Wow, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Solving the root cause of operational problems. What does that even mean? Well it must mean something, because Jeff Bezos (he’s the CEO of Amazon.com if you haven’t heard of him, and currently the richest man in the world) makes a point of doing it day in and day out in his business, and ensuring his managers do the same.
And it might sound fancy but in fact it’s very simple – find out what is bothering your customers, then don’t just fix it one time, fix the reason behind it. Here’s an example from the book “One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon” by Richard Brandt:
“When one elderly woman sent an email to the company saying she loved ordering books from the site but had to wait for her nephew to come over and tear into the difficult-to-open packaging, Bezos had the packaging redesigned to make it easier to open.”
He had the packaging redesigned. He didn’t just apologize. He didn’t go to her home and open the package one time. He had the packaging redesigned so it wouldn’t happen again.
Companies With the High Velocity Edge
A man by the name of Steven Spear found the same thing, through research in his book “The High Velocity Edge”. Companies who outperformed others over long periods of time had leaders who:
Designed their work to reveal problems and opportunities
Solved the root cause of those problems
Shared that knowledge throughout the organisation, then;
Developed the problem solving skill in others.
This meets the actions of Jeff Bezos perfectly. By solving the root cause of problems customers are having, they stop those problems from happening again. They are saving time, money, and retaining customers. Then by sharing that knowledge and building the problem solving skill in others, the managers and teams at Amazon.com are building upon previous successes in a way that starts as small improvements and gains, but soon grows to large gains as the improvements compound on each other.
Start and Finish with a Repeatable Process
Problem solving by itself may not give you the results you want. If you improve something, but don’t lock in those changes, there’s a good chance things will revert to normal after a short period of time.
This is where a standard, repeatable process comes in to play. By ensuring each product we sell, and each operational process we perform to get there has a clear, repeatable way of doing it, we can use that process to improve. Something as simple as a checklist, or screenshots, can work wonders with ensuring everyone knows what to do and can do it the same great way every time.
Then when you improve things, you can lock in the changes by updating the process, checklist, screenshots (or any other way you prefer), so the improvement isn’t lost and you can continue to grow over time.
In that way, small incremental improvements will compound on each other over time, leading to large improvements overall.
In that way, solving operational problems is the key to operational excellence. And by solving problems your customers bring to you (whether through complaints or other feedback) you are unlocking the door to a customer obsession mindset.
The Best, Most Loved Leaders Check in Regularly With Their Team
The Gallup business journal recently found that there is a very clear way to increase your team’s engagement in their work. They found that leaders who check in at least once a week with each individual in their team, while focusing on their strengths, saw up to a 27% increase in engagement.
To put that into perspective, companies in the top quartile of engagement have enjoyed twice the revenue of companies in the bottom quartile of engagement, according to a study by Kenexa. Other studies by Gallup have shown lower absenteeism (by 41%), improved sales rates, and significantly improved productivity in companies with highly engaged staff. Improving your engagement by 27% could easily move you into that top quartile where all the magic happens.
Do you want to be a leader that everybody loves? Check in with people regularly, and focus on their strengths. Part of this comes down to another key to increasing engagement – in fact some people have called it the main key. And that is progress.
By checking in regularly with your team, and focusing on their strengths, you are facilitating both a sense of progress, and the likelihood of real progress itself. Teresa Amabile found in her research and writings called “The Progress Principle” that people’s happiness increased when they had a sense of progress. In fact, there’s a good chance you can relate to this. How many times have you thought about (or actually gone ahead with) quitting your job or business plan because you weren’t making any progress?
So check in with your team, focus on their strengths, and make sure they are on the right track making progress.
Check In With Your Customers To Significantly Increase Sales
Retaining customers can be one of the hardest things in business, but when you get it right, studies have found very real increases in revenue and profit. One study by the author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Frederick Reichheld) found that retaining an extra 5% of your customers led to an increase in profit of between 25% and 95%. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Most of the cost to acquire a customer is spent up front, with advertising, brand awareness, many meetings or phone calls and even steep sales discounts. But once a customer has formed a habit of doing business with your company, there is a much lower chance they will go searching for something else.
And this is where feedback comes in.
It’s such a simple concept, yet almost no company does it well (outside of many of the best, most profitable companies). You want to search out customer feedback. Are you getting complaints? Great! At least your customers are telling you. Don’t hide away from the complaints – they are free feedback that is worth its weight in gold if you know how to fix their problem and improve.
Customer feedback might take the form of a survey, a Facebook or Google review, a complaint (as we noted) or even praise (statistically less likely, but still nice). And when we get any type of feedback, we want to solve the operational problems that lead to anything negative.
Work taking too long? Solve the operational problem behind it. Staff on-site leaving a mess after their work? Solve the operational problem behind it. Quality of the product not lasting long enough? Solve the operational problem behind it.
And – here’s where things come full circle – the best way to solve operational problems is to ensure you have a standard, repeatable process in place and then check in regularly to ensure it is being done. And if it’s being done, but the results are still bad, then you improve the repeatable process and roll it out again.
Rinse and repeat on your way to exponential growth – just buy me a beer when you pass your first million.
There’s the other side to this tale as well – as your business grows and you rely on repeatable processes more, if you don’t check in to see if those processes are giving you the outcome you want, there is a good chance you’ll run into trouble. If you don’t check, you can’t adjust, and if you don’t adjust, you may not get the results you want. Pilots check their course regularly on their way to their destination, and so should you, by checking in with your team, your customers, and making sure they are getting the outcomes they want.
We all make mistakes. In fact, making mistakes usually is a good way to learn and become better in life. But what happens when we allow – even encourage – our customers to make mistakes as they try to buy from us? Or what about your team members, trying to do a good job in your business, but thwarted (yes, thwarted) by long, convoluted processes that seem to trip them up at every turn?
Making things easy is the real key to engaging your workers, getting customers to buy from you, and ultimately getting the results you deserve in your business. And making things easy is done in a few ways, but one of the best ways is to find a way to make it impossible to make a mistake, as your team or your customer goes through their process.
If it’s impossible for them to make a mistake when they buy from you, they are more likely to buy. If your team can’t make a mistake in the work that they do, they are more likely to do it. But it also works the other way. If it is possible, even easy, for your team to make mistakes, then they may have to redo their task over and over again, costing you more, frustrating them and reducing their engagement.
Designing your work intentionally to make it harder to make mistakes takes work, which is why most leaders don’t do it. Instead, they fall on the crutch of “hiring the right people” or “hiring people smarter than themselves” and letting those superstars get to work. But here’s the thing – hiring superstars is expensive. And even when you do, there’s still an 80% chance they will be a dud – not matching the culture of your team, getting bored with the work, or wanting to go in different directions than your team, and the way they do things is ultimately still hidden in their minds (not made visible for all to see).
It is MUCH better, easier and cheaper for you to simply hire nice people – collaborative people – and give them the right boundaries with a repeatable process where it’s impossible to make a mistake.
After all, McDonald’s did it, and now it’s a multinational company with over 36,000 stores that has run for nearly eighty years. Uber did it, and it’s now it has scaled across the globe and is worth 70 Billion Dollars. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, all the big names you hear about know the power of making it impossible to make a mistake. They’ve all done it separately in different ways and have all had stellar success. How will you do it?
Yes, you will have to brainstorm with your team. Yes, you will have to put in a little extra work to make your process simpler. But the rewards you will see are 100 times worth the effort.
A picture is worth a thousand words. That’s what they say. Sure, it may be an old saying, and who knows where it started? But the thing is, it’s right.
One study found that adding pictures increased understanding and recall of information 98% of the time. So if you’re a leader and you want your people to do something, or if you’re a business owner or entrepreneur and you want your customers to buy something, making it visual is a huge part of them getting and retaining that information so they can do what you want.
Making it visual means taking your process from being hidden in someone’s mind, and writing it down or putting it on a wall so everyone can see it. Or better yet, taking that 1000 word report and turning it into one chart that people can easily and quickly understand.
The best websites have a user experience that visually guides their customers in the direction they want. The best software development teams have simple red or green lights when development environments are working or when they are not. Uber gave its customers a GPS map where you could see how many cars were close by to pick you up.
A picture is worth a thousand words. It is also around 1000 times faster at conveying the information you want, to the people you want.
Making things visible also brings clarity to your work and engagement to your people. When your team are uncertain of what they need to do, they are more likely to be disengaged and also more likely to not do the work – that’s what the research says. Making the work clear and the process visible goes a long way to improving your performance and your results.
What Can You Do In Your Own Work?
Is there “hidden” information you can make visible in your own work? Maybe it’s your best performing team member and how she does her work. Maybe it’s clarity on the next steps your customer has to take (or will go through) in their customer experience. All of these things are often hidden, and not clearly exposed for people to see, because it actually takes extra work for us to bring them out into the open. Most people won’t do it. But if and when you do, your team will be more engaged, and your customers will buy more often.
There’s an old saying that goes: “The journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.” It’s a great saying, and it’s a nice way to remind yourself to keep going and keep taking those steps when things get tough.
The only thing is, let’s say you’re a company selling software and you make your customers take 1000 steps to get what they want. They might do it for a while, especially if you’re the only one selling that software.
But then another company comes along, and it gives your customers what they want in one step. One single step. Not 1000. Just one. Pretty soon, all your customers have gone to your competitor for the simple reason that it was easy to do so. Nobody really wants to take that “journey” of 1000 miles or 1000 steps.
I bring this up because this is what many companies are doing in real life – they are making their customers jump through hoops, take extra steps, and take extra actions just to get what they want. And they are doing this, of course, until Amazon comes along, gives customers one click ordering and ridiculously fast delivery and the other company falls apart.
Reducing the steps to people getting what they want is the master key to huge success in business. It’s success with your customers, and it’s success in your teams. The simple fact is that most companies and teams have not clearly articulated what they do, the outcomes they give, and how to get to those outcomes. After all, that’s too mundane, right? Why should they write down the steps they take to get customers (internal and external) what they want? And you might think that way too, until you hear that nearly 50% of workers actually aren’t sure on what is expected of them in their job. In other words, 1 in 2 people probably aren’t doing what you need them to do, because they simply don’t know what it is. Why write it down? Because you can’t reduce what you haven’t articulated in the first place.
Uber gave customers one-tap ordering of a ride, and now it’s a 70 billion dollar company. Amazon Kindle gave you one click ordering of eBooks, and it has all but decimated physical book stores around the world. Microsoft gave you Windows so you could click on what you wanted, when DOS (typing into a green screen) was still a thing. Most of you won’t remember DOS because it basically disappeared from view once Windows was released.
Also, have you ever noticed that complicated things tend to break more often? That complicated system, complicated code, complicated buying process, complicated risk review or complicated creation of the annual shareholder report – where things are complicated with too many steps, hand-offs, rework, and waiting, then things tend to break.
Reducing the steps is one of those keys to making things more robust, making things easier to do, easier to use. And when things are easier to do, people tend to do them. That means the people in your team, and helping them to do what you want.
So many leaders, when I speak to them, blame the people for not doing what they want them to do. But when it comes down to it, it’s the complicated and uncertain process that causes their team to flounder.
Simplify things, and you will see incredible rewards.
How does a single restaurant manage to stay in business? Thousands of restaurants go out of business every year. Possibly hundreds of thousands, if you look at the industry around the world. So how does one manage to survive?
But then let’s take it a step further – how does a restaurant not only survive, thrive, scaling to over 36,000 stores worldwide?
36,000 stores. That’s roughly how many McDonald’s family restaurants there are around the globe, and it all started with a single one nearly 80 years ago. The McDonald brothers made burgers so well, so fresh, and so fast, and so repeatably that their model was able to be scaled to other stores quickly. It could be taught quickly, it could be replicated quickly, and each new store could have success quickly all because of one simple approach: Capturing their process and making it repeatable.
You see, every tiny piece of the process that went into making a McDonald’s hamburger was looked at, written down, and then improved and streamlined until it was the fastest burger at a very low price that could be found anywhere, for a long time.
By making their process so repeatable by anyone who came along, they were able to hire kids still in school, as their first job, and train them in their repeatable process. They didn’t need to hire people with degrees (costing them more) and anyone they did hire had great success at their work because it was made clear and simple.
2018 and Beyond – Scaling Drivers Worldwide
But it’s not just burgers that have a process that can be made repeatable. It’s anything. And when you do this, you can scale your business beyond anything you had ever thought of before.
In 2009, could you have ever imagined that more than two million individual drivers from around the world would all be trained and working towards a common goal? Well that’s exactly what Uber has done, and exactly why it is worth 70 billion dollars today. They used the power of technology and delivered it in an app, error proofing with automatic payments, GPS tracking and simple visual management where you could see exactly where your driver or passenger was. They made the process repeatable.
What Can You Make Repeatable?
Now it’s over to you. Everything can be made repeatable, and everything can be simplified. What are some areas in your business that you just know you need to clarify, write down the steps for, and then make a little bit simpler?
The Lean CX (or Ease of Use) framework shows you exactly how to simplify your work and your customer experience. Clarifying the steps to getting the outcomes you want, therefore making them repeatable by anyone, is the first step to simplification.
Playing The Leadership Card Game, With Lean Expert Phil Preston
You may have heard about the Leadership Card Deck – an incredible card deck (and associated, collaborative game and ice-breaker with your teams) that teaches ways to increase motivation and engagement within your teams, as a leader. And everyone can be a leader.
You can now buy your very own copy of the Leadership Card Deck to improve the leadership ability of the people around you, from almost anywhere in the world on beautiful linen-card paper. They really are a pleasure to use.
Transcript:
David McLachlan: Hey everyone I just wanted to show you something that we worked on over the last couple of months and it relates to ease-of-use and it relates to engagement and it relates to disrupting companies, creating disruptive companies and all of those things that come from
ease-of-use and making things easy to do and easy to use.
And come out of it is the the leadership card deck which helps improve the
engagement of your teams, that has huge flow-on effects like improving the
profitability and productivity of your people, making people want to come to
work and do a good job and I had to bring Phil along –
Phil Preston: Hello!
David: – because as we’ve been playing we’ve sort of evolved this game from the leadership card deck just by playing it over the last couple of weeks. And the way it’s evolved is really really great, you’re gonna love playing it as well. And Phil’s probably one of the best people to play this because he’s probably one of the most hardcore lean practitioners in the southern hemisphere I would say. He’s had training at Ford, from Toyota guys, he has a manufacturing background but also financial services, formal stuff like Six Sigma and not only that Phil does that as a day job and then teaches lean on the weekends as well, so he can’t get enough of it.
Phil: I am so passionate David.
David: But also so good at it.
Phil: Thank you.
David: And that’s how this sort of evolved over the last couple of weeks.
Phil: I love the game, I’m ready to go.
David: So did you want to walk people through how we’ve been playing?
Phil: Okay, so we started off with the cards, and on each of the cards is – how would you describe it David?
David: Oh it’s just a tip, a bit of research or a trick, how to improve engagement how to get the most out of your teams, that sort of thing.
Phil: So when we initially started playing the game we just picked three cards each and then we would try to make them flow. But the game’s evolved, where we originally thought it would all start off with the root cause and end up with a solution, but sometimes that’s not always the case. Anyway we’ll demonstrate to you how this works.
David: Let’s do it and yeah and that’s why playing with Phil in this manner is such a pleasure because he totally gets it and he gets that improving things just makes the way for making happier staff as well so that’s really one of the greatest treasures that you’ll get out of this I think. So you said take three cards – one two three – and when Phil says you “make it flow”, what we’re doing is we’re just arranging the cards in the order that we believe they fit, and you’ll see you can ask your people to do so and you can use this as an icebreaker for a meeting for any sort of you know improvement situation or a talk that you’re giving, you can use this as a great icebreaker for your teams and get them thinking about improvements before you delve into those things or any other meeting that you’re running and you just have your people take the three cards and read out the cards that they get.
Phil: Okay so I’ll go first – so Not Invented Here. Okay and could you just read that little description there David?
David: Not invented here, the tendency to rate our own business ideas as more successful than other people’s concepts. So it’s just hard for us to to rate other people’s ideas as better than our own, or take them on board even when sometimes they might be better. I think we’ve all been there but yeah that’s a really good one.
Phil: So an unusual mix this time to be fair. So this is a difficult one! So not invented here how do we make that consistent with the view to try and improve that concept?
David: So let’s find the cards that work around, that are similar.
Phil: Okay with this so let’s “make it repeatable”, even though it is a concept and almost the culture of thinking but if we can repeat and embed some form of consistency around that thinking we’ll make it repeatable –
David: – And that helps the not invented here.
Phil: I think so.
David: I’ve got this one, which I want to sort of bring into the mix as well and it’s the curse of knowledge. So once you have knowledge of a particular
subject it’s hard to imagine others not having that same knowledge and I
think I mean where where would we put that before or after not invented here?
Phil: I would put it after yeah.
David: Not invented here caused from the curse of knowledge, solved by making it repeatable in your teams, and then what else have you got?
Phil: To improve the repeatability make it visual.
David: Make it visual so people can clearly see what’s expected of them, that’s fantastic! Is that all yours? Phil’s done already. I’ve got two more – mastery which is when your team is able to be to working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill, it’s an intrinsic motivator and it actually motivates people more than money in some cases so working towards a worthy skill if you’ve put all of this in place then you’re working towards mastery, it’s more
of an intrinsic motivator than than money or gifts or bonuses or rewards in
many cases.
Phil: Yeah that could hover across quite a few to be honest. Leave it there but I think we leave it at the end because that’s pretty much to where we’re aspiring towards.
David: I like it! And lastly sales and satisfaction, as the effects of engagement. I don’t know if you can see that but companies in the top quartile of engagement achieved 10% higher customer satisfaction than companies in the lowest quartile of staff engagement,
Phil: Which leads into mastery because you’ve got autonomy and intrinsically motivated teams.
David: So your team mates are more engaged, they’re happy to come to work, they’re working on something that’s of value to them and now all of a sudden that impacts the sales and satisfaction of the company as well.
Phil: Yeah so you know you’ve got the – you started off with not invented here which is a sort of culture – a cultural waste in a way – you’ve then got the curse of knowledge as well which how would you interpret the curse of knowledge following that one?
David: In that people find it hard to see the value in other people’s ideas
above their own.
Phil: So this is the view together – so make it repeatable then make the thinking repeatable or make the culture repeatable – make the process repeatable – to provide the consistency.
David: And then we’re back into making the process visual, helps people work towards mastery continuously, brings in satisfaction. And see the way that
that evolved was that and this could go any way because all it is is a discussion around the way we think that it should flow and sometimes people play
it differently.
Phil: They do but I think that if you look at the real sort of standout aspects of this, is make it repeatable, make it visual, and then master it. I love it, that’s really good.
…Often isn’t laziness at all. It’s cognitive exhaustion. In other words, our brain gets tired.
Can you remember a time when you had a tough day at work? Maybe you were solving problems for your customers, which were long, difficult and varied, or maybe you were doing a report or analysis for your boss. And when you came home all you wanted to do is veg out in front of the television and not have to think any more. Your brain needed a rest.
Research has shown that when we’re working on things that require complex thought – problem solving, working around things, or deviating from our normal routine, it wears down our ability problem solve or think of complex things. So when people – whether they are your team or your customers – seem like they’re being lazy there’s a good chance you’ve just made their process too complex, and their brains are running out of steam.
It pays to make things simple and easy to use. Making things simple and easy to use means your team and your customers are more likely to do the thing you want, and do it more often.
Making things easy to use also helps people form habits around your product or service, as it’s easy to do and easy to come back to time and time again. And this is where Lean CX and the ease of use framework comes in. By reducing “waste” in a task – things like rework (having to redo something because of mistakes), waiting, not getting the right outcome, or having excessive hand-offs to many people or excessive steps, you are making things harder.
On the other hand, using Lean CX and making thing standard and repeatable, reducing the steps, making it impossible to make a mistake, making it visual so people know what to do first time, and checking in that people got what they wanted, all help make a process easier.
So I encourage you to think about the processes in your company, and how you can make them easier. The results you will see will be worth it.
If you’re not clear on something, how do you know what to do? In the moment, without trying things out or making mistakes, you don’t. And more often than not a company will blame the people, when in fact the real reason for mistakes is those people just aren’t clear on exactly what it is they have to do.
And here’s a fun fact: a recent study from Gallup Business Journal found more than 50% of U.S. employees aren’t clear on what is expected of them at work. Maybe it’s not so much “fun” as it is just a “fact” – especially if you’ve ever experienced it yourself. It’s like someone telling you to run faster but not telling you where you need to run to. Not having a clear objective, not having something to aim for or work towards can have a serious impact on the engagement in your team.
A clear objective was also one of the keys to improving results in executives by 35% in Albert Humphrey’s paper on SWOT analysis (being Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to a business). Just being clear on where you wanted people to head helped them improve.
If you’re navigating a ship or flying a plane, can you imagine not having a destination in mind? Well that’s the way most teams operate before working with Ease of Use and Lean CX – they simply run on whatever problem is most pressing at the moment and do their best to put out that immediate fire. They don’t look at where they’re actually heading.
So give your people clarity. Make sure they have a clear objective, know what is required, and know the steps to get there. It will have a huge impact on the engagement and profit of your teams.
…is often a situation problem. Have you ever had a really bad day – maybe your car breaks down, your boss yells at you, you break your watch and then someone asks you to do something and instead of helping out you yell at them to leave you alone? And they think “What a rotten guy!” when the reality is you would normally help, you were just having a bad day. It was a bad situation.
People tend to blame the person, instead of realizing that it’s the situation that is the real issue. If you were having a great day it would be easy to take on one more thing with a smile. But the situation made you cranky, and lowered your likelihood of helping as a result.
What looks like a people problem, is often a situation problem. This is one of the greatest lines from an excellent book – “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath. And they make an excellent point. If you change the situation, more often than not you change the people as well.
This is also where designing your work and your customer experience for Ease of Use comes in. If the work is easy to do for your teams – with no rework, no waiting, no searching, as few steps as possible, and the right result at the end, then there is a very good chance they’ll do it right and do it more often. The thing is, most people don’t really design their work at all, let alone get intentional about designing their work for ease of use.
Most leaders just let the work happen, and give some vague outcomes to their team to try and make it work. In reality they are trying to find the treasure without making a map.
And in most cases, it’s not your fault. The majority of people don’t know how to define difficult work in a way that reveals solutions to their problems. Having the right framework, in the form of Lean CX, makes it easy. By ensuring you have a clear outcome and a clear set of steps to get there, you are closer to getting the right result every time. But by reducing the steps to getting that outcome, ensuring your staff or people know what to do first time without having to ask, make it impossible to make a mistake, and check in to see if they are on the right track, you will be creating a process that is extremely easy to do and you will see the profit, productivity and engagement flow as a result.
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
