The land of clarity, peace, rhythm, shared language, and great culture
This is the story of a land of clarity, peace, rhythm, shared language, and great culture. This is a story about a land with process.
When I wasn’t given documented job instructions for my role, I started mapping the processes of my job and training other team members on the resources I created. We became more aligned on how we did things, we got clear on how and why we were each operating in different modes, we had a new shared language, and we had one document we could refer to and update when questions came up and when better ideas or tools became available. There was a frictionless flow for how we worked together. We started to really enjoy learning from one another and collaborating. We made each other better and held one another accountable to our processes. Working with my peers and the people I was leading was fun again!
When senior leadership recognized my efforts and needed a guiding document as their vision for growth of the business evolved, I was tasked with a role as Project Manager for the company’s first ever operations manual. I was responsible for using the resources available, including subject matter experts, as well as setting and managing the timeline, scope, and content for the project. It was the company’s first ever manual (after two-plus decades in business) and the first of dozens and dozens of process handbooks I’d produce in my career. The inaugural project took me nine months of work, was three hundred pages long, and was accepted by upper management as the go-to guiding resource for our business.
As I was growing my branch and expanding to two new markets, I used this process document to onboard, train, retrain, and delegate. In other words, it was like I was able to be in three locations at once because everyone had a process they could follow. The team was trained on their processes, and if they needed to be cross-trained or handle something in someone’s absence, they had the instructions right in front of them. If I wasn’t physically there to show them their process again, I could remind them that the process existed, refer them to the document, and have them let me know where they were getting stuck so we could troubleshoot together. We were a small but mighty team, so there wasn’t really enough time to explain everything from the beginning or schedule a meeting every time a question came up. This approach of managing by process allowed me to empower my team to find the answers themselves with the understanding that I was there to listen to the questions/feedback and provide a safe environment to hear, discern, and implement any new opportunities to improve those processes. This system had us working in a seamless rhythm like a well-choreographed dance.
The manual worked great for my team and was worth all of the effort put into documenting the processes — for my sanity, my branch’s growth, and my professional development as an Operations Director. It allowed me to manage my branch by process, not by emotions or the day-to-day demands. In other words, I was able to play offense more than defense because the plays had been written and communicated well. And, as I grew my team, I had a process to bring them successfully and quickly up to speed.
The problem, besides the time it took to complete this massive document, was that in spite of the tremendous effort and investment made by the company, it was never adopted by any other managers. All in all, this project likely cost the company over fifty thousand dollars, as a conservative estimate, in funding and lost productivity over three quarters only to never be used by the vast majority of employees in the organization, let alone the leadership team that funded, approved, and asked for it. What started out as an exciting project turned into a dreaded task that saw almost no end and barely reached the light of day. It collected dust on the shelves of other branches and never lived up to its intended potential: to grow and scale the business efficiently. Maybe you’ve been there? Maybe your company has tried a similar approach? This is all too common, and I hear similar stories from leaders daily. But it doesn’t have to be like this!
In contrast, today my process documents average thirty pages and take nine days to complete. NOT nine months! From the moment I get on the phone with my clients to understand their core processes, they are already 100 steps ahead of where they started weeks before I arrive for our workshop. Within the first hour of the process workshop, the teams I work with have already unlocked handfuls of wisdom from learning just how easy it is to take their complex operations and simplify them into the highest-level steps. They immediately see how this will skyrocket their productivity. From there, before the document is ever delivered, the team is in sync, with shared language, clear on where their inefficiencies are, and they have a newfound sense of peace around unlocking the challenge of their process documentation that’s been stifling them for months, years, or decades. The culture is instantaneously improved by a new sense of enthusiasm trickling throughout the room, hallways, and airways.
When the document is delivered, there’s a clear path for managers to follow. There’s a roadmap to manage the business by process, with the understanding that process management is a process in and of itself! The teams I work with report that everything is operating so much better now that everyone is on the same page (literally)! When issues do come up, they’re able to easily navigate them by using the document and referring to the specific step in a process as a starting place, identifying the exact challenges that are occurring, and committing to continuously optimizing the process and how it affects the overall business system. Changes inside the process flow get captured in real time, with the right people involved for approval, sign off, and handoff, and there’s a process to navigate those changes each and every time!
Imagine how much easier it is for everyone to digest and adopt 30 pages to understand almost the entire business instead of 300! Imagine now that a person sitting in one position may only need to understand one page of their process and commit to consistent, perfect execution each and every time. How efficient do you think that person could be in their role if it were that easy? How many mistakes do you think could be avoided? How much simpler would management and accountability be for their supervisor if they had just one or two master processes in front of them to follow day in and day out?
The companies I work with today invest a fraction of the cost to complete their process documentation compared to the approach my previous company took to attempt this in house. They get the benefit of knowing what pitfalls to avoid in advance and how to get REAL BUY-IN from any team member. Each team member can zoom out from their narrow vantage point of the operation and understand the business as a whole system, creating more awareness, empathy, clarity, and expansiveness for improved thinking and communication. These are the things that don’t come with a price tag. These are the invaluable intangibles. Not to mention, it’s actually fun for everyone involved to have a voice in collaborating on the end product as a team!
While outsourcing this process documentation and getting this done in nine days is an option, it’s not your only one. In the following posts, I’m going to lay out the methods I use to get this process documentation done once and for all and how to continuously manage by process and improve most everything about your business in ninety days.
Imagine a world where your entire team was on the same page, spoke the same language, and referenced one document for virtually any problem the business is faced with — how much time would that save? How many weeks, months, quarters, or years could you improve if everything was really as simple as looking at one process on a document together and finding out where the missing link is? How would that improve your communication? How would that improve the relationships inside the business? How would that improve efficiency and productivity and cost savings? How would that improve the results for your customers and clients? How would that impact your culture? How much more time for FUN would there be if all you had to do was look up a page in a small document and point to the step where improvement needed to be made?
In the land of documented processes, everyone speaks the same language and has a definitive place to go for answers. A definitive place to go to get on the same page with whatever it is you’re talking about and whoever it is you’re talking to regarding the business. The land of processes is prosperous because the opportunities are clear and the solutions are actionable. Processes improve every aspect of the business including its culture, the leadership, the overall operating system, and the opportunity to sell the business at a higher price, quicker. They give you the option to get your time back and let the processes manage the business so you don’t have to. Processes help you talk about your business seamlessly and improve and speed up the decision making of all leadership, including senior leaders, board members, advisors, and investors. Processes save time, optimize performance, and allow for simplistic streamlining and automation where appropriate. Documented processes bring the team together and enhance team building. They break down silos and allow for more clarity interdepartmentally. They improve people decisions and can attract the best talent for your company. There’s not much the land of process doesn’t offer. Will you choose to move there?
Getting your documentation right is key. It can be simple and take less than two weeks if outsourced, ninety days if managed internally. Or it can be cumbersome and overly complicated, take a large investment, and exclude critical information. And in many cases, just never get done at all. The choice is yours. It seems obvious to me after ten-plus years of doing this what the right choice is, but it certainly wasn’t clear when I set out on this mission over a decade ago. So please, do yourself a favor: avoid the mistakes I made in the past, and prevent your business from being another cautionary tale of process documentation gone wrong. Keep reading to learn the simple ways to build and manage your business by process forever. If you can sacrifice a couple more hours of reading time and dedicate yourself to ninety days of concentrated effort to the process of documenting your processes the right way, you will pay yourself back by the thousands or millions of dollars and wasted hours, keep or restore your sanity, AND… have fun in the process!