During the holidays one morning, I leaned over and watched a video my wife had on her tablet about how to make chocolatey peanut butter abominations called Buckeyes. Go YouTube a recipe video if you need some background.
My lovely bride had attempted several times before to make these things, but they were not pretty. They were still delicious; after all, how could you go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter? But they just weren’t aesthetically appealing.
She was willing to try it again for my relatives, so she’s watching this video, and she gets to the part where you dip the peanut butter balls into the melted chocolate and she says audibly “welllll, shoot!” I pay closer attention and watch the chef use a toothpick to enable the dipping. At that moment, it became instantly clear that my bride’s previous attempts at Buckeyes did not incorporate a toothpick. I began to giggle at the image of her fishing out globs of peanut butter submerged in melted chocolate with spatulas, spoons, forks, or fingers.
But I also had this realization: that while “process” may very well be one of MY fluent business languages, it isn’t necessarily EVERYBODY’S fluent language. I am a process guy, but I need to realize that there are creative, marketing types, and numbers types, and emotional intelligence types in the business world, too….and they may not spend much time at all thinking about the process of how to do something. Just like my bride might argue that I don’t spend enough time working on my emotional intelligence.
One of my clients is a vastly gifted marketing guy, but “process” just isn’t his thing. He’s been winging it and stumbling along, oblivious that “process” isn’t his thing. That’s not quite fair; he probably has an achy, nagging feeling that there might be ”a better way” to do some of the things he does, but he’s so caught up in the details and pressures and time constraints of his business that he doesn’t have time to pull back to think through what his process should look like. Anyway, it took me about ten seconds to look at one of the processes he’d “backed into” for his company to understand why his business is sucking the life out of him. There was something so obvious about his process that he just wasn’t seeing. He was way too close to the process. It took an outsider to help him see it.
As another example, I looked at a couple steps of a process that seemed kind of superfluous to me. I had a feeling that complexity had been introduced to avoid upsetting a sacred cow. After asking some pointed questions, I helped my client discover that the sacred cow was not sacred at all; indeed the sacred cow and all its added complexity were literally skimming margin right off the top of every sale…and taking more time and energy to do the step. The end-customer was not aware of the sacred cow and would never notice if it were put back in the corral. Now. it might have turned out that the sacred cow was indeed sacred and untouchable given their strategy, but it took an open discussion to draw that out.
So, take inventory of your special talents and gifts and develop an awareness of those business disciplines where you might need some help. Everybody can use some fresh ideas (or a toothpick).
If you have a nagging concern that one of your processes is needlessly complex, or the opposite – it’s not fleshed out at all and your team is “winging it”, please email me a bob@highlandross.com to discuss.
