How To Choose Between Two Or More Options That Are Both Right
September 22, 2020
Fireside chat: Scott McKay
October 13, 2020
I’ve just finished a session with a group, they all got fairly small businesses, sort of 10 people or less and what they were reflecting back to me and needing help on was this idea of right now they’ve all got pressures in their business and they’re all trying to either meet, deal with problems in the back end of the business or they’ve got problems with demand and customers at the front end of their business.
You know, we’re a little bit stressed and they felt like that was then permeating out into how they were dealing with their team and their staff. I don’t know if you’ve got feelings that way or you’ve got the same problem. I want to chat with you guys through what I talk through with them. And I felt like this was important because you know how in a business you’ve got momentum. You really kind of moving forward and things are going well or you feel like you’re stuck. I feel like this was one of the really important components to them feeling a bit stuck and feeling like the momentum wasn’t great. I think the other component to this is if there’s literally people like beside you, around you that aren’t engaged, like it just brings everything down.
The Four F Method
So I just wanted to talk this through. The first idea here is if you think about what the problem is, one of the guys, the business owners I talk to, articulated it like this, which is that most of us follow the Four F method. And the Four F method is follow up, follow up, follow up, and then f**k it, I’ll do it myself.
What he was kind of saying was there was a lot of this right now, and people are feeling really impatient and probably mostly because of what’s going on in their lives. I still don’t think that’s the right way for this to work and I’ll explain why.
As a leader of a team, what you’re trying to do is create capacity at your back end to serve clients. So, most of all, what you’ve got in your mind is an outcome here, and the outcome for some of you is about obviously a dollar figure, especially if you’re a public business you’ve got to be accountable at some level to that, you’ve got to manage some costs, but you’re also looking at making impact or a difference to that customer, whoever that is.
For a lot of people, while they’re in business it’s not just for dollars and cost, it’s also for that impact, that that difference that they make. So typically what happens with the business is you get to a point where you realise that you as the owner can’t be the CFO, the CEO, the CMO, the CTO. And you kind of end up playing all those roles and you spread too thin and nothing gets done perfectly. And what happens is that, first of all, your costs go up.
But that experience your customers impact, that eventually impacts dollars. And for business, dollars is like oxygen. So, what we do then is we realise that we can’t do it all ourselves, so we start to build a bit of a collective, like a bit of a team, and we start to align things out to people.
Delegate
Now, if you’re going to think of what you’re going to assign to people, I would think about three things:
- Strengths, yours and theirs
- Most valuable things to the clients and customers
- Keeping them to role
So, the more that they’ve got a clear sense of what their role is, what their strengths and your strengths are and value. Those are the three things that can help you decide which things or how to delegate things individually and also set those collective goals.
Once you’ve decided on what those are. You obviously want a higher will, but at the moment, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to manage the team virtually so that they’re clear on what the outcome looks like and they’re able to deliver them.So, I would think about a framework of three things and I would probably do a meeting, about a week and, meeting on a Monday follow up on a Friday or a Thursday virtually.
And then I would use a mechanism like WhatsApp group or text SMS, or it could be slack or one of those systems for all the touch points on the output of their work and giving feedback through the week. Some of you are doing that already, but a great way to do that virtually.
Now The What
That’s the How. Now the What – are the three things you need to really describe to people when you give them something individually to do? First one is why this is important? So we want to make sure that we explain from the customer experience point of view what they’re working in fits in.
So, things like, what if you’re in this position, why is a bit you’re working on and why is it important? So not what you want the output to look like because that takes away any of their freedom and discretion around how to do it. But I would describe what you want the outcome to be after that work has been completed. So, they’ve got some freedom and discretion to decide on it themselves and then how you do that is that you then use the feedback mechanism to give them that feedback during the week. So that’s how I would do that virtually right now.
Summary
I think a lot of people are getting into the Four F framework at the moment which is sucking a bunch of their time and you know it’s causing a bunch of frustration because for most people they want to get a result in their business, they want to serve customers and things are tough. If you’re spread way too thin you want to start building a team system so that you can increase capacity at the back end and serve clients better.
Just wanted to share with you this way of virtually managing in team right now which I’m sure you know a lot of you put elements of this in place but thought might be useful around the why, the what, and the how, and the follow up.
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