E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

UNDERSTAND MANPOWER

 

The long term success of a business rests squarely on the shoulders of the vested interest team – management. But that is a burden that they should not carry alone. A well run business relies on the hired help as much as it does on the key managers to achieve its goals.

It is neither practical nor prudent to rely solely on the management team. Failing to delegate limits organizational growth. To grow an organization must learn to delegate and manage all that is not the core capability of the management team. Not only is it unlikely that the management possesses all of the necessary skills, but without growing the team, the oldness will set in and start choking the business from within.

 

Training Ground

 

The pool of employees, is therefore, first and foremost, a pool of experts and specialists that the business needs to harness, train and test, so that as opportunities for growth arise, some of them can join the management team.

An organization often succeeds or fails based on its ability to hire, promote and support the employees well. As we work through the Guide, we will develop a system that will give us an indication of how well we are doing and help identify specific projects to excel in this area.

The path of growth for every employee should be in becoming more involved in decision making. An excellent worker that shares the mission of the organization and wants to commit to the organization’s long term success should have an opportunity to develop in to a key employee role, with an actual stake in a business, within either in a technical or managerial function.

  

Get in for Money, Play for the Game

 

But it does not start out that way. We hire employees to accomplish specific tasks, or fulfill specific roles. People can buy in to the Mission right out of the gate, but usually, the reason the vast majority of people starts a new job is to make money.

Money, however, while it can get a player in to the game, cannot get the game in to the player. Doubling someone’s salary will not make them twice as productive, unless they were screwing off in the first place. It is also unlikely to affect the long term satisfaction with the job.

The work itself has to be satisfactory. It is the job of the management to design the job in a way that would make it meaningful, safe, and satisfactory. People need to have clear goals and have the appropriate resources to successfully meet them. They need to be able to be proud of what they do and it is up to the management team to create such an environment.

 

Do It for Each Other

 

Before we can expect the workers to give their best, though, an environment of trust and camaraderie has to be created. People most naturally function each moment in the moment, not because of some reward six months down the road. There are many things an individual will do for friends that they will not do for themselves or for money. People care about what others think about them, especially if those others are someone close to them. The workers have to enjoy at least some of the people that they work with and be able to respect the rest.

One of key differentiators between the job for which a person is looking forward to waking up in the morning and a job that they dread, is the number and depth of close friendships that develop with others at work. No amount of casual Fridays, or cook outs can accomplish the same for the morale as building teams that actually enjoy working with each other and can rely on each other to get the work done.

In business like in war, in the heat of the battle it is no longer about the country, it is not about any slogans, it is not about the money, it is just about making sure that the whole unit comes out alive.

This is why hiring by referral can be so powerful, and lack of referrals can be such a great indicator of underlying problems.

 

Square Peg in a Round Hole

 

To build a good team, it is crucial to realize that everyone is different. It is both futile and unproductive to try to push everyone in the same mold. That is not to say that there should not be standards. There is typically only one best way to do any one small step. It’s combining the steps where individuality can shine through.

There are people that will be glad to do the same operation for the entire day, while others need to switch it up every once in a while. While some would rather work alone, others like working in a pair, or even a larger team. Some need music and others prefer quiet. Some work by the clock, while others work until the job is done. Some need hard data, while others go with their gut. Some are more concerned with logic, while others are more concerned with emotional harmony. Some need to think it through, while others would rather try it and adjust as they go. The variety is endless.

From early on in life, the educational system has conditioned us to try to do everything. And while at some level we need to have all the basic skills, to grow, eventually, we have to tackle areas wherein we excel and delegate everything else to others.

The areas that come naturally to us, the ones we gravitate toward, the ones we enjoy, the ones we really excel in are the areas that we need to figure out how to leverage. Some skills are prized more than others, but excellence in any skill is more impressive then complete mediocrity in them all. As management, we need to not just work on that in our lives, but help our employees to do the same.   

Not only do we need to make sure that people can get along, but that the individual skills and abilities, no matter how different, are appreciated by others on the team. This can only happen if everyone understands the jobs of others and has had an opportunity to try their hand at it, if they so wished.

To experience excellence in a business setting, each member has to know their strengths and learn to work them regularly. Specializing on achieving excellence in few focused areas gives others opportunity to pickup the slack and find out their own areas of excellence. Thus rather than having a team of mediocre players, a team of specialists can develop. That is not to say that one of those specialists does not become a utility player, filling in the holes until the proper specialists can be recruited, trained and promoted.

 

The Path of Least Resistance

 

There is one quality that seems to be common to all the people. It is following the path of least resistance. That’s not to say that most people are not hard working, or dedicated. It’s that in doing any job time after time even the most hardworking person, will figure out the least painful and most efficient way of doing things.  This can be a blessing or a curse.

Often the path of least resistance is not simpler, or more practical, it is just more familiar. Everything familiar appears simple and everything that is new appears complicated. Routine is an important aspect of the path of least resistance.

No amount of training, motivation or supervision can change the desire for path of least resistance. There is no need to. We can use it to our advantage. By making it easy and fun to make the right choices we create an environment where people can be productive by default. Rather then pointing fingers at the workers who do not follow rules, which most of them view as arbitrary anyways, the management has to take the time to build the rules in to the facilities.

Safety glasses are required for government compliance in many manufacturing environments, but no amount of slogans and policing will accomplish the same results as making nice clean glasses that are pleasure to wear readily available on every door leading in to facility.

The work environment has to be setup in such a way where it is easier or more enjoyable to do the right thing then the wrong thing. Ideally, doing the wrong thing should be impossibly hard.

Given enough time and freedoms, without continued outside threat, unless there is a deeper purpose, anyone will settle to the lowest common denominator of getting by. Thus, as managers in the organization we must make very clear the minimum standard, and that standard better be high enough that if everyone just did that, the organization would survive. But we must not stop there, since it is important to go beyond.

The next step is to work with the team to identify an organizational purpose that is relevant to the whole team, then to take work with each individual employee (or contractor) to see how their own purpose and growth goals align with that of the organization.

 

Failure as a learning opportunity

 

As soon as failure becomes acceptable, an organization will fall in the rut. That’s not to say that there are no setbacks allowed, failure is different in that rather then regrouping and trying a different tack, there is an acceptance of less then desired consequences. Mistakes, so long as they are not a pattern, can be fixed. An organization can work around the setbacks.

Yet, accepting less then adequate results cannot be a long term strategy, unless of course we are willing to admit that we have failed and are continuing to fail to pick meaningful targets in the first place. Nothing kills the morale and encourages the rut of the path of least resistance to set in quite like accepting failure because it puts in question the validity of the goals.

The key reason businesses struggle with these principles is that planning and managerial functions are usually not considered to be on the path of least resistance. Rather with the attitude of “Just do it” and “Get ‘er done”, we plunge in to projects and valiantly throw our efforts in to accomplishing them. By getting to work, we make a short cut through planning, only in retrospect do we see that it would have been much less work to plan first.

Simple, standard work can actually leverage the trend to the path of least resistance by making it easy and fun to do the tasks that need to be done. In the olden days even squeezing the juice out of the grapes or picking produce, or sheering sheep was an occasion for celebration and dance. There is no reason that a busy season in any modern business cannot capture the same spirit and use it to accomplish the seemingly mundane.

 

Work Fills the Time

 

The time it takes to complete a project is directly related to the time allocated to the project’s completion. Worse yet, people learn to work at a slow pace, if they have enough of an opportunity to work slow. While both people and organizations need to occasionally slow down, rather then always trying to operate at maximum capacity, these slowdowns need to be planned with various activities that act as a renewal for the organization, rather then just wasting time (since one again, wasting time becomes a habit). The example of the filler activities are cleaning, cross-training and fun projects. This filler work should be a break from regular work and hopefully very different in nature, since it is ideal if the whole organization looks forward to these activities, rather then dreading them.

There should always be more tasks to do. It is a job of a good manager to insure that there are always standing projects that everyone is aware of that have tasks that are small enough to be done in fifteen minutes or less. It is managing the short increments of downtime throughout the day where huge long term efficiency can develop.

Another key is sufficient cross-training, so that the whole team is ready to move on to other tasks, not just the individual. Even if a person is marginal at tasks that the others on the team do regularly, it is usually more practical to get the whole team caught up and have the whole team work on a filler project, then trying to manage the time of the individual workers.

 

Rewards and Compensation

 

It is important to have a simple and equitable compensation structure, but pay or bonuses should not be treated as a reward, but rather as a byproduct of being productive and doing a great job. 

But, having negotiated the wage structure, it should be left alone. With the primary focus being a great work environment. Work itself is the reason to be at work.

That is not to say that it is not a good idea to meet on a fairly regular basis to discuss the personal development and compensation goals. Working together a meaningful plan that encourages development can be put together.

 

The Backbone

 

The employees, contractors, consultants, temporary workers working together, with the guidance of management bring the whole business in motion.

They are the backbone of the business, not only making it operate, but protecting it, and keeping it in repair. Not only does backbone support the whole body, but it reacts to emergencies and communicates all relevant information to the head.  Any problems in the back cause the problems to the whole body and can both impede and prevent the doing of the tasks that the head determined from executing. Like every good backbone, employees need to be protected and well cared for.

It can often take restarting with a completely different team to change the dynamics that develop among the employees. Care therefore must be taken to insure that no major problems develop.

 

The weakest link

 

Yet often, the employees are the weakest link of the organization. The humans are the single most fallible component of a business. They make mistakes, take shortcuts, get sick, have a temperament, and are influenced by things completely outside the control of the organization. Machines don’t have most of those problems. And so, as machines become available that reduce or eliminate human involvement, it is often practical to turn to the machines. With automation as the continued trend, it is all the more reason to train people, so that they can move in to the positions that require more thinking and less doing.

A strong organization is not the one that is made up of super humans, but one that has enough checks, balances and will to fight: where mistakes and setbacks do not become failures, but are rather hidden opportunities for success.

 

Summary

 

Manpower of the organization is the best training ground for organization’s future managers. People get a job for the money, they keep it either out of fear, or because they like it. The ones that like it are infinitely more likely to be productive. Workers that care about their coworkers are much more likely to help the whole team succeed. People are different. Appreciating and using these differences rather then trying to eliminate them leads to excellence. Like water, people prefer to travel down hill. It is up to a manager to insure that the path appears to be in that direction a significant portion of the time. Work fills the time. To avoid absorbing dead time, there always has to be an abundance of work. It is up to the management team to insure that there is work. If the work can be accomplished without human involvement, it should be. When possible replace the repetitive tasks with the machine. Help people to learn the tasks that machines cannot do.