THRIVE!
Who brings protective goggles to a class about creating processes in business? Well, it turns out, we should’ve. The second week of our “THRIVE! 5 Weeks to Business Breakthrough” class is over, and it went off with a bang... or more accurately, with hundreds of flying shards of ice. Fortunately, everyone was agile enough to avoid injury, and there’s nothing like a little personal peril to drive home an object lesson. But first, I should back up and fill you in on why CREATING A PROCESS is a big deal for those of you who couldn’t be there.
In a business’s infancy, it is left up to the business owner to figure out how best to complete the many tasks required in its day-to-day operations. Generally, after a few chaotic months of trial-and-error, she settles into a groove and masters these repetitive tasks, having found the most efficient way to complete them. Which is fine, until the business grows. At this point, she must delegate many of these tasks to other employees in order to have time to attend to running the business. If she didn’t take the time to write down, analyze, and streamline processes to accomplish the tasks, she now has two options, neither of which is optimal:
- She can rack her brain and try to remember the way she first figured out how to do the things she now does by rote. She then communicates this process to the employee. However, because recollection is often faulty, incomplete or erroneous instructions are given, and the process has to be re-worked until it becomes effective
- She can tell the employee what’s expected, give general instructions, and let the employee figure out how best to accomplish the tasks.
Both of these options use up valuable time and resources, and often result in miscommunication and frustration. It’s much more efficient to create teachable processes as you go, cataloguing the best way to accomplish vital tasks while it’s still fresh.
Yet there’s a second, even more important reason to put time into creating teachable processes: adaptability. In creating processes, as with all things, you get better with practice. Businesses that maintain the regular practice of creating and updating the processes through which they accomplish their tasks are much more readily able to identify problems and adapt to better methods of doing things. Period.
Most of us have had the experience of taking a job in which we were taught ungainly and archaic means to accomplish certain tasks. It was instantly clear to us that they had been doing it the same backwards way since roughly the Eisenhower administration. These are businesses who didn’t maintain the regular practice of maintaining their processes, and consequently became stuck. And in business, as in nature, a failure to adapt is a failure to THRIVE!
People make millions in the stock-market through small percentage gains that compound over time. The same is true for refining your processes. If you can make your business run even 5% more efficiently because you found and taught marginally better ways of completing regular tasks, that will add up to huge gains over time.
Finally, creating processes is important for the accomplishment of big goals that otherwise seem too daunting to tackle. What’s most important is the daily discipline of including some action, however incremental, toward your ultimate goals. John Maxwell calls it his “Rule of Five”, and uses the analogy of taking five swings daily with a hatchet at a large oak tree that needs to come down. Over time, the tree will fall. Disillusionment with our goals and dreams is largely a result of failing to break them down into daily processes for their accomplishment over time.
It became clear, as class members shielded their eyes and hacked away at our “tree” of ice with five swings each, that they weren’t going to let a lack of goggles keep them from felling the trees in their lives.
