by The HLH Team
“A great coach tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear.”
-Sagi Kalev
Here’s what the trap looks like:
You’re in charge, and the future of the company is on your shoulders. Your employees can’t understand that; they don’t know the pressure. You think that needing to focus on your job is more important than helping them with theirs. You save time by giving orders and not listening to their ideas. This is the authority-trap, and it’s easy to fall into. Barking orders is quick; engaging in dialogue takes time. Time that could be spent on other parts of your job.
Being a Boss:
Bosses give orders. Bosses make sure that everyone is exactly where they place them, doing what they want them to do, so they can focus on making the big decisions.
The boss thinks that their time is more important because they’re the one in charge.
Here are a few signs that you’ve fallen into the authority-trap:
- You talk more than you listen. A lot more.
- You like to work away from your employees, and are often inaccessible. They slow you down.
- Your employees work for you because they’re scared of what will happen if they don’t.
- You need to be Cc’d, kept in all loops, and control everything that’s happening.
Being a Coach:
When a boss climbs out of the authority-trap, they become a coach. And here’s the difference:
- A coach listens more than they talk. They know their employees hold the key to growing their business, and that their perspectives matter.
- Coaches inspire trust. People want to excel for them because it makes them feel like part of the team.
- A coach likes to work where the action is, and has an open door policy so employees can run ideas by them, and give honest feedback.
- Coaches challenge their employees to do better. They delegate, give real responsibility and demand accountability, and push their team to grow the company.
The Road to being a Coach:
Coaches grow companies, and quality employees would rather work for a coach than a boss. But that doesn’t mean that a coach is a pushover. Far from it. A coach challenges and pushes employees to be their best and encourages them to find their strengths and hidden talents.
Here are some steps to becoming a coach:
- Practice aggressive listening – Become an Aggressive Listener
- Don’t lead by email. Get out there with your team and have the informal, face-to-face conversations that really matter.
- Reward your most engaged, energized staff with more of your time. Help them nurture their ideas, develop quarterly rocks with them (What Are Your Rocks?), and push them towards growing themselves and the business.
- Don’t embarrass people in front of their peers. Praise them in public and go behind closed doors to correct them in a constructive way.
- Don’t be everyone’s friend. A coach is not a friend, he’s a coach.
- Confront poor performances and/or bad attitudes quickly. Defend your team, and take decisive action if you must.
by The HLH Team
“The essense of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.”
-Masaaki Imai
The majority of business leaders who try to embrace Lean will fail. They won’t fail because they aren’t motivated or committed, but because they weren’t able to change the culture of the workplace.
Process Improvement can’t come from the corner office, and it can’t be driven via email. It needs to percolate into how your team thinks and feels about their daily routines. That culture is a unique combination of philosophy and action called Kaizen.
What is Kaizen:
Kaizen is Japanese for “change for the better.” As a Lean tool, it focuses on creating a workplace culture wherein everyone, from Janitor to CEO, is empowered to think about small changes that they can make to eliminate waste and simplify overly complex processes.
It’s not about big changes. It’s about making sure everyone knows where the stapler is (and puts it back after). It’s about re-delegating so that a file passes across one less desk on its way to being finalized. It’s about changes so small you wouldn’t notice them, until they accumulate and become real profitability.
Philosophy from Action:
There are 2 elements to Kaizen – the goal oriented actions and the culture-building philosophy. You can’t implement a cultural shift, but you can get everyone involved in its daily actions. Those actions, over time, build the culture.
Kaizen isn’t abstract theory. It’s an apparatus of actions, each designed to make one small change. Here’s what a specific Kaizen action looks like:
- Set a goal to make a small improvement in one department
- Bring in people familiar with that department’s processes and access what improvement can be made
- Implement the improvements
- Review anything that’s working with the change
- Have a plan to make sure the improvement is long term sustainable
Repeat this action, department after department. Give ownership to the departmental team for identifying and fixing, and provide them them the resources to do it.
Don’t go for the giant complex changes. Improve slowly, step by step. 50 small improvements, made consistently over time, will make a larger cultural change than 5 big ones.
The actions will build the culture. People will start to look for improvements in their departments, and as the improvements accumulate and they start seeing real progress they’ll feel proud of what they’ve done. With that pride, they’ll want more, and that is the heart of the cultural shift you need.
The Power of a Collective:
It’s impossible for you, as leader, to identify, eliminate and protect against the waste that’s engrained into everyday processes across your company. It won’t work unless everyone has bought in, and a culture of Kaizen, developed from the actions you’re taking, becomes the true driving force.
The key to building the culture is consistency of action. If it’s sporadic, exhausting, forced, or half-ass, it won’t build culture. But once a culture of Kaizen has taken hold in your business, every team member will come to you with ideas to improve.
Further Reading (our first introduction to Kaizen): 3 Qualities of A Leader
by The HLH Team
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Of all the 8 Wastes, Talent waste scares me the most. Talent built all our businesses, and only talent can drive them to the next level. If you aren’t nurturing it, then you’re wasting it. Unused talent in a business is like water freezing and thawing across a mountainside: eventually it will bring the whole thing down.
This article isn’t about how to drive people to work harder, put in more hours, or even close more sales. It’s about how to inspire people to want to build your company. Pressuring people may get your more short-term sales, but only coaching them will yield the creativity and innovation you need to stand apart.
Tough Love for the Boss:
The hard thing for those in charge is that when our staff’s talent is wasted, it is usually our fault. We all know a team member who we feel isn’t contributing in growing the company. But before you call them into your office, ask yourself if you’ve been proactive to help them improve.
We all know the baseline of what we need to contribute in our jobs. These are expectations. Whether that’s closing a million in sales in Q2 or making sure your patient’s teeth are clean and healthy, these are the things we must do in our jobs.
Most businesses do a good job at communicating expectations. Whether it’s in a job description or more abstract, expectations are easy. But expectations only maintain your company, they don’t grow it.
Beyond Expectations
You’ve got your goals. You know what you want your revenue to be next quarter. You’ve probably projected your Gross Margin and Net Profit. But do you have a plan for how your team will grow your business?
A Quarterly Rock is a goal that you set with key team members that acts as a roadmap for personal and business growth. It’s a simple concept that is shockingly easy to complicate, so here are the basics:
- A rock cannot be something that would have happened anyway (it shouldn’t be an expectation)
- If you’re just starting, aim for 3 or less per quarter per individual
- The team member chooses the rock and must be personally invested in it. Don’t force something on them they don’t like because you think it will be better for the company.
- The boss works as a coach both during the choosing and meets regularly to see how the goal is progressing and to help it will happen on time.
Turning Goals into Reality:
If you set Rocks with your team and then don’t follow up, they’ll probably fail. Not because they don’t care, but because it will appear like you don’t. If you don’t follow up, expectation-driven tasks will rush in like weeds and choke the Rock out.
Nurturing Rocks for your team is a significant time investment, so choose your key team members wisely. You’ll need to work with them individually and over/above your existing expectations-based meetings.
Whether or not the Rocks are achieved is up to both of you. The team member has to do it, but you need to nurture, prioritize, and provide the resources necessary for it to happen.
The Impact on your Business:
Rocks shouldn’t be a secret. Other team members should know about them and be engaged. Achieving them is both a personal and a business win.
People will be watching how you deal with the Rocks as much as the person doing them. They’ll be watching how much you support and in what ways. They’ll watch your reaction when the Rocks are met as well as your reaction when they aren’t.
If you stand by your team member, help them to see their Rocks through and make that commitment, you will have done more than stem the waste of their talent. You’ll have challenged the others to step up just by showing how invested you are.
Source: This idea of “Rocks” came from the Entrepreneurial Operating System ( https://www.eosworldwide.com/ )
by The HLH Team
“A meeting consists of a group of people who have very little to say – until after the meeting.”
– P.K. Shaw
Whether you’re the boss or the attendee, you don’t want to spend an hour in a meeting thinking about how you’re not getting any other work done. Meetings have extraordinary potential for bringing out our best, but they usually just make us sleepy.
Choose Attendees Carefully:
You can’t control attendees at every meeting. Staff meetings, like your morning fire-up, are for everyone. Keep those short and bold. For more collaborative meetings, choose your attendees wisely. Are you inviting them for the insight and/or experience they bring to the table, or because their feelings would be hurt if you don’t?
7 people has been shown to be the perfect balance of diversity and sanity for a good meeting. There is some room for movement around this sweet spot, with a couple people more or less than the magic 7. Less than 5 attendees, and you may struggle to achieve the critical mass of energy needed for innovative ideas to emerge. More than 9 people in a room and people will have trouble being heard, to the point that some will fade into the background potentially pulling their ideas off the table with their voices.
Implement Standing Meetings:
Standing meetings let the participants know the meeting will be short and concise. It allows everyone to make decisions and move on allowing the meetings to be shorter and everyone to be more productive.
At our office we have a standing meeting every morning. It is always 15 minutes max and happens every single day. This allows us to start the day off right and we wouldn’t go without it now.
Distribute a Written Agenda Beforehand:
Agendas are your secret weapon for controlling the meeting’s trajectory. They communicate the meeting’s purpose and show the roadmap for how to get there.
Whether you have a set agenda (although it should never be truly static), or a one-off, distribute it beforehand with the explicit expectation that attendees review it.
If you want to involve everyone on a deeper level, ask for their feedback in crafting it. This sets a more collaborative tone which you may or may not want.
Be Brutal with Tangents:
If a one staff member rambles on to another staff member about his weekend, headache, or cat’s eating habits, it wastes the time of 2 people. If this happens in a meeting, the waste is exponential. Let people know beforehand that you will shut that down, and then don’t be shy about doing so.
It gets complicated when the tangents stop being about cats, and start being about another aspect of the business that needs to be talked about, even though it has nothing to do with the meeting’s agenda-driven purpose. Keep the meeting on track, and either ask them to carry it on later or give them a few minutes to sidebar and return while you carry on with the main group. Otherwise you’ll sacrifice the intact goal of one meeting for the partially formed goals of 2 meetings.
Listen:
Seems obvious, right? The reality is that if a person doesn’t feel heard in a meeting, they will feel deflated and contribute less the next time.
It’s the organizers job to create and keep an open, respectful space where everyone feels heard. If there’s disrespect, shut it down decisively. If a few people are monopolizing, reach out to the quiet ones, who sometimes have the best ideas go unnoticed.
Take Notes & Hold Accountable:
If a meeting happens and nobody remembers it, was it useful? Of course not. So always take notes, even if it seems trivial.
Make sure the notes names, so that you can hold them accountable at the next meeting. But, beware of the “Hank thought of it so Hank has to do it,” trap. If Hank thinks that every idea he has will end up in the record with his name and as yet another task stacked on him, he’ll just stay quiet. Find the balance between holding people accountable and being punitive.
Cited:http://projectmanagementhacks.com/meeting-tips/
https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/7-plus-or-minus-2-for-meetings.html
by The HLH Team
“In your career, even more than for a brand, being safe is risky. The path to lifetime job security is to be remarkable.”
-Seth Godin, The Purple Cow
The Purple Cow holds an honoured spot on many entrepreneurs’ bookshelves. In it, Seth Godin challenges us to make our businesses different using a brilliantly simple analogy.
Consumer choices are like cows along a country road. There so many that no none of them stand out. No one remarks on them because what would the point be?
But put a purple cow in the field and every looks; everyone comments. With word-of-mouth being the most effective form of marketing (by far), businesses that are worth being noticed and talked about are the most likely to thrive.
Listen:
Are you listening to what people are saying about your business? If you aren’t, you need to.
Sign up for a Google Alert for your business here: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/4815696?hl=en
The word-of-mouth is the objective, sometimes ruthless measure of if your business if remarkable or not. On the other hand, it may reveal negative threads that you need to address.
If you hear a deafening silence, then you’re probably a brown cow. Your job is to make your business worth noticing, worth buzzing about.
Becoming Remarkable:
What aspect of your business, be it a product, a twist on your services, a new design, etc, makes you stand out in your sandbox?
Your Purple Cow needs to be remarkable. 5% lower prices or slightly better service is not enough. It needs to be a game changer.
Now here’s the rub. You have thought a lot about how your business is unique, but does your customer know? Have you build a strategy around how your customer is going to learn about it, or have you buried it on page 2 of your website hoping the customers find out on their own?
Purple Cows aren’t modest. Unless you tell the world you’re awesome, the world will assume you’re ordinary. According to Seth Godin, those are the only 2 options.
More than a Sales Pitch:
Being remarkable gets you noticed, being useful gets you paid and retained. Being a purple cow just for the sake of it isn’t enough. Your business needs to have the depth enough to close the deal and turn your customers into advocates.
How much trust is implied in your industry? If you’re selling shoes or software, you can typically take more chances than if you’re a lawyer or life insurance salesperson. Be careful not to sacrifice the trust necessary in your first impression with too much glitz.
Being remarkable isn’t about a facade. It needs to run through the entirety of the customer journey, from brand exposure to advocacy. The savviest companies craft their Purple cow to reflect the value-added usefulness that potential customers may not otherwise see.
by The HLH Team
“He (or she) who has no problem has the biggest problem of all.”
– Taiichi Ohno
The House that Leadership Builds:
A lot of managers have a “Lean” vision for their company. Most of them fail, not because of lack of energy or talent, but because they didn’t achieve buy-in at the ground level.
Darril Wilburn was a leader in the development and implementation of key leadership programs for Toyota. Now a Managing Partner at Honsha, an internationally respected Lean Leadership consulting group. He approaches Lean, or Process Improvement, through the lens of leadership.
It’s easy to sit in a board room and develop a company vision over coffee. The mistake happens when we think that’s sufficient. It’s only the first step.
Making a vision that’s developed in the board-room relevant to the front line is a leadership challenge. Buy-in at the top is often relatively easy, but harder as you move down the levels:
Organizational
Management
Team
Individual
Engaging individuals is not about vision boards; it’s about on-the-ground leadership. According to Wilburn, there are 3 qualities that a leader needs to embrace in order to foster worker-level buy-in.
Learn more about what it takes to be a leader of Lean: Lean Leadership
Courage:
Visions for Process Improvement happen in a caffeine-induced board-room euphoria of what is possible. Holding onto that vision over time, so that the end goal is as clear on day 500 as day 1, takes deep courage. You can’t have a lean organization without the courage of conviction.
Disillusionment is a normal part of organizational change, but if you don’t hold the vision, stubbornly at times, when those around you start calling for the next-best-thing, your company will remain stuck in a feedback loop of failed endeavours.
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Humility:
Courage is vital, but it must be tempered with humility. The smartest people in the room are usually the ones asking the best questions, because they have both the humility to accept that they don’t have all the answers and the courage to show it.
Leaders with a drive to learn make the best teachers. You’ll rarely find them squirreled away in their corner offices; they’re on the floor and in the trenches, learning from whoever they can learn from and teaching in return. Their humility, driven by their desire to understand, makes them a conduit of vision.
Kaizen:
Big changes don’t tend to be profitable over long term. They start out strong because everyone is enthusiastic, but fizzle when, not having been integrated into daily routine, the enthusiasm supporting them fades.
Kaizen, or Continuous Improvement, is about making small changes, consistently. This gives each change time to be integrated into daily habits and, over time, leads to stable, sustainable efficiency improvement.
Without the proper balance of courage and humility, a leader cannot effectively implement Kaizen. Small changes happen at ground level. As such, all employees must feel engaged and empowered for Kaizen to work. Leadership in the trenches, with the courage of vision and the humility of listening, is the key to massive improvements developed over time.
(inspired by the teachings of Darril Wilburn)
