Are you Essential?

This is a question worth asking yourself periodically.

From time to time we're all guilty of getting into a rut at work - slogging through paperwork, handling routine requests. In most companies, what we do is necessary, but are we essential?

Essential implies belonging to the very nature of a thing and therefore being incapable of removal without destroying the thing itself or its character

What are you bringing to your job that no one else could? Attitude? Efficiency? Ideas? Execution? How vital are you to your company?

Would your fellow employees vote you to the company All Star team?

Better to ask (and answer) this question for yourself, than have someone ask it for you.

The Benefits of a Smaller Company

Thanks to Seth Godin for posting a link to this video, which illustrates the problems of "group think" in larger companies. Not unlike Dilbert cartoons, this video parody struck a little too close to home.

It's what happens when the journey becomes the destination - when work activity trumps results.

Enjoy.

Waste

I've been spending more and more of my time recently looking at reducing process waste.

Once you begin looking for waste, you begin to see it everywhere.

It's like buying a new car. You only notice how many other people are driving YOUR model after you've taken delivery!

In my search for waste (process improvement) I'm involved in departmental projects throughout the company. And I've discovered that my I.T. department is not immune.

If I could magically undo some of our previous practices, I'd start by reducing the I.T. peripheral "clutter".

No more dual monitors.
No more personal printers.
No more PC speakers.
Fewer docking stations.
No more projectors.

We've all heard the arguments FOR all this stuff. I need dual monitors for productivity enhancement. Really? How many more sales will you be delivering if I get you that second monitor? Will you be completing projects faster? How much faster? Will you communicate better? How will we measure this?

Once the first dual monitor shows up, its not productivity that spawns the next one and the next one. It's generally a status issue.

The same holds for personal printers. While everyone knows that printers are idle 99% of the time, it seems like everyone has to have one sitting on their desk. God forbid we should have to walk 30 feet to a high speed network printer!

Consider the walk a printing deterrent. Consider it part of the company health plan.

Sometimes the argument is that we need a personal printer for "sensitive" documents.

Print sensitive documents? As soon as a document is printed, you've virtually given up all security control, unless you immediately shred it or lock it away somewhere. Printing is about the LEAST secure activity you can do. Better to leave the document hidden or password protected on the network than to print it! And think of the waste!

1. Unique printer cartridges require you to keep a wide variety in stock or risk continually ordering unique replacements.
2. It means having to "learn" the quirks of several dozen printer types.
3. It means supplying paper. Filing paper. Shredding paper. Discarding paper. Waste. Waste. Waste.
4. Filing storage (cabinets, floor space, key control, archiving process, off site storage, archival rotation and destruction).

And don't get me started on PC speakers.

There are few things more annoying than listening to a cubemate's latest YouTube selection. These days we can all purchase headphones for less money and greater privacy!

Docking stations do serve a useful purpose - if the laptop travels frequently. But in many cases, docking stations are installed in case a person has to travel. A quick walk around our facility at the end of a workday will demonstrate the point. Laptops sitting in docking stations. Or docking stations allocated to people who seldom travel. And in our company if you have a personal PC at home, you don't need to take your laptop from work to get secure access to your business files.

I'm not immune to wasteful practices. We recently had a projector bulb fail. If you've ever had to replace one, you know they can be expensive - around $350. And they never seem to last as long as the manufacturer says they should. One of my guys asked me to consider a large flat screen TV/monitor. I prefer the resolution better. They install neatly on a wall and they have a longer life than projectors seem to. Larger up front investment (maybe) but better value over the life of the device.

I used to work for a manager who could tell how efficiently a company was run by the cleanliness and organisation of the warehouse. A neat and quiet warehouse indicated to him, that operations were well organized and efficient.

I take the same measure by walking around the office area and counting PC and network peripherals.

(Full disclosure: I may be a freak of nature. My desk is completely empty except for one small pile of papers (mostly handwritten notes to myself) and my laptop.

No docking station. No additional monitor. No personal printer. No in/out box).

It wasn't always that way for me. In previous positions I was comforted by the piles of paper, the unread industry magazines, the overflowing in box. It wasn't necessary. it was just a habit.

It's amazing how execution can improve when you strip away the "peripheral creature comforts".

And you'll enjoy the cost savings too.

Leadership Presentation

I had the priviledge of speaking to a friend's MBA class recently. Here's the presentation I gave.

Capturing Tribal Knowledge

Ancient civilizations passed along tribal knowledge in a variety of ways - through storytelling, apprenticeships, rites of passage.

Some documented their history and beliefs in hieroglyphs or cave drawings or in sculpture.

Rituals were extremely important.

In ancient times, sharing knowledge was essential for survival.

In modern times, it seems we've lost the habit of sharing. Perhaps we don't see it as essential to our survival anymore.

After all, if we want food, we go to the grocery store. Want it prepared? Go to the Drive Thru at McDonalds. If we need shelter, we rent an apartment or buy a house. Need transportation? There are a dozen car dealerships within 10 miles.

The price we pay for convenience, is that we've lost our skills at capturing tribal knowledge. Skills learned within business tend to stay in our heads. We aren't taught on the job anymore, we learn on the job. The wisdom of the skilled craftsman isn't shared like it once was.

And we're all the worse for it. As our population ages, many businesses are facing the growing threat of losing their "tribal knowledge". The most experienced employees, who have long contributed to the company's success through their individual contributions, have never bothered to share their knowledge with others. In some companies, sharing meant losing power, leverage or stature and so it was actually discouraged.

So how do we go about capturing our tribal knowledge?

Start by starting. Recognize the need. Conceptualize the business benefits. Make it a priority. Implement a sharing tool and develop a sharing culture. Position sharing as a win/win strategy rather than a zero sum game.

Corporate intranets have tried to serve this purpose, but many fall short. Intranets are used like the Yellow Pages. They're there if you need them. But many times they're like a one way street - a reference tool. True collaboration requires that everyone contribute to communal knowledge. Effective intranets facilitate a two way dialogue. Ideas are gleaned from every corner of the company and are surfaced for discussion and evaluation by all.

For some, this is a painful endeavor. Documenting ideas, participating in discussion boards, blogging are all time consuming efforts. It is so much easier to pick up the phone and tell someone your opinion. But the problem with this is the fact that you're telling someONE. This process is inefficient and in larger organizations, one to one communication is never captured in the collective conscience.

Here are a few suggestions to try to engage your team in capturing tribal knowledge.

Provide an intranet where everyone can contribute. Co-locate access to business applications, reporting tools, news and discussion.

Position your intranet as the "Town Square" - the intersection of all your company's activities - work, play, recognition (parades), initiatives and news.

Encourage people to visit. Where you used to communicate via mass email, instead, write a blog post and email the link. Instead of printing and distributing reports. Create a framework where project participants update tasks and projects in real time. Then make it easy for anyone in the company to be easily informed (custom email alerts, RSS feeds etc).

Develop rich, plentiful, interesting and essential content.

Avoid, where possible, content approval management routines. This places publishing burden on some individuals and discourages the capturing of spontaneous ideas.

Nurture, coax, encourage. You're trying to create a new corporate habit. It will take some time.

But the journey will be worth it!

Starters vs. Closers

Are you a Starter or a Closer?

Starters

1. Arrive at work with no set goals for the day. You would like to get something done, but don't have a plan.
2. Spend most days adjusting to the time demands of others. Your agenda is set for you, not by you.
3. Typically have many tasks in progress at any one time. And they're ALL important.
4. Prefer to do things yourself, rather than delegate them, because others wouldn't do as good a job as you would (if you had the time).
5. Intentions are noble, but deadlines are frequently missed.
6. Always find the time to begin a new task, but can't find the time to complete an existing one.
7. Have difficulty saying "No" to others' demands.
8. Are more of a "go with the flow" person than someone who "makes waves".
9. Hold the belief that if you're putting in 40 (or more) hours of work, you're doing your job.
10. Tend to do more "gathering of information and reporting" than "doing".
11. Count meetings as "work" - even if they don't accomplish anything.
12. Spend a portion of every day explaining to others why something isn't done yet.
13. Tend to be an individual problem solver and tend to "reinvent the wheel".
14. Starters try to eat the whole elephant in one sitting. You see large projects as daunting, difficult and have difficulty breaking a project into smaller manageable tasks.


Closers

1. Arrive at work knowing exactly what needs to get done.
2. Are in control of their daily schedule - will refuse (or counter-propose) meetings if they jeopardize a deadline.
3. Are focused on a few important tasks and have the discipline to defer less important tasks.
4. Can effectively delegate tasks and get things accomplished with their team. They understand that even if the task might not be (initially) done to their standards, that providing a learning opportunity to a junior member of the team will both advance the completion of the task and better prepare your team for the next one.
5. Deadlines are personal. Making and meeting a commitment is very important to you. Your reputation is on the line.
6. Are comfortable with prioritizing and helping others understand the difference between important projects and urgent projects.
7. Can gracefully say No to a request (or Yes, but not until Task A,B and C are completed).
8. You measure your job performance in terms of tasks and projects completed, rather than time spent.
9. You understand that by focusing on completing Project tasks on time, that the overall Project deadlines (milestones) manage themselves.
10. You are selfish with your time. If you're invited to a meeting that doesn't have a specific objective you ask the organizer for the meeting objective or don't attend. Not all meetings are bad. Just the ones that don't accomplish anything.
11. You're focused on the future but working in the present. (How do I get this task finished to get on with the next one?)
12. You want to get to the answer quickly. Don't have a problem in asking for expert advice if it moves the project forward. It's the answer that's important, not who provides it.
13. You view projects as the sum of their tasks.

Ready, Set. Learn!

Perhaps the most painful thing you can ask anyone to do is to document - a program, a process, training materials.

And we'll find any excuse NOT to do it.

Well, we're piloting a program at work these days which seems to be working pretty well. We've stopped writing training documentation in many cases.

And we've started creating instructional videos.

With a free downloaded program called Jing, creating short instructional videos is quick, easy and fun. Jing captures video from any portion of your computer screen, and along with audio narration, you create flash videos in real time. Once completed, the videos can be stored on your PC or server or (for free) at Jing's site.

We accumulate, meta tag and store all our training videos on our SharePoint intranet.

We're building up quite a library. And avoiding that painful exercise of creating volumes of documentation that no one ever reads.

The second thing we're doing is certifying our users on computer functions, before granting permanent rights. Recently we put some staff through certification on the customer and contact merge function on Goldmine CRM software. Only after each of our users had successfully performed data cleanup (on some of their own accounts), were additional rights granted.

And of course, we documented the process with Jing.