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Businesses are bought and sold based on the perception of future value.
Business owners are often experts in fields outside of business.
We developed Business BeyonDIY to help you cross that chasm.
Show Topics:
Buying a Business
Selling Your Business
Preparing Your Business for Sale
Practical | Actionable | Sustainable
Business owners and entrepreneurs are go-getters. We start things other people don't (sometimes too many things am I right?) and we push through hard times. That means that entrepreneurship involves a lot of DIY.
Some of the most important transactions we make are buying a business; preparing a business for sale and selling a business. We'll almost always want/need help to make these successful but there is still a lot we'll need to do ourselves.
Business BeyonDIY is a Livestream/podcast where we own our DIY nature but find that sweet spot where doing it yourself doesn't mean going it alone.
In this introductory episode, I'll let you know the format of the show, what to expect, and when I'll be live.
I'm looking forward to getting to know you and your business and sharing practical tips that will make your DIY more like DI-Us!
BBDIY009-Video
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[00:00:00] I asked for input, considered everyone's thoughts, and developed what I thought would be a great system for document control and management. Based on the input I received, I expected a slam dunk when we went to implement it. And I was surprised at the difficulty I had implementing that system. Today we're going to talk about why that didn't work out.
We're going to talk about how to get the right input at the right time from the right person And we're also going to cover the difference between input and participation. Hi, business owners. Thank you for being part of the backbone of the economy and welcome to Business Beyond DIY. I'm your host, Steve Krause, a passionate small business veteran of over 30 years.
I help owners like you DIY what makes sense and when needed, DIWH, do it with help. to make practical, actionable, sustainable changes to your business so that [00:01:00] you can increase your happiness, impact, profit, and company value. Business Beyond DIY will help you get the most out of your entrepreneurial journey, whether you're a one person show or a 50 member ensemble.
If you're a regular listener, thank you for that. If you're new to the show and the content sounds valuable, consider subscribing so you'll never miss an episode. All right, let's roll up our sleeves and get to work. So today we're talking about input and participation. And the first thing I want to do is start with some definitions, and a little bit about each one.
So what is the definition of input? According to Merriam Webster, it is something that is put in, such as advice, opinion, or comment. Now, before we go on to the benefits of this, I want to take a break here from my notes and let's talk about those three things when it comes to input, advice, opinion, and [00:02:00] comment, and look at where those things are advantageous or possibly Thanks Disadvantageous because they, what isn't included, and this is the conspicuous part of input that people tend to forget what's not included in that definition is expertise, experience, education, broader understanding, integrated knowledge, and other things that help us make valuable, comprehensive, well thought out decisions around our business.
Now we're going to get into that a little bit more later, but I want you to keep that in the back of your mind while we talk about the benefits of input. So the benefits of getting someone's input is that you have the benefit of another person's experience, knowledge, hopefully expertise, and the operators often [00:03:00] understand how a system works better than the managers or leaders.
And what I mean by that is, is that, um, even if a manager or a leader helped design the product or the program or the process that we're talking about improving, even if they designed it themselves or, or worked in it prior to being, uh, promoted or taking over a new position or becoming the boss, whatever it is, We never necessarily understand how it feels to work in those positions at this time in the company.
So it's important to get those perspectives. The other thing about input that we have, and this is where people think of the value I think more than anything else, is that people feel heard. Asterisk. They feel heard if they see their input utilized. And remember, we back up to what I said was missing from the definition of input, [00:04:00] expertise, experience, education, a broad overview and comprehensive understanding of the integrated workings of a business.
All of those things are not necessarily included in the concept of input. And so it makes it difficult to use input that doesn't bring together all of those things in a way that's recognizable to the employee that provided it. So we need to talk a little bit about how to deal with that and we will.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about the risks of having input. One of them is, and this is kind of an important, almost a differentiation, but input does not create buy in. And I think people often think, well, I, if I get people's opinion, they'll buy into the program. It doesn't necessarily, um, happen that way.
All right. Another thing that people can think is that or that we should consider [00:05:00] is that input creates an implicit obligation. And remember, I talked about this when we talked about, um, people feeling heard and they feel heard if we use their feedback or their input. If we don't, that actually creates a negative.
Think about, well, I told you what the problem was, or I told you how to solve it and you didn't do it that way. You didn't take my feedback into consideration. You didn't listen to my input. That becomes less beneficial than just ignoring people's feedback to begin with. Because now you took the feedback and you obviously ignored it.
So that's not a positive. So we need to deal with that. People often provide input. from the perspective of conflicting goals, their goals or the goals that they have in relationship to their, their work and their, um, how they get their work done. The, the, um, deliverables that [00:06:00] they're required to deal with or provide might differ from somebody else's, but that's where they come from.
They come from this specific position. So they have a narrow focus, um, you know, what's in it for me, maybe not. Exactly that really what's in it for me, but what's in it for my position, people doing what I do on the on the floor on the line in front of the computer, whatever it is. So they might have a lack of knowledge, understanding, or experience around how the system works from a top level.
All right. And so even if you try to explain that, unless you give people time to work at different workstations or have different experiences, which may or may not be practical in your business, people will come to the table from the perspective of their own work, and that's fine. That's what we would expect, but we need to deal with it.
Okay, so let's move on for a brief [00:07:00] discussion about participation. Again, according to Merriam Webster, the definition of participation is to have a part or share in something. Like your mother participates in this ambition. Your mother has a share in this ambition. So the benefits of that are that we can have the integration of ideas similar to getting input But we also get to add to that the division of labor and potentially the feeling of ownership, which is what participation really buys us in the business sense.
Well, that and division of labor. It is nice to have other people to help you do stuff, but that feeling of ownership makes the long term success of any kind of change management much more likely than if people don't feel like they own it. They weren't a part of it. We just put it on them. Okay. So the risks of participation.
Or the risks that are [00:08:00] involved with having a collaborative work environment are obviously conflicting goals, just like I talked about earlier, where people come to the table with their own perspective about how something should happen, what is supposed to be going on, or what is the impact of this process or system on their specific work.
So the next thing that we have to deal with is the risk of groupthink. We get to the table, there's, maybe there's six people. And they all kind of go along with each other, whether it's, um, you know, implied or whether it's an active agreement or a passive agreement. We just all kind of agree. The problem with that, of course, is that we don't look at new ideas.
We don't look at new options. And that's really important if we wanted to succeed in the long term, to be able to think about, Everything that might be a solution rather than simply kind of going along with what the group thinks [00:09:00] will succeed. Another thing we have to worry about is the domination by a single member, right?
Somebody who's driving the bus, who's actively or passively putting down anyone else, and not putting them down personally, but um, squashing. The participation of other people, either just by being a bull in a China shop or, um, by actively, you know, telling people they're wrong or something like that. Um, and so another possibility is that we'll get too many cooks in the kitchen and then nothing gets done.
We get in this bureaucracy, which is what we all like about small businesses that we don't end up in this bureaucratic environment. But we risk when we start collaborative work. We risk pulling that into our, our small business. And so you've probably heard a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Well, we don't want the committee to be in our business, right? We want to [00:10:00] avoid that. That's why we start own run, participate in small business to begin with, because we're lean and fast, we can make decisions quickly and there's something nice about that, right? Well, uh, You know that actually that phrase is terrible, isn't it?
Because that, it presumes that a camel is some kind of lesser being than a horse. But the camel is designed for a completely different environment for a different specification, right? Um, so actually that, that phrase is probably kind of dumb. So, alright. But too many cooks in the kitchen still fits, right?
So, we want to make sure that our committee Has the same goals, and that's the job of the leadership or the ownership is to come to the table and say, Hey, we all need to have the same goals, and this is what they are, and we need to explain to people why those goals apply to them and get them to buy in on them from the beginning.[00:11:00]
It's critical that we do this. We also want everyone who is participating to understand all the issues at hand. So they need to understand the broad spectrum, the broad view, you know, that 30, 000 ft view of the organization, at least from the perspective of those pieces that we're going to try and fix that process that we're going to try and improve.
The next thing leadership needs to do is have realistic resource expectations. We need to be able to provide people and say, These are the resources that this group is going to have access to. For this project, whether it's the resources we're going to use to create the project or develop the solution, or the resources we're going to have available to implement the solution, all of those things need to be up front and clear to begin with, so you don't have somebody coming in When you need to make an improvement, you budgeted 5, [00:12:00] 000 and somebody comes up with, well, we need to buy a new truck and a new computer and sign up for the software that's 6, 000 a year, which in, in some cases, whatever may actually be a great solution, but it doesn't fit the scope that we have for our business.
So we need to be able to set those boundaries. What expectations do we, or what resource expectations are there? And what resources can people use to find a solution? All right, so we, we've talked about the input, the definition of the input. We've talked about the risks and benefits of input. We've talked about what the Participation means and the benefits and also the risks of participation.
So let's break it down. How do we win when we're talking about process improvement [00:13:00] from the perspective of input and participation? So one thing that is really important to understand here is that input is not equal to participation. Both are valuable. Both are very important, but they are not equivalent.
And that's okay. So the keys to input is we have to have people self qualify their input on a scale of one. Uh, and let me, let me kind of clarify that we ask someone, you know, um, what is, here's the, the issue. Can you please tell us what you think a good solution would be or provide some feedback or input on how this system works for you?
But then we need to back up and say, on a scale of 1 to 5, how much does this affect the performance of your work on a day to day basis? Okay, 1 to 5. [00:14:00] Then, and here's where we're asking people to self qualify, we're not going to clarify that, or we're not going to, we're not going to describe it that way, but we're going to ask them to provide an example that explains why they numbered it the way they did.
If they circled 3 on our form, then provide an example that demonstrates why you wrote 3 on this. And what this does is this allows our employees to obviously provide us very specific examples of how this impacts their work, whatever it is. But it also gets their brain engaged in a way that they might not have been expecting.
And we're not trying to trick people, but we do want them to realize what the reality is, is for, what the reality is for them. When it comes to this issue, they don't need to articulate it to us necessarily that change in thought or that that shift in thought patterns, and we [00:15:00] don't need them to change their answer on the scale of 1 to 5.
That doesn't matter. What does matter is that when they see the implementation, they already know how much it mattered to them, and they can articulate why it also. It lets us know. If we make choice A that doesn't help this employee, this is the impact we're going to have. And it helps us go back to that employee group and say, hey, we implemented a new solution.
We understand that this particular piece of it is an issue. We were not able to solve that at this time. But we do have it. In our notes or whatever for future reference and consideration so that they know even if we didn't incorporate it into their into the new solution that we did hear them and that we've documented it for future use.
And that's that's very important. You don't want to not use feedback into a [00:16:00] vacuum. Because that then people will fill that vacuum with we told him and they didn't do it. So they don't care. Okay. So we don't want that. Um, first of all, because we do care. And second of all, because we don't need that kind of, uh, uh, backlog of bad feelings, right?
When we take a look at participation, the key to that is the leadership. We're starting this collaborative work and it's very easy to lose track of the program. And so we need to identify and commit to scope early. So that everybody understands this is the time frame. This is the financial resources that we have.
This is the personnel resources we have. And that's the boundary. We need to understand the conflicting interests within the group. You know, is production and sales [00:17:00] constantly at odds? Because sales wants to sell what we can't possibly produce and production if they had their way, we would produce one thing a month so that it was perfect.
Um, you know, whatever the concerns are, we need to understand those interests within our own organization. And we need to find a way to unify the team around shared interests. So our shared interests may be that this process works this much better within this timeframe so that we can make this improvement now.
And if there are other issues that we need to deal with, We'll talk about them. And we need to understand the timeline. I kind of talked about that when I talked about scope. So that needs to be, uh, very clear from the beginning. So we don't fall into the trap of scope creep. I'm sure you've heard it before, but we don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good.
And I actually bring that to a different [00:18:00] place. I say, don't let the don't let perfect be the enemy of better because it is really easy to get caught up in what is good enough. What is good enough is what improves on what you had before within the scope of the financial and time resources that you allotted to it.
So if better is half a percent better profit within the timeframe that you have, then that's better. And we'll do that. If we, if we always wait for the right solution, We end up wasting a terrible amount of time that we don't have a small business owners. So we don't let perfect or even good be the enemy of better.
We just say this needs to be better and move forward with that. And we need to be patient but firm with the timelines and the scope. It's really important as the leadership team, whether it's a single leader or a [00:19:00] partnership, You need to be very clear and firm about those timelines and the scope of the project.
So getting input is good. Input provides us outside perspective, at least from our own. It also sets an expectation that we'll use the input. What if the input is under informed? How do we ask the right questions? That's where I blew it on document control. Getting participation is good. It spreads out the workload, brings in new ideas, develops ownership, and brings in important knowledge and perspective that we might not have, very similar to input.
So how do we get this done every single time? How do we make sure that we are going to have the right input from the right people at the right time? And also, how are we going to keep control of that collaborative work environment, when we start having participation, so that we [00:20:00] stay in scope, stay on topic, and get the work done as quickly as possible.
Well, I've provided two downloads for you, and the links will be in the show notes for this episode. And they are, um, a template for an input survey. And I made it so general that you could probably use it for anything, but you're welcome to update it and change it for your own needs. But it's basically says, here's the topic.
And then in fact, I'll show it right here on the screen, but I'll also provide the downloads, but we're basically going to say, here's the topic. Here's what we're talking about. What are some feedback you have on a scale of one to five? How much does this affect your job on a regular basis? And then provide an example of how it impacts your job on a regular basis.
And so those questions allow us and the person filling out [00:21:00] the form to really put themselves in the right frame of mind for how much, um, experience and, and, uh, education and expertise they have. to bring to this situation. And that's, that's a great way for them and yourself to have the right perspective about the feedback they provide.
Whether you do the feedback as an oral conversation or as a written document, you have the same, uh, the same, um, obligation to get that information, but also the same opportunity. It doesn't change. What I would caution you about when it comes to, uh, oral conversations is that memories are notorious.
People remember what they want. We have all kinds of cognitive biases that come into play. Having it [00:22:00] written down eliminates that. Have them write it down, my two cents, but you can do it orally as long as you document it. All right. The second download I have for you. Oh, and the both downloads are going to be in Google Docs format, um, Word or PDF.
So you can download whichever one works best for your personal needs or your business needs. Um, the second thing I have is a kickoff meeting template for participative, participative projects. And what that does is it just forms the structure that everybody can walk away from the first meeting with a right Expectations and, or I shouldn't say right, but with a common set of expectations so that everybody knows what the scope is and how we're going to stay on track.
Okay, so I talked about this earlier, but what isn't the purpose of collaborative work? [00:23:00] Perfection. The purpose of collaborative effort is to generate a sufficient solution within the scope of the time and resources allocated. And I'll reiterate here that we don't want to let perfection be the enemy of good.
And a fast imperfect solution will have far more impact than a perfect solution that is never implemented. Alright, makes sense. I do want to take a moment to talk a little bit about credit. I think it's really important and this is something where we can build a lot of value in the culture of our business as leaders.
But we need to ask for ideas and let the credit go. Always give away credit. Never take credit for yourself. Always ensure that it is clear you're not taking credit for someone's ideas. All right. Even if you seed the idea to the team and the team runs with it and creates a [00:24:00] great solution. And it was in fact your idea.
Give it away. Let the team have credit. As a team, if that's what you feel is best, or if there's specific people who really contributed, maybe they took your idea and they added some of their own experience and then collaboratively within the group, we came up with something great. Great. This person did a great job.
You know, recognize Jenny did a great job on this project, and the team really benefited from that. And we came up with a great solution. So I'd like to thank the team and Jenny specifically for their hard work during this project. Okay? But never take the credit yourself. There's no point. You're not trying to impress your team.
Let them have the [00:25:00] credit. Right? So let's close the loop here a little bit. What happened to me with document control is that I didn't ask the right questions of the right people at the right time. My intent was on point. I knew exactly what I wanted to get and I thought in my naivete that people would tell me everything I needed to know if I asked them.
Instead of asking them pointed questions that got me the information I needed, I assumed that people would just tell Share it or also that they would even know what to share. So when you say, Hey, what do you think about document control? What are they going to say? Well, that's a good idea because then we'll know where the documents are, where the original is, how it's been updated over time.
There's no, you know, there's no downside until you figure out who's going to do the work. And then everybody's like, well, like I'm busy. Okay, so that's where I drop the ball. And where I needed to make some [00:26:00] changes. Like I said, my intent was on point. I wanted the feedback. I wanted their help. I wanted the participation.
But I needed to get the right people's perspective. And I needed to get the right perspective from them. The right answers. I had to ask different questions. And I needed them to share their expertise. So I could better understand what their real expectations might be. Thank you for joining me on this episode of Business Beyond DIY.
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