Sometimes it is necessary to jump.
I begin this essay by pointing out what could be the business world’s most virulent strain of self-deception: The heroic posture that one must work hard in order to find success. It’s a simple fact that grueling work is nothing unique. Most people work hard. Truth is, hard work is too often a distraction from seeing and then doing what must be done to find success! And what must be done? Very simple. You must see your job or business as a dispassionate machine that has a purpose and then you must make it hyper-efficient via relentless system improvement. Your long, long hours can be worse than useless as they distract you from implementing this simple mental stance that will actually lead to freedom and peace. The day you see your life as a mechanical collection of linear systems and not an emotional conglomeration of swirling sights, sounds and events is the day everything changes. You’ll gently manipulate the systems of your world and with delicious satisfaction, watch them coalesce into simple efficiency.
Experiencing this is a mini-enlightenment.
Work is not a place where individual preference based on mood, time of day, or random circumstance should rule. Your business is a machine with a goal and not some chaotic gathering place where the right attitudes and enough hard work will maybe someday make everything perfect. Feeling good and hard work are fine but they won’t be enough.
It’s “boring but true” that most managers fire-kill, stumbling through the day fighting inefficiency in a defensive posture. Make your workplace mechanically efficient and you’ll be in select company. You’ll leap ahead of the competition the moment you fully embrace the somewhat mundane process of creating order.
You and your people are at work for a reason: First, to earn a living. And second, for the satisfaction of it. The ironic bonus to a new-found orderliness? Your workplace will be a fun place to be because profitability is great and there is a relaxed, all-is-well atmosphere. No more chaos. No more fire-killing.
Like the previous post, Communication for the New Mobile Lifestyle, you might want to pass this post on to your coworkers Here are ten steps to stop the tumult and create efficiency.
- Renounce holism as a process. Instead, make it a goal. Isolate your attention to the workings of the linear systems of your job or business. See these systems as singular entities and understand that only by taking your systems apart and fixing them one-by-one can things be permanently improved. No longer a fire-killer, your new role is that of a system improvement specialist.
- Know without any doubt that your life is made up of linear systems and that 99.9 percent of them work just fine (for proof, right this minute look around at the raw details of your day and note how much of it works flawlessly without any overt management whatsoever). With this in mind understand that although some of your systems are not working so well right now, there probably isn’t that much to repair in order to make them efficient.
- Embrace the fact that documentation makes your system improvements permanent. It’s your job to convince your co-workers that documentation is a smart thing to do and a requirement of the job.
- One by one, analyze each system within your scope of influence – on paper. Start with the most pressing problem – the system causing the most real-time trouble. Use a 1-2-3-step format to describe how your existing systems execute.
- In working your systems to hyper-efficiency, assertively seek advice from the people who manage you and from those you manage.
- Use your staff’s suggestions to tweak your systems to perfection. Relentlessly document that perfection. Manage your systems to create the results you want. Stop spending your time fixing the bad results of unmanaged systems!
- Distribute your documented system protocols. Get everyone to agree to apply them as they are written. Assure all involved that if there is inefficiency in any of the processes, you will consider their advice and if their advice is good you will instantly make modifications in the system procedure. The goal is to improve the steps and sequences of your individual systems until the systems are perfect. (How to get your staff to climb on board? See my book Work the System for details. Or maybe I’ll discuss that aspect in a future essay. It’s a simple thing but a bit too much to discuss here.)
- Keep your collection of documented systems at hand, readily accessible to everyone.
- Get everyone on board. If there are hold-outs to your new documentation and procedural efforts, you have a simple choice to make: Your people must embrace the new strategy or leave. You want to surround yourself with people who share your vision.
- Grease the wheels by constantly encouraging your staff to see everything within the workplace as either part of a system or the outcome of a system.
And what do you get? A holistic result: A workplace where all the parts are working smoothly, the primary necessity of profitability is being met, and the people who make all that happen are satisfied with their positions.
Photo by h.koppdelaney via flickr used under a creative Commons License.
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What about creative people/environments? It’s fine to build a system from work that is linear, but what if it isn’t? In my job I have many moving parts, meetings, deadlines… It seems like an impossible task to try and bring any order to it… what do you recommend in these situations?
EXCELLENT point, Heather. Funny thing, this is where real creativity comes to play. In my answering service business our first and greatest challenge was how could we quantify messages that our Telephone Representatives processed? How does one take something so subjective as a message and make it objective? Every message is different and there are 100,000 of them processed every month. It took a lot of work and in the beginning we weren’t even sure what the outcome would be. The end result though was that we came up with procedural documentation that, among other things, allowed us to rank the quality of a written message in 44 different criteria: voice quality, spelling error, empathy…Yes, each criteria was a bit subjective and had to be ranked on a 1-10 scale of poor to excellent, but in the end, it has been incredibly effective in raising message quality.
The key is to break things down into the smallest “chunks” and then rate each chunk. Our first average rankings for all of our telephone service representatives was 66 out of a possible 100. Now , rain or shine, scores are in the 92-94 range. This was a quantum leap in quality. The largest creative challenge was to decide how to quantify a message into mechanical pieces (ironic, yes?). It’s been an incredible success and is the fundamental reason we are the #1 answering service in the country and one of the reasons I work two hours a week and net 25 times what I did before I changed my thinking. But that is just a part of what we did. We turned hundreds of repeating tasks into written procedures, saving some amount of time and effort in each. The accumulation of savings and efficiency increase has been enormous.
So, I don’t know what you do for a living but my advice is that you examine your tasks from the outside and find out what you do over and over again, and then see if you can make a mechanical process out of each of these repeating tasks…then, over time, work on the processes and tweak them to perfection over time. Work your systems! There may be only 20% of what you do that can be streamlined into processes but it’s my guess that that 20% may create a 40% time savings. (And then take that 40% in time savings and reinvest it back into the sales and human relations aspects of your business).
I am talking in generalities here because I am clueless as to what you do. The guts of all this are presented in detail in my book. There is a lot of information on the workthesystem.com website too. Check out the FAQ section. Also, go to centratel.com under Resources. Maybe this would make a good general post later on because this is a frequent topic that my readers bring to me. Thanks Heather!
I’d argue that someone has to stop and look around to challenge the status quo and this is especially so if you’re the boss. One more person deep in the mire up to their necks isn’t going to make all that much difference but one person figuring how to drain the swamp will cause a massive improvement.
Matt
I am not a manager or business owner, just a cog in the wheel, so to speak! I do not readily see how someone in my situation can apply this method to the work environment. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Thanks Carol: A “cog” has duties. Also, the cog category is where nearly everyone begins their upward climb. First, if you can see the systems of your job (the “get it” part that I discuss in the post), and make each as efficient as possible, your boss should notice. Then it’s a matter of expanding your new-found systems expertise to systems that your boss is dealing with. Help him. This is how the corporate ladder is climbed. However, if you are in a job that has no potential for upward mobility, best to find another job.