High Performance Company

destroy your job (on purpose)

“Destroy everything, and build it up again.” ~ Hatebreed

I love to build and hate to maintain. I crave variety, new thoughts, new ideas. I want to hang out with the people who make me run faster and think harder to keep up. I want to play bigger, live louder, and do better. Tear it down, shake it up, and put it all back together.

If this is not you, please stop right here. The rest of this post will be absolutely baffling.

Destroy Your Job

Well, no, I don’t want you to actually destroy your job. But I do want you to reconsider what it is and what it could be. Below are two thought exercises, perfect for a Friday morning (or afternoon, for my friends across the Water).

1. Redesign

What if your position you were tasked with creating your position from scratch? Forget everything you know about your job (tougher than it sounds) and truly start with a clean sheet of paper. Pretend you are leaving the company on super good terms and are designing the position for your successor.

What are the three most important benefits the role could provide to the company? What projects, initiatives, and goals best support those benefits? What responsibilities would you make 100% sure were a part of this role? What duties would you fight to ensure were never handled by this position ever again? In your boldest dreams, what could this position be doing for the company?

2. Make Yourself Redundant

What would you need to do to eliminate your position while ensuring its core functions are fulfilled? I love this question because it forces us to really think about the essential value the position brings.

What work would go to other people? What needs to be done that could be easily and logically absorbed by other roles?

What work would stop entirely? If it doesn’t add much value, why continue doing it? More importantly, why continue doing it now?

What work could be easily automated? If it needs to be done, is there a way to automate it to minimize the impact to other roles yet still provide full value to the company?

What work could be outsourced while maintaining quality and still supporting the company? (Note: just because something can be outsourced, doesn’t mean it should.)

Of the work that is still left, is it truly valuable or is there a higher value use of the role’s time?

What new and higher value work could the position take on?

And Build It Up Again

Notice that the point of thinking about how to destroy your job is not to eliminate it, but to give it laser focus and expand it. Creation, not destruction. A thought exercise to ignite the Phoenix. If there are tasks and responsibilities that are easily added or eliminated, functions that need to stay or go to destroy the position or make it redundant, why not do them right now so you can focus on the truly exciting work the position could bring?

What thinks you?

human resources’ top goal?

From time to time I see HR folks insisting that the primary purpose of Human Resources is to keep the company from being sued. This philosophy is at the very core of everything I find wrong with HR.

Yes, HR can play a huge role in preventing or mitigating employment lawsuits. This is an important result of HR, but the top goal? Prevent lawsuits vs. select and train really great people? Prevent lawsuits vs. creating an environment where people actually want to be there? Prevent lawsuits vs. helping managers be the best leaders they can be? It really seems to be putting the cart before the horse. After all, a company can get sued if it mismanages its money but no one ever says that the number one goal of the finance department is to prevent lawsuits. You can get sued for being abusive to customers or false advertising, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the primary purpose of customer service and marketing are to prevent lawsuits.

Want to know the #1 way to ensure that HR is never involved in any strategic level conversations? Want to guarantee that your company culture is rife with fear and managers don’t manage? Want to be stuck in the glorious tar pit of HR as bureaucracy? Spend all your time focused on not getting sued.

In the perfect little world in my head, HR’s #1 goal is to help the company perform at its best. Minimizing lawsuits is a byproduct of doing things right; it’s a means to an end but not the end itself. The best processes and practices will help the company perform in a way that comply with all the laws and regulations. However, “not getting sued” as an end goal will never, ever create high performance. It’s like a runner training for a marathon with the #1 goal of not getting injured. Sure, they don’t want to get injured, but the best way to not get injured is to not train. After all, you can’t pull a muscle sitting on the couch. But that doesn’t work because their #1 goal is to perform at their best on race day. Not getting hurt is a part of that, but it’s obviously not the focus. Instead, the runner knows that with good planning, preparation, and execution of a training program they will minimize their chances of getting injured while maximizing the chances of high performance.

It’s an idea worth repeating: HR’s #1 goal is to help the company perform at its best.  And if you do it well, you automatically reduce the chance of getting sued. But that’s an outcome of doing things right not the other way around. For example, adhering to all the anti-discrimination laws does not ensure that you hire great people. But when you are focused on hiring the best people you will naturally seek diverse talent pools because you don’t want to exclude the best talent because of arbitrary bias.

Can we move HR out of the dark ages now? Instead of operating out of continual fear of lawsuit, let’s create high performing companies by helping people be at their best.

 

[This was first posted on November 14, 2011. I’ve reposted it because the issue was on my mind this morning.]

the good news about disengagement

“Stereotype fools, playing the game. Nothing unique, they all look the same. In this Sea of Mediocrity, I can be anything – anything I want to be.” ~ Arch Enemy

The Bad News:

People everywhere are disengaged from work. The statistics, if accurate, are horrifying. Within just the past year or two, Gallup indicated that 72% of US workers were not engaged in their work. This disengagement ranges from just going through the motions and getting through the day to actively undermining the efforts of co-workers and the company. Gallup also reports that the lost productivity from actively disengaged employees puts a $370,000,000,000 drag on the economy each year. Other research and news outlets consistently report similar findings.

That’s bad news for the economy, bad news for the average company, and not much fun for the majority of workers.

The Good News:

There is actually so good news that comes with so many people setting such a low bar for themselves and the world.

At the leadership / company level, there is a very effective and nearly uncopyable competitive advantage for those who can attract, develop, and retain people who care. [Here’s a little secret: people who care want to be around other people who care. Use this information to your advantage.]

At the individual level, the more others are disengaged, the easier it is for you to stand out as a superstar. Show up, smile, do a good job, do right by the customer and the company, and you’ll be looking good. Have some enthusiasm, give a damn, strive to go the extra mile, and you’ll be a full on rock star.

yet another thing they didn’t tell you in business school

Conventional wisdom holds that: Profit = Income – Expense. Formulas don’t get much simpler than that. Increasing income or reducing expenses increases profits. Intuitively, that sounds right and LOTS of business decisions are made on this basis. Stock analysts and the companies that pander to them love this formula. Announce significant expense reductions (perhaps through massive layoffs) and stock prices jump up in anticipation of the profits to come.

The problem is, this formula is nice in textbooks but a gross oversimplification in the real world. It pretends there is no relationship between income and expense and makes the implicit assumption that the other variable is being held constant. But that’s not how it works. The real interpretation of this formula is this: Increasing income while holding expenses the same OR reducing expenses while holding income the same increases profits.

Income and expense are connected in a very real way and cannot be completely isolated. Why? Income is determined by your customers, not by you. Let’s play with some “what ifs”:

What if you cut your inventory on hand to zero? Your overhead costs would drop tremendously. You’d save a ton of money and your profits would go through the roof, right? Nope. Your customers would get torqued off that you had nothing in stock and they’d go shop elsewhere. Cutting expenses cut income.

What about maintenance expenses? You’ll save a bundle by “deferring maintenance” for a year or two. Bingo! Except you’re going to have a hard time convincing your best customers to shop in a dingy, dirty, broken down building. They go across the street to your competitor’s modern, bright, clean store. Cutting expenses cut income.

What if you laid off all your employees? No salaries or benefits to pay – there’s a major expense gone. Big time profits, yes? No. Without employees to help customers it won’t be long before there aren’t customers. Cutting expenses cut income.

What if you just forced all your employees to take a pay cut or cut benefits? You’ll save some money then, oh yeah! Um, well, no. Disgruntled employees don’t take care of the customers. Your best employees have other options and they leave. Your customers are now consistently receiving poor service. Wait, I mean your former customers. Cutting expenses cut income.

What if you invest heavily in technology and facilities that make shopping easier, convenient, pleasurable, and more fun for the customer? What if you spend more to find, hire, train, and reward outstanding customer service driven employees? Is it possible that increasing expenses could actually increase income? Only if the variables of income and expense are in some ways interconnected.

It’s worth saying again:

Expenses and income are often directly connected. They are not independent variables because your customers determine your income, not you. Customers have choices of who they give their money to so income can never be assumed to be constant. If you cut expenses in ways that negatively affect the customer, your income will go down. Likewise, if you increase expenses in ways that positively affect the customer, your income may go up.

Some expenses are worth reducing, but all expenses are not equal. Choose wisely.

diagnosis of organization and human resources (doh!)

Normally, if you want to find out what your company could do better you need to hire big dollar consultants who will come in and talk to the employees you’ve been ignoring conduct an extensive analysis and provide you with a lengthy report complete with graphs describing what you need to do different.

But that’s expensive and time consuming. So, in today’s post, I’m piloting the  Diagnosis of Organization and Human resources (DOH!). This diagnostic tool will analyze your organization and highlight five areas that are, ahem, “opportunities for improvement”. Given the beta nature of this tool, it’s not 100% accurate yet, but I think you’ll find it remarkably close. Give it a minute to run and this diagnostic will provide you with a customized summary specific to your organization.

(It’s working, give it time… give it time…)

If you put your ear up to the screen you can hear the computering electrons working their magic in the background. [it sounds like: whirr whirr whirr]

(Give it time… give it time…)

Done! Scroll down for your customized summary analysis.

Customized Summary Analysis Results of Your Organization:

Your organization fails at: can optimize performance by focusing on:

1. Communication. Seriously, does anyone in your company talk to anyone else? Between the silos, walls, moats, and fiefdoms how do you get anything accomplished? Communicate occasionally and you’ll be amazed at the improvements. No, your passive aggressive emails that cc the everyone in the company do not count as “communication”. Back away from the keyboard and pick up the phone. Better yet, go talk to people face to face.

2. Customer Service. Consider the possibility that not blatantly offending the customer isn’t the same as providing great service. Even being better at customer service than your competition isn’t really enough because that isn’t really a high bar to beat. Try this: make a list of the five companies you will go out of your way to do business with. It’s probably less than half a dozen. Why is the list so short? Because while many companies can do inoffensive, vanilla-bland customer service, very, very few can do great customer service. Remember: better than bad doesn’t equal good.

3. Innovation. Yes, your company wants to be known as innovative, but your company punishes risk taking, frowns on anything different, and dogmatically enforces the status quo. “Innovation” is left to the seasoned senior managers who know how things ought to be done.

4. Diversity. Your organization treats diversity as a compliance issue instead of a way to benefit from many, many perspectives and ideas. Oh, and the lack of diversity is killing your “innovation” efforts.

5. Leadership. Your managers try hard and mean well, but most of them have never been taught how to lead. While there are a few standouts, many have trouble holding people accountable, a few (and you know who they are) are on a power trip, and the rest are doing ok, but just ok. “Sink or swim” is not a development strategy and flavor of the month training doesn’t teach anyone anything but cynicism. Your managers deserve better.

Bonus: As a thank you for trying out this diagnostic tool, we’re including an extra area of opportunity:

6. Hiring. Companies live or die on the quality of their employees and your hiring process is haphazard, misunderstood by some, ignored by others, and ineffective even on the best of days.

 

Analysis Summary:

Face it, your organization is in rough shape. The only thing keeping the doors open is that your competition has the exact same their own growth opportunities. The good news is that most of your challenges are very fixable: Improve your hiring process, focus on developing your current and future leaders, hire people who look and think differently (and listen to them), make customer service a top priority, and communicate to keep everyone connected and prevent isolation.

Yes, I’m in a smart aleck mood this morning. Although I make this stuff sound obviously simple, I know it’s not easy. There’s a reason many/most companies face these challenges. There is also a great advantage that goes to the companies that get it figured out.

Your thoughts?

good profit // bad profit

“Do you want me to mount the spare for you?” the voice over the phone asked. He had just told me that my tire was unrepairable and the others were nearly worn out. He seemed hurt I didn’t take him up on the implied offer to buy a new set of tires. The flat tire actually just had a slow leak so it didn’t matter if we swapped out the spare or not so I said, “Sure, why not.”

I recently wrote about a used tire shop with a unique business model. Four days after buying a set of tires, I picked up a slow leak in one. Rather than driving all the way across town to the used tire place, I took it to a national chain tire store less than a block from my office. The contrast between the two businesses really highlights what some have termed “good profits” and “bad profits.”

Bad profits are profits made at the expense of the customer in a way that hurts good will, the overall customer experience, and prevents generating long-term profits from the customer. From my experience, the mobile phone industry follows a bad profits model. All the effort is made to acquire new customers with little effort being made to retain customers. Any business that focuses on fees or charging the customer more with little in return is a business focused on bad profits.

Good profits, in contrast, are profits made in a way that add value for the customer, creates good will, improves the customer experience, and increases the likelihood of long-term profits from the customer. Rather than seeking ways to charge the customer more fees, etc., a business focused on good profits is trying to find ways to serve the customer that makes them want to spend more. Apple and Zappos are regularly used as examples of businesses seeking good profits.

This national chain tire store told me my tire was unrepairable and the rest were getting thin and needed replacing. Then charged me $20 for installing the spare in place of the leaky tire – after they offered to; I did not ask. Lies, fees, and scare tactics to upsell the customer from a cheap repair to $800 worth of tires. They relented on the fee after I protested, but not ripping off the customer when they call you on it is not the same as treating the customer well.

I immediately drove over to the used tire shop where: they told me “no problem” on repairing the tire, hustled my tire through even though they were crazy busy, offered to install it on my truck for me, oh, and didn’t charge me anything for the repair because I bought the tires from them. No written agreements, no need to hassle them, no arguments, just a focus on doing right by their customers.

It’s cheaper and easier to retain customers than to find new ones. Why is this so hard to understand? Which business will I return to in the future? Which business do I refer to others? Which business do I want to support and see thrive? Which am I happy to give money to?

how do i know what to do? priorities for success

It is possible to show up early, stay late, be busy, and work hard on all the wrong things. It’s possible to give it your booty kickin’ all on some pretty stupid things. Spend enough time and effort on the in the wrong places and you can turn the bottom line into a sieve.

So, how do you know if you’re focused on the right things? Only you know your business, goals, and priorities, but I can share some guidelines to help you sort things out.

ONLY spend time, thought, and effort on actions that are:

* Legal, moral, and ethical. This is a baseline given. If you can’t get this one right, the others don’t matter. I realize that only taking actions that are legal, moral, and ethical would shut down major chunks of entire industries, but we find over and over again that the short-term gains of taking legal or moral shortcuts are crushed out by the potential long-term consequences. Cut corners long enough and someone is going to find out and make your life absolutely miserable.

1. Beneficial to the customer experience. Take care of your customers and they’ll take care of your business. Hurt the customer and they’ll hurt your business. Be indifferent to the customer and they’ll hurt your business. My tip to all businesses: Spend your time and effort worrying about the fifth sale to me, not the first. I might buy from you once but if you make it painful or forgettable I probably won’t buy from you again and I certainly won’t recommend you. Make the process so remarkable that there is no question that I’ll be making my second, third, fourth, and fifth purchases from you.

2. Beneficial to the employee experience. Ultimately, your business lives or dies based on your employees. Treat your employees as though you need your them more than they need you. Operate from that philosophy and you’ll be fine. Treat your employees as though they are easily replaced cogs and you’ll soon have your company staffed with the people who have so few options left in their lives that they are easily replaced cogs.

3. Beneficial to the long-term success of the business. Yes, certain reports and paperwork must be done. No, you can’t buy every employee a Porsche as a signing bonus. No, you can’t operate without a balanced budget. Yes, decisions and tradeoffs and compromises must be made according to the mission and vision of the business. Just don’t confuse “convenient and short-sighted” with “long-term success.”

Anything else is box-checking bureaucracy. If you can’t justify an action under one or more of these conditions, why are you working on it? If you can’t show a direct connection between an action and a legal and ethical benefit to the customer, employee, or business, that action is doing far more harm than good. Stop it.

[Note: this is an expanded version of a response I made on Laurie Barkman’s “Passionate Performance” blog post People Say (and Do) The Darndest Things. She had a great example of a manager whose actions probably followed policy but were a stupid waste of time and hurt the employee experience (which hurts the customer experience, which hurts long-term success).]

lessons from used tires

It’s pretty easy to confuse flash for substance. To think that we’ll do better once our surroundings, our products, our marketing are better. Once we have the nicer office, we’ll keep it better organized. Once we have a better brochure, we’ll be better salespeople. Once the new software is set up, we’ll provide better service to our customers. Once we redo the lobby, we’ll get more business.

And it’s a lie. We tell it to ourselves because flash is easier than substance.

Appearances do matter, but delivery matters more. Looks can give credibility to a first impression, but results keep people coming back. All else being equal, flash will attract more attention, but things are rarely equal.

I was reminded of this lesson over the weekend. My truck needed new tires so I headed over to my favorite tire shop on Saturday morning. It’s a business that most would say are doing everything wrong. They:

Only sell used tires. Used tires are not sexy.

Only carry popular sizes. Need something special ordered? They don’t do that.

Don’t advertise (as far as I know). If they do it’s in the local trader classifieds.

Don’t have any product displays. No pretty pictures of families traveling in their car, tough four wheel drives adventuring through the back country, or sports cars gripping the road at high speed. The only display they have is a shop with tires stacked to the roof. If you’re buying from them you want tires, not a lifestyle validation.

Don’t have individual bays for each car. They have a shaded concrete slab that’s about three cars wide. It looks like a race car pit crew decided to work in a driveway.

Don’t have a reception area. There is no lobby. The office is where you go to pay and it’s off to the side. There isn’t even a dedicated person to greet you.

Are off the beaten path where you would never pass by in your daily activities. You’d never even find them accidentally. They are in a rough and forgotten part of town. Not dangerous, just poor and long neglected.

Look well worn. The shop is old galvanized metal and looks like it belongs on a weathered farm. The office is the size of a small garden shed and is clearly an afterthought. The business name was painted on the outside once, but has long since faded and been obscured.

Don’t pamper the customer. You could wait in the office but probably don’t want to. Most just sit outside near the cars on plastic chairs.

The appearance doesn’t inspire confidence. There is no flash. Judging by looks you’d assume they can barely afford to be in business. And you’d be wrong simply because of what they get right. They:

Are friendly. They talk to and joke with their customers. They enjoy their work and their customers and it shows. Many repair shops are terrible with customers and these guys really stand out.

Are fast, fast, fast. Saturday morning and I was in and out in less than an hour. Done and on with my day.

Are busy. It is always a beehive of activity. The place would look abandoned EXCEPT for all the people and cars always there.

Greet you quickly. Despite all the noise and chaos of power tools, cars, people, etc. I have never waited more than 30 seconds before someone noticed me and came over to help me.

Know who they are and what they do. They don’t pretend to be anything else or waste the customer’s time trying to do something they can’t.

Thrive on repeat business and word of mouth. I’ve bought at least four sets of tires from them and every time I’m there it seems that most of the other customers are just as enthusiastic and have been coming to them for years.

Are empowered. There is no visible chain of command, no noticeable differentiation between employees. Everyone is helpful and everyone helps.

Have freakishly low prices. Seriously. They clearly aren’t spending money on their location, buildings, or marketing and the customer benefits. They’ve used what most would consider a major disadvantage (location and appearance) and turned it into a huge competitive advantage.

Are not a “me too” business. They have the segment to themselves. While others fight and scramble for their piece of the pie, these guys found a niche where they get the whole pie for themselves.

Want you to come back. Too many businesses stop caring the second they have your money. Not these guys. The manager/owner stopped working on a car as I left to shake my hand and tell me to come by if I needed anything, had trouble with the tires, or wanted them rotated.

What can we learn? Reputation matters. Attitude matters. A focus on long-term service matters. Speed matters. Results matter. What you deliver matters. Caring about the customer matters.

What other lessons can we take from this? How else does this apply to HR, leadership, sales, Realtors, health care, and everyone else?

easy or great?

It’s been said that you become like the five people you spend the most time with. Is that good news?

Did the last person you hire make you think, “Man, I’m going to have to raise my game! I love being around people who inspire my best!” OR did you think, “I’m glad that slot’s filled. Next.”

The people you’re filling the company with – the people you’re surrounding yourself with – are pulling you up or dragging you down. There is no neutral, there is no holding steady – they are forcing you to be better or letting you slack. Do you go for easy and comfortable or do you go for greatness?