Costs Don't Matter

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.

The Struggle to Let Go

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Human Resources Discussion Group

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.

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.

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

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.

I Just Made a Mistake

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.

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.

Do Certifications Suck?

• The Society of Manufacturing Engineers has a three-tiered Lean certification program, with Bronze, Silver and Gold levels of recognition. The American Society for Quality and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence have also contributed to this program.
• The Kaizen Institute has a two-tiered Lean and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt certification program.
• The International Independent Board for Lean Certification offers independent Lean certification in more than ten countries.
• The list goes on and on - Lean Certification Online has, as it's name implies, an online Lean Certification program. Automated Learning has an International Lean Certification Standard. Beyond Lean offers Lean Six Sigma Certification.

From one point of view, this is great, and I mean that. There are literally hundreds of companies and organizations offering some form of Lean certification, trying to teach people standard skills and philosophies to improve their organizations. There is great debate about what standard is, about what Lean is, but the intent (beyond making money through training and certification exams) is noble - let's teach people about Lean.

Now I've known many skilled professionals who've pursued and maintained various certifications, and who are very effective in their roles, so this is not a criticism of the valuable learning inherent in the various certification programs. Yet, there's a significant problem with certifications that emerges in most of the companies I've known.

Almost without fail, organizations seem to end up with a Quality guy, or a Lean department, or some Six Sigma gurus who end up doing the improvement work. There ends up being a quasi-elite group, generally of certified this-that-or-the-others, that are the people who "do that sort of thing." Certifications often suck the initiative out of the rest of the group, and often suck the confidence out of the other workers. You'll hear variations on "I don't make the changes - I just do the work" or "that's something the Lean team does" or "I've given up making suggestions" - the workers themselves are not involved in continually making their own work better and better.

So, while Lean Certifications are well-intentioned, it creates a very different workplace than that advocated by Deming in his 14th point for management, "Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job."

So, pursue certifications and get some Lean training as you see fit, but remember that the goal is to get everybody involved in the transformation, not just an elite certified few. Are certifications sucking the initiative and confidence out of everybody else in your organization?

The Blind Leading the Blind

As part of a team-building exercise at a corporate training retreat, staff were paired up, with one of each pair asked to wear a blindfold. The blindfolded team member would then be led around by their partner, with the intent of building trust and showing how staff can and must rely on each other to be successful. The retreat facility was at a lakeside resort, and the blindfolded team members were led around outside in the fresh air, across a small lawn, and onto the boat dock, trusting in their sighted partner to lead them safely.

As a final trust example, the blindfolded team members were led to the edge of the dock, toes just over the edge, and told to lean forward. Their partners were to support them, and prevent them from falling. Now one participant, who normally wore eyeglasses, had removed them and slid them into his shirt pocket before accepting the blindfold. As he leaned forward over the water, the glasses slid out of his pocket and plunged to the bottom of the murky lake. No amount of searching could locate them, and this unfortunate man was out a pair of glasses.

And now to put the Motivational Icing on this delicious Team-Building Cake...

His boss, who was also participating in the team building retreat, accused him of losing his glasses on purpose so that he could get new ones through the company's benefits plan. In front of all the staff, he ranted about abuse of the benefits package and reminded everyone it was only to be used in case of real need because benefits cost the company a lot of money.

Needless to say, nobody really came out of this with a warm, fuzzy feeling of trust and teamwork. And, even without this extra unfortunate event, such teambuilding exercises rarely produce any lasting improvement. If you really want to build teamwork, improve the work itself; reduce the daily frustrations and stresses.

When you help your people succeed as a team, and they will likely start behaving like a team.

Shooting Blanks - The Impotence of Financial Business Planning

"Over the next five years, our projected Internal Rate of Return will be 21.3%."

"We calculated an ROI of 12.63%"

"In the first three years, using conservative estimates, our sales are projected to be $82,300, $256,805 and $544,080"

I recently attended some presentations by business students, showcasing their business planning skills. The event was pleasant enough, but I see now where managers learn to shoot blanks when they're aiming at business targets. Whether entrepreneurs looking for investment capital, or managers planning improvement initiatives, the presenters always seem to make up a whole bunch of numbers, multiply them by a bunch of other guessed numbers, extend them five years into the uncertain future, and then state their financial projections to three decimal places of accuracy. The reliance on financial business planning is all-pervasive, and I've always felt a bit cynical about its usefulness.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn how recent the development of financial business management is. Prior to the 1950's financial data was rarely used to manage the day-to-day business and planning of operations. It was used extensively to keep score, but it's use was limited to reporting after the fact - to telling shareholders how the company actually did. That is what financial tools are really useful for; for counting the money, for reporting results to shareholders, for looking in the mirror to see what happened.

But I'm shocked by how many companies that are planning improvement efforts look at it primarily as a financial, cost-accounting exercise. The magic formula they use - Profit equals Revenue less Costs - leads to very straight-forward decisions that never seem to quite work out. Yes, this formula is true, but only for keeping score, not for planning. It's like carefully, precisely aiming at a target, but then being impotent to achieve the results and actually hit the target, because there's no bullet in our gun.

For example, to make more profit, an obvious method is to cut costs. But, of course, most costs are associated with some sort of purpose, some function. And, when you eliminate those costs, you also eliminate those functions. So, the company reduces the amount spent on new product development, cuts the number of staff in customer support, and eliminates a number of HR positions that had been dealing with internal conflict resolution, staff training and occupational health and safety. Things look good on the balance sheets for a few months, but surprise!, your products soon fall behind your competitors, your customers become unhappy, and staff conflict increases while safety and quality slip. And, the financial results don't meet up with what was expected from the simple financial planning formula.

The most solid way to improve the financial results is to continually improve the details of how we do what we do for customers. By improving the processes, the details of the daily work, we can reduce the resources required while improving quality, improving speed of delivery and improving employee engagement at the same time. This WILL produce more profit. This isn't rhetoric, this is a practical approach and a long-standing alternative to how to manage your business. Toyota (despite the recent witch-hunt), Scania and other industry-leading organizations, don't use financial accounting to manage their businesses as much as they use them to report the results.

If your attempts at improvement never seem to quite measure up, maybe you should start using different methods to achieve improvement. If you're shooting blanks, you'll never hit your targets, no matter how much effort you put into aiming.

If You Build a Nursing Home That Looks Like a Hospital

If you build a nursing home that looks like a hospital, the people who live there will behave like patients. They will be sick, they will be unhappy, they will defer to those giving them care.

If you build a nursing home that looks like a community of small houses, the people who live there will behave like functioning independent people. They will be active, they will take more control of themselves, they will ask for the care that they need.

Behaviours truly do emerge from the systems you set up. If you want to create a nursing home that is respectful and promotes activity and vibrant living, if you want to create an environment where multi-skilled staff do whatever is necessary to help those who live there, then the design of your building is important, the design of your policies is important, the priorities of your value systems are important.

The Village Model at Sherbrooke Community Centre in Saskatoon is living proof of this. Rather than an institutional look and feel, the resident live in a small community of joined houses, complete with indoor streets. Staff provide the medical services along with all the diverse, normal services that anyone would provide for their own homes. Residents are more independent and in control of their own care. As CEO Suellen Beatty says, "We did not realize how much simpler the environment would make our work."

It is harder to do compassionate, respectful, client-centered care in an institutional hospital setting. The systems that your people work within are important, and can make the path forward easy and natural, or bumpy and difficult.

Learning Without Marks

For many, it's hard to imagine a workplace without performance evaluation, or a school without marks. A simple example that might resonate is the University of Saskatchewan Ballroom Dance Club, one of the largest clubs on the U of S campus with about 1,200 students. The club started in 1964, my wife and I met in an instructors' class there back in 1988, and the club is still going strong, so you know they've got a model that's effective.

The club is all about learning how to ballroom dance, with volunteer instructors, and students who self-assess what classes they should be in. You start as a beginner, and as you master that, you can proceed to intermediate or advanced classes. If you're having too much difficulty, the instructor may suggest that you move back to an easier level, but generally, students make their own decisions on how competent they are.

You don't get marks in the class, you aren't ranked and compared to the other students in the class. The focus is on learning, on skills development, and you can repeat a class as many times as you want in order to master the steps. You also get to practice in a real social situation at a number of formal dances that the club holds each year.

This club has taught thousands of people to ballroom dance, without ever giving out a mark or an evaluation.

Telling Stories or Writing Manuals?

On my first day helping to install kitchens, my job involved attaching the knobs and handles used to open the cabinet doors and drawers. I'd done a lot of carpentry work and had a lot of experience with power tools so I was pretty comfortable with the task. I made a jig, held the jig onto the door with my left hand, and then proceeded to drill holes in the cabinet doors. On the third door, because of the way I was holding the door, I proceeded to drill through the door and right into the middle finger of my left hand. As I bled all over the lovely new kitchen, I learned a safety lesson that I don't think I'll ever forget. There's still a little scar there twenty years later.

I've told this story to various friends over the years, and was surprised to get feedback on it recently. Chatting with a long-time friend who works at a large technical school, he described a new ten-page manual that the safety committee just released for operating an electric drill. We joked about this, as we were both pretty sure that nobody will ever read that manual, let alone use it in any meaningful way. He then mentioned my story, which pops into his head every time he uses an electric drill, especially while holding the workpiece with his other hand. He credited my story with saving his fingers many times over the years.

Whether you're trying to convey your safety messages to employees, or to clarify your personnel policies or company values, many companies are using "company stories" to augment or completely replace their comprehensive written manuals. We humans are naturally drawn to engaging stories, and we remember them easily, unlike a boring, lengthy manual that we don't ever read.

When you want to develop a certain style of customer service, capture and share some stories about what you consider to be really good, and really bad, service experiences. To convey how you'd like your managers to handle employee situations, capture and share stories of what happened when it was done particularly well, or particularly poorly, in the past.

Tell more stories. Write fewer manuals.

You Just Can't Teach This Stuff ... Online

In my continual exploration of online training platforms, I've repeatedly come up against a problem. So many of the topics I teach are about people working together and learning together.

In a training class, it's effortless to break up into groups of two or three people, work on a joint task, then reconvene with the group, debriefing, sharing key learnings and reviewing patterns that emerged. It's effortless to get people to repeat something that didn't quite go right the first time. It's effortless to get people to all work on a project together, taking on different roles, exploring the interactions as the exercise develops. It's effortless to spontaneously add some additional twist to the exercise to clarify some point of contention. Like storytelling, good training is not so much something you present TO people, as something you do WITH people.

Online, students either work independently, or go through everything at the same pace, sharing a common screen view. There may be shared audio, there may be webcams on the various participants, but the shared experience is still quite shallow. There is often a voting mechanism, or a question and answer mechanism, but it often takes preparation and training and struggles to achieve the easy adaptability of being in the same roon. Course preparation seems to end up as an exercise in squeezing the content to match the media.

We learn better with joint attention; when they can see, touch, hear the same things. we communicate better with verbal cueing, intonation, and body language. When groups need to learn something about how to work in a group, they need to work in a group. Military training emphasizes Drill, where the team works together, trains together, practices together.

It seems to me that there are some things, many things, you just can't learn ... online.

Ten Key Reasons to Reduce Training Budgets

1. We already have enough knowledge.
2. There isn’t really any change going on in our industry.
3. We don’t want to get too far ahead of the competition.
4. Our customers are getting less demanding over time.
5. All of our people are already on the same page.
6. We’re as productive as we need to be.
7. All of our managers are effective leaders.
8. We haven’t hired a new employee in years.
9. Costs just keep going down so there’s really no need to make any changes.
10. Economic downturns never seem to affect us.