High Performance Company

keepin’ it relevant

Recently my daughter and some friends were doing a scavenger hunt where they followed a series of clues to discover the prize at the end. One of the clues was, “The place where we get bills.” Immediately, my daughter rushed to the computer because that’s where we pay bills. Uh oh. The last thing a business wants is to be irrelevant to the customer.

Your business, your department, and even you become irrelevant to your customers the second they no longer think of you as a resource and solution to their problems. Few think about it that way, but it’s true. Customers are trying to solve a problem they have and need you to do it. Put another way, from the customer’s point of view, your business (department, team, etc.) is useful and relevant only if you can solve their problem.

Banks exist to solve the problems of safely storing and accessing money. Lawnmowers exist to solve the problem of an unkempt lawn. Car dealers exist to solve personal transportation problems. Human Resources departments exist to solve the problems of finding, hiring, managing, and developing people. And so on. Internal or external, it doesn’t matter – your job is to help your customers solve their problems.

When salespeople don’t listen to the customer, they don’t (can’t!) provide solutions. When employees judge their worth to the company by their tenure rather than the problems they are solving, they are missing the point. When HR departments focus on administration they are solving only the lowest level of problems (which are easily outsourced). When your potential customers avoid you or work around you or tolerate you because you are the only option (for now), you become a problem to them.

You become a problem that they will look to someone else to solve.

training is (still) stupid

“Training is a complete waste of time!” Not true, but that’s what I got out of an article in ASTD’s Buzznews published yesterday. A report by ILX Group “revealed that 63% of HR professionals and business managers conduct training to boost business capability.”

Pardon me while I go hyperventilate and scream in rage against my profession! So they are reporting that 37% conduct training for reasons unrelated to boosting business capability?! Anyone else see a potential problem? How about a real, right now, in your face problem? And some wonder why training is the first thing cut when money gets tight!

It gets worse: “30% said training had a positive impact on achieving profit.” SEVENTY PERCENT of those surveyed believe that training doesn’t have a positive impact on profit!!! Why are we bothering?

The actual focus of the article was that 40% of companies want tablet computers for training. Well, sure, if your training doesn’t do any good you might as well spend money on toys and at least entertain the participants. New technology doesn’t improve bad training. EVER.

For a more in-depth and less exclamation point filled response, I’m reposting a piece I originally published on June 04, 2011.

 

Training is Stupid

There is one and only one purpose for training: to increase performance. That’s it. Training provides new knowledge and skills that allow a person to perform better than they could without the information or practice provided by the training. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about training for leadership development, college classes, or even physical fitness. Any training that doesn’t increase performance is stupid.

I once observed a safety training where the trainer was showing the participants how to fill out a government form. Not the most exciting topic to begin with, the training was so slow, dull, and unengaging that the trainer made Mr. Rogers look like Tony Robbins. The more experienced participants were getting caught up on reading spy novels. The others looked like they were wishing for sweet, sweet death – his or theirs, it didn’t matter. It was total waste of time and money, but the company was able to check the box and say that their employees had attended the required training.

I’ve also known trainers so charismatic and entertaining that everyone has a great time and universally gives the trainer high marks on their evaluation. Yet, said and done, the participants can’t remember what the program was about or don’t understand how to apply it to their own lives. A good time was had by all, but it was still a horrific waste of time and resources.

Sometimes the training is a hodgepodge of great ideas and techniques, but there is no plan to bring it all together so that the person can consistently apply it and improve. Every been at the gym and seen someone “training” their friend by almost randomly showing them different exercises? Information is dumped on them, but they have no understanding of how to truly apply it. There’s no plan, no tracking of progress, and minimal (if any) improvement.

The biggest challenge is that increasing performance means change. Scary word. Our performance gets better only when our behavior changes (we’ll never get better if we keep doing the same things). Changing others – even simply helping them change themselves – is incredibly difficult. That’s why most training fails us. It’s much, much easier to provide information and call it “training.” It’s much, much easier to be entertaining, have fun, tell some great stories that kind of relate to the topic and call it “training.” It’s much, much easier to string together a bunch of ideas than organize them into a plan that will create ongoing improvement. It’s much, much easier to think of training as a one-time, check the box event than to approach it as an ongoing process. How different would training be if every aspect was scrutinized to determine if each bit of information was truly important and if it would create the changed behavior that leads to increased performance?

And here’s why we care. Company performance improves ONLY when individual performance improves. It’s painfully funny how many leaders insist on improving company performance without ever trying to create higher performance from each and every individual. Training is crucial to any company that wants sustained performance.

Except when it’s stupid…

 

simplify, then add lightness

I’m a big fan of good policy and process because it allows for quick, consistent, and better decision making. It says that when this event happens, we respond this way. No agonizing, no reinventing the wheel, no he said/she saids or playing mom off of dad. Policy defines how we as a company have decided – in advance – to deal with certain situations. Process defines how we will do certain tasks and ultimately supports and makes it easy to adhere to policies.

Great policies and processes enable decisions to be made as quickly and as low in the organization as possible. Decisions made on the ground are always more relevant to the immediate situation than decisions made even one or two levels up.

The problems start when we adhere to policy for the sake of policy, rather than to help make better decisions. Policy should guide thinking and decision making, not replace it. Once we let policy and process replace judgment and thinking, then we must exponentially expand the number of policies and procedures to cover every possible situation that could possibly come up. When new situations arise, even one-time anomalies, another policy must be added. The more specific the policies, the more policies we must have. Soon, we’re crushed with bureaucracy and we’re safe because we’re sticking with policy even when it’s the wrong thing to do.

Unfortunately, thriving in this world requires dealing with new situations. Little to no innovation is possible in bureaucracy. The tighter the policies, the less judgment allowed, the higher in the organization decisions must be made and the less we are able to innovate, adapt, and invent.

Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus Cars and legendary race car engineer, famously once said that the secret to building a winning race car is to “simplify, then add lightness.” Simple parts and systems are less likely to break. Reducing weight makes a car quicker, better handling, more responsive, and reduces the amount of strain and wear on critical components. He understood cars, but might have well been talking about organizations.

The internet is full of people babbling on about the need for companies to be more innovative, react more quickly, and adapt faster. But it misses a crucial point: nimble companies react quickly, ponderous companies don’t. You can’t be driving along in a city bus and expect it to stop, accelerate, and turn on a dime just because you want it to. Mass creates momentum. Yet, we smugly suggest that bus size companies should behave like race cars.

Solution? Simplify, then add lightness. Good policy and process provides just enough framework to make decisions consistent with the strategic direction of the company. And not a gram more.

Four prime examples:

1. The US Constitution. This document is a miracle of simplicity. The few Americans who have actually bothered to read it know that it is amazingly stripped down and simple. In fact, it’s only about 7,400 words long (call it about 16 pages). Knowing that they couldn’t accurately imagine every possible situation that would need to be accounted for, the authors simply created an enduring framework that would enable adaptation. It was so simple and brief that they had to immediately amend it to establish and protect basic rights.

2. Nordstrom. Nordstrom’s focus is customer service and they want nothing to get in the way of employees providing phenomenal service. Their entire employee handbook is reported as listing only ONE rule: “Use good judgment in all situations.” And then there is brief mention to feel free to ask the department or store manager or HR any question at any time.

3. Apple Computers. Steve Jobs genius was not leadership: it was an unrelenting focus to make things as simple as humanly possible and then make them even simpler. How many steps does it take to get to any song on an iPod? (Hint: you won’t come even close to using all the fingers on one hand when you’re counting.)

4. Amazon. 1-click ordering. Enough said.

Um, how big’s your policy manual again? How many pages does the dress code really need to be? How many steps are truly necessary to for a customer to return an item? How easy is it for the customer to give you their money?

quick review: The Strategy Book

“The Strategy Book” by Max McKeown – brilliant and practical. I posted a slightly different version of this over on amazon a few weeks back, but it’s worth repeating.

I had been following the author for a while on Twitter (@maxmckeown) and I ended up getting a copy of the book through a promotion. Once it arrived, I moved it ahead of the long list of books in waiting. Less than 30 pages in I was recommending it to others and I ordered several of the author’s books for our corporate library.

The Strategy Book

This is one of those books where, if I’d highlighted all the ideas that grabbed me, I’d have ended up with practically all of the book in yellow. The author is concise and down to earth, yet has a very engaging and conversational style. He does a great job of condensing big ideas into simple sentences.

Barely finished, I immediately moved his book “The Truth About Innovation” to the top of my reading stack. And then “Unshrink” (and my department is now reading it as part of our ongoing development). Next up, “Adaptability”.

Definitely my new favorite author. Track it down, read it, enjoy. Really, really great stuff.

More info: http://www.maxmckeown.com/thestrategybook

you say you want a revolution: three steps to changing culture

Company culture . Can’t escape hearing about it, but why is it important? Stripped of all buzzword mystique, culture is just “the way things are done” in the organization (or the team). It’s the personality of the company. Just like people, some are stiff and precise, some are loose and casual, and some are all over the board. We usually refer to the company, but culture also applies at the department or team level. Every group has its own feel or culture.

If the culture isn’t what you want, no problem. Changing the culture of a company, department, or even a team isn’t easy, but it is possible. It takes time, patience and persistence. There are three broad steps to reshaping the culture.

1. Decide what you want the culture to be. One way of thinking about culture is to consider it the default decisions and actions. When X event happens, we always take Y action. For example, “We have a culture of the highest integrity. When any dishonesty is discovered, we terminate the person immediately.” Or, “We are a customer service culture. When a customer wants to return an item, we always accept it, no questions asked, no hassle involved.”

So what do you want the culture of your team or company to be? What are the characteristics you would want anyone and everyone to use to describe the atmosphere?

Here’s the challenge: whether you consciously and deliberately choose a culture or not, there will be a culture. It will be whatever decisions and actions you support, reward, and tolerate.

2. Design processes and rewards to support that culture. If you’re trying to create a culture of high quality but the pay scale is based on volume, you will have a culture of volume – always. If you want a culture of simple, fast customer service but the processes are onerous, cumbersome, and unfathomable, you will continue to have a culture of complex and cumbersome customer service. If culture is the default way of acting, then the default way of acting IS the culture. Words won’t change it, only action. Different action = different culture. Same action = same culture.

3. Make selection decisions that support the culture. If you want a culture of outstanding customer service, don’t hire misanthropes. New hires should have the skills to do the job (duh!) but also the behaviors and inclinations that will allow them to both support and thrive in the culture you are creating. People who won’t support the desired behaviors/actions will be a continual drain on the culture. If they already exist in the team/company, they need to move along to a company with a culture better suited to them. NOTHING destroys attempts at shaping culture quicker than continuing to reward and employ people whose actions are in clear opposition to the intended culture.

For example, if you want a culture of integrity do not continue to employ people who clearly lack it just because, “they get results.” Doing so, only reinforces a culture of getting short term results by any means necessary.

There you go: know what you want to create, reward and support the necessary behaviors, and make selection (and de-selection) decisions that support what you want. Have patience and perseverance. It won’t change overnight, but it will change.

status quo?

“If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?” – Robert Anthony

 

Belief fuels action and habit, which creates a hard to break cycle. The more we do something, the more it becomes habit and the more of a habit it is, the more we do it. This penetrates every aspect of our lives.

Mr. Anthony refers to beliefs and it’s easy to think he is only talking about belief with a capital ‘B’: God, morality, religion, etc. That makes the power of his comment easy to miss. We have beliefs about every aspect of our lives. We choose our actions based on what we think will make us happy and successful (or at least happier or more successful than other choices), if only in the short run.

How often do we hear (or say), “I have to do it this way” or “Everyone does it like this” or “That’s just the right way to do it”? How often do we overjustify our actions without bothering to consider other possibilities (remember: we don’t want the best way, we want our way to be best)? How often do we use our beliefs to justify playing the victim?

We can try to make changes, but if we don’t change our beliefs, the changes will never stick. We’ll never, ever lose weight if we think we’re doomed to be fat. We’ll never get rich if we believe we were born to a loser’s life. We’ll never make good leadership decisions fueled by inaccurate beliefs. Too many times it’s been said:

  • “I can’t fire them, they are over 40.”
  • “I have no control over my employees’ motivation because I can’t give raises.”
  • “HR won’t let me fire them.”
  • “They’re doing a poor job, but I can’t fire them because I can’t have that position empty.”
  • “I spoke with them about that once, but it didn’t change so I’ve just learned to live with it.”
  • “I’m not a pleaser, I just don’t like people to be mad at me, but that’s ok, because no one does.”

Change the belief, change the action, change the result. Keep the belief, take the same action, get the same result. Your call.

schisms and divisions for fun and profit?

Us humans seem to really like dividing the world into “us” vs “them”. It is a simple way of dealing with otherwise complex relationships and I assume that it is a survival mechanism developed in the foggy mists of time when anyone outside of the immediate family/tribe/clan had to be thought of as enemy.

A few years back I was having a business dinner in Germany with a rising star of a company where I was facilitating a  leadership development program. We were very similar in age, family status, etc. It was unsettling to think that if we lived closer to each other we could have probably been good friends and if we’d been born a few generations prior we would have been blood enemies. Divisions of arbitrary geography.

Yet, even when we remove survival or the geographical politics of war, it seems as though we strive to create divisions and isolate ourselves in the warm comfort of factions. Recall, yesterday’s post: we don’t want to find the best way, we want our way to be best. And we’ll segregate and re-define the world until that’s possible. It’s easier to exclude those with different perspectives than to consider the validity of their ideas or allow them to help improve our thinking.

Of course, we’re so good at creating schisms that we’ll do it just for fun and amusement. I used to belong to a forum for a specific sports car. When the car was new many of the postings reveled in the smug glory of having a better car than the rest of the world. Soon, a suggestion was made – in the spirit of fun (I think) – to create unofficial factions based on whether one’s car was a light or dark color. This spawned good natured bickering over the merits of having, say, a dark blue car vs the yellow one. Then, after four years, the car was updated and it became first generation vs second generation. Never mind, that you had to be a true car geek to tell the difference, this was serious. One person even posted that to like the first generation was to hate the second generation. What? Within just a few years the unity of common interest degenerated into dozens of “us vs them” groups bickering over arbitrary distinctions.

That’s a simple example of how trivial it can be, but don’t we see this in everyday life at work? Ever work at a place where communication was challenging between departments and cooperation non-existence? Where the various departments were willing to hurt overall company performance just so their tiny fiefdom could “win” against other departments?

How sad when organizational performance suffers because of internal strife and distrust, because of redefining the company from a united “us” to separate pockets of “us – this department” vs “them – those other departments”. How pathetic when the competition is turned inward and the other departments are seen as bigger competitors than the company’s competition. We get ahead at the expense of the company and we all lose.

We can talk all day about gaining competitive advantage through better customer service, strategy, people, processes, etc. and it’s all meaningless as long as silos exist within the company. Silos and castle walls crumble and fall when we move the boundaries and stop defining it as “us vs. them” and start defining it as “Us”.

What say you?

the next small thing

I suspect that too often we are waiting for the next big thing when we would really benefit from looking for the next little thing. It is the little things that can make the biggest difference in our lives.

Buying groceries is about as mundane as it gets yet the grocery store is great fodder for the subtle differences between getting it right, getting by, and screwing it up. This weekend, after waiting forever in the checkout line I noticed that there wasn’t a bagger helping out the cashier. Yet there was a bagger standing around talking to the next cashier over whose line had just emptied.

An A-player would have looked over, seen that there was work to do, and gotten the groceries bagged as quickly as the cashier was scanning them. Instead, this bagger chose to wait until all the groceries were scanned and I was paying for them to come over and help the cashier bag everything up. The total time difference to me was probably about three minutes. Not a big deal, yet I left the store irritated at the indifferent service. And, multiply three minutes across all the shoppers and it’s no wonder the lines had been moving slowly.

Did the groceries get bagged? Yep. Did the bagger do their job? Good enough to stay employed. But keeping an eye out for the next opportunity to serve would make a big difference and take almost no more effort. The sad thing is they probably think they are doing a good job and will never understand why they aren’t getting ahead.

When we wonder why our businesses, departments, or teams aren’t as successful as they should be, when we wonder why our career seems to have stalled, is it possible that we are overlooking the simple things that open the gap between average and outstanding?

 

A-player opportunities rarely come to B-players. The best opportunities come to those who are already doing a great job.  And it is typically the little things that separate good from great. A question to be asking is, “What could I do right now to make things quicker, easier, or more pleasant for my customers?”

it’s the little things

I despise and resent pre-paying for gas. I find it to be a major pain in the rear. Either I pay at the pump with a card and then go in and pay again (because I’m probably going to get a snack or soda while I’m there), pay once and forego my snack, or make several trips back and forth and stand in line a few times.

It’s interesting how quickly we humans adjust to and even expect such poor service. With nearly 100% of gas stations now requiring pre-pay we deem such lousy treatment acceptable and the norm. Why?

Hmmm. That’s a bit tougher. Certainly we all understand that this prevents drive offs, but how big of a problem is it really? Imagine if you couldn’t try on clothes until after you’d paid for them because it helped prevent shop lifting. Makes sense, but is it an acceptable solution, and would anyone shop there? No. That’s why stores use other measures to prevent theft.

I’ll admit, this sounds like a silly point of contention if only because the pre-pay system is so prevalent. Aren’t their bigger injustices to rail against? Sure. But how many other industries could inconvenience their customers, treat everyone who shops there like a criminal, and still thrive?

I go out of my way to pay more for gas because there is a local convenience store that will let me pump first. That’s how strongly I feel about it. Not everyone feels the way I do, but I can’t help but wonder about other people’s pet peeves. I’m sure other examples abound of people accepting higher price or having to go a bit out of their way because they prefer the service, selection, product, whatever at a certain store.

The challenge is that when everyone’s doing it and customers don’t have a choice it’s hard to identify these areas. I remember when I first moved to the Midwest back in the mid-nineties. I was in a mildly rural area and customer service was horrendously bad. But it was so universally terrible it was simply a case of “it is what it is” and no one knew different or cared. Then the big box stores came in. Say what you will about them, they had much better service and forced all the other companies to play catch up. Within a few years, the overall customer service for the entire area had improved markedly.

You can really only compete on price or differentiation. Being lowest cost is a losing battle for most. That leaves differentiation which means providing a product or service different enough to be worth paying a little more for. That might be selection, customer service, outstanding return policy, unique product or knowledge, etc.

Whatever your business or field, I can spend five minutes on google and find someone offering it cheaper. Let’s put this in an HR perspective (please tweak to think about from your business/field’s point of view): it wouldn’t take long to find a vendor that I could outsource your entire HR department to for less than your company is paying for internal HR right now. Keeping HR internal is not the cheapest option. So what value are you providing that differentiates you from your competition?

Where are you making life more difficult for your customers because it’s more convenient for you? What are the things your customers really value? What could you do that would be free or low-cost that would make life easier for your customers? These questions are doubly valuable if you are in a support department and have internal customers. Without external options it’s easy to get slack. Try this on: if your internal customers had three other options for your product or service would they choose you? Why should they?