Training Isn't The Problem

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 Often, the printed paper versions would end up being out-of-date the next time they used it.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.

Home Concerts and Productive Conversations

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.

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

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:

1. Get people to work harder. Generally done through some combination of begging, bullying, and bribing.
2. Work longer hours. Crank up the number of hours that you and your people work.
3. Hire more people. Throw more bodies at the problem.
4. Downsize some people. Growth and profits through emaciation.
5. Add some technology (the mythical silver bullet). This gizmo ought to fix things.
6. Set targets and hold people accountable. I don't know how to improve things; maybe they'll figure something out.
7. Set big bold stretch goals. And then hope some magic happens.
8. Work smarter, not harder. Which isn't insulting at all to those who've been experts at their jobs for fifteen years.
9. Fire anyone who makes a mistake. Only for perfect managers or hypocrites, of whom I've met several.
10. Hire only the best. We need a hero, because we don't know how to succeed without heroes.
11. Reorganize. Changing who people report to will somehow fix what we do.
12. 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.

Caution - Low-Fat Organization!

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

I Had No Idea How Complicated It Is!

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.

Home By Six

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. "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.

Rapid Improvement Projects

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.

But We're Different !

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.

The Backbone of Your Organization

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.

Higher Costs Produced Higher Profits

In pursuit of profit, a research and testing lab had been methodically eliminating support staff like administrators, middle managers, and secretaries over the years. By reducing costs, the result should have been increased profits, according to their standard formula of Profit equals Income minus Expenses.

The tasks that had previously been performed by support staff were now handled by more senior people, by technical people, by staff, by managers and by sales people, empowered by ever-evolving office technology. Unfortunately, profit and productivity never seemed to keep up with the wishful thinking. They weren't getting the upside that should have emerged as a result of the continually decreasing expenses.

An intervention by a trusted advisor had them reconsider their strategy, and they quickly doubled the size of their support staff, re-creating administrative and secretarial positions that had been eliminated over the years. The result of this modest increase in staff? An almost-immediate forty-percent increase in revenue, with a correspondingly large increase in profit.

It turns out that most of the remaining people just weren't that good at administrative and communications tasks, and they also weren't getting much benefit from the office productivity software. The remaining people were excellent at their specialties, but that didn't mean that they were good at writing, at typing, at using integrated office software packages. They'd struggle with details like fonts and layout, and waste time that they could have been spending on the areas where they should have been working, in their areas of specialization.

By increasing the size of the support staff, by increasing costs, the company was able to increase their profits. The administrative and secretarial costs were directly associated with valuable functions, with valuable purposes. By increasing the costs, the company also increased the capacity of the entire system to do more; they free'd people up to work on what they're good at.

Give Me More...

Have you ever had the joy of working in a very capable organization? In a place where the processes are in control, people are on top of things, and the team is actively seeking to take on more and greater challenges? It's radically different from the more common situation where people feel overwhelmed and do their best to avoid getting burdened with more work.

At some point in an effective improvement journey, the switch happens. Rather than a daily feeling of chaos and stress, people evolve into a feeling of calm capability, of strength, of collective confidence. One day, the group realizes that they are easily handling what used to be impossible beyond imagining. Like buying a new sports car, a new kind of thinking takes hold - "let's open 'er up and see what this baby can really do!"

This can happen in a one-person office. This can happen in a department. This can happen throughout an organization. When you finally figure out a system for staying on top of the daily tasks, clawing away at the backlog, and eliminating the churn and waste from your processes, it starts to get really exciting.

How much better would your world be if you could move your organization from "don't bother me" to "give me more?"

The Savage World of Management

As your troops struggle with a hoard of zombies that were time-teleported onto your battle cruiser from ancient Rome, you swing your mono-molecular sword and attempt to decapitate the tentacled Zygorthian leader who's been leading the rebellion. The entire battle hinges on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

As you try to convince a herd of rebellious nurses and their union representatives to change how they organize their work, the entire campaign depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

As you try to battle the evil out-of-scope health region warlords and convince them that six nurses can't actually do the work of thirty, your department's sanity depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

In the role-playing and action game of Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment Group, the role of the dice feels particularly realistic, and is a useful analogy for anyone looking to improve their intuition about change, risk, randomness and prediction as it applies to management and business.

Whenever you launch a new product, or start a new improvement initiative, or even just have a conversation with someone, there is never certainty of the outcome - it may go the way you hope, it may succeed beyond your wildest imagining, or it may fail miserably. You bring a certain skill level to the process, either as an individual or as an organization, and then luck kicks in; the random variation of complex dynamic real-world systems.

In a Savage Worlds game, an action generally succeeds if you roll four or higher on your dice. So with a regular six-sided D6 dice you have a 50% chance of basic success. But, if you happen to roll a Six, you get to re-roll and add the new roll to the first. If you get another Six, you keep adding. So, even with a six-sided dice, there is always a small chance that you could roll a really big number (ie. roll Six, then Six, then Five and the total is 17). So, let's say you need a Four to wound the Zygorthian leader, but each additional four adds an extra wound. There's always a chance that you will really succeed and roll 17, inflicting four wounds to take him out of the game.

Another neat twist is that on some actions, if you roll a One, it's not just a miss but it's a "things go bad" failure of some sort. So, if you're swinging your "collective agreement" at the evil warlord, and roll a One, you might accidentally chop off the only leg you had left to stand on. Sometimes, even the best of us do something bone-headed and make a big mess of something that we had expected to go smoothly.

As you gain experience and knowledge, you can improve your skills in certain areas. Maybe you take some Leader Effectiveness Training so now you're rolling an eight-sided dice (D8) when kicking off your next team improvement project. Now, your chances or rolling a Four or more have increased to 62.5% from 50%, making it more likely that you'll succeed. However, even if your skill level increases to Legendary, and you're rolling a D12+1 on every attempt, with a 83.3% chance of success, there's always a chance you'll fail.

This feels real, for most situations we face in business.

When cold calling, there's a small chance you'll get a huge order, there's a pretty good chance that you'll start to develop a relationship that might lead to orders in the future, and there's a small chance that you'll cause so much damage to the relationship that you destroy any further chances of doing business with that firm.

When trying to improve the capacity of your service department, there's a small chance that you'll figure out a way to triple capacity without adding any staff, there's a pretty good chance that you'll have some conflict but work through it and gain 35% in capacity, and there's a small chance that it'll go very sour, with serious customer complaints, huge staff turnover, and a new job for you as a homeless person.

There's no certainty in Savage Worlds, and there's no certainty in business. Work on your skills and do everything you can to improve your effectiveness. On a really good day, everything will fall into place in ways you only dreamed of. But every once in a while you'll roll a One, and see how savage the world of management can be.

You Can't See Your Doctor

A lovely lady, approaching eighty years old wanted to see her doctor to talk about some immediate health troubles that were concerning her. But she hated calling, and hated going in to the clinic, so she kept postponing it.

"Whenever I phone them, it's so frustrating. It says push this button, then push that one, then I talk to someone but they won't let me see him for for three weeks. It hurts today! If I go to the clinic and wait, I don't know who I'll get and I have to tell them the whole story. At the desk, they won't even tell me if my doctor is working that day! Sometimes I wait and he ends up being the one that I get. It's OK to see another doctor, but I really just want to see my doctor. Why can't they even tell me whether he's working or not?"

If you're sick today, you want to see your doctor today. We get so concerned about "optimizing our time" and "filling the schedule" that we end up giving really bad service to our patients. We need some slack in our day, so we can handle the unpredictable demand. And it turns out that the unpredictable demand is actually quite predictable.

If you're struggling to provide quick service to your patients, clients or customers, check out the work of Dr. Mark Murray with Advanced Access in health care, and of John Seddon's approach to Lean Service with the Vanguard Method. Turns out, you can see your doctor.

Mean and Scrawny

The manager of a small office proudly spoke about how Lean their organization was. He described how few staff they now had, and how much more work they were doing than before. Conversations with staff quickly revealed that they were all extremely stressed, turnover was high, clients were falling through the cracks, important tasks weren't getting done, and serious mistakes were common. This office wasn't Lean, it was just mean and scrawny. What he called Lean was really just dramatic under-staffing.

Working Hard but Wasting Your Time?

"We're working hard but getting nothing done. It's like some days we're organized and some days we're not, but I guess that's what it like everywhere. Today has been so frustrating though - it feels like I've spent hours just searching for files and trying to figure out where we're at."

Those are the words of a technician in a small, but busy, medical office. As she commented, this is typical of organizations everywhere, and, indeed, most of her work and most of her day was a waste of time. Not because she isn't a hard worker, but because the layout of the office and the design of her work processes have waste built into them.

Waste can take many forms, whether searching for stuff, trying to find answers, waiting for approvals and inspections, moving things around, walking for miles, or sorting and counting piles of Important Things. When you eliminate Waste from your processes, it frees up time for you to do more of the things that are truly valuable.

If you're working hard but feeling like you're wasting your time, you might want to investigate Lean thinking. Lean is about avoiding waste in our processes, getting rid of those activities that keep us busy but don't add any value to our customers. Lean identifies seven Wastes - Defects, Overproduction, Transportation, Waiting, Inventory, Motion and Processing - many resources discuss and clarify these.

Check out Lean thinking and stop wasting your time!

Hearing Voices - Why Hallucination is Good for Management

So you want to be a good manager, a great leader; what do you do? The key to Good management, yes, even to Great management, is the ability to hallucinate, to hear voices that nobody else can hear.

First, the Voice of the Customer. If you can hear the voice of the customer, you're doing well. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the Voices of the Customers, because there's more than one type of customer, and they have more than one thing to say. There are your Actual Customers, those who buy your solutions. Then there are Brokers, those who connect you to your customers, act as some kind of middleman, and help your Actual Customer buy your solutions. Then there are Fixers, who help your Actual Customers when something goes wrong with your solutions. And, each of those different kinds of customers will tell you about What Outcomes They Want, What Outcomes They Don't Want, What Features They Want in Your Solution, and What Features They Want in your Selling Process. So, Three types of customers times Four types of wants equals Twelve different voices, just from your customers.

Then, there's the Voice of the Process. If you can also hear what your processes are telling you, you're doing really well. If you can understand the data you collect about what your processes are capable of, what's normal for your systems, what you can expect from them in the future, you're among an elite group of companies. Most managers respond to randomness in their results as if something significant has happened. And most managers ignore clear cries for help from their processes, because they don't know how to listen. So, two more voices here, one saying "something special is happening" and the other saying "everything's under control". We're up to fourteen.

Finally, there's the Voice of your Employees. Once you become CEO or President, it's almost guaranteed that you'll never hear the truth again. The higher up in management you go, the less likely you are to hear the truth. Your employees are almost certainly scared to share the truth as they see it, because they're justifiably worried about the possible consequences. They've seen what happens to people who stick their necks out, open up, and are candid about the risks and opportunities they see. But if you can manage this; if you can find a way to truly hear your employees' voices; to get them to share their thoughts and ingenuity and creativity with you - you set yourself amongst the super-elite few of the world's elite organizations.

The world's best companies aren't necessarily the largest companies, or the ones in the news. Often, companies are in the news simply because they are large or because chance has favored them with exceptional luck this quarter. But if you can hear the Voices of the Customers, the Voices of the Process, and the Voices of your Employees, you are well on your way to becoming one of the world's best companies, with engaged employees working in stable processes that are truly focused on the customer.

So if someone calls you crazy, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe you're hearing all of these voices, the voices no one else can hear, and you are becoming a truly great leader of a truly great company. Or, maybe you actually are a slobbering nut job like everyone says you are. Only you can know for sure.

We Treat Our People Like Family

Is there fear in your organization? Are your people scared to speak up, to be open, to volunteer information, to risk? Are your people off-balance, concerned about their performance, and scared that they might be replaced, or let go?

A phrase I heard from five different managers this week is "We treat our people like family", accompanied by lists of all the good things they do, like their companies' open door policies, fun work environment, 360 reviews, training programs, performance management process, benefits, bonuses and incentives. I can only think of one manager in my experience who readily, publicly admitted that he wanted his people to be constantly scared, to realize that unless they performed, they would be replaced. He was a mean man, who I believe enjoyed the fear in his underlings. He is the exception. Most of the leaders and managers I've worked with feel a little offended at any suggestion that their people might be scared - leaders want to be liked, managers want to believe that their people can speak freely and trust them.

In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming spoke repeatedly about the need to "drive out fear, so everyone can work effectively for the company." Ryan and Oestreich speak of building high-trust organizations instead of high-fear organizations in Driving Fear Out of the Workplace. And, though twice as long as it needed to be, Steven Covey's The Speed of Trust makes a compelling case for how trust, and lack of fear, contributes to the bottom-line.

Now all of the five managers I heard from this week are very nice, very accomplished people. They work hard to blend a clear vision with compassion and polite kindness. But still, from discussions with people in their organizations, it is clear that their employees feel fear. The fear isn't about whether the manager is nice or mean; it generally isn't a personal fear at all; it is fear that's built into the structure of their companies.

I don't know about your family, but mine seems very different from the way these companies are run. It doesn't seem to go over very well when I give my wife a performance review. She doesn't seem to appreciate it when I let her know how she compares to other women I see on TV. Similarly, when I make my kids compete for parental affection, and promise to withhold love from the one that gets the poorest marks in school, it doesn't seem to promote the free exchange of mutual support and encouragement that I'm hoping for.

We don't (or shouldn't) do this stuff in our families. We shouldn't do it at work.

At work, we rank our people and compare them to each other. We hold people accountable for the randomness and results of our systems. We use carrots and sticks that trivialize their efforts and take away the inherent joy that comes from doing good work. We set targets that are outside the capacity of our systems, and blame people when they don't achieve it. We believe that someone who is totally dependent on us for reward and promotion will be able to give us open, honest feedback. We set up competitions between our people, then wonder why they don't work together.

We don't do any of this because we are mean people, and most of us try to very nice and respectful when we do these things. That's not the point. It is not that we are mean people who are trying to induce disabling fear in our people, it is that we are nice people using management tools that inherently produce disabling fear.

There are better ways.

How Many Calls Did You Handle Today?

The managers of a small internal call center tracked the number of calls handled each day. In efforts to improve customer service, pep talks and incentives were put in place to reward the team if they could increase the number of calls handled without increasing staff. It worked, and within a few months the same group was handling about twenty percent more calls. Success!

Unfortunately, some quick data collection about the purpose of each call revealed that about half of all the calls were not new orders but were calls to follow up on something that hadn't been thoroughly completed - checking for order status, looking for supporting paperwork, providing information missed on an earlier call, reporting an incorrect shipment, trying to find a person, or asking for copies of invoices. All of these demands on the call center were counted the same, a call is a call and they were handling more calls than ever before.

With the focus on increasing capacity, the customer service reps felt pressure and incentive to handle calls more quickly, and so they were. Not dramatically, but shaving a little time here and there on each call to try to speed things up. Unfortunately, this often resulted in less complete communication, a few details missed, and slightly incomplete understanding of customer needs - resulting in more calls that subsequently needed to be handled to fix things up. A similar focus on increasing and rewarding activity in specific departments existed throughout the company, and many of the calls were due to minor problems occuring throughout the organization. Since all outside communication flowed through the call center, it felt the impact of little glitches all over the company.

By tracking the type and frequency of calls, and working to improve the concrete little details in the call center and throughout the company that were contributing to all this failure demand, management was able to methodically reduce the churn, the customer service busy-work. Over a period of six months, the number of calls handled actually decreased, but this was because true customer service was improving significantly; customers were calling mostly to place new orders, rather than to follow up on previous calls. This kind of work never stops, and there is always further room for improvement.

All calls are not equal so don't bother just counting them. Look at which are new, valued calls and which are based on some previous little (or big) failure. Then work systematically to reduce the sources of the failures, throughout the company. That's the key to improving your customer service department.

The Hero Method of Business Improvement

Your department must get 20% more production! 30% more clients! 40% less defects! but you really don't know how to achieve any of those things. After all, if you knew how to get more production, wouldn't you already be doing it? If you knew how to magically increase capacity or reduce defects, why didn't you do it last year? If you don't know how to get better results from your people, your teams, your processes, what do you do?

The standard approach, that I see over and over and over (and over), is what I'll call the Hero Method, and it's not a complimentary term.

As we strive for success, we rely on heroes. We try to find people who will excel despite the systems we've created. We think that if we can just get the right people in the right seats on our dilapidated bus, everything will be OK. Deep down, we know that our processes and policies and leadership are really what determines our capacities, but improving our systems seems hard; improving our leadership  approach seems hard.

So instead, we rely on heroes. We hire "only the best". We say that our people are "top performers in the industry". We praise people who get good results. And we hold people accountable when they get bad results. We blame individuals for failures, just as we rely on individuals for successes.

As a Hero Method basketball coach, we yell at players when they pass the ball instead of driving to the hoop. Then we yell when they drive to the hoop instead of passing the ball. When they try something new, we praise them if it works and yell at them if it doesn't. When we teach a play, and it doesn't work, we scream from the sidelines "just run your plays!". When players make exceptional effort to make a crappy play work, we say "that's better".

Managers who use the Hero Method are essentially powerless; as you talk to them, you soon hear their frustration and desperation. Unless they can find an exceptional person who can succeed, they don't know how they will meet their goals. If they can't find a hero, they are out of options.

If, upon reflection, you see that you have been relying on heroes, consider that there are better ways. Heroes are fine for fairy tales and comic books, but in real life, in real business, investigate the ways to achieve super-hero results from the wonderful, everyday, super-normal people that already work for you.