How Many Grandmas Can You Hire?
If you can't find enough experts here's a better way
This Post is Based on Two Ideas
The only reason to hire people is that you need them to produce results (which I call outputs).
Outputs come from two places:
People with experience and intuition (tacit knowledge). I call this grandma in the kitchen who makes really good food without a recipe.
People following repeatable systems.
I'm joking - they aren't always grandmas; they can be any expert, sage, virtuoso, or master. Use whatever term you want. It means someone who can produce the right outputs in ways that you don't really understand (and often they don't either). It's hard to find these people - and expensive when you do. Contrast that with this quote from Daniel Jones, the Chairman Lean Enterprise Academy.
Brilliant process management is our strategy. We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes.
Would you rather build your company with "grandmas" or average people?
What about "A" players?
Let me clear something up. There's a lot of talk about how you should hire only "A" players because they out produce others and "B" players hire "C" players and that leads to everyone being lazy or inefficient. I don't disagree. What I dispute is the unspoken assumption that being an "A" is only about the person. That's sloppy thinking. Being an "A" is about the fit between the person and the outputs they're hired to produce. This is obvious when you look at a sports team made up of all "A" players. You can't just put the goalkeeper on offense and expect the best results.
With repeatable and scalable systems, people can produce the outputs that they are especially qualified to produce, with other people operating systems that produce the outputs they aren't so good at. When you have your systems broken out so they are repeatable and scalable, you can put "average" people in the game and get amazing results. Consistently. Isn't that what you want?
What Makes a System "Brilliant"?
I call it robustness. And there are 4 parts to it. (Not to be confused with the parts of the system itself which I talked about here https://johnseiffer.substack.com/p/systems).
D = Documentation
The system is documented so it can be done repeatedly by more than one person and new people can be trained to produce the output with no loss of quality. A system is well documented if someone who’s never done it before could learn to do it based on the documentation. I've talked about the ways to document three kinds of systems here https://johnseiffer.substack.com/p/there-are-3-kinds-of-sops
A = Accountability
There is a single person accountable to produce each output. This person doesn’t have to produce the outputs, but they are responsible that they get produced.
M = Metrics
The output is measured so that quantity, quality, or any other applicable attributes of the output can be tracked and improved. It’s important that you measure what’s important, not just what’s easy to track.
S = Subdivisions
This is perhaps the most important. As companies grow, the output that was produced by one person from start to finish can be broken out into subsystems such that the output of one is the input to the next. In a restaurant, there are different people who do the shopping, the food prep, and cook different parts of the meal that ends up on your plate. Unlike grandma who did it all.
When systems are subdivided well, everyone in the company plays at the top of their game. That means nobody does work that a lower-level employee is able to do. Work, decisions, authority, and ultimately outputs are pushed as low in the company as possible. This can only happen when systems are broken apart into subsystems which each have documentation, accountability, and metrics.
How to Make your Systems Robust
Make a chart like this - with a bit more detail obviously. Check off each column that applies. You'll see where your systems lack robustness and you can start to buff them up. Systemization Is a skill that not everybody has. If that's not the top of your game, don't sweat it. Find someone who is good at it and have them build your systems with you.
If you found this useful, here's where you can find more like this.
1-1 Coaching - I only work with a few clients at a time but anyone can sign up for a free session. If you don’t know where to start building systems, it’s something I can help with.
My book Output Thinking
Follow me on Twitter @BetterCEO