{"id":160,"date":"2010-12-19T13:04:34","date_gmt":"2010-12-19T18:04:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/?p=160"},"modified":"2010-12-19T13:04:34","modified_gmt":"2010-12-19T18:04:34","slug":"stop-fantasizing-about-your-dream-team-and-get-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/?p=160","title":{"rendered":"Stop Fantasizing about your Dream Team and get to work!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m continually amazed how often I come across underperforming organizations that don\u2019t try to improve because they feel the caliber of their employees is inadequate to achieve higher performance. It may well be true that your team is suboptimal in its makeup but that\u2019s no excuse for failing to optimize the team you have. Donald Rumsfield once said \u201cYou go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.\u201d In this case what\u2019s true in War is true in business: Unless you are the sole proprietor with an unlimited bankroll, you have to accomplish the tasks in front of you with the team you have.<\/p>\n

In many cases it\u2019s unfair to label the employees as under-performers because they haven\u2019t actually been given the opportunity to perform. A workplace without a formal system of standardized work is chaos and what emerges from that chaos is leadership by fiat: the loudest and brashest control the process. What I am trying to get across here is that if you don\u2019t set<\/strong> the standard, the loudest and brashest of your employees will set the standard themselves. The standard that they set will be created based on their motivations, not yours! What are their motivations? Minimizing their workload? Transferring responsibility to others? Whatever they are, you can rest assured that unless your employees are of impeccable character, they aren\u2019t going to be the same standards that the business manager or owner would set. Further complicating matters, without a formal standard, each individual employee is going to set their own<\/strong> individual<\/strong> standard. What you\u2019ll have is system of work made of multiple competing standards.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.\u201d –Milton Friedman<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While Mr. Friedman is talking about politicians, the same concept is very true about motivating employees to \u201cdo the right thing.\u201d\u00a0 With apologies to Milton, let me rewrite that for our purposes:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe solution to our problem is not simply hiring the right people. The important thing is to establish a work culture which will make it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of a job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deming, the founder of modern process improvement always said that \u201cA bad system will defeat a good person every time\u201d and he\u2019s absolutely right. Without a formal standard your best employees will be driven to lower performance so they don\u2019t \u201cmake waves\u201d or alienate their coworkers. Any workplace is a mix of employees of various performance levels. The purpose of standardization is to optimize the performance of the employees you do have. Let\u2019s look at this quick chart:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Since it is unlikely you will be able to significantly change the composition of your team, all we can do is move the distribution along the Employee Performance axis. Standardization moves that distribution to the right, a lack of standardization moves them to the left.<\/p>\n

The solution is simple: Standardize the work to improve the performance. Then enforce the standard and involve the employees in continuous improvement to lock in and improve that performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m continually amazed how often I come across underperforming organizations that don\u2019t try to improve because they feel the caliber of their employees is inadequate to achieve higher performance. It may well be true that your team is suboptimal in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,56,19],"tags":[27,13,18],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-info","category-standardization","category-system-optimization","tag-efficiency","tag-operator-training","tag-standardization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163,"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taocompliance.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}