Leadership Card 31 – Impossible To Make A Mistake

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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.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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