Be specific when communicating objectives to employees

BY RICH SCHMITT
Management specialist

I was recently talking with the founder of a family owned company. He was beet-red as he described his frustration regarding the condition of one of his locations.

He had driven past one of his branches at 7:35 a.m. on the way to an appointment. He always tries to drive by his locations when he is in or around the area. He likes to make sure the branch is up and running at its opening time of 7:30. His drive-by inspection left him enraged and frustrated. It had been several months since his last inspection and the facility looked dirty, the yard was a mess, the grass was overgrown around the front door, customers were milling around the front door waiting for it to be unlocked, the yard people (also waiting to be let in) had seemingly come to work in dirty clothes, the company’s pickup was parked in one of the few customer parking spots, the delivery trucks weren’t out on the road and nobody was answering the phone when he called in to provide some “guidance.”

I think you get the picture. I didn’t ask if the company had caller id, but I’ll bet nobody in the branch was interested in the “suggestions” that the founder was going to offer over the phone at that time of the morning. After his blood pressure seemed under control, I asked about the process that he used to ensure that all the branches were operated the way he wanted them operated. He said, “Everyone knows how we want our branches to operate.”

I asked how the employees come to know how he wanted the branches to be operated. He said that the branch manager is responsible for training his people and keeping his branch in order.

I asked how the branch manager comes to know how the branch is to be operated. He said that they had hired an experienced guy from a competitor in the area. I asked what the competitor’s branches looked like and it finally dawned on him as he said, “The competitor’s branch is a mess -- just like mine.”

He made “suggestions” to his people whenever there were problems. (Some of the older employees hinted that, while he had mellowed over the years, his style was loud, explicit and often included expletives. They had a cartoon on the wall with his initials under it saying, “If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you.” It was mostly a joke but a bit closer to the truth than anybody felt comfortable discussing.)

Even though most of us understand that the founder’s approach wasn’t pretty, it was effective in getting his team to do it his way. The operation was always under his watchful eye. He told them when and where to jump as well as precisely how high. As his company grew and his team became larger and more distant, this personal coaching approach became less and less effective. The team was mostly coached by a mixed group of supervisors. Some of them knew the drill since they had learned it from the founder, while others didn’t since they had limited exposure to him.

So, over time, the company’s implementation of the founder’s vision became diluted and inconsistent. As people were hired from competitors or from outside the industry, the vision became further confused and fragmented. The founder’s vision for the business’ operation seemed obvious to the founder but not to his supervisors and team.

A couple of quick observations:

As companies grow, their training programs cannot be dependant upon the founder getting around to each individual and personally “coaching” him or her. Even when a company is small, this is a founder-intensive approach that does not foster growth and expansion. Growth requires a process for communicating the company way of doing business to every individual at every level.

Years are not a good measure of experience. While it may seem unbelievable that experienced people who have been in the business for 10 or 20 years cannot perform some of the rudimentary functions in wholesaling, it happens all the time. My favorite way to describe the phenomenon is that some people have 20 years of experience while others have one year of experience 20 times. A person who graduates from high school can do more than someone who spends 12 years in first grade. The elapsed time is the same, but the results are different.

Hiring experienced people is not always a reliable way to ensure that they will understand how to do a job your way. Certainly, you need to understand whether the experience is with a business similar to your operation. Unfortunately, today there are many wholesalers who provide bad or sub-par training and coaching to their people. Often, you will need to spend time helping experienced people to unlearn their old ways and to learn your ways of doing things. Remember, experience is not always good experience.

Good wholesalers normally don’t let their top people get away. So even when a person comes from a good competitor, you cannot assume that he will be someone that you really want.

Companies must provide the specification, in writing, for how they are to be operated and how all jobs are to be done, then provide proper training to qualified people. General statements of intent do not create the in-depth understanding and guidance that people need. You need detailed written descriptions of how each job is to be done.

Branch inspection visits should be reasonably frequent and always unannounced. Normally, branches don’t go into the dumper overnight, so you try to visit them often enough to catch the beginning of the slide -- not just to see the wreckage from the crash.

Providing consistently superior performance is one of the critical challenges facing our industry. In many situations, there are five facets to solving this challenge:

Step 1 -- Creation of a standard or specification that clearly describes and explains what is to be done and how it is to be done. This specification should include measures for how the task will be evaluated and the qualifications of individuals that will be required to perform the job successfully.

Step 2 -- Identifying -- internally and externally -- the right, qualified people for the job.

Step 3 -- Creation of communication and training processes that are matched to the type of people who will be involved in performing the job.

Step 4 -- Ongoing review of the measures to determine whether the job is being done to the specification then providing ongoing feedback -- both positive and constructive -- to the team.

Step 5 -- Continuous updating of the specification to cover situations that arise in the course of business.

Creating a specification for the tasks in your company is a responsibility that is often short-changed. Managers often provide rousing guidance like “Provide superior customer support,” “Maintain the facility and inventory in an outstanding fashion,” “Drive customer success,” or “Pursue excellence.”

These are not bad objectives, but they are insufficient guidance to your people regarding what they are to do. For many of your team, this kind of general guidance is like asking them to promote world peace. While they may be inspired by the idea, to use the old phrase, the devil is in the details. What is superior customer support? What is excellence? One person’s view of excellence might be another person’s view of mediocrity.

Ultimately, every person in your company should know precisely what they are supposed to do. Personally, I like checklists as a starting point for the guidance. It brings a level of detail and precision to the job that is required for consistently superior performance. Checklists are a common tool that can be used in any situation where consistent performance is required and where the consequences of a failure are significant or life-and-death. Every space shuttle launch has a huge checklist that must be checked completely and signed-off before the launch. Every airline flight involves a checklist covering their preflight preparation, their emergency procedures and their post-flight activities. Some restaurant chains have developed checklists describing how various tasks should be performed, including food preparation, customer service and even how the bathroom is to be cleaned.

At a minimum, I think each branch manager should be required to complete a daily or weekly checklist that requires a walk-through of the facility and a signoff indicating that the branch is in good order. For an MS Word version of a sample checklist, e-mail me at rich@go-spi.com.

The samples may contain tasks that aren’t part of your company’s procedures and tasks that need to be added for them to apply to your company. You should modify them to your needs. I like a process wherein the responsible individual initials and dates or timestamps each line to represent a commitment that the task was completed.

Checklists are not the detailed description of each job that I discussed earlier, but checklists can be developed quickly. They provide simple guidance to your supervisors and they can serve as an outline for the development of detailed task descriptions that should be created.

Of course, you always need to start with good people. Good people require less-specific and less-detailed direction than mediocre people. (And just as a reminder, you shouldn’t have any bad people because there is no training program or coaching methodology that can cure bad people. They won’t learn or follow your guidance and will aggravate and demoralize the good people.)

Next month, I will discuss how to find the qualified people and how to establish the right type of training for those people in order to provide consistently superior performance.

 

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