Here let me read it to you or listen direct on Spotify

 

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Less work for you, more results

 

Here’s a way to make your work life easier, and save a heap of time and effort.

Stop your futile efforts to bend people’s essential nature to your corporate will.

So much time gets wasted on this, so much unnecessary friction. Managers look at their staff, who have perfectly useful skills, and wish they were a more complete employee. Let’s work on those gaps in their skill set!

How about you don’t?

This is a high nuance topic. Obviously if they can’t do the job, that’s a problem. Or if they’re horrible, unreliable, or liars. Stop thinking they will change that, no matter what they promise. They will not change, just get rid of them asap.

And I’m not suggesting a halt on skills development, it’s a strong motivator for most.

I’m talking about the idea that a job description is a sacred text that cannot be varied. So all people doing that job must conform 100% or be forever marked down as inadequate.

 

“You should be more like me” management

 

I’ve seen plenty of leaders whose philosophy is, “Everyone must work toward being the perfect work person, so they should be as much like me as possible.” So you get an arse-kiss ascendancy where everyone thinks the same.

The HR department loves a neat matrix of skill boxes ticked. Far more than they love the commercial performance of the organisation.

Staff who are good at 80% of their tasks must sit through an eternity of reviews with various middle management. Focusing on the 20% of weaknesses identified in the 360-degree appraisal process by conformist workmates.

It makes the employee feel like a failure.

It wastes everyone’s time. I don’t know a single high performer in business who doesn’t have glaring weaknesses in one area or another.

The practical reality is people are what they are. Working on people’s skill weaknesses can help in a tinkering-at-the-edges sort of fashion, but it’s not the most productive approach.

 

The people you should hire right away

 

When you’re hiring, it’s really hard to find people who really give a fuck about your business. People with a genuine work ethic. Who you can rely on when you’re not there supervising. Who have the backs of the people they work with. Who think about the job rather than just executing a list of tasks.

They’re incredibly valuable. It’s your job as a leader to hold onto them by finding something that suits them. Change the damn job description. Move them around.

I’m reluctant to pull in Julius Caesar references, given the whole guys thinking about the Roman Empire meme. Nevertheless, he got a lot done. One of the ways he did it was a belief that people get better results from building on their strengths instead of trying to remedy their weaknesses.

You don’t have unlimited time. Most day-to-day business is triage, fighting off fresh hordes of winged monkeys all day. Do the stuff that produces the most results with the least effort.

You might even find it helps with your own self-improvement efforts. Though I’m not a world-renowned psychologist like Mark Manson so I’m unable to bring that level of confidence to this suggestion.

 

Hiring good people at random pays for itself

 

Our approach from the start has been: if you find good people who are into what you’re trying to achieve, hire them and find something for them to do. Whatever they end up doing will pay for itself.

Don’t demand they become all that PLUS good at some other task that you wish for. Pay someone else to do those things.

This approach has never let us down. Revenue magically expands to justify the new hire. Our staff turnover remains pleasantly low.

Some few people are nice, but hopeless beyond redemption for most tasks and you should do them a favour by moving them on. And if their weakness is one that has ongoing effects on the rest of the team, that’s unacceptable.

But most people can be steered around the obstacle.

 

Individual recognition is a massive advantage

 

You become known as an employer who will bend the framework to help them be their best. Recognising people as an individual is a massive advantage to you as an employer. Not so much Employee Of The Month certificates as taking the time to know who they are, their family situation, their life outside work, what they want to do with their life. And helping out with that.

It’s a foreign concept to so many managers. They prefer to hold all staff to processes and frameworks designed around the worst employees and customers they ever had.

Your staff will tell other good people, and it builds from there.

Obviously this is a benefit of working in small and medium businesses. It’s why you can thrive on lower revenues than big business, where tailored job descriptions are too hard to operate across ten thousand staff. Anywhere you hear the word “headcount”, you know it’s become too big to care about any one individual. It’s more like farming than leadership.

And it’s just a happier way to live your working life. What’s not to like about helping people build their strengths rather than nagging them about details that might not matter much?

 

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Have you read my book Undisruptable?

Zoë Foster Blake said: “Ian is a cheeky, funny, disruptive (and proven: important) business rascal and thank goodness for that.”

On paper, electronic or audio book with me reading it. Get it here:

 

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