People + Process = Profit

PEOPLE

“You don’t build a business. You build people, and people build the business.” 

  Zig Ziglar

Ever since I read about E=mc2 in School, I had told myself back then that one day, I shall work out a relevant formula, which I shall share with the world. So here it is folks, over to you, my 3Ps. “People + Process = Profit”

We live in a world which assesses everyone and everything by balance sheets, has no time and space for patience and shall choose profit over people in a heartless beat. But we should pause and ponder that the genesis of successful Organizations comes with usually one visionary founder, joined hands by a team of dedicated individuals guided by well thought processes. Let us all strive for legacy not headlines, so follow the right path inspiring the rest to follow us and to be constantly reminded of, that success can’t be achieved without good people and great processes. 

We have already seen tons of paperwork spewed out in the past few decades on the dilemma of whether we should be Employee (People) Centric or Customer Centric?

This is not even worthy of a debate according to me, because if you take care of your Employees, surely, they shall take care of your Business. But sadly, all our efforts usually are focused on the customer experience, which I don’t deny for you to do, but don’t disillusion your Most Valuable Resource = Employees, by not giving their wellbeing and growth enough thought.

Here are five reasons your Employees are more important to your success than your customers are:

1.     Every Employee on your team has influence over some or all of your customer relationships. One disenchanted Employee will shrink your ability to serve customers well, but lots of unhappy human touchpoints will make it virtually impossible for you to succeed. Whatever amount of time and energy you dedicate to Sales, Marketing and Customer Engagement, invest even more in keeping your team equipped, informed and ready to shine.

2.     A toxic culture spreads its bad energy well beyond your Company walls into the community. Once your Employer Brand is hurt by poor Employee sentiment and your Company becomes infamous as a toxic workplace, you will have lost a critical competitive advantage that could have powered your growth. (Check your Glassdoor rating to see what Employees and ex-Employees say about you and work on the areas of concern) 

3.     Your Employees have powerful energy to bring to your organization, if you trust them enough to tap that fuel source. If you are someone who swear by job descriptions and believe that your Employees are merely responsible for fulfilling the tasks mandated by their job descriptions, you are shooting too low and wasting time and money. If you empower your Employees to use their capable brains and hearts on the job, you will see them create breakthrough solutions, collaborate and innovate far beyond what you could have ever imagined. You will have created tremendous value for your Company out of thin air, just by trusting yourself enough to trust the people you hire.

4.     Your Employees are the only real connection between a CEO and their Leadership Team at the top of an organization, and the customers in the real world. If that connection is compromised because the top Manager don't trust their Employees enough to listen to them, the leadership team will lose its customers and competitors will swoop in to take advantage of the situation. Listen to your Employees, always.

5.     Every good thing that you hope to accomplish in your Company will be powered by the same energy source, the commitment and talent of your Employees. You cannot activate that energy source if your Employees are frustrated and underappreciated. When your culture is in danger, you should have no higher priority than to open up communication channels and put things right before it’s too late.

Manager pretend that Customers are Gold while Employees are Silver, hence disposable and replaceable cogs in the machinery. How wrong they are! When you are in sync with your Employees, your Organization will be nimbler and shall be more agile and responsive to changes in the market. The work will be easier, more satisfying and you won't run into fractured Employee relations. Fear is expensive, and Fear-Based Management left over from the Machine Age has no place in the new-Millennials dominated workplace. 

Try trust instead. When you adopt trust as a core leadership philosophy, you will see what a powerful fuel source it is, and your Organization shall never have to look back again.

What is the defining contribution of a Great Manager, when it comes to People Management? They boost the engagement levels of the people around them. According to a Gallup research, only 28% of U.S. Employees are engaged, or are actively pursuing top performance on behalf of their Organizations, and Gallup studies show that this has a direct impact on the bottom line. Engaged Employees lead to engaged customers, who in turn drive a Company’s growth, long term profitability, and stock price. 

So, what distinguishes Manager who not only retain valuable Employees but, by boosting engagement, also extract their full value? The answer lies in rejecting conventional wisdom for out of the box thinking, in four core areas of managing people: selection, expectation setting, motivation, and development. 

Selection 

Most Manager select Employees according to the skills needed for the role, but great Manager choose people for their talent. Talent is a recurrent pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior and accounts for the better results produced when compared to those with the same skills and training. Talent is not abundantly present, yet rejected over experience and qualifications, and people whose natural talents fit their role are a rare and valuable commodity who needs to be identified and onboarded.

Great Manager resist the temptation to hire people whose skills are a good match for how a job is already configured; instead, they seek those whose talent will redefine how the job is done. Progress is made by such people and not the conformists who just perpetuate the tradition of monotonous mediocrity.

 Expectation setting 

Conventional wisdom says Manager should lay down the steps that Employees need to take to accomplish a specific activity. But great Manager rather define the outcomes they seek and let each team member have the freedom to use their individual approach to achieve them. For example, while great Manager do not usually demand a sequence of steps to be taken, they do provide specific direction when accuracy or safety is paramount, or when a Company or industry standard is at stake. But even then, they don’t let the steps take priority over outcome. Micromanagement only stifles great talent, paving way for either listless performance or eventual attrition. Reminds me of Steve Jobs who talked about the logic of hiring smart people was not to tell them what to do, but so they can tell us what to do.

Motivation 

Conventional wisdom says that “Anybody can be anything they want to be,” and thus Manager are trigger happy in shooting down their ward’s weaknesses as the only way they can be what they wish to be. This leads to cringing Reviews and Improvement Plans that focus on negatives— where the emphasis is making the person devoid of ugly identifiers.

In contrast, great Manager emphasize the development and strengthening of their subordinates’ unique strengths so as to help further their talent, while finding strategies to offset their weaknesses. The key here is to have a strategy to extract more advantage out of what people already do well, and not be constantly berating them for their shortcomings.

Development 

Conventional Manager rate the person and develop the performance; great Manager rate the performance and develop the person—they realize that every person is different and should be handled with a strategy uniquely tailored for them.

Most companies view promotion as the natural path of rewarding success. But is that always the right course? No, because success in one role does not necessarily guarantee success in an elevated role, if it doesn’t suit the individual in question, or maybe he isn’t equipped yet with all arrows in his quiver to handle the new responsibility.

Great Manager seek the right fit for a person’s talent, they work to see that he is suitably rewarded for his performance, which in every case is not a simple vanilla promotion and they endeavor to ensure that his talent is developed through incrementally more challenging and meaningful assignments. 

PROCESS

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.”

W. Edward Deming

Processes and Systems when in place, ensure functions are actioned seamlessly and products, services or experiences are delivered on time and turn out to be beyond expectations. But we should remember one thing, that no system is etched in stone and Organizations need to be agile and stepping up to the demands of current times and adapt and adopt relevant practices to stay relevant. This is the biggest challenge in Organizations, where the founding fathers sometime find it to be nothing less than sacrilege, when any amendment is sought to a process. They swear by their grey hair and right over the Company and dissuade the change only to watch from their graves years later, that what they build with passion and dedication, lay beside them buried by the competition.

The entire science behind BPM (Business Process Management) lies on the bedrock that nothing gets done right, if right processes are not in place. The benefits of applying this are immense and invaluable and some of them are as under:

·      Reduce costs by eliminating redundancies, identifying quality control issues, and highlighting excessive materials and labor costs.

·      It can help businesses to recognize and respond to new customer demands by making customer centric approach a priority over just focusing on productivity demands. This leads to a solution based rather than a problem-solving DNA, whilst also pushes the team higher on the innovation ladder.

·      BPM leads to scrapping old redundant processes and business models and bringing in the new ones to match today’s times and keeping Companies relevant.

·      It keeps Organizations competitive. When your processes are repetitive and inefficient, they become filled with waste, which means you don’t have time to focus on research and development, or other steps that make your Company more capable to stave off the competition. 

·      It makes it easy to retain customers by improving metrics such as productivity and innovation, which leads to a better customer experience. We should keep in mind that a poor customer experience is responsible for 67% of customer attrition.

·      BPM can help standardizing the processes, which in turn lead to easier improvement opportunity due to documentation of process maps, easier onboarding of human resource by teaching them these well laid down processes.

·      It leads to cross departmental collaboration and this happens in two ways. First, during the process mapping and standardization phase, different departments and teams must communicate with one another. They must identify processes that are shared, determine where redundancies exist, and learn where shared information and expertise may be beneficial. Next, this collaboration is fostered moving forward through joint interactions on the strategy for the future as Business Process Management continues to be implemented.

·      It increases safety, security and compliance by increasing awareness of the stakeholders and updating them of any changes down the line. It reduces liability concerns significantly.

PROFIT

“Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.” 

Yvon Chouinard 

In the confluence of Motivated People and updated Processes, lies the mantra of profit, which all of us are in search for, many in vain, as they search in all the wrong places. Next time you want to succeed in life, you know where to look for, so go on, look no further!

Have people in your team who would take a bullet for the cause, fire always into the bullseye and create and maintain processes that become the industry Gold Standard.

If God whispered in your ears, “I shall give you only one of them” (between People and Process), what shall you choose, please share your thoughts in the comments section.