Lessons from 2022

Well, it is the time of year again where all the social media influencers explain how amazing their 2022 year was, what will happen in 2023, and how we can learn from their successes.?

Well, for me it is a time to decompress and hope to survive another year!

What a wild ride!?Due to a management transition, I took over responsibility for a young company in turmoil.?The company had suffered from years of dysfunctional management, a lack of focus on operations, and a very poor technology stack.?These issues manifested themselves into lawsuits, issues with regulators, staff productivity, retaining talent, and employee morale.

As if that was not bad enough, it got worse.?The macro-economic environment began to change from the most favorable in our industry’s history to the most challenging for our young company’s existence.?As you can imagine, I would have preferred to focus on internal operations without the headwinds from the macro economy.?Thanks Obama!

Have you ever tried to repair a car while driving down the interstate??I have.?And I’ve learned it is quite challenging to rebuild a company while operating a legacy business.?

Not fun.

But I’ve learned a lot—both about things I wanted to learn about and things that I hope I never have to talk about again.?

Here are my personal takeaways from the year.

At Least Try The Wheel Before Reinventing

This year, I have noticed the tendency of many individuals to try to take a novel approach before going to the tried-and-true methods.?I am not a fan of rules of thumb or doing things just because they have always been done that way.?But!?Businesses exist as complex adaptive systems.?If there is a common way to approach an industry or process, that is probably a good place to start.?For example, do not waste time trying to invent a new organizational chart—just copy the organizational chart out of a management textbook!?Once we have the standard way implemented, now that is the time to ask questions and work from first principles.?But sometimes copying others is the fastest way to start iterating.

I Hate Operational Debt

In my prior role, I thought a lot about technology debt.?In my current role, I have inherited more types of debt than I ever considered previously.?I am just going to refer to it all as operational debt.?For example, we are in the business of lending money to people who are less likely to pay it back.?As a result, we have a lot of customer communications that must occur.?These communications are governed by law and need to be accurate.?But at our company, it looks like we have never considered simple items like using mail merge to fill out letters.?I was horrified when I saw staff using their two monitors to look at data in one screen and hand fill it into forms and letters in a Word document on the other screen.?Not even a copy and paste!

This lack of a focus on operations really hurts our ability to move quickly.?One practice that is common across all business, but was particularly acute in ours, is reinventing the wheel.?Instead of using the systems we pay for, there are countless spreadsheets, PDFs, and other documents relied on to conduct business.?(Un)surprisingly, no one in the company can even find these critical documents half the time!?Some processes that have existed for years simply did not need to exist if we used the system appropriately.?Think of all the wasted time and capacity!

The lesson from all this is simple: strive for everything related to a process to be in a single system.?If you do not think the system can do what you need, ask the vendor’s most expensive consultant before creating a spreadsheet to accomplish the goal.?And if the system can’t do it, find a system that can.?Simple.?But difficult.

Do Not Reason with Fear

Regardless of whether it is the newest employee or the owner of the company, I have been surprised by how much decision making is driven by fear.?Fear of being fired.?Fear of harmed reputations.?Fear of change.?When people are overwhelmed with emotions like fear, tunnel vision creeps in.?I spent far too much effort this year trying to communicate based on “facts” only to find out the person was too afraid to listen.?As the year has progressed, I’ve gotten better spotting when I’m dealing with someone overwhelmed by emotions.?In those situations, I’ve realized the first step is to calm the situation as much as possible.?Then proceed to talk about the facts.

Reverse Perspective

I’ve spent a lot of time this year reading, watching, and listening on how to lead and manage teams effectively.?Because of all the crises in 2022, I have put very little of this to practice—hopefully you’ll see some learnings in my 2023 post!?

But I have learned a thing or two.?And one is to force myself constantly to take the opposite perspective.?For example, it is very easy to forget the perspective of an employee.??If an employee approaches me in my office about a payroll issue, this seems spur of the moment to me.?However, the employee has spent weeks thinking about the topic and talking to others—such as their husband or wife—to prepare for the conversation.?Understanding this difference in perception is key to eliminating miscommunications.?This video really helped me understand this underappreciated dynamic of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7tr3IlH5Ro?

If you want to learn the lesson I did, get it straight from the source in the video above.

Bad Team Members

Bad team members are a cancer and need to be eliminated immediately.?In a small company, it is difficult to eliminate bad team members since there is often a lack of overlap in duties among staff.?It is especially hard if the business is run by what is in people’s heads (as opposed to documentation!).

Regardless, document issues and remove people quickly.?This requires more formal HR practices than our company had previously, but it is a small price to pay to keep the team healthy.?I now document everything through memos or contemporaneous emails.?At the end of the day, I’d rather deal with a lawsuit than keep a bad team member around for any longer than is necessary to document the issue.

Unlike most people I have interacted with, I take responsibility for everything.?It is easy for me to blame myself for a team member not performing well.?But I have learned that I need to accept I cannot help everyone.?I should only blame myself for not replacing the person with an employee I am skilled enough to coach.

Disagreement Agreements

I have had to deal with litigation in 2022.?And one thing is crystal clear—the time to handle disagreements is when everyone is getting along.?I heard this quote a long time ago that I really internalized this year: “You should view every agreement as a disagreement because its most important function is to tell you what happens and what the options are if there’s a disagreement.”

Every contract I sign now is from the perspective of what do I want this to say if I am unhappy with the relationship 6 months from now.?And I happily pay lawyers to review these contracts, because it saves me a ton of headaches in the long run.?The key is to find lawyers who “get it” and are not just speaking legal jargon to increase the billable hours.?Look for lawyers who bill you more because they researched the issue.?Avoid experts who immediately answer from their gut.

Bystanders

Related to bad team members, I learned to keep my social circle healthy.?This was the second worst year of my professional career.?The only reason it was not the worst is because I was largely in control of fixing the issues.?What a little empowerment can do to perception!

And while I’ve been very stressed, unpleasant, and busy this year trying to have a better 2023, there have been people who have clearly been supporting me despite the difficulty.?And there are others who clearly are not interested in helping me during this tough time and have made my life more difficult.?It has been a valuable lesson to learn which of the people on this journey with me are truly friends trying to help me survive and improve!?I won’t forget those who were very supportive through this process.

How To Be a Good Employee

Regardless of the situation, my superiors almost always ask what it would take to keep me on the team.?And I have never understood this.?From my point of view, all I do is the job I have been hired to do.?I never understood what I was doing differently from my peers.?That changed this year!

If you want to be a good employee, it is simple.?Take the assigned tasks as objectives to be accomplished, not items to knock off a checklist.?Do what is asked, but constantly think about a way to do it better, faster, or eliminate the task altogether.?I now use a simple test for meeting this standard:?how much better will a future employee perform at this job because of the changes I made?

For example, if your job involves creating PowerPoint decks for investors.?There are several levels to transforming a job.?The lowest level is reformatting a previously existing graph or adding new charts.?This is what every employee does.

The next level would be finding a tool like Macabacus to automate the links from Excel to Powerpoint, saving yourself and all teammates time.?In prior jobs, I took tasks that took ~20 hours a month and automated them with Excel and Macabus to take 30 seconds.?This is a transformative change, but it still just improves the process and likely reduces errors. The final work product will look the same.

The highest level would be showing the team how to use Canva and Macabacus to generate beautiful looking, automatically generated pitch decks.?This is great, because not only is the task more efficient, but the final work product looks much more professional.?I have never seen a PowerPoint made in my prior jobs that comes close to even the most basic Canva template. And those Canva templates often take the same or less time!?

But remember! The tasks must get completed too.??Of course, do what the boss asks—like creating a normal PowerPoint—but then also show them an alternative that they cannot say no to.?

And realize bosses are great at not wanting to change, so do not get discouraged!?

In our example, I would bet most bosses would not want to use Canva because of fear (and we know how to deal with that now!).? The boss is afraid that if the employee leaves, the boss will not be able to continue the process.?Anticipate these fears and eliminate them before the pitch!

The Law of the Lid

Since I’ve historically taken on work tasks and independently figured out how to accomplish the goal and improve the process, I never quite understood what my bosses did all day.?In many of my jobs, I’ve had to speak to my boss only a couple of times a month, because I knew the objectives and was self-directed enough to accomplish the goal.?I would simply reach out when I needed the boss’s input on anything.?And I found this way a key to my productivity—less time meeting and talking, more time executing and iterating.

However, I have learned not everyone is as self-directed as myself.?In learning about leadership, I came across the law of the lid: https://www.johnmaxwell.com/blog/the-law-of-the-lid/.?This essentially states that moderately improving the effectiveness of a team produces a higher output than doubling the effectiveness of a single individual.

I’ve found that people learn virtually nothing when I tell them what to do.?Instead, I have started to rely on side-by-side training on what I refer to as work meta skills.?These are practices that are independent of the work, such as: time management, organization, coding practices, or spreadsheet management.?I show the employee exactly how I would approach the situation for a few sessions.?After that, I then have the employee do the work with my supervision and commentary.?Finally, I step away and observe if the practices are still occurring without my involvement.

The goal is to train the employee on whatever area will help improve their productivity.?A common area I have been training people on is time management and task organization.?Since there is so much to do to fix the operations of our company, staff members have gotten overwhelmed on understanding what to work on and when.?In these situations, we will plan the day together first thing in the morning.?After we do this together over the course of several weeks, I remove myself from the process and observe if the individual is still performing.?I have been amazed at the increased productivity from team members by teaching them these meta skills of work.?

And this increased productivity occurs even when I do not understand what the employee does!?I have found it is a simple way to pair my strengths with the employee’s subject matter expertise.

Unfortunately, I have not found a way to scale this practice yet, but I have been amazed at how much more the team accomplishes with a little mentoring.