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Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them. – Dalai Lama
This is the third post in a series looking at key ideas in John Seddon’s ‘Freedom from command and control”.
The ideas in this post are possibly the most important ones to learn if you want to dramatically improve how your business operates and how happy your team are.
Let’s start with a question that comes up all the time.
How many new people do we need?
You’ve got a problem. Things aren’t working very well. Or you see an opportunity. There’s a market you can get into. What’s stopping you?
Your answer, quite possibly, is that we’re too busy already – we need more people.
Everyone is maxed out working on stuff and there is no time left to deal with these issues or go after opportunities.
But hold on, what are your team actually doing now?
Some managers have no idea what the actual work is that their team does.
And that’s a problem, because you need to know – you need to sit with them and learn about what they’re working on.
This is the demand being placed on them.
But what we don’t realise is that there are two kinds of demand: value demand and failure demand.
Value demand is work that clients actually need – this is the outcome that makes them happy, such as the successful payout from their insurance claim, the signing of an important contract, the cash back from an error that you helped to argue.
Failure demand is the work resulting from a mistake – that error that requires rebilling the entire year, the handoff to someone that drops the ball and requires redoing all the interviews, the person who sits on a problem until it is too late and creates a massive PR issue.
Both types of demand look like work but they’re not.
What you’ve got to do is drive out failure demand and increase the time you spend on value demand.
Some people think sales is all about demand – you need a salesperson to get the client to agree to things, right?
Wrong. In most cases a salesperson, Seddon argues, is like one of those players at a fair picking ducks out of a pond.
It’s not their special ability that makes the sale but the fact that the duck is within reach.
It’s the demand that happens to meet you at the right time.
So, to sell more, you need to be awake to value demand and all of your team need to know what that looks like so you can sell more and build your business.
But how do you get that keen eyed, motivated, enthusiastic team?
You do it by getting them focused on the customer and doing good work.
You don’t break them into silos and divisions and have work going from one place to the other.
Instead, you try and get one person to manage the end to end process for a customer, from getting started, to delivering the result.
If that person doesn’t know enough, you don’t hand off the work to someone else.
Instead, you pull expert support and work with the person to get the job done, which means that they will see how to do it and get trained along the way.
Eventually, they’ll do more and more and you’ll have a team of experts all delighting customers with their capabilities.
And, by the way, your team will be happy at work which means they’re less likely to leave.
And that virtuous combination, happy customers, happy team will lead to profits and growth.
Good operations create good businesses that grow.
It seems very simple doesn’t it.
But it’s not easy. You have to unlearn assumptions you’ve had for a while and learn new approaches that are based on tricky things like trust and patience and the ability to deal with uncertainty and complexity.
We’ll talk about some of that later.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
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