you found successful in a way that the new person can use? Have you trained them? Have you mentored them? Have you let them try it on their own? Often, we get someone to do a job, and then hold them accountable to the standards in our heads, standards that they don't even know exist.
They do the job differently than you would. This is also a certainty, since they are not you. Unless the job is absolutely trivial, no two people will approach it exactly the same way. While standardization is important, and SOP's can help the transition, realize that different is not necessarily worse. It can be a significant threat to your ego if a newbie comes in, tries something different and it actually works better than what you've been doing and preaching for years.
You don't really want to let go. Especially in the case of retirement, or succession planning, it is very hard to give up control, and the associated feelings of importance, of influence, of being needed. Moving towards the next thing you are going to do can help take your mind off of the things that you are no longer doing, that somebody else is now doing. Changing your title to something supportive, rather than controlling, can indicate your willingness to relinquish the reins, and help you accept the change as well. Sometimes this takes some coaching or counselling, either professional or from a trusted colleague, to help you work through the emotions - much like dealing with grief.
They don't seem confident. They keep having crises that drag you back into they fray. They ask for your help, they ask for your advice, they just seem so young and inexperienced and, in comparison to you, they are. But they're also competent, and learning. Perhaps you need to pull back more, to force them to stand on their own. Or, perhaps you need to shift your thinking, and realize that asking a mentor for advice is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength.
You don't want to follow. New people bring new methods, new inspiration, new systems, new requirements. If you've been handling a role your way for years, and it has worked well for you, it seems absurd to have to change just to match what the incoming whipper-snappers want to do. Sure, they might set up some fancy new software, or new scheduling methods, but it doesn't apply to you, does it? So, they end up making all kinds of workarounds to accomodate you - out of respect, out of necessity. It's times like these when you need to dig deep, accept your changing role graciously, and honor the systems and changes that your successor is trying to implement - out of respect, out of necessity.

Letting go isn't trivial, and often pushes a lot of your emotional buttons. But letting go is the key to allowing the organization to grow beyond just you. And the key to letting the new people shine.

A Tale of Marketing Success

2010-11-30T17:20:00.000-06:00

Here's the story, as best we can figure out, of how we came to make a recent sale. What can we learn about marketing from this story?

Four years ago, we offered a public presentation. Person A from ABC Company attended, and we kept in touch.
Two years ago, at a business networking event, I had an interesting conversation with Person R from PQR Company and we kept in touch.
One year ago, we offered a different public presentation, and Person B from ABC Company attended.
Person B from ABC Company talked to Person A from ABC Company about our presentation, and Person A was reminded of how much they had enjoyed our approach.
Potential Client X had never heard of us but asked Person A if they knew of anybody that did Such-and-Such. Person A referred Potential Client X to us. Trust begins.
Potential Client X then spoke to his supplier, Person R, who mentioned his interesting conversation with me a year ago. Trust builds.
Potential Client X then checked our website and read our blog. Trust builds.
Potential Client X then happened to see an email ad we regularly send out. Trust builds.
Potential Client X then phoned us, inviting us to work with him. Trust explored.
Potential Client X then became actual Client X, and we went on to do some good work together. Trust confirmed.

So which part of our marketing strategy produced the sale? Did he phone because of the email ad, or because of the website, or because of the blog, or because of the casual reference from his supplier, or because of the direct referral from Person B?

What about the public presentations? The people from ABC Company who were at our presentations didn't buy from us (yet!). But those people referred Potential Client X to us.

What about the networking? The person from PQR Company didn't buy from us (yet!). But he provided a reference to Potential Client X.

When measuring the effectiveness of these marketing activities, what should we attribute this sale to? In your own marketing activities, can you really truly say with certainty which marketing initiative produced the sale?

It's probably more complicated, more inter-related than you think, and your measurements probably don't contain the real answers. Measurements can definitely be useful, but sometimes you need to act based on theory - do the methodical things that you know will bring success, and keep doing them, tweaking them, and refining them, until they do bring success.

Business Ain't Science

2010-11-29T13:59:00.000-06:00

Some really interesting science-based companies were presenting their Exciting Investment Opportunities to a group of potential investors. Half of these really-interesting companies were wasting their breath due to a common and faulty belief - the belief that business is just about having good science, good products, good technologies. As they made their investment pitches to the business community, most of them talked about the science, as if they were presenting a technical paper to the scientific community.

They spoke at length about the chemical compositions of their bio-products, while investors wanted to know the market advantages and ther strategy for entering the market. They charted graphs of technical tests, while investors wanted details about competitors, industry partnerships, barriers to entry, and supplier and distribution agreements. The Chief Science Officers spoke in technical jargon, while the audience expected discussion about return on investment and exit strategies.

One lesson is - know your audience and tailor your presentation to what they're looking for. The more important lesson though, is - having a good product is not enough. You are not investment-ready when you have a good idea, a good product, or good science. You are investment-ready when you have a good business opportunity, and that goes far beyond the science.

Jumping Through Hoops

2010-11-19T17:51:00.000-06:00

A small startup had a great product, a really creative team, and a number of small sales under their belts. Then, a BIG customer came along, one that would BREAK OPEN THE MARKET! The only problem was...

The BIG customer needed the startup to have a Quality Management System (ie. like ISO 9001-2008) to qualify as a supplier. The startup scrambled to find someone who could fix the problem in a hurry and get them an ISO registration. All they wanted to do was "jump through the hoop," to get the sale. "Our product is great; it's better and cheaper than the competition; what more do they want?"

The customer wants the product, true, but a sophisticated customer wants more than that. They want confidence in the supplier's records management and documentation control; they want established procedures and reilable and robust quality control; they want to know that you've designed your business, you've planned out your processes, and you work according to your plans. Sure they're just buying the product, but they have a strong interest in the reliability of your company as a whole too.

So, don't waste your time doing the minimum required to jump through a hoop. Embrace the requirement and make your company better, more capable, more reliable. Everybody wins.

A Real Live Dinosaur

2010-11-17T11:28:00.006-06:00

I just saw a real live dinosaur. President of a successful industrial company, this fearsome creature roared his mighty roar, in a throwback to prehistoric management practices:

"If somebody makes a mistake, I fire them! Nobody makes a mistake twice here."

"Discipline is everything. If the union ever gives me trouble, I wait a bit and then fire a couple of them."

"I've never lost a union dispute. I just send my accountant with a checkbook to settle it. Way cheaper than a severance package!"

"The only thing workers care about is money. They don't understand anything else."

This superb example of Tyrannosaurus Wrecks was terrifying; the blood-red wine flowed, chicken bones crunched, and it took every ounce of courage not to run screaming from the darkened restaurant. Well, it wasn't that bad, but lordy it wasn't that good.

We've all had tyrannical bosses at some point in our lives, but few match the ferocity of this specimen. His proud reliance on fear, intimidation and discipline bring to mind the horrors of slavery and serfdom. Yet despite the offensiveness of his managerial approach, his company, his empire, is financially successful and has a good reputation in the industry.

There are many management styles, both in terms of personal approach and in terms of policy, and all work to some degree. Indeed, in a well-controlled study of CEO management style, Bertrand and Schoar found that the financial and investment policies of the leader accounts for only about 4% of the variance in a company's results. In terms of personal style, the research is scarce, but it's clear that some bully managers succeed, and some bully managers fail. Some respectful managers succeed, and some respectful managers fail.

In my own experience, aggressive bullying management seems to make all the good people leave. And those that stay behind tend to keep their heads down to avoid the teeth, and constantly look for increasing compensation, either within the company, or in greener pastures. Aggressive bullying can work as a management style, but there are good reasons that dinosaur managers have been going extinct. Hopefully, the remaining few will soon follow.

Nothing to do With Technology

2010-11-11T09:19:00.002-06:00

A TV news production company has an online presence, a 24-hour news channel with text, photos, and videos; glitzy and content-rich, but basically, a website. The technology and tools they use are identical to the tools you can use to do this at home, with the same kind of software running on the same kind of computers. Sure, they have fancier cameras, and professional staff, but there's nothing in the technology they're using that differentiates them from us, from the masses. So what does differentiate them? What gives them a competitive advantage?

Touring their facility, you see computers, cameras, computers, microphones, and more computers. There is a physical desk and background set where the news is produced, but most of what you see throughout the building is technology. Indeed, a news production company is a technology company, an IT company. But that's not what they feel is responsible for their success.

The people in this organization are remarkable, the relationships are remarkable. The production engineer talks more about how well the different groups work together than about how the technology works. The person who creates the headlines and graphics enthuses about how good the internal technical support group is. The technicians are so grateful for how well the five branch offices work together, with a frequent and free flow of problems, solutions and support. The union leader is proud of how well management and labour get along - "we just talk things out; it seems like everyone's just trying to help people do good work and enjoy their work. We do really cool things. People love coming to work here."

Over and over, throughout the company, people would willingly demonstrate the technology they used. But, more noticably, people would enthusiastically rave about how good the people were, how positive the environment was, how strong the relationships had become and how much of a joy it was to work there. These were people who were doing an unplanned technical demonstration for an unplanned technical guest, but their enthusiasm and their presentations had little to do with technology.

Indeed, the success of their technology company has little to do with technology. The continuing success of their company is firmly rooted in the human side of things. Isn't yours?

Does Your Data Collection Have an Exit Strategy?

2010-11-08T16:41:00.002-06:00

A review of the reports that were being collected by a small retail chain revealed that four out of six reports that were regularly generated to coordinate inventory were not used by anyone for anything. It appears that there were initially good reasons for creating each of the six reports, but along the way, those reasons had become obsolete. A culture of blame fostered a just-in-case behaviour throughout the organization. Consequently, noone was willing to stick their neck out and say "We don't need to do this anymore".

Eliminating these four extraneous reports and the associated data collection and data entry saved an estimated six hours per week at five different branches. So, about one full-time position was freed up by eliminating a task that was adding no value.

What data are you collecting that is no longer useful? What reports should you phase out? How much wasted time can you free up?

Take a look.

Twelve Leadership Tips That Really Work

2010-11-05T15:24:00.000-06:00

Are your people taking too much initiative? Do they solve problems spontaneously, and apply their creativity to problems that arise? Are they functioning effectively as a team, with great communication and conflict resolution skills?

If so, there is no time to lose. Here are twelve proven techniques that are guaranteed to reduce motivation, and inhibit those pesky spontaneous problem-solving activities that sometimes arise amongst your staff.

Give Orders - When someone presents you with a situation, make sure to tell then what to do and what not to do. Direct them and give them commands to make sure they know who is supposed to do the thinking.
Warn and Threaten - A little fear goes a long way. In no uncertain terms, lay down the law. Something like "If you don't shape up, then ... blah, blah, blah ... dumpster diving and food stamps ... blah, blah, blah ... cattle prod."
Preach the Gospel - Where fear falls short, guilt can save the day. Talk about responsibility, and duty, and should's. Make it a moral issue. If necessary, beg, and appeal to their conscience.
Advise and Solve - Suggest a different approach; tell them what would be best. Whatever you do, don't let them come up with ideas on their own. That's just asking for further creativity in the future.
Persuade and Argue - Especially when there's conflict, make sure to present facts and arguments explaining why they're in the wrong. If they stubbornly try to have their issues heard, try speaking louder or covering your ears.
Criticize - Point out how they are being foolish, or overly sensitive. Identify how their thinking is skewed, how they're wrong, and why what they're saying is, at best, wrong, and at worst, stupid.
Praise Them - Butter them up with compliments, and try to put a positive spin on their complaints. Let them know how intelligent they are, how they've always managed to succeed in the past. Just make sure you don't let them talk about how this challenge might be different.
Ridicule and Shame - Call them a whiner, or a sloppy worker. Or dismiss what they're saying because they're a typical engineer, or accountant, or a woman, or Ukrainian, or whatever. Labelling is an effective tool, because it quickly addresses their delusion of being an individual by lumping them into some arbitrary group.
Interpret and Analyze - Let them know that you completely understand them (even though you really don't have a clue and honestly don't care - you just want them to do their job). Imply that you fully understand their inner motivations - they're just jealous, or have a problem with authority, or they're angry. Just make something up - it still works.
Reassure and Console - Especially with interpersonal problems, a kindly "you'll feel different tomorrow" goes a long way towards dismissing the importance of the issue. Platitudes like "every cloud has a silver lining" are also useful for avoiding their snivelling.
Interrogate - Challenge everything they've told you with lots of questions. Why did you do that? Why didn't you come to me earlier? How long has this been going on? What have you tried? Anything to imply that they were wrong and should change their behavoiur. If you have a bright light you can shine in their eyes, all the better.
Distract and Divert - Tell a funny story, or, better yet, tell them about your own problems. Sometimes a cup of coffee or a shiny trinket can take their mind off the situation, and save you from having to hear about it. Whatever you do, don't let them focus obsessively on the problem at hand - that's unhealthy.

All of these techniques contain the powerful message that they need to change; they need to think, feel or act differently; they are not OK. All of these techniques are wonderful for showing people that we don't accept them as they are. And, as we all know, feeling unaccepted is the perfect environment for poor psychological health, personal stagnation, and poor communication.

Of course, if you're a bit of a wingnut, and actually want to encourage creative problem solving, team work, and good communication, you might want to avoid these behaviours. These are the Roadblocks to Communication outlined by Dr. Thomas Gordon in Leader Effectiveness Training. Surprisingly, he actually recommends NOT using these techniques, in favour of other, more effective leadership techniques. Go figure!

Boss Botches Bag, Nurse Nags Nicely

2010-11-03T16:40:00.000-06:00

Intravenous solution causes a red track up the patient's arm.
IV disconnected, and replaced with new bag.
Shift supervisor prepares a form to send to the lab to see if it's contaminated.
Nurse says "I think we should send the name of the patient with it as well. The lab might have to talk to them, if they find something."
Supervisor overrides her, saying "They don't need that."
Not much later, the lab phones down and says they need the patient's name.
The nurse informs the supervisor, and does very well not to say "I told you so".

How often does the hierarchy interfere with the daily work at your business? Usually, the people who do the work are truly the experts. If you're the boss, stop telling the workers how to do the job, and start asking them how you can help them do it better.

Human Resources Discussion Group

2010-11-02T18:50:00.003-06:00

Dave Hunchak of Swift Fox will be facilitating an interactive discussion group for SATA (Saskatchewan Advanced Technology Association) called HRX - Human Resources Exchange. In a relaxed, confidential environment, participants will share issues and challenges and learn about current industry practices around one of the most important components of a business – people.
The 2010-2011 program runs the 2nd Tuesday of each month, from 4:30 – 5:30 pm at Ideas Inc., 207-120 Sonnenschein Way, Saskatoon. Registration is free for members of SATA.

Tuesday Dec 7, 2010

“Compliance is not an option”
HR Basic Rules - Labor Standards, OH&S

Tuesday Jan 11, 2011

“To set policy or not to set policy, that is the question”
HR Policies

Tuesday Feb 8, 2011

“Lead, follow or get out of the way?”
Leadership Style and Practice

Tuesday Mar 8, 2011

“Finding them, getting them, keeping them”
Talent Management

Tuesday Apr 12, 2011

“Cooperation vs. competition - what works when
Productivity

Tuesday May 10, 2011

“More than just a paycheck”
Compensation

Tuesday Jun 14, 2011

“Wrap-up and Review”
And topics for next year…

For more information contact Laurel Reich, SATA Program Director at lreich@sata.ca or phone (306) 244-3889.

I've Only Ever Worked for Idiots!

2010-11-01T18:06:00.000-06:00

After a couple of beers, an articulate and well-educated teacher, with years of experience, great relationship skills, and a reliably positive attitude, lamented that, throughout his career, he had "only ever worked for idiots!" As examples he gave:

One administrator awarded managers a 14% pay increase, then, citing poor economic conditions, was shocked when the teachers' union balked at a 4% raise for them.
Another bureacrat required weekly reports that took up to three hours a week to prepare, when the teachers already didn't have enough time to prepare for their classroom lectures.
Another manager allocated half a million dollars a year for research stipends, and then created such a large administration staff for the program that less than $25,000 / year was ever available for research.
At another job, the boss would request that skilled and professional workers wash the manager's shoes when they got muddy in the construction around the facility, because "his time was too valuable."

These kind of power-abusing experiences are shockingly common. These kind of experiences seriously compromise morale and create a toxic environment that damages the effectiveness of even the most positive of employees.

So much of our Human Resources effort seems to be focused on fixing problem employees. This isn't surprising when you realize that management hires HR people to help with the people issues, and HR reports to management. But maybe the focus on employees is a little misguided, a little too much on symptom bandaids and not enough on root cause analysis. Perhaps the Human Resources Department needs to set itself apart a little, and direct a little more energy at finding and fixing managers whose behaviours are destroying the morale of the company's precious human resources.

It Seemed Cheaper at the Time

2010-10-26T08:45:00.000-06:00

As we seek economies of scale, as we try to keep busy and fully utilize staff, we often keep working even when the next step isn't ready for more. We do things in large batches as we try to be as efficient as much as possible. We try to spread the changeover costs or processing time or transportation time over many items. Unfortunately, things then wait. In piles. In queues. In holding areas. In waiting rooms. In work-in-process. Waiting for the next step to get to them.

Over-production is often considered the worst of the Lean Wastes, as it contributes to the creation of so many other wastes. Whenever one step produces more than the next step is ready for, you have over production. It seems cheaper to produce in batches, but your costs are higher than they could be whenever you produce too much, too soon.

A few examples...

A company ordered steel in large batches to get the unit price down. With about six months worth of stock sitting in the warehouse, the company made a major change in it's product design and no longer required that type of steel. The market price for steel was soft and, when all costs were factored in, the company only recouped about 40% of what they had originally spent for this "cheap" steel.
A kitchen cabinet manufacturer made colour samples on small wood pieces. Customers would use these colour samples as they shopped for everything else they needed to decorate and finish their new kitchens. The manufacturer would run large batches of samples, to minimize the cost per sample, and all the dealers would get boxes of hundreds at a time. Styles and colours change rapidly in the cabinet industry and, inevitable, dealers would end up throwing out hundreds of obsolete samples.
The order handling department in a lab would accumulate ten to fifteen requisitions before processing them in batches, to "be more efficient." A process mapping exercise revealed that this batching was adding, on average, a full day to the total cycle time for the tests. By changing to immediate handling of each order as it arrived, they were able to shorten the cycle time by a day, without any additional expenses.

We seek economies of scale because it seems cheaper. Yet, when total costs are considered, big batches often cost us much more than we imagine.

Misguided Incentive

2010-10-25T09:21:00.000-06:00

At hockey practice, the kids lined up at center ice for a shoot-out, where each skater would in turn try to score on their goalie. This is a fun drill, especially for the goalies, who go head-to-head with each of their friends, their teammates. Shoot-outs are a matter of pride for goalie's; their reputation is on the line so they do everything they can to keep the puck out of the net. But, on this occasion, the coach decided to offer a prize of two dollars if the goalie could stop all the pucks on the first round of about twenty skaters. The rationale was "you have to give them incentive or they won't try."

The goalie was pretty excited - two bucks is two bucks - still a significant amount of money for a kid. But, when the fourth skater of twenty scored, this external "incentive" dissappeared, and the goalie visibly reduced his effort, even moving out of the way on some harder shots. The coach was miffed, and when he asked the goalie what he was doing, he said "why bother, I can't get the two dollars anymore."

So, by offering the perk, the bonus, the money incentive, the coach replaced the pure joy of stopping pucks with the calculated pursuit of two bucks. What the kid normally would do just because he loved it, he now stopped doing as soon as the external "incentive" was no longer attainable.

Managers, coaches, and leaders need to learn that internal incentive is the only true incentive. So set a fair wage, then take money out of the day-to-day picture, and let people enjoy their work.

An Ode to Rapid Improvement Projects

2010-10-22T14:55:00.001-06:00

There's a part of your business that's not doing well;
The people are great but they're going through hell.
They just can't keep up and they beg for more staff, but when
You think of hiring you just have to laugh:
"We can't hire more - we have to cut costs
But we have to do something before it's all lost."
Rapid improvement is something we need
Our people can do it! Swift Fox can lead!

Thanks to the Blatant Self-Promotion division of Swift Fox for this little ditty.

Home By Six

2010-10-21T14:25:00.000-06:00

A manager in the Toronto office of a large insurance provider was having an odd problem with his staff. The overall corporate culture was one of long hours and competitive posturing between employees. If John started working until 6:15pm, Steve would one-up him and stay until 6:45pm. When Heather worked until 7:00pm, Janice would then stay even later. Soon, everyone was in the office until eight, nine at night.

In their daily work, none of their clients or insurance suppliers were working at these hours, and the manager was aware enough to realize that these long hours were not really about getting the work done. Gathering the staff together, the manager laid it on the line:

You need to get your work done in the regular work day. If you can't, you need help with time management. We'll provide training and support. If that doesn't help, we need to examine our work flows and our capacity.
If you don't want to go home at the end of the day, there's something wrong with your personal relationships and work-life balance. Our EAP provides free confidential counselling and coaching. Use it.
"Home by Six" is now policy, and we'll help you achieve that, as part of our daily work.

We often talk of work-life balance, of respect for people, of the importance of family, of the need for rest and recuperation, yet how many of us live it? How many of us really encourage this for our staff?

You can demand more from your people than they can sustainably provide, and over time you will deplete them and have to replace them. This is a valid business model.

Or you can create a culture where life balance is truly valued, and still get the work done. If you are having retention problems, with high levels of stress and anxiety, perhaps something like "Home by Six" would work for you.

No More Shakespeare!

2010-10-21T09:25:00.000-06:00

In an attempt to bond with a Grade 11 math class, the substitute teacher provoked a discussion about how Shakespeare was too hard to understand, obsolete, and should be replaced with better modern authors in the schools. Expecting the students to join in with stereotypical complaints, she was surprised to be challenged by the whole class, who passionately defended the importance and value of Shakespeare.

It turns out this was an Honours math class, and most of the students were also in Honours English where an enthusiastic and passionate teacher had inspired a love of English literature and Shakespeare in particular. Students counted off the benefits of Shakespeare on their fingers, loudly protested her critical comments, and laughingly dismissed her anti-Shakespeare arguments.

This kind of passion happens when people are challenged by work that is hard enough to stimulate them, by a leader that makes them believe they are capable enough to handle it. As described by the work on flow experiences by Dr. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, the work needs to be challenging enough so people can just handle it. Too much challenge produces anxiety, too little produces boredom and apathy.

These students were engaged and interested in their work, and surprised their substitute teacher who was fishing for complaints and cynicism. In your workplace, think about the challenge of the work compared to the skills and abilities of those doing the work. Too much challenge, and you have anxiety and worry, too little challenge and you have boredom and apathy.

If your workplace seems filled with cynicism, complaints, anxiety, worry or apathy and boredom, does it arise simply because people have bad attitudes? Or does it emerge from systemic issues, from a mis-match between the challenge of the work compared to the skills and capacity of the people? One you can control, to make things better, the other you just have to live with.

Six Saskatchewan HR Basics That Can Bite You

2010-10-19T20:25:00.001-06:00

Recent discussions with a potential immigrant investor made us both realize how overwhelming all of the regulations and requirements can be for starting a new business in Saskatchewan. Ranging from provincial business registration, to city business licenses, from GST and PST to income tax and specific licensing issues for specific industries, there truly is a lot to learn. You want to make sure that you don't miss something that will come back to bite you later, and most of these something's have really sharp teeth.

After talking about general business, we got into specifics of hiring staff, and she commented on how much more regulation there was compared to her home country. She exclaimed, in broken English, "Workers treated very good here!" as we went through a few of the HR basics that can bite you when employing people in Saskatchewan:

Provincial Labour Standards outline annual holidays, hours of work, minimum wage and other employment rules.
Occupational Health & Safety (OHS) sets rules for safety in the workplace, including requirements for employee-driven Occupational Health Committees or Representatives, and penalties for safety violations.
The Worker's Compensation Board provides mandatory coverage and compensation for workers injured on the job.
Withholding and remitting Payroll Deductions, including Canada Pension Plan contributions, Employment Insurance premiums and Income Tax.
Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System (WHMIS) defines rules for safe handling of hazardous products in the workplace, and defines employer responsibilities for safety of employees.
The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission protects people from discrimination based on age, ancestry, marital status, disability, religion, gender and other factors.

There are lots of other HR basics that are good business practice and nice-to-know, but make sure you know and understand how these six apply to your business - they're need-to-know.

Misleading Metrics

2010-10-14T16:46:00.002-06:00

At SREDA's Fall 2010 Economic Forum, Mario LeFebvre of the Conference Board of Canada gave a useful caution for anyone using metrics to try to understand a system. Saskatchewan's unemployment rate has remeained remarkably stable, between 4% and 6% for the last ten years. (Visit Human Resources and Skills Development Canada for detailed stats.). These days, Saskatchewan is a booming have province and, looking this measurement, you might think that that must always have been the case.

But, knowledge about the system is more valuable than measurements of the system. In Mario's words, "The 5% unemployment rate is about the same in 2000 and 2010, but the underlying reasons are very different. In 2000, [Saskatchewan] had low unemployment because all the unemployed were leaving the province. Today, you have low unemployment because you're creating a lot of jobs."

Same measurement; very different meaning. Strive to look beyond the metrics and understand what in the system contributes to those metrics.

He Was Terrible - Will Never Use In The Future

2010-10-14T16:21:00.001-06:00

After a recent presentation about quality to a large group of Saskatchewan health care leaders, the feedback forms about my presentation ranged widely, from "What I Liked Most" about the workshop, to "What I Liked Least". I've learned to expect variation, and, striving to improve, I try to learn and adapt based on all the feedback I receive.

The most critical feedback comment I received after this presentation was:

The message of giving patients what they want, when they want it is not realistic. He was terrible - will never use in the future.

Now this one threw me at first, as the insecure side of me reacted to the "He was terrible" part. I quickly re-read some of the other "He was great" comments to restore myself, and then thought about this one for a while. I'm certainly open to adapting my speaking style, or my audience participation exercises, or the ways I present information, but that didn't seem to be what this commenter was saying.

The message here, as far as I could see, was that giving patients "what they want, when they want it", was not realistic. Granted, there's plenty of room for misinterpretation, since it was a very brief comment with no opportunity for discussion or clarification. Still, this is a deeply disturbing comment coming from a health care leader.

If we don't give patients "what they want, when they want it", what do we do instead? What is "realistic" for the health care industry?

Not give patients what they want. Perhaps we should ignore our patients' desires for good health, for effective interventions, for relief of pain and symptoms, for respect, for information, for good service. My mom wanted an appointment with her doctor this week; the clinic's schedule wouldn't allow it. Maybe that's a good thing?
Give patients what they don't want. Perhaps we should try to increase the number of hospital-acquired infections, clinical errors, or prescription drug interactions. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that one out of thirty senior hospital admissions were due to adverse drug reactions.
Give patients what we want. Perhaps we need to reschedule their appointments more at our convenience, make them walk further around the hospital, drive to an even-more-distant specialty hospital, and put a few more people into each bed while we're at it.
Not give them help when they want it. Face it, patients are whiners. The whole idea of wanting health care when you're sick is just so needy. Perhaps it would be better to extend wait times even further, and add more handoffs and waiting rooms to each procedure along the way.
Give them help when we want to. Perhaps it would be better to require people to pre-schedule their visits to the emergency department, or maybe spread out their influenza infections throughout the year. Or, like a recent friend's experience, send notice of a scheduled specialist appointment at an arbitrary date in about six months, then push it back two months, then push it back another three months.

What scares me most about this critical comment is the suggestion that good customer service in the health care industry is not realistic. In every other industry, customer service (giving customers what they want, when they want it) is critical to business, a differentiator between success stories and business failures. Yet somehow it's "not realistic" in health care? I don't think so.

In today's StarPhoenix, Mark Lemstra wrote that Health care needs ideas, not more money, I couldn't agree more. And some of the old ideas and attitudes might have to go, to make room for new ones.

Have You Built a Tower of Babel?

2010-10-14T08:26:00.000-06:00

To mess up the ambitious plans for construction of the Tower of Babel, God "confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8). In a bit of a mischevious intervention, God divided the people by getting them to speak different languages, where before they had spoken one. Without the ability to communicate, they were unable to coordinate their efforts. There was no possibility of getting the job done at all, let alone getting it done on time or under budget.

In the 1967 sci-fi short story "Babel II", available in War Games, Harry Crosby (aka Christopher Anvil) describes a world where the technology has gotten so complicated, where the degree of professional specialization has become so extensive, that none of the professionals can understand each other, and no-one understands completely how the technology works. Their attempts to build an Esmer-drive starship are doomed!

In your company, it's very likely that the people in purchasing have no idea what any of the stuff they're buying is used for, or how to tell a good flux capacitor from a bad one. Your people in operations probably have no idea what finance means when they talk about "Net changes in non-cash working capital items related to operations". As we divide our companies into departments, into specialists that speak different languages, we build a Tower of Babel where people are truly unable to understand each other.

As you examine the sequential steps that your organization takes to satisfy your customers, you'll see many handoffs from one department to another, from one language group to another. More often than not, the handoff is not well understood by either group. A complete order, for the sales department, means they got a deposit or purchase order from the customer. A complete order for the shop means all the line items are correct and all required materials are in stock. A complete order for shipping has no back orders and clear delivery instructions and address.

When we try to improve, it's common to work within a department, trying to make our work as efficient as possible. We aim to meet our departmental targets in the belief that this will achieve the company targets. We work to improve our individual departments in the belief that this will improve the organization. Paraphrasing a little more of "Babel II": All the departmental curves showed progress. It was natural to assume this meant company progress. But what about the connections between the departments, between their managers and between people generally. It would be possible to carry this specialization so far that nobody understands anyone in any other line of work, and then what will we have?

What we'll have is the typical modern company, where departments speak their own languages and work to improve within themselves, but the real flow of work and value never gets much better.

Rapid Improvement Projects

2010-10-08T21:56:00.000-06:00

Are there areas of your business that continually struggle? Are your people having trouble keeping up with your customers’ continually increasing requirements? Maybe growth has strained your systems beyond their capacity. Or perhaps a slowdown has made you realize how out-of-control everything has been. Regardless, it’s gotten to the point that you have to make some changes, and you have to do it now.

You don’t have to figure it out yourself. By pulling together a cross-functional team that includes people who work in the area, people from other involved departments, and outside eyes from valued customers and suppliers, a Rapid Improvement Project can help your people to:

Map out the current process, warts and all.
Recover from the shock of seeing your current process.
Learn to see wastes in the process.
Map out a future version of how the process could be, should be.
Identify specific changes to help make the leap from here to there.

Using principles and tools from Lean Enterprise and Systems Thinking, a Rapid Improvement Project empowers your people to address a struggling area of your operation. Along with some pre-interviews and preliminary data gathering, a Rapid Improvement Project can often accomplish in a day what has been dreamed of for years. And, because your people create the improvement, it tends to be an enlightening, positive, and productive experience.

The idea is not to create a perfect process in a day. The idea is to get the right people in the room, get everyone looking at how the work really happens (not how you think it does), and identify changes to make it immediately more efficient. It’s not magic, and your ugly old frog might not instantly turn into a handsome prince(ss). But it is a strong, quick and reliable method for improving whatever it is you do.

Who's In Control? Four Ways to Help Someone

2010-10-07T12:47:00.000-06:00

There are four main types of leadership that a manager can provide; the same four types of intervention that you can seek from a consultant. All can be helpful in different situations, but it is useful to clarify what you're looking for. The four types vary in the degree of control exercised by both the leader/consultant and the employee/client.

Command

"Do something, or stop doing something. I am in control."

This is the domain of the expert, the guru who fixes your problem for you. At Superior Millwork, we would fly in equipment specialists from Italy to recalibrate the computer-controlled drilling machines or set up a new production saw. We did what they said, because this was their area of expertise. Outside of specific technical services, or emergency situations, this is rarely the most effective approach.

Consult

"Here's some information. I'll lead, but you can take or leave what I present."

Here's where a facilitator or consultant is brought in to teach principles, lead a group improvement effort, or redesign processes. They know less than you do about your business, but they know more about process and ways to get better results. Their is a definite element of persuasion and influence, but with respect for your knowledge of your daily work.

Collaborate

"Let's explore ideas together as equals."

True partnerships of equals aiming to create a mutually satisfying solution. Although the process often requires a facilitator, it primarily involves different stakeholders with complementary or conflicting interests. A good example is the Business Ready Investment Development Gateway (BRIDG), which aims to bring First Nations together with viable business opportunities. The First Nations have capital and labour, but often lack management skills and experience. The businesses often have management skills and experience, but lack enough capital and labour. The opportunities for collaboration are exciting.

Coach

"I will help you on your journey. Where do you want to go? You are in control."

Unlike the cliche drill-sargent coach who makes you run 'til you puke, an executive coach helps you get where you want to go. With open-ended questions, reflective listening, and group facilitation skills, the coach draws out your priorities, and helps you decide between your options. Working as a coach to another consultant, I help him review his activities for the week, compare them to his objectives, hold him accountable for deviations, and help him find workarounds when barriers prevent him from achieving his goals. He decides where he wants to go, I help him get there. He is in control.

Next time you intervene in the daily problems in your business, consider whether Command, Consultation, Collaboration or Coaching would be most effective at resolving the situation. And, next time you look for outside help, ask about what kind of help they'll be providing.

Thanks to Andrew Bergen of Bergen Coaching for the inspiration for this posting. Andrew speaks about four types of conversation, with a continuum of control ranging from Calibration, Consulting, and Collaboration to Coaching.

One Thing Crucial to Success

2010-10-06T10:30:00.001-06:00

A panel of successful business leaders was asked for the single thing that was crucial for success; some advice for young entrepreneurs looking to follow in their footsteps.

One said "Passion"
Another "Integrity"
A third "Tenacity"
A fourth said "Attitude"

The list went on, and in the ensuing discussion, they all made it clear that there is no silver bullet, no prescription for success. It takes all of these things plus hard work, luck, leadership, relationships, and vision. But a message that became clear, and that pulled it all together, was this:

You have to learn to give, before you try to take.

Of the lessons they'd learned, all the positive ones centered on using your gifts to truly serve the needs of your customers. All of the negative lessons centered on times that their companies forgot that.

Learn to give, to serve, to share your gifts with customers, to help solve their problems. The more you focus on giving, on serving, the more successful your business will be.

This is Not Good Enough

2010-10-05T22:55:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you grow too fast, or you lose focus, or you lose some good people, or [insert your crisis here], and all of your talk about Customer Service and Quality goes out the window. For whatever reason, your customers end up getting it in the shorts, even though you swore you'd never let that happen.

Sometimes you have to get tough and tell your people that "This is Not Good Enough!" It may be a supplier, it may be an employee, it may be a manager, or it may be your whole company that needs to hear this message. If your company is facing a harsh reality, your people need to understand that, so they can do what needs to be done.

Speaking at an NSBA dinner meeting, Wally Mah of Northridge Development Corporation candidly spoke of the problems they faced during the intense Saskatoon housing boom in 2008. Paraphrasing his comments, "We failed our customers. We let the busy trades dictate our schedule and decide on the quality of the homes we were building. It came to a crisis. So we gave one of the owner's wives the final word in quality control. She would go to the trades and say 'This is not good enough; you have to come back and fix it.' That way it wasn't just an employee talking, it was an Owner. We had to do this to regain control, to regain the trust of our customers."

W. Edwards Deming told leaders to Drive Out Fear and Eliminate Numerical Goals from our management toolkit. Yet he also made it quite clear that communicating the facts about harsh realities that might be facing a company was totally justified. In words he might have used - "Unless our quality improves by 20% in the next six months, we will be out of business."

Yes, work on your systems. Yes, engage everyone in continuous improvement. And, yes, tell your people when your company faces a harsh reality, so they can pull together to do what's necessary.

However, if you find yourself repeatedly in crisis, and repeatedly telling people that "This is Not Good Enough," you need to read Deming's Out of the Crisis. If your people are always "Not Good Enough", it's likely your management approach that is "Not Good Enough". There are better ways.

Five Truths in Today's Horoscope

2010-10-04T09:49:00.000-06:00

LEO (July 23-Aug 22) "The ones who do well in business know how to tolerate the ups and downs. It won't always go smoothly, and you have to be able to sustain a certain degree of loss. Practice endurance, and in the end you'll succeed. Keep going."

That was my horoscope today in the StarPhoenix, and, today only, even if you're not a LEO, you can adopt this as your own. All businesses experience ups and downs, successes and failures, periods of growth and periods of crisis. Heck, everything in life goes up and down, and we need to learn to deal with this more effectively.

Here are five thoughts to help you handle the ups and downs of business:

Not all ups warrant celebration, and not all downs require intervention. We tend to take credit for successes, jump on the bandwagon, and strike up the band with every little uptick in results - the TSX is up 0.4% - hooray! Yet we also tend to blame others for faliures, jump off tall buildings, and strike out at others when our measures drop - the Dow Jones is down 45 point today - aaaarrrrggghhh! Most of the variation we see in our daily results is just the random dance of hundreds of common little factors. Calm down about it, and learn to see variation differently. The world of statistical process control gives us powerful tools for separating the wheat from the chaff, from telling us whether today's change is something significant. Learn to "tolerate the ups and downs."
Stick with your process. You create a long-term vision and mission statement, whip up a business strategy and operating plan, standardize the daily work for yourself and the little people, and set out on your path to success on a going forward basis. Then, after three weeks/three months/three quarters of staying the course, everybody panics because the desired change has not yet materialized. Doubts well up, blame is bandied about, and everybody frantically scrambles to figure out what they should do differently. Reorganize! Re-brand! New business cards for everyone! Sure, sometimes you have to adjust your course; sometimes you choose the wrong direction. But very often, in my experience, you need to trust your original plan, trust your original process to produce results, and "keep going."
Expect downturns. Believe it or not, your business will not always be strong. You will not experience unending growth and success. There is no such thing as endless summer; winter will always return! Yet so many owners and leaders seem completely blindsided when a downturn hits, when the sales chart no longer climbs, when their industry stops being the poster child of business success. Once you've been through a couple of downs and ups, through a few completely "unpredictable" crises, you start to realize that unpredictable crises are actually quite expected, quite normal. So, despite enjoying growth in the summer sunshine, make sure you can "sustain a certain degree of loss."
Business is Personal. There is a pervasive delusion that business is somehow separate from us, that it is something "out there" that deals only with facts and figures and production and sales. True, we have human resources departments, but we treat it as just another cog in the big mechanistic machine that is business. If we're honest with ourselves, we realize that this is hogwash - business is intensely personal. Business is first and foremost about relationships, about belonging to a group, about feeling competent and valued, about being able to express our creative drives, and about having fun or living through personal hell. If you're a business owner, you know intimately how personal business is - your whole identity is wrapped up in the daily progress of your company. So when our horoscope says "Practice endurance, and in the end you'll succeed," we see the connection between our company's success and our success. We need to be able to handle ups and downs in our business, and this means we each need to learn to handle ups and downs in our lives.
All horoscopes are crap. If you use astrology to make management decisions, you should stop.

It's Turtles All the Way Down - Coaching the Coaches

2010-10-01T15:48:00.002-06:00

Do you need a coach? Can you use a consultant? Do your people need outside training? Consider Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, which starts something like this...

A well-known scientist gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "That's rubbish; the world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the turtle standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

While the origins of the turtle story are uncertain, the idea applies well to personal development for all of us.

As Swift Fox, I offer coaching services, yet I personally use coaches to help me keep on track. I offer business consulting services, yet I hire other consultants to help me learn and grow my business. I offer training services, yet I often attend training courses, sometimes on the same topics that I teach. I mentor business owners, yet I have mentors myself.

We can all use a little help. Even those who are in the business of providing help.

Company Loses Million Dollar Account

2010-09-29T17:33:00.000-06:00

A large Saskatchewan metal fabrication company was well into a Lean Enterprise transformation and was buying $1 million/year of product from a particular supplier. The supplier produced parts using a combination of in-house and 3rd-party fabricators with considerable transportation of work-in-process between their facility and others and back.

As part of their supplier development process, the customer tried to convince them to examine their processes and get rid of all this transportation waste (one of the Seven Lean Wastes), so they could reduce lead times and reduce costs. They were willing to share the savings, but needed supplier improvement to help them meet their own customers' ever-more-demanding requirements. Unfortunately, the supplier wasn't willing to explore Lean, and repeatedly told the customer that their processes were efficient enough.

Another supplier, eager for work, was willing to embrace Lean improvement initiatives and accept the offered supplier development assistance. As a direct result, the first supplier lost $1 million/year in profitable business.

This is what is happening around the world. If you're not willing to embrace continuous improvement and Lean, you can bet someone else will. And they will beat you on price, quality, and delivery time. Can you afford to lose your million dollar accounts?

Get it Done, Make it Better, or Both?

2010-09-24T17:01:00.001-06:00

What's your job?

Is it to rise to the challenge, overcome obstacles, fight the daily fires, and make sure the the job gets done? Or is it to improve the process, work on the system and figure out ways to make it better? Or is it to do both - to balance the need to operate your company on a daily basis with the need to improve it on a daily basis.

I was impressed this morning by a breakfast presentation at NSBA Club Connect from a man of action, Rick Langlais of Hands On Street Ministries, who works with Saskatoon’s inner city street people. He does things for the destitute, addicted and violent that most of us would never risk. For twenty years, he has taken direct, daily action to help those who live on the streets, people with nowhere else to turn for respect or a meal or a place of refuge. Rick's language is passionate and direct, and you get the impression he'd lean more towards four letter words, given the choice.

In another world, you have the Urban Public Health Network (UPHN), a group created by the Chief Medical Officers of Health from Canada's eighteen largest cities. This group, though far removed from the individual heroin-addicts and sex-trade workers on our streets, is working on the same problems. They are developing strategies to address common urban public health issues and reduce the health disparities between socio-economic classes, with reports like Health Disparity in Saskatoon: From Analysis to Intervention reporting their findings and pointing the way to a better future. The language is analytical, tending to four-syllables rather than four-letters, and the research is statistical and evidence-based.

In comparison to the possible long-term benefits of high-level policy interventions by groups like UPHN, the daily efforts of Hands On Street Ministries seem tiny. Yet, the impact of Rick Langlais' daily action is far more immediate and valuable to the people on the streets than some high-falutin' report put out by a bunch of doctors. So we need both - we need daily immediate action to get the job done today, and we need high-level systems thinking to eliminate root causes of the problems tomorrow. And how much better would it be if we could get them together, with immediate daily action coordinated with long-term continuous improvement of the system.

This is what a culture of continuous improvement is all about; operating today, and improving for tomorrow. And it applies to helping street people, improving public health, addressing povery, and running our businesses. As Red Green so aptly put it, "we're all in this together."

I Just Made a Mistake

2010-09-22T12:28:00.000-06:00

If a worker knows how to do a job, wants to do a good job, and is capable of doing a good job, why do they screw up sometimes? When somebody tells us "It's not my fault, I just made a mistake!", do we let them off the hook? Do we take them to task and hold them accountable? Do we throw our hands up in despair? Is there anything we can do to prevent these kinds of screw ups, or do we just have to powerlessly resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be human error?

John Evans (UK) of http://www.human-error.com/ talks about Risk Influencing Factors (RIF's), all kinds of little things that contribute to the risk of an error occuring. So, if a person is entering data from a paper form into a computer, there's a risk that they will enter some data wrong. Even if the person can do the job, wants to do the job well, and knows how to do the job (aptitude, attitude, training) a bunch of little RIF's added together still might conspire to produce errors. And if you ask someone why they made those mistakes, they will honestly be baffled. Holding them accountable would be damaging and ineffective.

For this example, some contributing factors might be ambient noise, a confusing form layout, a screen form that doesn't match the paper form, distraction and interruptions, poor ergonomics, fatigue or illness, stress or worry, poor handwriting, poor lighting, screen glare. Imagine that if four or five of these factors are active, the person can still do the job completely error free. But then, if the situation changes and a few more factors suddenly apply, we cross some threshhold and an error occurs.

Deciding whether and when to hold people accountable seems to be the same as deciding whether to search for the cause of variation in statistical process control. If you search for the "cause" of every random-dance common-cause variation, you are wasting your time and money. Instead, you need to study and modify the system, the tasks, the tools, the procedures to reduce the build in variation and risks. On the other hand, if you don't search for the "cause" of special-cause something-important-just-happened variation, your system is out of control and you're missing a golden opportunity for process improvement.

In the same way, if you hold someone accountable for a problem that is actually produced by the random dance of lots of little risk influencing factors, it will do nothing to reduce the risk of error the next time a bunch of contributing factors all occur at once.

In the absence of strong evidence of incompetence, maliciousness, ignorance or maybe even intoxication, we may still be tempted to hold the person accountable. But we're more powerful if we take this as a cue to look for factors that we can control, rather than fall back on the ineffective blame game.

But We're Different !

2010-09-21T12:16:00.000-06:00

I recently spent a day at a great Quality in Healthcare conference and repeatedly heard variations on this theme:

"We're different"
"This isn't like manufacturing."
"Health care is more complex."
"Health care is the Mother of all service industries."
or the admission from a recently enlightened doctor who admitted "I didn't used to think I was in a service industry; I'm a urologist, not a waiter."

In talking to other sectors about various process improvement methods, I hear similar laments:

"That wouldn't apply here."
"We're already lean and mean, we don't need that stuff."
"Yes, but we're in the [totally unique] industry. That [pick one - manufacturing/service/health care/mumbo jumbo] stuff doesn't make sense for us."

And yet, when I pursue the topic, and explore what issues they're having, and what they want to achieve, I hear the same things from everyone in every industry:

"We need to do more with less."
"We've got to increase our capacity."
"How do we get our people engaged?"
"We've got to reduce warranty claims/errors/defects/problems/lead time"
"There's a lot more competition."
"We've got to streamline our process."
"We've got to get different departments to work together."

Sure, the specific words might change from industry to industry, but the concepts are identical. Yes, your industry is different, you may work on house plumbing, or oil refinery piping, or sales pipelines, or people's pipes (like our urologist buddy), but the desire for improvement, and the methods for improvement, are universal.

Medical clinics can learn from restaurants about access and queuing. Restaurants can learn from manufacturers about flow and efficiency. Manufacturers can learn from financial services about customer relationships. And financial planners can learn from entertainers about thrilling customers.

Like everyone else, you are different. But the way to be really truly different is to realize how much the same you are. Then, you can learn from all industries, not just your own.

My People Don't Make Mistakes

2010-09-16T14:15:00.002-06:00

"My people don't make mistakes."

It was a simple sentence in an email exchange that occurred recently at a large grain handling company. Before we go any further with that story, let's give some thought to what that sentence actually means.

For example, if we emphasize different words, we can hear completely different meanings:

"My people don't make mistakes" sounds a bit boastful and challenging, implying a comparison between My people and Your people. This interpretation might trigger a defensive reaction, along the lines of "My people don't make mistakes either!"
"My people don't make mistakes" suggests an admission that mistakes are happening but with an insistence that the people are not the problem. Perhaps equipment or technology or work instructions are failing, but the people are doing a good job.

"My people don't make mistakes" sounds defensive, as if responding to a previous accusation that these people do, indeed, make a lot of mistakes. It pleadingly suggests that we look elsewhere for the problem.
"My people don't make mistakes" sounds like a clarification, an explanation that although mistakes are indeed happening, it's not that the people are doing anything wrong - it's just chance, randomness, the mistakes are just happening.
"My people don't make mistakes" seems to admit that something is going wrong, but that it's not accurate to call these things mistakes. Perhaps they're just misunderstandings or misinterpretations, but they're not mistakes.

With a little work and imagination, we could come up with many more interpretations. If you were to add in a little more context, the possibilities could become even more varied.

Back at the grain company, this unfortunate little sentence triggered a flurry of emails, a large number of concerned phone calls, and an emergency meeting to resolve the inter-departmental conflict that emerged. After much discussion, it was discovered that the intent of the writer was close to number 2, admitting that something in his department was going wrong, but suggesting that something other than people seemed to be the source of the mistakes. This was a non-threatening, non-challenging statement - he was reporting what he'd found and was still looking for the problem.

It turns out that almost nobody interpreted the sentence that way, but at least one person reacted to each of the other four meanings. And things went to hell, for a little while at least.

Communication is hard. People do make mistakes. Close the loop with dialogue and conversation. And careful what you put in an email.

Do You Treat Your People With Respect?

2010-09-15T00:54:00.004-06:00

Do you treat your people with respect? I know you'll say "Yes" - everyone says "Yes". But do your actions really demonstrate respect? Would your people say "Yes" if asked the same question?

Without respect, both given and perceived, managing becomes infinitely more difficult.

Here are a dozen ways that managers disrespect their slobbering, unwashed, incompetent employees...(oops, did I say that out loud? make that thirteen ways)...

Do you hold people accountable for the results of the system? Deming said that 95% of results come from the system, yet we seem to direct 95% of our management efforts into fixing "bad" people.
Have improvements resulted in layoffs?
Do you think anyone will help you make further improvements if their jobs, and their friends jobs, will be at risk?
Do you identify who causes each problem?
Root cause analysis is not about finding culprits, it's about changing the system so problems can't recur.
Who designs the work?
Engineers? Managers? Bosses? The people know how to do the work; the people know how to improve the work. Most of the details of the work are probably never known to those who don't actually do the work.
When asked a question do you typically respond with an answer?
Decisions should be made as close to the work as possible. People need the information, the understanding, and the support to make their own decisions about their own work.

Do you use carrots and sticks?
Performance management in all it's flavours implies "I'm OK, but you need to be motivated and controlled."
Do you “roll out” changes?
When you assume that a success in one area can be rolled out to another area, it implies that people are interchangeable. They're not. They're all unique and every change must be adapted and adopted, not imposed.
Has there ever been a strike or a lockout? Have people had to work without a contract?
Pretending that labour-management disputes somehow evaporate after the contract is signed is naive. Of course it damages trust, destroys respect.
Do you blame people for absenteism and sick leave?
People miss work because they have to; they're trying to survive in the system.
Do you set targets and quotas?
Systems have capacities. Imposing arbitrary targets with no idea how people will achieve them isn't management, it's wishing, it's abusive
Do you tell people that they're the problem?
If you've ever put up a poster saying "Do it right the first time," your true thoughts are clear - people screw up because people aren't careful enough.
Do your people ever truly get to contribute to the improvement of their daily work?
In most companies, only an elite few ever get to change the work. This is insane.

Respect is the core of Lean, of Continuous Improvement, of the Toyota Production System, of effective auditing, of teamwork, of communication. It's crucial. Yet so many of the things we managers do are deeply disrespectful. Belittling. Condescending. The damage is vast, as are the opportunities as you start to turn it around.

One Mouldy Raspberry

2010-09-14T12:51:00.003-06:00

Note to gardeners: One mouldy raspberry will soon spoil the whole bucket. It's a shame, after all the hard work of picking those fresh juicy berries, to lose the whole bucket. It's a shame to lose everything because you didn't invest the energy to deal with the mouldy one. Sure, sometimes it's not right out on top where you can see it, but with a little digging, it becomes obvious. Deal with it, or lose it all.

Note to managers: One mouldy employee will soon spoil the whole department. It's a shame, after all the hard work setting up the team, fostering relationships and building trust, to lose the whole thing. It's a shame to allow it to fail because you didn't deal with the mouldy one. Sure sometimes they're not right out on top where you can see them, but with a little digging, they become obvious. Deal with the mouldy ones, or risk losing everything you've set up.

Note from the field: The talent pool in the research department was astounding, with top-notch professionals from all disciplines. With excellent equipment, skilled administrative staff and seasoned management, the expectations were high for top-shelf collaboration and results. Yet, soon, it became clear that something was wrong. Despite some early successes, the department toppled - people would arrive late and leave early, absenteeism was high, collaboration was limited to a few small pockets, and morale was low. Some candid interviews with employees all pointed to one individual, one of the top professionals, who would have been covered in fluffy white mould if she'd been a raspberry. As a coworker, she was disrespectful, manipulative, cricitcal and abrasive, irritating everyone in the department. Yet, as a professional she was bringing considerable grant money into the department and the top dogs considered her essentially untouchable. Turnover escalated, morale disappeared, and the organization festered along, nowhere near the top-drawer excellence that should have been possible with the team that had been assembled.

If you've got a mouldy raspberry in your bucket, isn't it time to deal with it?

The Backbone of Your Organization

2010-09-13T17:50:00.001-06:00

From one vertebrate to another, a backbone is a wonderful thing. Compared to slime molds, jelly fish and malpractice lawyers, our backbones give us integrity; holding us together and providing a unifying structure on which we can hang all our other nifty bits and pieces.

Working with companies to map and improve their work processes, it's clear that a good, solid process map can serve as a very effective organizational backbone.

First, you map out the things that you do, step-by-step-by-step, to do good things for your customers. Then, you examine every step of this step-by-step-by-step sequence of events. Then, you think about all the things that can and could and should and shouldn't happen at each step...

Standard Work - Do the people involved in this step all do their work the best known way possible? How do you know? What typically prevents them from doing the work correctly? What gets in the way?
Pride of Work - Do the people feel proud of this step? Do they enjoy their work? Is it mind-numbingly boring? Is it stimulating? What can you do to improve it?
Customer Requirements - What are the requirements of the next step in the process? And the step after that? Do the workers know those requirements? Does the next step understand this step?
Communication - What does this step communicate to the next? What do they fail to communicate? And vice versa?
Training - Do the people know how to do this step? Is the training material correct? Is the work activity done correctly? What parts of this step are likely to be done wrong?
Quality - Does this step produce stuff that meets specifications, that meets customer requirements? Are we following our stated work processes? Could we prove this to a customer? To a regulator?
Regulations - Does this step conform to all applicable regulations? Some steps may have no regulations, some may have many? Do the people doing the work know what regulations are applicable?
Standards - Are we following the applicable standards in this step, both internal and external? What could cause a non-conformance at this step?
Capacity - How much can this step produce? How much does it need to produce? Is it a bottleneck? Is it consistent?
Variation - What causes results to vary at this step? How much variation is there? Is this part of the system in control or does it fluctuate wildly due to special causes?
Safety - How can a person hurt themselves in this step? What opportunities for injury can we address? What are the ergonomics of this step? How can we improve them?

Errors - What kind of errors could happen here? What are the consequences of an error here? Does this step produce a lot of rework? Can we disrupt the possibility of an error here?
Ethics - Do our people face ethical dilemna's in this step? Privacy issues? Inappropriate temptations? Couldn't we anticipate these and address them in advance?
Waste - Does this step add value for our customers? Is this waiting or transportation really necessary? Are we producing more than the next step can handle? Does all that frenzied motion really make our service better? Can't we identify these wastes and get rid of them? Can't we make our backbone stronger?
Risk - Does this step expose the organization to risks, whether liability, injury, financial, security, technical, intellectual property, or maybe even a really big explosion?
Reporting - What do we truly need to know about this step to manage our company? What do we measure? What should we measure?
Money - What are the costs and investments associated with this step? Can they be identified? Verified? What about contributions to revenue? What about added value? What about efficient use of resources?

The list goes on. At every step of what we do, there are things that we want to happen and things that we don't want to happen. A good process map can be the backbone on which we hang all these other nifty bits and pieces - our Quality Management System, our Safety initiatives, our Lean improvement efforts, our variation-reduction and process control, our ethics and privacy practices, our financial analysis or our business process modelling.

So, unless you work for Slime Mold Structures Inc., the Jelly Fish Facilitation Co., or the Wees Krew Yu & Laff Lawfirm, take a look a process mapping as a first step in understanding, controlling, and improving your business.

Be Here in Fifteen Minutes, Or Else

2010-09-09T07:20:00.000-06:00

A large phone company had a waiting list for the new iPhone 4. Customers on the waiting list had paid a $100 deposit and wanted the new phones as soon as they were available. In the interest of fairness, the company decided that they would call the people on the list, and give them fifteen minutes to get to the store to pick it up, or it would go to the next person on the list.

Angela and Doug, long-time customers of this company, both happened to be on that list. Angela, a surgeon, was interrupted in the operating room by her receptionist who had received the call at the office. Doug, a pilot, received the call while he was enroute from Calgary to Denver. In both cases, the company rep insisted that "If you want the phone, you need to be here within fifteen minutes." In both cases, their first responses were not fit to print. In both cases, their subsequent suggestion that a spouse or colleague pick up the phone was rejected. Both eventually got their phone, but not without several more phone calls and escalating complaints.

A very good lesson in how not to listen to the voice of the customer.

A Little Over-Processing Waste at the Pharmacy

2010-09-08T11:16:00.000-06:00

A pharmacy has a software system that prints three items at once - a label for the bottle, a receipt for the customer, and a record slip for the files. The software system is robust and reliable.

As part of their work process, one pharmacist routinely checks the information on all three items to make sure it is the same. This is not to make sure that it is correct, this is to make sure that the three pieces are the same. This cursory check takes about 20 seconds and is done on the basis that "you can never be too careful."

Truth be told, you can be too careful, if you're being careful in a way that doesn't actually help anything. These printed pieces are never different; they will never be different; the inspection will never find a problem. The inspection is a hold-over from experiences with previous systems that weren't robust; with the current system, the inspection is not needed.

In Lean terminology, this extra effort, this double check, this inspection, is Waste, specifically Over-Processing waste. It is a step that takes time and effort, but doesn't add any value for the customer.

And these wastes, tiny as they seem, really add up. Consider that 20 seconds/prescription x 200 prescriptions/day x 250 days/year = 275 hours wasted each year. Eliminating this step from the process could free up 275 hours for a pharmacist every year! That's almost two months! Finding and eliminatng a few more small wastes could potentially free up the equivalent of a full-time pharmacist, without adding any new staff.

That's the excitement of Lean and the potential of continuous daily improvement.

Managers Need to Play Catch

2010-09-07T11:06:00.002-06:00

A large financial services company had built itself on mergers and acquisitions and was planning a big integration project to get everybody on the same page - using the same systems, common procedures across all geographic regions, and scalable reporting. In a sensible move, they brought in representatives from all of the global regions to give input and work through all the issues over a period of months.

This project team came up with a plan that seemed to satisfy most of their requirements and they moved into the implementation phase. Despite having representatives from almost every region on the team, the rollout of the new systems and procedures met with huge resistance in almost every geographic region. Local managers actively fought the new systems, and the top-down initiative struggled and stalled for almost three years.

Even though each region was represented in the planning team, the planning team had never closed the loop with all the other people in the region who would be affected by the changes. The managers of the regions weren't given any real opportunity to review the plan, modify the plan, or run the plan by their own people - the people who actually know what's going on and how the work gets done. And, even if the plan was actually a pretty good fit for most regions, the unilateral directive that "this is the way we're going" put everyone into defensive mode, stalling the project.

Every business is made up of individual people. Every division is made up of individual people. Every manager is an individual person. And no individual person likes to have change imposed on them.

People need to be involved in the changes that affect them. Ideally, they need to create the changes that affect them. The traditional corporate planning approach - gather information, plan and implement - doesn't do that, regardless of how good the initial "gather information" stage is. Just as in any communication, a one-way transfer of information doesn't cut it - we need to close the loop with discussion, feedback and conversation.

Much better are the methods of Hoshin Kanri (also called Hoshin Planning and Catch Ball). Check out this short video about Catch Ball from the 2009 IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference (forgive the slow 15 second intro.)

By the way, the financial services company has now retreated from unilateral implementation, and is working to get respectful involvement of every region; engaging their concerns and suggestions and letting the regions adapt the plan to suit their operations. Interestingly enough, when given the chance to adapt the plan to their own needs, most seem to be choosing the plan as is.

One Gallon of Waste at the Hospital

2010-09-03T09:42:00.001-06:00

"Do you remember that gallon of blah-blah-blah that I asked you to order last week? Do you know where it is?"

So started the conversation in the hospital ward, and the search began.

The file of paper requisition forms was searched.
The computer records were examined.
Two phone calls were made.
A search of the storage room was undertaken.
Thirty cabinet doors were opened and closed.
Another phone call was made.
Three people were asked if they'd seen the blah-blah-blah.
Two possibilities were suggested.
Two wild geese were chased.
Another staff arrived and said they thought it was back-ordered.
The computer records were examined again.
Two more phone calls were made.
The blah-blah-blah wasn't found.
A new requisition order was filled out.

This is just one gallon of waste, one tiny incident in the life of a busy hospital. This is one small example of how trivial our wastes can be.

This little incident won't even make the radar of management, won't be considered important in the grand scheme of things, but this is the stuff that drives people crazy. This is the stuff that contributes to error. This is the stuff that wastes time and money, day after day after day. This is what Lean, and 5S, and continuous improvement, and employee engagement is all about.

Building Relationships, One Coffee Percolator at a Time

2010-09-01T08:46:00.001-06:00

I just got a hand-written Thank You card in the mail from the Handy Group of Companies in Saskatoon. We had rented a 36-cup coffee percolator from their Special Events department for a family birthday party a few weekends ago.

This was a very nice gesture, and indicative of how they've built their business. Consider that our entire rental cost about ten bucks and the hand-written card probably cost about two, including time and postage. Now this company does rentals for large-scale parties and all sorts of tools and construction equipment and would routinely have rental contracts worth thousands of dollars. Yet for my ten dollar coffee pot, they still invested the time and energy to send a Thank You note. Hand-written no less.

This is a great example of how to value your customers. Rather than looking at the tiny size of my purchase, this company saw an opportunity to build a relationship. They looked beyond the value of the individual transaction to the lifetime value of a customer. That's what makes it worth sending a Thank You note for even a ten dollar purchase.