Strategic Discipline Blog

What makes people hate their jobs? What makes them non-productive, complaint-happy zombies? 

Answer: Recurring problems and hassles. 

Last blog Discover Leading Indicators in Weekly Meetings we discussed how the customer and employee feedback segment of your weekly meeting is a fountain for leading indicators that advance or impede your growth.

Mistakes, problems or issues that recur over and over, never getting fixed demoralize your employees!

Recurring problems eat up as much as 40% of an average employee’s time!  That’s because a problem is rarely just one person’s problem. The person who discovers, or takes ownership of the issue will have to speak to several people.  One conversation won’t solve the issue, so were talking about multiple discussions, multiple people. Then there’s solving the issue. Sometimes even putting a band aid on the problem brings progress to a screeching halt.  Most recurring problems stay that way because no one accepts responsibility.  So the issues repeat over and over! 

If you’re a customer these recurring issues and problems are worse, except that they don’t have to hang around for them.  Customers simply leave!

A weekly meeting with customer and employee feedback is critical to gather this type of information.  Issues then need to be discussed in collective intelligence if they merit the leadership team’s involvement.  If not the cascading weekly meeting segment of a department or team needs to work to solve them in the collective intelligence portion of their meeting.

In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits Verne Harnish reveals how Michael Dell understood the concept of compounding.  He knew that if you solve just one percent of your problems or make a one percent improvement in your systems or processes each week, you’ll gain greater and greater yields from the solutions each passing year.  If you aim to solve too many problems you can demotivate yourself and your team, making the Collective Intelligence process a hassle in itself.

Just as complaints are opportunities, employee problems and issues are too!  Imagine the progress you can make by wrestling one issue a week to the ground, solving it and improving your business even by just 1% a week.  Imagine the improvement in your employee’s performance and morale if instead of spending 40% of their time on recurring issues they now spend 30 - 35%.

In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish notes there are 23 million firms in the US yet only 4% ever exceed $1M in revenue.  Why?  We’ll explore the three barriers to growth next blog.