The Disappearing Boss - Issue 26

In this issue, we're still working through the ramifications of feedback you've collected from your customers, team, regulator and systems.

Only this time, it gets really interesting because we're talking about Roles and people.

Roles

First, let's go though what I mean by a Role.

A Role is a part played in a performance by a person. It's defined by what the Role does during the performance, and by the parts of the customer experience they are responsible for delivering.

Here's an example from one of my clients. It's the definition of the Ship's Role in a Sail Cargo Voyage Co-op:

It covers what the Ship does as part of a Voyage, what it is responsible for, and the Activities it runs in order to achieve that.

What it doesn't specify is how exactly the people playing the Role do that, nor the skills and competencies they are expected to possess in order to be able to do it. Those are taken for granted. What matters is that responsibilities are taken and the desired outcomes are delivered.

The great thing about using Roles rather than job descriptions is that they allow great flexibility in resourcing.

One person can play many Roles. A given Role can be played by many people.

Like acting, any Role can be stepped into simply by taking up the mask and putting it on.

There will be stars and understudies but in essence anyone trained to play a Role can play it. And by watching others play, a newcomer can learn enough about a Role to take it up as a kind of apprentice too, because everyone is practicing, all the time.

Once defined, a Role can easily be handed off to someone outside the business or replicated to increase internal capacity.

At the same time, focusing on the 'what' of a Role, rather than the 'how', leaves things to certain extent open, allowing every actor to bring their own personality to the performance and enabling them to respond to the unknown with the kind of creativity, flair and inspiration, that keeps your customer experience memorable and worth coming back for again and again.

In my Disappearing Boss programme, Roles are defined early on, once you have fully articulated your Promise of Value, and ideally, in terms of whatever Metaphor we've found to sum up the relationship between your business and its customers.

The reason for this is that the Role name acts as a reminder for the person playing it what they are really here to do - to make and/or keep your Promise to the customer in front of them.

For example, a dance class organiser is the Host, co-ordinating Venue, Partners and Teacher to be ready for Guests at their weekly ball. A cattery owner is a Hotelier, welcoming feline Guests to their Luxury Suites, to enjoy a Holiday while their owners are away. A Flight Dynamics Officer takes monthly accounting information from their client on a mission, and uses it to generate and send useful information that will keep the client on the right trajectory to reach their destination safely.

As a rule of thumb, you shouldn't need more than half a dozen Roles.

Part of the point of having a Score is to enable individuals to take responsibility for significant parts of the Share Promise/Keep Promise process, if not all of it.

After all, you're not building a pin-factory, you're enabling human beings to create exceptional experiences for other human beings, and seeing a case or project through from beginning to end is very satisfying – both for the person doing it, and for the client on the other side. It also means that when one person is on holiday, ill or simply unavailable, the client needn’t feel the difference.

Adjusting Roles

It's possible that you will adjust one of more Roles as a result of adjusting your Score, or creating a new part of the Score to cover a new Package. This might mean adding more things to the 'I Do' list, and or additions to the 'Responsible For' list. It may even involve creating a brand new Role responsible for running a new part of the Score.

So far, so easy.

Now for the hard part:

People

There are two key principles to keep in mind here:

1. It's people that bring your Promise to life for your customers. Whether they do that remotely or face to face, in real time or asynchronously. Even if they do it through the medium of AI, their creativity, ingenuity, humour, compassion, care and imagination- their humanity - is what the human beings you serve come to you for.
2. Your Customer Experience Score and the business systems that implement it are there to support your people to deliver on your business promises as humans. They play your Score, it doesn't play them.

So, you won't find me talking here about how to 'adjust' your people, but in the spirit of responsible autonomy (anarchy even), how to enable them to find their best place in your orchestra.

That doesn't involve reducing them to a list of skills and competencies either.

In the words of John Ferriola, I'd say if you "Hire for attitude, train for aptitude", you won't go far wrong.

You need your people to share your core values and behaviours. You need them to believe in what the business is here to do for the people it serves. Beyond that, having a Customer Experience Score in place means you can train them to run any part of it. Or all of it. Depending on their knowledge, experience preferences, worldview and ambitions.

You can find some of these out before you hire, or as part of putting your Score together.

The 5 Voices framework is useful for capturing worldviews, The Language and Behaviour Profile is excellent for discovering motivations and working style. These will give you and them an idea of which Roles might best fit an individual, and if you're recruiting for a particular Role, they can help you attract the right profile.

I think in the end, though, the most useful way to allocate people to Roles, is by negotiation.

I came across this idea from Vaughn Tan, in his paper "Using Negotiated Joining to Construct and Fill Open-ended Roles in Elite Culinary Groups".

In a nutshell, instread of recruiting new team members against an extensive checklist of skills, competencies and attributes, these elite teams (incumbents) select a likely-looking candidate (aspirant) and find out whether and how they can best work together by actually doing it for a provisional period.

During this time, the aspirant is expected to understand the Role and the Activities it is responsible for, and to demonstrate strengths in enough of these Responsibilities to make them worth employing. They may even bring new strengths to the Role, inspiring adjustments to the Role, maybe even a new Role altogether.

On the other side, incumbents are expected to understand and test the strengths of the aspirant and recognise when one or more of their own Responsibilities is superseded, or a completely new Role has been created.

Only when the negotiation is satisfactory to both sides does membership become formal. In this way both sides negotiate coming together to form a new, reconfigured team.

Having the Customer Experience Score in place makes this less risky than it might seem, since everyone knows 'the least that must happen'. Plus, everyone involved is 'responsibly autonomous' - they have the authority to act, and responsibility for the outcomes.

It seems to me that this kind of approach would allow individuals to negotiate how they can best contribute to the delivery of the company's Promise of Value, not just when they join, but throughout their career with the company, as they grow and develop. It would certainly be more meaningful than most performance appraisals.

I'd also use it to ensure that everyone knows more or less everything about the Customer Experience Score, giving flexibility and resilience to the organisation while leaving plenty of room for evolution.

Because, after all, the Discipline is there to make Daring possible.

Thanks, as always for reading.

And that's it, we've been once around the Promise System.

The question is, where next?*

That's where you can help.

Let me know if there's anything you want to revisit. Ask me questions, or just tell me I'm mad, and not to bother.

*I have some ideas of course, this time around about implementing your Customer Expereince Score. But I'd rather be driven by you.

Cheers,