Standards over obedience

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Generally speaking, there two big ways to get your team to do what needs to be done.

Obedience: You can require obedience, with a very detailed list of what needs to be done, and expect them to follow it to the letter. If you’re flipping burgers at McDonald’s, this is how it needs to be.

Standards: Alternatively, you can set standards to be met and trust that your team will find the best ways to meet them.

There’s a third option of doing neither, but that’s likely to be met with frustration and failure.

In his new book “The Song of Significance“, Seth Godin pushes the idea of standards:

“It’s unlikely that we can consistently create significant work without standards. We need consistent, measurable, external benchmarks of quality. We can establish expectations for our work and meet them.”

Standards can help with obedience

At our agency, we work from standards for almost everything, and those standards help lead to avoid the need for strict obedience. While I trust our team to make the right decisions on each project, the standards we set help make sure they stay on the right path.

It again reminds of of the concept of “Commander’s Intent“, which essentially encourages a specific plan of action, but with a focus on the primary goal at the end. If the plan of action needs to change to meet the goal, so be it.

If you have proper standards in place and trust your team to follow them, it avoids both problems:

  • You don’t need to micro-manage to ensure obedience.
  • When things need to change, it’s easy to allow it to happen.

These two concepts overlap a bit, but it’s almost always better to push for more standards and less forced obedience every chance that you get.

Dumb rules come from lazy leadership

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We’ve all worked at organizations where they had some rules that were clearly overkill, or even didn’t make sense at all. Most of these rules can be traced back to an incident in the past, and people say “Oh yes, that rule is because of Steve”.

Rather than management talking to Steve about his behavior, they took the easy way out and just made a new dumb rule for everyone.

My friend Craig was talking about this a few weeks ago and summarized it this way:

“Dumb company rules exist because people do not want to have the hard conversations with the person that the rule was created for”

As Craig shares about his company, which is similar to how we handle things at GreenMellen, they try to have as few rules as possible. They hire people that they trust to make smart decisions, and then they give them the autonomy to do what they think is best. It’s similar to the concept of Commander’s Intent, where you give your team freedom to do what they think is best because we all know what goal we’re chasing together.

It’s not that we have zero rules, or let things go crazy, but a brief conversation about a problem is almost always better than creating some weird new rule to try to solve it.

Craig shared a few more excellent examples of this, and I encourage you to check out the full video (it’s only three minutes long) to hear it from him.

Transparency isn’t the same as honesty

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It’s always felt to me that being transparent was a big part of being honest. It can be, but they aren’t the same thing.

In his book “Lost and Founder“, author Rand Fishkin explains it this way:

Transparency isn’t the same as honesty. Honesty is saying only things that are true. Many founders and startup teams are honest (in that they don’t directly lie). But transparency requires digging deep to find and expose what others would normally leave unsaid and refusing to take the easy, quiet road.

Transparency becomes dishonest when you intentionally leave things out. For example, a leader could tell their team that their future is secure because they have $1M in the bank, but leaving out the fact that they also have $2M in debt would be very misleading.

The other side of transparency is being a good human about it. In her book “Radical Candor“, Kim Scott gives this brief example (as told by Rand Fishkin):

She outlines one of the most important things to remember when it comes to transparency: you need to balance it with empathy. If I tell you I hate your haircut, I’m being transparent. I’m also being an asshole.

If you’re going to be transparent, there are two things you always need to remember:

  • Use transparency as a way to show more truth, not hide it.
  • Be kind in how you deliver the news. Gary Vaynerchuk’s approach of “kind candor” is a great way to do it.

Transparency can be an awesome tool, as long as you use it honestly and wisely.

The whirlwind is a thief

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In reading the book “The 4 Disciplines of Execution“, they talked a lot about “the whirlwind” — all of that junk you have to do every day just to keep moving forward. This largely includes email, but also many meetings, phone calls, and other distractions. These are things that are semi-important, but they often prevent you from getting to the truly important work.

A few quotes from the book really stood out to me when it comes to fighting the whirlwind. First is how it can prevent you from really executing your job:

“The real enemy of execution is your day job! We call it the whirlwind. It’s the massive amount of energy that’s necessary just to keep your operation going on a day-to-day basis; and ironically, it’ s also the thing that makes it so hard to execute anything new. The whirlwind robs you of the focus required to move your team forward.”

You have a lot of things that are important, but performance tends to be much higher if you can focus on one at time. The book compares it to being an air traffic controller:

“Think of it this way. Right now more than a hundred airplanes might be approaching, taking off, or taxiing around, and all of them are very important, especially if you happen to be on one of them! But for the air traffic controller, only one airplane is wildly important right now—the one that’ s landing right at this moment.”

At the end, though, you can’t ignore the whirlwind. Living it in is bad, but ignoring it completely would be foolish:

“If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.”

The whirlwind is something we all face, and if nothing else I’m glad to have this new word to put around it. Sometimes I get caught in the whirlwind, and sometimes I put myself directly in it on purpose, but finding time to escape and dig in is where the real growth can come from.

Misaligned incentives

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As a small business owner, I’m often looking for ways to better incentivize our staff to work hard and for our clients to stick with us. For our clients it’s not about “incentives”, but rather providing the right products, data and outcomes to satisfy their needs, so it’s not all that different from what an incentive might look like.

The problem is that not all incentives are good.

For example, stores that pay employees by commission are encouraging those employees to push for sales even if it’s a bad fit. If a store employee encourages me not to make a purchase, that will create a better bond and likely lead to more sales in the long run.

PGA Superstore

A few months ago, I went into the PGA Superstore with the hopes of getting a new driver. I made it clear that I was ready to spend money right then, but after some discussion and hitting a few balls with some of their new drivers, the employee suggested that I not purchase anything that day. Instead, they suggested that I first get some lessons to improve my swing, and then we’d be able to find a proper driver for my needs.

I was surprised that they turned down the sale, but they earned huge credibility in my eyes and I’ll certainly go back there when the time is right.

The Daycare in Israel

You may have heard this before, but I recently heard an extended version that added a new twist. Uri Gneezy tells the story of when his children were in daycare and there were times when he was running late to pick them up — he’d speed and do his best to get there on time so that the daycare staff wouldn’t have to wait around for him.

This was a big problem at the daycare, so they started imposing a $3 fine if you were more than 10 minutes late for pick-up. For Uri and many others, this caused them to be even later! $3 was worth paying in order to be late, so the rate of late pickups went way up, which is the opposite of what the staff had intended with that incentive. By paying $3, people like Uri didn’t feel bad about arriving late for pick-up.

Some time later, they dropped the $3 fee in the hopes that parents would again hustle to pick up their kids, but it didn’t work. Instead of considering being late to be a big deal, parents now equated being late to a value of just $3, so they continued to run late.

Improper incentives can cause more harm than good.

Measures are bad targets

It’s not unlike the idea of measures becoming worthless when they become a target. As soon as you set an incentive, people will work toward that instead of the real goal behind it. Sometimes it’s a good match, but often it isn’t.

If the direct result of the incentive is a good thing for your company, go for it, but think through any possible shortcuts that might lead to incentives being earned with no really value being created.

Who should you really serve?

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When working in any organization, it’s important to remember who you serve and it’s not always as obvious as it seems.

Years ago when I worked at a few different churches, I went on a lot of mission trips with the high school youth groups. These trips were all still in the United States (we didn’t take the youth overseas), but generally at least a few hours away.

On these trips, there would be jobs already set up for us — re-roofing houses, painting, etc. In most cases, the adults were more skilled with these jobs, but we had to set firm rules with them. In short, we’d tell them “you’re not here to serve the resident; you’re here to serve our kids“. They’d be eager to get the job done, but much of the value in mission trips goes way beyond the physical work we accomplish and it’s to help the students grow.

If some parents took over the roofing work it would indeed likely go faster, but that’s not the point. We certainly wanted to serve the residents of these houses, but that wasn’t the only purpose. For the parents, their sole purpose was the serve our youth.

Business

The same is true in most businesses. While I certainly care very much about our clients, my first responsibility is to our team, in two ways:

  1. If the team is treated well, that will flow down to our clients. I don’t need to teach them how to be respectful and responsive if we hire quality people and we model it consistently.
  2. If a client is abusive, the team needs to know that they come first. We’ve fired a handful of clients over the years because their revenue could never be worth enough to overcome their attitude. It’s rare, but those occasional “firings” tend to be good for the staff because they know that we’re giving up some revenue in order to protect them.

The roles can change depending where you are. Back to the mission trip example I’ve been on all sides of it.

  • In high school, I’d serve the residents with my work.
  • As a volunteer with the church, I’d serve the students.
  • As staff in the church, I’d serve the adult volunteers and the students.

Roles like this show up in our lives in many places, and taking the time to really understand who our role is supposed to serve can make us far more effective.

Assigning fault versus solving problems

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As time goes on, I’ve been finding myself caring a lot less about “who is at fault?” when something goes wrong. I’ll certainly want to investigate why something went wrong, but the who is less relevant.

I’ll admit, part of this is because I’m lucky with how great our team is at GreenMellen. I’m confident that every decision they make is done in the best interest of the company, so the outcome is a bit less relevant. It’s kind of like the idea of removing decisions from outcomes; if the decision was made with the right intent, I’m not going to be upset about the outcome.

This leads to two other angles.

First, assigning fault doesn’t solve the problem. In his book “Integrity“, author Henry Cloud puts it this way:

Successful people care very, very little about “fault.” They do not worry about things “being their fault.” Fault to them does not have the most important implications, as it does for immature characters. What has the most important implications for mature characters is solving the problem.

Second, assigning fault might give a client a chance to beat up one our staff, which is no good for anyone. Beat up Ali or I instead. The problem with letting a client yell or harass one of your staff leads to can go two ways:

  • The staff is likely to bow down to whatever the client demands, for fear of losing them.
  • On the flip side, I’m happy to “fire” a client if they behave that way.

Again, the tenure of our employees has helped a lot with that over the years, as they’re quick to let us know when a client is becoming unruly so we can deal with it. It’s very rare, but it happens.

At the end of the day, some things will go wrong and you can either look to assign blame or look to solve the problem. The better choice seems pretty clear.

Serve others by taking care of yourself

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In Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take“, he proposes that there are three kinds of people: Givers, Takers, and Matchers. The goal of the book is to show how being a giver is your best bet for long-term success and happiness.

However, being a “giver” can be draining. In most studies, givers were the most successful of the three groups, but also the least successful, with the takers and matchers landing in the middle. The difference in the two types of givers is that successful givers made sure to stay healthy, whereas unsuccessful givers simply ran themselves into the ground. A few quotes from the book help to drive this home.

First, when it comes to the degree of self-interest with givers:

“givers always score high on other-interest, but they vary in self-interest. There are two types of givers, and they have dramatically different success rates. Selfless givers are people with high other-interest and low self-interest. They give their time and energy without regard for their own needs, and they pay a price for it. Selfless giving is a form of pathological altruism, which is defined by researcher Barbara Oakley as “an unhealthy focus on others to the detriment of one’s own needs,” such that in the process of trying to help others, givers end up harming themselves.”

Bill Gates agrees with this idea, proposing that people are most successful when they combine the ideas of self-interest with caring for others:

As Bill Gates argued at the World Economic Forum, “there are two great forces of human nature: self-interest, and caring for others,” and people are most successful when they are driven by a “hybrid engine” of the two. If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are otherish: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests.

The basic idea comes back to what you hear on airlines: “in an emergency, secure your oxygen mask first before helping others”. If you pass out, you’re of no help to anyone.

If you’re a giver, it can seem difficult to spend time on yourself. That time could be spent helping more people, right? In the short term you may be correct, but if you want to make a lasting difference you need to have the stamina for the long haul.

If you’ve not read “Give and Take” yet, I highly recommend you give a shot.

Love is greater than hurt feelings

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Despite the title, I’m not advocating for being a jerk, but I also think there are times when some hard truths that lead to hurt feelings can be a good thing. In Annie Duke’s excellent book “Quit“, she shares some insight on this from Daniel Kahneman:

When I asked Daniel Kahneman what he thinks the secret is to being a good quitter, he told me, “What everybody needs is the friend who really loves them but does not care much about hurt feelings in the moment.”

You break up with someone and, all of a sudden, your close friends tell you, “I thought you should have ditched them months ago.” Or you quit your job and people in your family say, “I could tell you were miserable. It sure took you a long time to figure that out.” Of course, when they tell us those things, we all have the same reaction: “If you knew that all along, why didn’t you say so earlier?” And the answer is always the same: “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” You can get over hearing that you should quit something. But if you spend months or years in a job or a relationship that’s not contributing to your long-term happiness, that’s time you can never get back.

Of course, being a jerk is easy to do and we’ve all seen it. I think this really goes back to Gary Vaynerchuk’s idea of “kind candor“. If you want to truly be a good friend to someone, finding ways to speak the truth to them is key, even if it hurts a bit.

We see this with governmental leaders quite a bit. We have some (most?) that surround themselves with people that always agree with them, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong. The best leaders are willing to surround themselves with smart people that are willing to tell them when they’re wrong.

Lincoln’s Cabinet

Abraham Lincoln was a great example of this. in an article from Prologue Magazine, author Ellen Fried explains his cabinet like this:

In 1860, prairie lawyer and former one-term congressman Abraham Lincoln stunned the country by prevailing over three prominent rivals—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates—to win the Republican nomination for President. Perhaps equally surprising was what Lincoln did after being elected President: He appointed all three rivals to his cabinet—Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general.

Lincoln wanted to be the best president that he could, and that meant bringing on very smart men that would have no problem telling him in the truth in all circumstances. It worked out quite well for him.

I’m fortunate to have a business partner and team that aren’t afraid to tell me when I’m wrong, but I’m equally fortunate about the way they handle it. Treating others with kind candor is a great way to live life.

Mistakes versus carelessness

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Many times when reading books, little things pop out at me that simply help me clarify how two words relate to one another. I’ve talked about a complaint versus a problem, social networking versus social media, interpersonal empathy versus social empathy, routines versus practices, attunement versus empathy, precision versus intent, knowing versus understanding, and dozens of others — more than I thought I had done, for sure! 🙂

This one today comes from the excellent book “Small Giants“, where Jay Goltz shared:

“I had to learn the difference between a mistake, which I can live with, and haphazard conduct. Backing into a pole is a mistake. A crooked label is a sign of carelessness.”

I like that take on it. If one of our staff makes a mistake due to being careless or lazy, I have little patience for it. However, honest mistakes happen, and I encourage those.

For example, we’ve given our staff the ability to price smaller projects themselves, and they do a fantastic job at it. Undoubtedly, something will be priced incorrectly and cause a small problem at some point, but that’s absolutely fine if it was done with the correct intent. We’ll learn from it and do it better the next time.

Mistakes will happen in every business, but carelessness can be avoided and should be a red flag if it shows up.