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Leadership Card 33 – Problem Solve for Exponential Growth

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Leadership Card 33 – Problem Solve for Exponential Growth

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Leadership Card 033 Problem Solve

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Solving The Root Cause of Operational Problems

Wow, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?  Solving the root cause of operational problems.  What does that even mean?  Well it must mean something, because Jeff Bezos (he’s the CEO of Amazon.com if you haven’t heard of him, and currently the richest man in the world) makes a point of doing it day in and day out in his business, and ensuring his managers do the same.

And it might sound fancy but in fact it’s very simple – find out what is bothering your customers, then don’t just fix it one time, fix the reason behind it.  Here’s an example from the book “One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon” by Richard Brandt:

“When one elderly woman sent an email to the company saying she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging, Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.”

 

He had the packaging redesigned.  He didn’t just apologize.  He didn’t go to her home and open the package one time.  He had the packaging redesigned so it wouldn’t happen again.

Lean Cartoon Next 352 Problems

Companies With the High Velocity Edge

A man by the name of Steven Spear found the same thing, through research in his book “The High Velocity Edge”.  Companies who outperformed others over long periods of time had leaders who:

  1. Designed their work to reveal problems and opportunities
  2. Solved the root cause of those problems
  3. Shared that knowledge throughout the organisation, then;
  4. Developed the problem solving skill in others.

This meets the actions of Jeff Bezos perfectly.  By solving the root cause of problems customers are having, they stop those problems from happening again.  They are saving time, money, and retaining customers.  Then by sharing that knowledge and building the problem solving skill in others, the managers and teams at Amazon.com are building upon previous successes in a way that starts as small improvements and gains, but soon grows to large gains as the improvements compound on each other.

Start and Finish with a Repeatable Process

Problem solving by itself may not give you the results you want.  If you improve something, but don’t lock in those changes, there’s a good chance things will revert to normal after a short period of time.

This is where a standard, repeatable process comes in to play.  By ensuring each product we sell, and each operational process we perform to get there has a clear, repeatable way of doing it, we can use that process to improve.  Something as simple as a checklist, or screenshots, can work wonders with ensuring everyone knows what to do and can do it the same great way every time.

Then when you improve things, you can lock in the changes by updating the process, checklist, screenshots (or any other way you prefer), so the improvement isn’t lost and you can continue to grow over time.

In that way, small incremental improvements will compound on each other over time, leading to large improvements overall.

In that way, solving operational problems is the key to operational excellence.  And by solving problems your customers bring to you (whether through complaints or other feedback) you are unlocking the door to a customer obsession mindset.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 32 – Checking In To Increase Engagement (and Customers)

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Leadership Card 32 – Checking In to Increase Engagement (and Customers)

Leadership Card 032 Checking In

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The Best, Most Loved Leaders Check in Regularly With Their Team

The Gallup business journal recently found that there is a very clear way to increase your team’s engagement in their work.  They found that leaders who check in at least once a week with each individual in their team, while focusing on their strengths, saw up to a 27% increase in engagement.

To put that into perspective, companies in the top quartile of engagement have enjoyed twice the revenue of companies in the bottom quartile of engagement, according to a study by Kenexa.  Other studies by Gallup have shown lower absenteeism (by 41%), improved sales rates, and significantly improved productivity in companies with highly engaged staff.  Improving your engagement by 27% could easily move you into that top quartile where all the magic happens.

Do you want to be a leader that everybody loves?  Check in with people regularly, and focus on their strengths.  Part of this comes down to another key to increasing engagement – in fact some people have called it the main key.  And that is progress.

Employee Engagement cartoon Making Progress

By checking in regularly with your team, and focusing on their strengths, you are facilitating both a sense of progress, and the likelihood of real progress itself.  Teresa Amabile found in her research and writings called “The Progress Principle” that people’s happiness increased when they had a sense of progress.  In fact, there’s a good chance you can relate to this.  How many times have you thought about (or actually gone ahead with) quitting your job or business plan because you weren’t making any progress?

So check in with your team, focus on their strengths, and make sure they are on the right track making progress.

Check In With Your Customers To Significantly Increase Sales

Retaining customers can be one of the hardest things in business, but when you get it right, studies have found very real increases in revenue and profit.  One study by the author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Frederick Reichheld) found that retaining an extra 5% of your customers led to an increase in profit of between 25% and 95%.  And if you think about it, it makes sense.  Most of the cost to acquire a customer is spent up front, with advertising, brand awareness, many meetings or phone calls and even steep sales discounts.  But once a customer has formed a habit of doing business with your company, there is a much lower chance they will go searching for something else.

And this is where feedback comes in.

It’s such a simple concept, yet almost no company does it well (outside of many of the best, most profitable companies).  You want to search out customer feedback.  Are you getting complaints?  Great!  At least your customers are telling you.  Don’t hide away from the complaints – they are free feedback that is worth its weight in gold if you know how to fix their problem and improve.

Customer feedback might take the form of a survey, a Facebook or Google review, a complaint (as we noted) or even praise (statistically less likely, but still nice).  And when we get any type of feedback, we want to solve the operational problems that lead to anything negative.

Lean Cartoon Fix Operational Problems

Work taking too long?  Solve the operational problem behind it.  Staff on-site leaving a mess after their work?  Solve the operational problem behind it.  Quality of the product not lasting long enough?  Solve the operational problem behind it.

And – here’s where things come full circle – the best way to solve operational problems is to ensure you have a standard, repeatable process in place and then check in regularly to ensure it is being done.  And if it’s being done, but the results are still bad, then you improve the repeatable process and roll it out again.

Rinse and repeat on your way to exponential growth – just buy me a beer when you pass your first million.

There’s the other side to this tale as well – as your business grows and you rely on repeatable processes more, if you don’t check in to see if those processes are giving you the outcome you want, there is a good chance you’ll run into trouble.  If you don’t check, you can’t adjust, and if you don’t adjust, you may not get the results you want.  Pilots check their course regularly on their way to their destination, and so should you, by checking in with your team, your customers, and making sure they are getting the outcomes they want.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 24 – The Curse of Knowledge

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Ease Of Use & Lean CX Leadership Card 24 – The Curse of Knowledge

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Have you ever been speaking with someone, and when you’ve finished you realize you didn’t understand a word they just said?

It probably wasn’t your fault.  There’s a very common personal bias that affects us all, and it’s called the curse of knowledge.  It happens when a person has learned something or been doing something for a long period of time, and it becomes very hard for them to imagine other people not knowing it as well.

You may have experienced jargon or acronyms where people speak in a seemingly secret language without realizing that other people may not know those same acronyms or jargon.

One recent example I had was a large financial company adding a push button menu to their telephone system, so when a customer called through they would have to push a button depending on which department they wanted to go to.  The only trouble was, they used the internal names of their departments, like “operational support” instead of things that a customer could relate to, like “changing their bank account”.  This resulted in customers pressing any button just to speak with someone, and almost every call going through to the default department!  Needless to say, they were then overwhelmed with calls and very disengaged in their work, before we problem solved and found out what was going on.

The curse of knowledge means you have to have empathy for the person you are speaking with, not just speaking with yourself in mind.  That means giving your message in lay-person’s terms for your customers, or for your team, so everyone is clear and fewer mistakes are made.

And what are the benefits of this?

If everyone is clear on what is required, it’s been shown that engagement within your teams is higher, and productivity and profit are higher as a result.  There are studies on engagement, studies on happiness, and business studies from Stanford and they all point to the same thing.

There are fewer mistakes, so less rework in performing the same task over and over, and all of this has an effect on your profit and bottom line.

I encourage you to have that empathy, think of the other person’s point of view, and explain things without the jargon or industry specific terminology if you can.  You’ll be amazed at the results.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 22 – Growth and Contribution

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Design For Ease Of Use, Leadership Card 22 – Growth and Contribution

Leadership Card 022 Growth and Contribution Lean CX Ease of Use

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Engineering Happiness by Using Growth and Contribution

Researchers and business owners alike have found something incredible over the years, and that is that money is not always the answer when it comes to getting the best results from your team.

Sure, you could throw money at something to try and improve it – maybe approve a project, get the latest third party provider to work with you, give bonuses for performance or commissions for certain activities.  But making happiness and engagement come from within has been shown to get far greater results.

People Want To Grow

There’s a great 30 second video by vlogger Casey Neistat that shows him on a treadmill, and says that life is like being on that treadmill.  To stay in one place, you have to keep moving.  If you stop moving, you actually fall behind, you don’t just stay in the same place.  And to get ahead, you have to hustle – you have to run and you have to grow.

When you help the people in your team grow, by focusing on their strengths and enabling them to improve, stretch, and get better, then their happiness actually improves.  And improving their happiness has an affect on your company’s bottom line, with up to 20% more productivity, and improved profit as a result.

People Want To Contribute

Growth isn’t the only thing that motivates your people from the inside out.  Focusing on something bigger than they are – a larger goal that helps others – also gives people the motivation to do better and become more than they are.

It’s not always easy to focus on growing yourself, while also focusing on contributing to others, but if you can find a way to engineer both of these into your work, you will see some stunning results.

How To Do It, Practically?

So how can we do it practically, as a leader?  Checking in with each person in your team at least once a week, and focusing on their strengths, has been proven to improve engagement by up to 27%.  That means getting to know them, making the time to meet with them, and finding a way to use the strengths and passions they have to enable them to grow.

Doing that, you can also set stretch targets or look at ways to grow within those strength areas.

Contributing to others can be aligning your work and processes to how they meet the company’s targets, or how they meet the needs of your customers and the outcomes of helping them.

Most people aren’t aware of these things they can do as a leader to improve their team’s results.   But doing these small things can make the difference between success and failure, and being a mediocre leader or a great one.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 20 – Certainty and Variety, Deep Human Needs

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Give Your Team Happiness, By Meeting Their Core Needs

Happiness.  People want it, talk about it, reminisce about it, and miss it when it’s not there.  And it can be everything from instant gratification (like a big meal) to deep meaning in a person’s life (like having meaningful work).

Seeing as anyone can eat a big meal or piece of chocolate and get instant gratification, I’m going to talk about the deeper meaning, that you can actually engineer into your team’s work to make them happier, more productive, and ultimately want to do a good job.

In fact, one study I found for the Lean CX Score book showed that people perform around 12% better simply by being happy.

Anthony Robbins’ Six Human Needs

You’ve probably heard of a few different types of “Needs hierarchies”, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that goes from safety to self-actualization.  But in the 1990s Anthony Robbins came up with a deep set of human needs that completely make sense, because they actually conflict with each other.

They make sense because in a way we are all striving for happiness, and  the ebb and flow of life, and events that happen over time make it either easy to get or elusive.

The first combination of needs are Certainty and Variety.

Certainty and Variety

We need certainty that what we do will turn out OK.  Some people need more certainty than others before they do something, and others need no certainty at all.

The only problem is, having certainty conflicts with our other need, which is to have variety in our life and work.  After all, if we have a lot of certainty, doing the same thing in the same way every day, then we don’t have a lot of variety.  but if we have a lot of variety – spontaneous things, ideas, and outings – then we don’t have as much certainty.

And yet we need them both for fulfilling work.

How Can We Engineer Both Into Our People’s Work?

Over the years, I’ve experienced a few ways to engineer both of these things into a team’s work.  The best ones I’ve seen involve this:

  • Having clear outcomes, and a clear path or process to get there (certainty)
  • Allowing (and encouraging) our team to problem solve ways to improve that work regularly (giving variety)

Not everyone is a natural problem solver.  It can be hard to work through uncertain territory, and that is why it helps to have a standard process for problem solving and improving our work, making it easier to use.

The Lean CX Score is that framework that improves the ease of use and engages your team at the same time.  Using things like a repeatable process, error proofing, visual management and checking in, you can go a long way to building the meaning back into your team’s life and work, no matter what they are doing.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 19 – Flow, Happiness and Immediate Feedback

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Engineering Happiness, Engagement and Flow in your Team

Leadership is a funny thing.  We naturally look up to those risk takers, the ones who “made it”, who did something outrageous against impossible odds, and won.  It’s easy to write an article about those guys (and gals), and it’s easy to think “if only I had done this or that, maybe I could have been that leader too.”

But here’s the thing about those high flying, outrageous risk taking leaders – they’re full of sh*t.

They’re full of sh*t because of a very simple psychological principle: Survivorship Bias.

What is Survivorship Bias?

Survivorship bias is our tendency to look at people who have done something against all odds, see them a lot because the news loves their story, and believe it is easier than it really is or that we can do it do, or that it is even more common than it really is.

When the reality is we see more of them because they are the ones who made it, making it look as though it is easy to do and more people are doing it.

Case in point – look at all the people who try out for American Idol, because they can sing.  Even just a little bit.  Even only in the shower.  So they go on the show and they get obliterated by the judges, because real, true, burning talent is a hard thing to find and in reality it takes years and years of hard work.  Now look at it from the other perspective – how many of these tens of thousands of people go on to have long, successful careers as entertainers?

Very, very few.  Even the ones who “make it” on the show have short lived careers that fizzle out relatively quickly.  And yet we see them in the spotlight, while they are there, and we hail them for their seemingly incredible life.

So Here’s What We Don’t Do

We don’t celebrate the grinders.  The workers.  The ones who are building a solid foundation for their team and engineering an environment that makes them happy to come to work, engaged in the work they do, and feel as though they are working towards something bigger than themselves.  And people who don’t make it to the spotlight – the majority of people – are the ones who need that engagement and happiness in the work they do.  And that happiness leads to the “Flow” state, where you can lose yourself in the moment, do things effortlessly, and forget to eat.

Engineering Flow in the Work Your Team Does

How would that be, if you could engineer that flow state in your team and their work?  Do you think their results would be affected?  You bet they would.

And so far we’ve seen a few key ideas in designing our work to create a state of flow in our team.  This last one is a key idea not just from Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi, who originally coined the idea of the flow state, but from many other methodologies as well – namely the Lean CX Score, Agile, Lean Startup and more.

This last key idea is fast feedback.

The idea is feedback because have you ever been doing something – making something really special or important, and working very hard on it every day?  But imagine this – you’ve worked on it every day for many months, even years, and at the end of that time for whatever reason it turns out it’s actually not the right thing.  It doesn’t do what you wanted and nobody wants anything to do with it.

That is what happens when you don’t get fast feedback.

The Lean Startup method is built around fast feedback – creating a Minimum Viable Product, a small product that does just enough to test in the marketplace and see if it works and gather feedback from real customers.  The Net Promoter Score is built around fast feedback – if you’re not doing well the customer gives you a score below 8 and you’re meant to follow up immediately to find out more and adjust if you can.

Feedback is almost priceless.  It is extremely valuable in business, and yet most businesses are afraid of it.

Asking for, and receiving feedback can be quite tough.  It’s tough on our ego, who doesn’t like things rocking the boat.  And yet to thrive in business we need to know if our customers aren’t getting what they want, and if it’s not ridiculously easy to get what they want.

It’s Like Playing A Video Game

Finally, I’ll say this: what else has clear rules, a clear objective, is neither too easy nor too hard, and gives you immediate feedback if you’re winning or not?

That’s right, a video game.

And people play video games for hours and hours.  They forget to eat.  They forget to sleep.  Some people become quite addicted to them, which has unfortunate results but it happens for good reason – they are the perfect example of the things that need to be present in order to engineer the flow state.

Do This For Your Own Teams, And Win

So find a way to give your team a process that is neither too easy nor too hard, and that gives them immediate feedback if they are on the wrong track.  It’s like a pilot checking in on the flight plan.  Are they on course or off course?  Are they moving towards their destination?  Because if you’re a pilot you need to know.  In fact, if you’re a human being you need to know.  But most leaders first don’t clearly articulate the process and objectives for their team, or don’t improve the ease of use of that process, and then finally they don’t check in to see how their teammates are tracking towards that goal so they can assist and make changes to the process as necessary.

Objective.  Process.  Feedback.  Improve and repeat.  You’ll soon be on your way to your destination when previously you were only flying around in circles.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Oh and good news!  You'll be improving the speed, morale and engagement of your teams at the same time.  Get the Lean CX Score now.

Leadership Card 5 – Absenteeism and Turnover

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Design Your Work For Ease Of Use – Card 5

Leadership Card 5 - absenteeism and turnover

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People Leave Leaders, Not companies

Your experience of a company, now matter how large or small, is only as good as the leader you are working for.  Have a good leader who engages her staff, checks in regularly, focuses on strengths, ties outcomes to meaning and more, and you will likely have a good experience and want to do great work.

Have a bad leader, however, who micromanages, is never around when you need them, doesn’t seem to care about the work or your development and only looks out for themselves, and there’s a good chance you’ll be left with a bitter taste in your mouth when thinking about that company.

It’s no surprise, then, that teams in the lowest quartile for engagement experience 41% more absenteeism – people with sick days or any other reason to get away and have a day off.  They also experience 59% higher turnover.  When you combine these two things as a business, not only is less getting done, but the cost of replacing staff – from advertising, to hiring, and training someone new, is absolutely huge.

Design Your Work For Ease Of Use, and Employee Engagement

Getting intentional about designing your work means designing it in a way that engages your staff.

At its very core, the framework described in the book The Lean CX Score advocates things like checking in regularly, removing frustrating rework, gaining clarity through a standard process and much more.  It’s the little things, the mundane things, but these things make a huge difference.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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