Lessons from Child Rearing

Even though I don’t have children, I find the topic of child-rearing interesting. Getting Things Done—a personal productivity site—recently had an interesting post involving children. The author was going to spend the day with his children, and involved them in planning the day.

They began by listing some of the activities they wanted to do. They then identified how long each activity would take—there is no sense in trying to cram 10 pounds of potatoes into a 5 pound sack. I won’t relate the entire story, but it turned out to be a fun day for everyone.

The lesson in the story is directly applicable to small business owners. Often, we simply dictate to our employees how things will be. After all, we are the boss and if they don’t like it… But this often gets us results different from what we want and expect. We don’t get “buy in”.

Like the parent who involved his children in planning the day, we should involve our employees in the decision making process. This doesn’t mean that we give in to whatever ideas they come up with, but it does mean that we give their ideas serious consideration. Not only are they more likely to approve of the results, and therefore implement them, there is a good chance that they will have some better ideas.

I certainly don’t mean to equate children and employees, but in a certain sense there is a similarity. In both relationships, we have the final authority. In both relationships, we are looked upon as the expert and the guiding force. We are the leader. While this requires a firm hand, it does not mean that we should be dictators.

I am familiar with parents who tell their children to do something “because I said so”. This hardly helps the child understand the rationale behind the directive. However, when the parent explains his reasons (in a manner the child can understand), the results can be much more satisfactory to all involved. The same applies to our employees.

Empowering Customer Service

Bill Hogg tells how Home Depot recently impressed him because an employee was empowered. An employee offered to discount an item to match a sale price. When asked why he did this, the employee responded, “I am empowered to make our customers happy”.

This may seem like a simple thing, and in many ways it is. But are your employees empowered to make customers happy? Certainly, we don’t want them arbitrarily giving away work or discounting prices, but there are many other ways to make a customer happy.

A simple example recently occurred with my company. When I originally met with the customer, they did not want their garage door painted. I went through my normal explanation as to why I thought it best to paint the door, but the customer persisted. However, on the first day of the job my supervisor raised the issue, pointing out that the door was going to look dull and worn after everything else was painted.

He did this without prompting from me. He recognized that the customer would be more satisfied with the door painted, and the customer quickly agreed. Because he was empowered, the supervisor created a situation that is beneficial to everyone.

Acting in One’s Self-Interest

Mark Forster has an interesting post on a topic near and dear to me—acting in one’s self-interest. As he correctly points out, this is often taken to mean “do unto others, before they do unto you.” But as Mark explains:

In fact this is the very reverse of acting in one’s own best interests, since it can hardly be thought to be in anyone’s best interests to alienate other people so that they will not cooperate.

The results of confusing acting in one’s own best interests with a narrow mean-spiritedness are disastrous.

Business is a perfect example of this principle. We own a business with the goal of making a profit—we are pursuing our own self-interest. But we cannot achieve this if we charge outrageous rates, attempt to underpay employees and treat them poorly, cheat customers, and engage in other activities that might seem to have short-term benefits. The result of such actions is that we will have difficulty getting customers and keeping employees, which ultimately is not in our self-interest.

That’s Too Much Trouble

A recent post on Michael Stone’s blog raises an interesting point—many contractors seem to have plenty of time to complain, but no time to fix or prevent the object of their complaints. He tells the story of a contractor who was receiving complaints that his employees were damaging things they didn’t work on. Michael suggesting taking pictures prior to starting work. The contractor declared that that would be too much trouble.

Apparently, dealing with customer complaints wasn’t too much trouble. Apparently, upsetting customers is preferable to avoiding the complaints. Apparently, an ounce of prevention isn’t worth a pound of cure (in this contractor’s opinion).

Years ago we noticed that we seemed to get the same types of complaints over and over. It wasn’t that we had tons of complaints, just that the one we got were similar. I sat down with my supervisors and we made a list of the common complaints and what caused them. We discovered, like the contractor above, that most of these were pre-existing conditions. But we were getting blamed for them!

So we put together procedures to identify these items before starting any work, and we then brought them to the customer’s attention. Not surprisingly, most of the time the customer was unaware of these issues. But when inspecting their fresh paint job, they would have seen these issues and assumed we were responsible. Suddenly the complaints virtually stopped. And we often were able to sell additional work to correct the problem.

The little extra time we spent addressing these problems has saved us countless hours over the years, avoided upsetting customers, and perhaps best of all, helped us increase our sales.