Teaching Your Business to Manage Itself
Posted on 06. Mar, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Commit, culture, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Teaching Your Business to Manage Itself
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Have you ever encountered a business where everything just felt in place? The experience was perfect -the products, the people, the brand, everything worked in seemingly effortless fashion. You made an odd request; it was greeted with a smile. You went to try a new feature; it was right where it should be. You walked in, sat down and felt right at home.
Building a business can seem a bit like a giant set of Legos scattered all over the room. There are countless bits and parts and pieces that might fit together or they might not, but the game appears to be locked in composing these fragments in a manner that verges on what seems like some kind of normal.
But here’s the thing. Normal is a trap. Normal is the business you ran from to start this business. Normal is the last three businesses that choked and spurted and collapsed under the weight of management. Normal is a poor imitation.
Businesses that run so smoothly as to seem self manage aren’t normal. In fact, they are terribly counter intuitive, but terribly simple it turns out. The key is a tremendous focus on three things only – clarity, culture and community.
Clarity
Until you can get excruciatingly clear about the one thing your business really does that no one else does and, perhaps more importantly, the handful of high payoff behaviors that you the owner of said business must to spend as much time as possible immersed in, you will have a very difficult time practicing anything that looks or feels like art.
Until you can feel why you do what you do and use that as your guide the road ahead will always seem uncharted.
When you are clear about the one thing everything just gets so simple. You don’t even have to think about decisions anymore because you have the perfect filter and the filter runs the business.
If clarity for your business means earning a referral from 100% of your customers everyone know what to ask, how to greet a customer and who owns the result.
Culture
If a business is to mange itself a culture of ownership should be the sole objective. This must come at the expense of hierarchy and the assertion of autonomy. Every business, regardless of size has a culture. The only question really is whether or not it serves the business and the people that come to work there.
I’ve worked with business owners for years now and in my experience control, or the inability to give over control, is the greatest threat to business growth. Until a business can extend trust to those around him and give up control, there will be little more than constriction and contraction.
This means that you must also be able to communicate your sense of clarity and package it in a set of core values that when practiced in action become the road map for culture and the mantra for “this is who we are.”
Community
There was a time when community meant only customer. Today the customer is the community and that includes its customers, employees, mentors, vendors, advisors and even competitors all conspiring to advance and influence the business ecosystem.
When there is a clear picture about what the business stands for and the people that fill in that picture are given the freedom to manage their outcomes, the creation of a strong, vibrant and supporting community is a natural outcome.
A fully alive, self-managed business is little more than the sum of these parts orchestrated with total purpose.
Teaching Your Business to Manage Itself
Posted on 06. Mar, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Commit, culture, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Teaching Your Business to Manage Itself
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Have you ever encountered a business where everything just felt in place? The experience was perfect -the products, the people, the brand, everything worked in seemingly effortless fashion. You made an odd request; it was greeted with a smile. You went to try a new feature; it was right where it should be. You walked in, sat down and felt right at home.
Building a business can seem a bit like a giant set of Legos scattered all over the room. There are countless bits and parts and pieces that might fit together or they might not, but the game appears to be locked in composing these fragments in a manner that verges on what seems like some kind of normal.
But here’s the thing. Normal is a trap. Normal is the business you ran from to start this business. Normal is the last three businesses that choked and spurted and collapsed under the weight of management. Normal is a poor imitation.
Businesses that run so smoothly as to seem self manage aren’t normal. In fact, they are terribly counter intuitive, but terribly simple it turns out. The key is a tremendous focus on three things only – clarity, culture and community.
Clarity
Until you can get excruciatingly clear about the one thing your business really does that no one else does and, perhaps more importantly, the handful of high payoff behaviors that you the owner of said business must to spend as much time as possible immersed in, you will have a very difficult time practicing anything that looks or feels like art.
Until you can feel why you do what you do and use that as your guide the road ahead will always seem uncharted.
When you are clear about the one thing everything just gets so simple. You don’t even have to think about decisions anymore because you have the perfect filter and the filter runs the business.
If clarity for your business means earning a referral from 100% of your customers everyone know what to ask, how to greet a customer and who owns the result.
Culture
If a business is to mange itself a culture of ownership should be the sole objective. This must come at the expense of hierarchy and the assertion of autonomy. Every business, regardless of size has a culture. The only question really is whether or not it serves the business and the people that come to work there.
I’ve worked with business owners for years now and in my experience control, or the inability to give over control, is the greatest threat to business growth. Until a business can extend trust to those around him and give up control, there will be little more than constriction and contraction.
This means that you must also be able to communicate your sense of clarity and package it in a set of core values that when practiced in action become the road map for culture and the mantra for “this is who we are.”
Community
There was a time when community meant only customer. Today the customer is the community and that includes its customers, employees, mentors, vendors, advisors and even competitors all conspiring to advance and influence the business ecosystem.
When there is a clear picture about what the business stands for and the people that fill in that picture are given the freedom to manage their outcomes, the creation of a strong, vibrant and supporting community is a natural outcome.
A fully alive, self-managed business is little more than the sum of these parts orchestrated with total purpose.
What Is Shared Culture
Posted on 09. Jan, 2012 by John Jantsch in Blog, Commit, culture, Duct Tape Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media
What Is Shared Culture
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
I wish I could give you a crisp definition of what the word culture, with regard to business, really means. It’s a tricky word that finds its way into most discussions regarding the workplace these days.
Like so many things, it’s hard to describe, but you know it when you see it.
The thing is, every business has a culture. It may be strong or weak, positive or negative, or just plain hard to spot, but it’s like a form of internal brand in a way. It’s the collective impression, habits, language, style, communication and practices of the organization.
Some elements of culture are intentional, some are accidental. Some are rooted deeply in the ethos of an original employee group, some are created out of a lack of any real direction or clarity.
My belief is that a healthy culture is a shared culture, one created through shared stories, beliefs, purpose, plans, language, outcomes and ownership.
These aren’t little things; these aren’t things that you get right during an annual retreat. These are things molded over time with trust and passion and caring. These are things that evolve.
I don’t have all the answers, no one does, but I assure you this is the question that needs answering – How can I build a culture of shared commitment?
The following elements make up the foundation of a system of shared commitment.
Shared stories
The first step is to begin to develop, archive, curate and tell stories that illustrate what your business stands for.
Stories that tell why you do what you do, who you it for, why you’re passionate about it, and where the business is headed.
Throughout time great leaders have used stories to inspire commitment and attract community.
The central elements of a strong culture are the stories that employees tell themselves and each other. The why you would want to work here story, the orientation story, the here’s how we deal with challenges story, the here’s where we are headed story.
These illustrations are like oral traditions that allow culture to sustain, thrive and grow and it’s the job of the leader of the business to make story building an intentional act.
Shared beliefs
People want to work for more than a paycheck. Sure, they want to be paid fairly and in some cases the element of salary will be an important aspect of their decision to come to work for an organization, but perhaps more importantly, people want to work on something they believe in and they want to do that work with people that share their passion and beliefs.
This isn’t the same thing as saying, everyone in your organization has to maintain the same beliefs. However, by creating a set of core beliefs that everyone in the organization lives by and supports, you create a set of filters for how decisions are made, how people treat each other, how they treat customers, what’s expected, how to manage and even how to write a sales letter.
Shared purpose
For some time on this blog I’ve talked about the idea of connecting your passion with why you do what you do, or what some might call purpose.
In order to bring purpose fully into the organization you must determine a way to bring it to life and reinforce in every decision the organization makes.
This may take the form of an employee development program, foundation support, benefit package or community program. The key is to bring purpose to life by example. Your actions, or how you treat your staff, will speak far louder about purpose than any page in an employee manual. In order to create a shared purpose the staff must be your first customer.
Shared plans
The strongest, most productive cultures come to life when people know what to do and how to do it – In places where they are trusted to do go work and use their creativity to solve problems.
If you are to grow your organization to the point where it can serve you ultimate higher purpose, you’ll need to develop a system that enables people to manage themselves.
Now, that may sound a little foreign or perhaps even scary to anyone who’s worked in a typical hierarchical business structure, but it’s central to a fully alive culture.
The key lies in systematic planning thinking, clear accountability and consistent communication.
Shared leadership
While stories are an important way to attract and inspire people to join you on your journey, they can only take you as far as the leaders you develop around you.
After payroll is made and your business is generating sufficient cash flow I really believe that the leader’s primary role should shift to developing leaders internally.
In fact, as the owner of a business you’ll never succeed in reaching beyond where you are today until you are no longer the person that brings in the most work.
Teaching others to land the big fish, to tell stories, to create shared beliefs, to inspire and attract commitment means you have to invest time and resources in this very thing in a very intentional way.
This element of the shared culture comes by teaching your people what an ideal customer looks like, what a customer is desperately in need of, and how to communicate your core difference in a meaningful way.
It comes by teaching what everything costs, how profit is made, how every decision impacts a customer in some way. It grows by sending them to school, supporting their growth in other areas and demonstrating this is an organization that cares for the whole person.
Shared outcomes
One of the strongest ways to foster commitment is to get people to commit to a stake in the outcome of their work.
The only way I know to do this is to establish benchmarks, goals and indicators and then report and communicate progress religiously.
You must create reporting mechanisms that truly measure the most important components of your business. This will include key financial elements, but must strive to go far beyond into measuring success around shared beliefs and culture.
Shared ownership
The ultimate measure of commitment is achieved when people that work for your organization come to understand that they play a crucial role in creating the kind of company they want to work for – that the company is actually their most important product. (Of course the owner has to realize that first.)
This won’t happen until you help your people free themselves from the typical job descriptions and organizational charts so they can begin to manage themselves. It won’t happen unless they are excited about the journey they are on. It won’t happen until they fully understand how a dollar spent on a new desk equates to profit margin.
It won’t happen until they start thinking like an owner (and I mean in the good way) when it comes to meeting a customer’s needs. It won’t happen until everyone realizes they can help develop new business, build the community, create innovation, fix problems, right wrongs and make decisions that impact the organization on their own.
Every Business Must Manage Only These Three Things
Posted on 16. Sep, 2011 by John Jantsch in Blog, Commit, culture, purpose, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Every Business Must Manage Only These Three Things
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
While one business may be organized in departments, job titles and roles and another basically made up of only one person doing it all, every business that grows and thrives internally and externally figures out how to manage three things at all times: purpose, projects and process.
Lots of employees come into businesses hoping to rise to the ranks of management. The thing is every employee in a business is a manager of something. Lots of business owners start a business and quickly realize they must manage everything. The question is manage what?
As a customer, if you enjoyed a remarkable experience with a business there’s a very good chance that experience enjoyed the complete attention of management from three very distinct points of view – but what really made it remarkable was that it didn’t feel managed at all.
No matter how simple or complex a business may seem if it is to come to life it does so essentially orchestrating these three things – communicating purpose as strategy, delivering innovation, growth and positioning through the implementation of project after project and creating a remarkable culture and consistent customer experience through the operation of process after process.
The cartoon above was done for me by Mark Anderson. Check out Mark’s custom cartoons and consider commissioning one for yourself.
No matter how many people actually go to work in a business, every business needs to fill the role of Purpose Manager, Project Manager and Process Manager even if all three of these roles are played by the same person.
The role of the Purpose Manager is to create and tell the story of why the business does what it does, create and keep the picture of where the business is headed and act as the filter for business decisions made in the name of the brand’s positioning.
The role of the Project Manager is to continually look to break every business innovation, question, challenge, initiative or campaign into logical projects complete with required action steps and resources.
The role of the Process Manager is to receive and implement the tasks and action steps that fall from each project plan and operate established processes that ensure trust is maintained through consistency.
No matter how complicated we want to make our businesses, this is what success comes down to.
But, this is what makes owning a business such a challenge, this is what makes managing people such a challenge, this is what makes doing a job such a challenge. Finding the places where these three roles divide and where they come back together again is the art of the business and it’s not always obvious or even natural
If you’re the sole employee you must spend some part of each day playing these distinct roles no matter that your innate talents may reside squarely in one or the other.
As you hire staff you must focus on first hiring for your weaknesses in performing or managing one or more of the three roles not on job titles or departments.
As you grow your business you must build purpose, project and process thinking into every new department, innovation and initiative.
You must also guide your entire team to approach their work in this manner and give them the tools that will allow them to embrace purpose, think in terms of projects and know when and how process that delivers purpose is the right path.
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