Are we human or are we dancers?

First of all, apologies to the Killers fans who spotted the deliberate error in the above title. The grammar pedant in me just couldn’t let it go.

If you’re not familiar with The Killers, they are a stadium filling US Indie rock band led by charismatic most well-dressed man in rock, Brandon Flowers. The title of this (one of their most iconic songs) was actually stolen from a 1970s book called “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by one of America’s most famous authors, Hunter S Thompson.

Born in 1937 and a heavy drug user, Thompson disdainfully criticised the next generation by suggesting that they were simply dancing to a tune written by someone else. It’s easy to do that when you earn lots of money for writing slightly crazy books whilst mostly being stoned!

We all live our lives balancing the routine and the unique activities in them.

There are people in parts of the world whose lives are one of drudgery with every day repeating the other.

On the other hand, a friend who is a is a social worker has a job where she finds herself sometimes having to deal with people who live chaotic lives with no routine, bouncing from one crisis to the next.

I’m not sure which is worse.

If you run your own business, you are probably lucky enough to have a good degree of balance within your work. But if you want to make it less dependent on you, then you need to always strive to systemise the 90% in order that you can humanise the 10%.

I talk about the 90% a lot. I try my best to pass on best practice to my team whenever I can. I tinker around under the hood, trying to get us to be more efficient, better, more scalable, less stressful for everyone.

It’s intellectually stimulating but also hard work. I keep my fingers crossed that enough of them will meet that challenge head on as well and will in turn keep striving for best practice and passing it on to colleagues.

Of course, in your business you will be on your own journey and the likelihood is that you are nowhere near (yet) getting to a situation where 90% of the activities in your business are systemised. For the sake of this chapter, you’ll need to assume that you are though. And if not, then when I talk about “the 10%”, I’m talking about the most interesting 10% of what you do.

Got that? Great, then let’s talk about the 10%.

Because I love the 10% as much as I love tinkering with the systems of the 90%. The phone call from a client about a problem or an opportunity. The human bit.

One of my partners (Emma) who I have watched grow up from a lively teenage girl on her first day in a full-time job into a highly professional adviser with a client base who hang on her every word, described her way of looking after clients like this:

“It’s generally better to over-communicate. If you wait to reply because you don’t have an answer yet (or because you don’t want to share bad news), the other party often ends up making assumptions about what the delayed reply might mean. Silence frustrates and confuses people. Better to communicate early and often.”

Communication is one of the things that makes us human. It’s an art and not a science.

When our trainees start with us, one of the things they do is call up clients chasing either tax records or approval of tax returns. There are some pretty standard responses that they get, and we have documented them in the systems and train them on how to deal with those standard responses.

But you can only systemise communication so far.

Because there will be all sorts of things that are not standard. Sometimes there are difficult people to deal with. Sometimes there are nice people dealing with difficult circumstances that you must speak to. Sometimes there are clients suffering the early stages of dementia. There are hundreds of situations and thousands of questions. There comes a point where you have to just get on with it.

If your staff deal with the standard stuff well, the client will respect them. If they deal with the non-standard stuff well, the client will love them.

A few years ago, one of my clients described one of our then tax juniors (Kyra) as “delightful”. It was definitely the non-standard stuff that elicited that compliment but if Kyra hadn’t been able to deal with the standard stuff well, the client would have been so irritated by then, that Kyra’s delightfulness would have been downright annoying.

It doesn’t matter how good your staff are technically at whatever it is that your company does. If they can’t communicate their knowledge, you will lose out to competitors who are much less knowledgeable. Get it right, and your customers will stay with you for decades, refer you to their friends and family and forgive you on the rare occasions you don’t get things 100% right.

So much for where you staff need to be though. The question is how are you going to get them there? There are a few key elements to this:

1. Develop a customer-focussed culture
2. Inductions
3. Reinforce the message regularly
4. Probation periods
5. Regular training

Let’s go through these one by one.

Developing a customer-focussed culture

Many organisations operate in a hierarchical way. Usually whoever is on the higher salary wins most debates.

But in a customer-focussed business, everyone is required to think about who their customer really is. For those who deal directly with the business’s customers, their customer is the same as the business’s customers.

But for those in support roles, their customers may be the staff who deal with the customers directly.

Then there are roles who have customers who are in other support roles. They support someone who supports someone else who provides a service to the customer of the business.

Take that logic far enough and you realise that for much of your time as Managing Director (or whatever your title is) your customers are the entire workforce of the company.

You didn’t realise you were working for them, did you?

This sort of thought process helps settle a lot of arguments about how to tackle particular issues in your business and creates a way of thinking that enables your team to make the right decisions without you.

Inductions

Inductions for new staff are critical to getting staff off on the right foot.

This is especially important if you are making changes and getting rid of some bad apples. The new staff need to understand what you are expecting from them. This might even require you to explain to the new staff some of the problems you have had in the past.

One of the issues we explain to our staff is a funny little “rule” we have which is that if three people want to go out to lunch together they have to invite the whole office. We explain that the reasons are to avoid cliques developing that exclude some people. It’s a really symbolic issue to us and important that it’s explained right at the outset. New staff always accept it because they understand the reasons.

But of course, an induction is about more than cliques. It’s about the standards you expect.

If you have delegated the induction to someone else, make sure there’s a system for it. Otherwise, the most important moment in that new employee’s career at your company is in the hands of someone else.

Reinforce the message regularly

Don’t think you can just come up with one initiative that sets the rules for ever.

Cultures evolve and can evolve into something a long way from what you want it to be. Silence from you creates a vacuum and other voices will fill that vacuum.

If you’re not careful, your new member of staff will experience a day of high-quality training in their first day induction followed by a second day observing all their colleagues doing the job in a completely different way.

You will need to keep reinforcing the message, praising those you catch doing things right and intervening when you spot people not doing it right.

Probation periods

These are critical. As we know, people can talk a good talk in interviews but don’t always do what they say or you want them to do once they are in the job.

Probation periods should ideally be set at 6 months and can be extended if you feel someone is not working out but might be able to turn things round.

Don’t be frightened to finish someone’s probation early if they are doing well or let them go if you don’t think they can do it. Both tactics will send out the right message to your team and encourage the right behaviour.

Regular training

Laws change, industries change and customers will come and go.

A regular or even an ad-hoc training programme will keep your team energetic, customer-focussed and ready to help drive the company forward.

Get all this in place and whilst you won’t have managed to control the uncontrollable, you will have maximised the amount of influence it is possible to achieve.

So, are we human or are we dancers?

We’re both Brandon, we’re both.