This interview process has allowed others to carry the QBR and still adhere to Scott’s vision.
Before we wrapped up our conversation, Scott said, “Focus has compound interest, Mike. Entrepreneurs try to serve everyone and do everything. They never master anything. My company is running on its own, and I devote my time to just knowing the market. I know my customers so well that I can move a million times faster than my competition. Not working in my business has given me the freedom to make moves so fast that my competition is blurry eyed.”
RIVERS FOLLOW THE EASIEST PATH
As you give your workers tasks, especially the responsibility for making decisions, some may still keep coming back to you for your input—even if you have captured the systems you want them to follow. From their perspective, it makes sense, because what if they make the “wrong” decision? They are concerned about being reprimanded by the boss (you), or worse, fired. They surely don’t want to lose your trust. But if you make the decisions for them, they can do no wrong. If you give them an answer and it works, they are rewarded for following your instructions. If you give them an answer and it doesn’t work, it’s not their fault. Either outcome, as long as you make the decision, is safe for them. And bonus—they don’t have to think! They just have to do. (And you already know that “doing” is your preference, so why wouldn’t it be theirs, too?)
The natural tendency of people is to defer decisions. We do it at work and at home. Ever catch yourself saying “yes, dear” to your significant other’s request? It’s easier than arguing, right? It’s easier for your employees to do the same.
If you are meeting resistance from employees you’ve empowered to make decisions, whatever you do, don’t make their decisions for them! You must let them do the research, determine the course of action, and then commit to it. After all, we are trying to get you out of the business, and you can’t do that if you keep making the decisions.
Your employees may resist this by coming to you for assistance in decision making, but you should always push the decision making back to the employee. If they ask for direction, respond with “What do you think we should do?” If their plight of avoiding a decision continues with the popular “I don’t know, that’s why I am coming to you” answer, respond with: “We hired you because you are smart and driven. We hired you to find answers. Please come back to me with your best answer and the decision you would make, and we will discuss.” When they do come back, get ready to smile, nod, and give your okay.
Even as they offer up ideas that you disagree with, bite your lip and support it. Then, after the decisions and actions have been carried out, for anything with significant outcomes—either positive or negative—do a debrief and have the employee share what they have learned and what they will do differently the next time. Always do the debrief after they make and execute on a decision.
The only time to intervene is if you see them making a decision that will have extreme and dire consequences. If you spot severe danger, make your colleague immediately aware. Now you are mentoring them, not deciding for them.
* * *
In a must-see interview, billionaire Sara Blakely,* the founder of Spanx, explained the foundational belief that spawned her success: failure should be embraced. Blakely explained, “My dad growing up encouraged me and my brother to fail . . . It’s really allowed me to be much freer in trying things and spreading my wings in life.” The only way to make progress is by moving through challenges, mistakes, and errors, and learning on the way. This requires making your own decisions. Ultimately, as Blakely explained, the only true failure is idleness, where you don’t make any decisions. Stop training your employees to be idle by deciding for them. Have them move your business forward by empowering them to make decisions.
How do you empower someone to make decisions? Brace yourself—you must reward mistakes. When something doesn’t go right and you punish the person (lecture, point out what went wrong, chop their pay, anything), you instill fear of making the wrong decision, and therefore it is safest for them to just come back to you for decisions (keeping you in the Deciding phase). But if you say, “Hey, the outcome was not what we expected, but I am proud of you for making a decision to move us forward. I want you to keep at it and move us forward. Tell me, what can I do to serve you?,” you will not only start to see your business run like clockwork, you will have improved your relationship with a member on your team.
Toyota’s world-famous manufacturing process is based on the same core belief. The decision making must be pushed “down” to the people making them. When a line worker has a problem, he can stop the entire line (you read that right), while the managers hurry over to provide support for that person. The line worker gives out the commands and direction and the managers provide the support to get the line up and running again. That is empowerment and giving decision making to the right people—the people closest to the problem.
CLOCKWORK IN ACTION
Capture a system now. Yes, you have hundreds of systems you will ultimately capture, but you won’t capture any of them if you don’t get started. Take the first step now—something small and easy, and something that you can take off your plate permanently. Capture that first system and see how it works for you. And then have the person to whom you assign the system make the next version of the recording.
Store your first captured system in a directory that is accessible by your entire team. Set up a simple directory with folders labeled ATTRACT (marketing), CONVERT (sales), DELIVER (operations), COLLECT (accounting). Then, make the necessary sub-directory below the appropriate ACDC folder for the new system you captured. As you and your team move along with capturing systems, store them in the new folder structure you created. You rock star, you . . . we saaaaluuuute you. (That’s a shout-out to AC/DC the band, if you missed that.)
CHAPTER SIX
STEP FIVE: BALANCE THE TEAM
Nicole Wipp is an attorney who runs her own firm in Milford, Michigan, about forty-five minutes outside of Detroit. Before she designed her business to run automatically, her firm was focused on litigation, which she found overwhelming in terms of her time and the emotion involved in dealing with her clients’ cases. Then Nicole had a baby and took a four-week maternity leave (sounds like the “four-week vacation” test for the business, doesn’t it?). During that break, she decided she needed to make a permanent change.
When I was picking Nicole’s brain about this book, she said, “I had to be brutally honest with myself, Mike. I had to think not only about what I should be doing, but what I should not be doing. Maybe I was capable of something, but was I really suited for it?”
Nicole analyzed her work habits and discovered that she was not good at traditional lawyer work, such as writing briefs. She was great with ideas, but not seeing them through. When she was fundamentally truthful about her strengths and weaknesses (and you need to be, too), Nicole realized, “I’m better at the first 20 percent of an idea, and the last 5 percent, but I am not good at everything in between. I needed people to handle the other 75 percent.”
As she evaluated her workload, she monitored the energy involved in each task. “Tasks that drained me, even when I was just thinking about them, those tasks were not playing to my strengths. They caused me to procrastinate, and dredged up negative feelings that impacted me, and my team.”
For some of you, daily work may feel like it’s slowly chipping away at your soul. That experience must be transformed in order for you to not only love your business, but to grow it to its full potential. To do that, you must give the tasks that drain your energy to someone else. With those tasks off your plate, you can operate in the zone of flow—your own zone of genius.
Considering her own zone of genius, Nicole decided to transition her firm out of litigation and became the Family & Aging Law Center, the changed name showing the new intent of the firm. She not only got rid of the tasks that drained h
er; she eliminated the traditional lawyer offerings that she was not great at delivering. After hiring and restructuring staff, Nicole went from working one-hundred-hour weeks, thirty days a month, to working just five days a month. And she did it without dropping her annual income. Many entrepreneurs fear their personal income will drop off when they hire someone, so I pressed Nicole to explain that point further.*
“For a brief period after I started this process, my income did drop a bit. But it went back up as soon as I found the right team and they came up to speed,” she said. “Even though there was an initial drop, on an annual basis, I made more.” The lesson there is, when you consider hiring, look at the annual impact, not just what might happen in the next few weeks.
Nicole’s firm is now more profitable than ever. She accomplished this by hiring the right people to do the right things, which freed up her energy so that she could maximize what she does best. Then she had to balance that team so that they also did what they do best.
“I didn’t start off with a good team,” Nicole told me. “There was a ninety-day run when I cried every day because my team was so bad. But what I realized was, it was me, not them. I had to reset and restart, and make sure I was hiring people based on their zone of genius, which complemented my zone of genius.” (That’s a lot of geniuses!)
Nicole works just five days a month and she’s more successful than ever. She doesn’t do any QBR work, which for the firm is spot-on legal work. She focuses on managing the business flow. Do you see how replacing yourself—especially in terms of the work you do that does not feed your soul—can only help your business to grow?
From the moment you make your first hire, part-time or full-time, or bring on your first virtual assistant or contractor, your company has multiple gears and you need them to mesh harmoniously. If you build a balanced company from the get-go, you will have a stronger foundation and it will be easier and smoother building from that point. Master the skill of balancing your team, starting with your first employee. This is a Designing skill and mastering it early will carry you far.
As Verne Harnish says in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, we need to get the right people, doing the right things, right. This is true. Very true. But there is one additional element. The right people need to be doing the right things in the right amount. My modified version of that maxim reads like this: Have the right people, do the right things, in the right portions, right.
Here’s how that sentence breaks down:
“Have the right people . . .” This means that you know the super strengths of your team, that you know their zones of genius. Not what they do most, currently, but what they are best at doing and get the most joy from. When a person is great at something and loves doing it, they will excel. Unfortunately, most business owners and leaders don’t know the strengths of their people. Determine your people’s strengths (and evaluate the strengths of people before you bring them on) and use this knowledge to put them in a position where they will excel.
“ . . . do the right things . . .” Identify what your business needs and what it doesn’t. Trash what it doesn’t need so that no one is distracted by these tasks. Transfer the work to the right people. Trim the work that can be made more efficient. When you do that, you are aligning the right people with the right things.
“ . . . in the right portions . . .” People and your business both need balance. All the Doing in the world will fall short if there is no clear direction. And all the direction in the world is useless if no one is taking action on the strategy. Even if they are great at something, your team needs balance, and they need their own appropriate amount of variety.
“ . . . right.” This is about education. Provide your people with the relevant captured system. Have a clearly defined outcome and process to follow. Educate them on what the QBR is and the necessity to serve and protect it.
THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Part of my book-writing process is testing and refining the book’s core concepts and processes by actively sharing them from the stage, getting intrepid entrepreneurs to try them out on their business, and taking as much feedback and questions as I can get. If my audience can grasp the concepts and knows how to apply them to their business within sixty minutes or less, it is a solid process. If it is hard to explain or hard to grasp, or if the entrepreneurs aren’t getting great results, the book isn’t there yet and I need to head back to the drawing board.
I delivered my first big keynote on Clockwork to four hundred people at a conference in San Jose, California, on November 27, 2017. This was my tenth time presenting Clockwork; all the prior speeches were delivered to small audiences of twenty or fewer. On this occasion, everything clicked, for everyone. The metric of measurement is pretty simple. After the speech, do people come up to me in droves and talk about what they learned, the ahas they had, and the actions they plan to take? Or do they scurry out of the event as fast as possible, leaving that one weirdo with an indiscernible funky smell to tell me his life story and talk about the skin rashes that appear all over his body when he sits for too long? (Seriously, that is exactly what happened at my second Clockwork speech. The book wasn’t quite there yet.)
After I finished the first home run speech on Clockwork, I stayed in the room for another forty-five minutes answering questions, listening to entrepreneurs’ stories and what people were doing to streamline their businesses. One entrepreneur, Andrew Berg, who was in the audience on my ninth attempt presenting Clockwork, was so inspired by it that he flew himself and his executive team from their New Jersey offices to the San Jose presentation to hear the tenth version. Andrew approached me, introduced me to his team, and then looked at them and said, “See. I’m not crazy. We have to declare, protect, and serve our QBR.”
As the audience funneled out of the room, I noticed one gentleman waiting patiently for me. If you are a speaker, you will know this is usually the weirdo, and you should avoid eye contact at all costs. But this guy I recognized. It was Darren Virassamy, cofounder of 34 Strong.
Darren is the expert on balancing teams and bringing about extraordinary engagement from every employee. His company has taken the StrengthsFinder system, which measures an individual’s talents (among other things), and developed a powerful process to move the right people into the right roles at a business.
Darren and I started chatting and decided to continue our conversation over dinner, where he proceeded to school me on balance. I realized then that, even though the QBR strategy worked, and resonated with audiences, a company would still have to balance its team in order to achieve organizational efficiency.
“The mistake organizations make, both big and small, is that they see all people as basically the same. If you can talk well at an interview you are hired. If you can kiss ass well once you’re hired, you get a promotion. The work, of course, matters, but the measurement is simply whether you can do an adequate job in the time allotted,” Darren said. “What’s missing is the realization that every person has an extraordinary talent. The person who turns red-faced in an interview and can barely spit the words out may be the best analytical mind in the world. That person who talks about the importance of serving others may not be a good salesperson who is motivated by numbers, but may be a powerful customer service person who is motivated by impact.”
He continued, “You need to know what people are inherently strong at, and then match them to the role in your business where they are applying that strength as much as possible.” In other words, if you measure a fish by how well it can climb a tree and a monkey by how long it can breathe underwater, you have set up both for failure. But if you measure the fish by its ability to breathe underwater and the monkey by its ability to climb a tree, you will find they excel.
For your people, match their strength to the role. How do you find their super strength? You ask them. Well, it is a little bit more involved than that. For example, if
you are interviewing someone to write content for your website and you say, “What is your strength?,” if they have even a modicum of desire to land the job, they will likely say, “I’m really good at writing copy.”
So the question is not what you are good at; the question is what do you naturally love to do. For example, “What are the three favorite things you have ever done at work?” “If you were able to have any job on the planet, doing anything you want, what would you do?” “Ten years from now, what is the perfect job you see yourself doing?” “If you had all the money in the world, and simply wanted to work for the joy of working, what would you do?” Seek out their interests. Seek out their hobbies. Seek what gives them joy. Because if it gives them joy, it is usually their strength.
That’s the shortcut. For my own business I use a far more thorough approach. I did 34 Strong’s team evaluation and took their direction in moving the right people into the right roles (which we’ll discuss in a minute). As new hires are considered, we interview with the questions above and have Darren test them out for us.
As we said goodbye, Darren reached out to shake my hand. Me, not being the master of human cues, didn’t even notice, subsequently invoking the most awkward hug of all hug moments. His outstretched arm was now pinned between our abdomens, as I clung to him for a weirdo length of time. We both cleared our throats, but nothing would overcome the pinnacle of awkwardly long, pinned-arm man-hugs.
Now that you are working toward a target 4D Mix, have identified your QBR, and are mobilizing your team to protect and serve the QBR, you’ll notice that your team may need to shift to accommodate these changes. This is where you will sometimes get pushback from your staff. People may worry about their job security, or they may have a difficult time letting go of their old roles. Or you may find yourself locked in your own awkwardly long hug. As you go through this process, keep in mind that transition can be difficult for some people. In this chapter, I’ll share how to balance your team, and also address some potential issues that may come up in the process.
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 12