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Teams: How to Make Quality the Signal above the Time and Money Noise

December 28, 2010 by Liz Leave a Comment

(Updated in 2020)

10-Point Plan: Train Self-Managing Teams with an Outstanding Bias Toward Quality

Show Me in the Contract Where It Assures the Work Will Be Good

Spend enough time in business you hear the saying, “Fast, Quick, and Good, Can’t have all three!” or some version of it. In my business it was Quality, Schedule, Budget, Pick Two!”

I watched and wondered for years what made this algorithm work. Observation proves that without constant surveillance it consistently comes out the same.

Schedule and Budget win out over Quality.

Quality is hard to define, protect, and keep. It’s high touch, high concept, by it’s very nature qualitative and subject to discussion. Schedule and budget are right there, out loud, down on paper easy for everyone to measure and see.

In a business endeavor, every member of a team knows exactly how late, how much over budget some effort might be, but few can agree how much it has slipped on quality.

If we’re talking about products, it’s hard enough judge the quality gap — that’s the job of the product team.
But suppose we’re talking about quality leadership, quality thinking, quality communication, quality relationships, or living out a quality social media strategy?

How Do You Keep the Noise of Time and Money from Killing Quality?

Quality leadership does the quality thinking that forms the quality decisions. It’s quality communication that builds long-term quality relationships. That kind of quality is at the foundation of any team endeavor that succeeds. It’s also the at the core of any quality social media strategy.

Whether we’re talking to employees, customers, or volunteers, it’s important that we telegraph with every nuance of our brand that quality will always be the signal above the noise of time and money. Because quality is about them.

How do we build an outstanding bias toward quality into the fabric of our organization and our teams? Use the same steps we used to build a brand-values baseline and if you can, invite help from that same core team.

Start with the heroes and champions from the core team. Whenever change is the goal, look for the folks most predisposition to embrace the change and invite them first.
Put the problem before the change makers — about 12 people in three teams. When they have gathered first challenge the teams to define quality as a definition of thinking, leadership, communication, relationships, and process. Have them come to one definition for their team.
Ask that core group of change makers how to tackle the problem Ask them how to bring quality to be the highest signal above the noise on their team.
Listen and record their answers. Think of it as a list of possibilities, not necessarily a brainstorm, but more like an offer of possible tactics to try in their natural habitat.
Review the list and ask the group to sort it. Choose three categories. Possible categories might be leadership-based ideas, communication-based ideas and process-based ideas.
Ask each team to discuss one of the three lists they’ve made. Suggest that they discuss how well the idea might work over time with their coworkers, how it might need to be changed, and whether it needs outside input. Allow teams to add or remove ideas. Explain that they’re looking for one or more ideas that have merit — enough power and value that the team believes they could persuade others to put the idea into action.
Invite the teams back to the group to present the ideas that they believe have merit. Challenge the teams to persuade the rest of the room to take on their call to action.
Allow the listening teams to give their response and to offer their opinion on how easily they might be able to persuade others to join in to the proposed quality challenge. Work together to help reword and rework any that have value, but need a more powerful argument.
Decide on the most effective quality-enhancing changes that are most natural to the organization.
Build a strategy on how to introduce them to the larger group. Will it be peer-to-peer training? Will it be a meeting? Will it be a proof of concept that the small group tries and then demonstrates success?
Then, choose a way that everyone can measure the success of the attempt to change behavior to a more quality-based way of work. Set a date to meet again to report back, consider how things worked, and adjust the call to action or the process.

Research has proven we go where we look and we change what we measure. If we want our bias toward quality in thinking, leadership, communication, and relationships to grow, we have to look at, measure and talk about them in the same ways we do schedule and budget. If we want quality to be the signal above the noise, we have to invest our schedule and budget in making it so.

People look at what we do — not what we say — to know what we believe.

How do you prove to your employees, customers, and volunteers that quality is above the noise of time or money?

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Are You Blogging for as Many or as Much?

December 5, 2007 by Guest Author Leave a Comment

This guest post was contributed by friend and SOB, Jon Swanson. He often emails me about my writing. I find his observations incredibly valuable, thoughtful, and dear. –ME “Liz” Strauss

As many or as much?

by Jon Swanson

I’ve been blogging for a couple years. I read the wonderful writings of Liz and Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse who all talk specifically about blogging, about success in community. I have considered how to build my reach, how to monetize, how to do all of those things that make a blog successful.

And then I am forced to think deeply about this: as many … or as much?

In my life I often wrestle with whether to help as many people as possible or to help people as much as possible. I understand that there is a falseness in this forced choice, but humor me briefly.

I see needs. It’s one of the things that is part of who I am. I can hear hurt. I can see chaos. I can feel anxiety. And I like to help. Sometimes, I like to help as many people as possible, to spread information or money or ideas widely. But even as I am talking with or working with a large group, I see that one person at the edge of the group, the one being ignored by everyone. And I want to go to that person, to talk with them, to listen.

And now do you see the dilemma? In a fixed amount of time you can talk with a large group or you can listen to an individual, but you cannot do both.

I love cross-links as much as the next person. I love reach. But when I hear pain in someone’s ‘voice’, I have this desire to send them an email or a text or a DM. And that takes heart cycles that then can’t be spent elsewhere.

I know that it is possible to have different levels of relationship with different people. I know that many people are very caring. But I know that in order for me to be most effective as a person who blogs as part of my involvement in lives, I have to put more of my life into ‘as much’ than I do into ‘as many’.

As a result, I feel a deep connection with a fairly small group of people online. Other people read my posts and comment occasionally, but my desire is to make sure that I am adding as much value as I possibly can to that group of people.

As we wrestle with our blogging, trying to figure out our purpose, our unique voice, our distinctive value to the people of the blogosphere, some of us will be very effective with ‘as many’. It is important to get the information that you have, the perspectives that you shape and share, to as many people as possible.

At the same time there are others of us who will be working on the ‘as much’.

It is possible to be very successful in both of these worlds. However, at some point feel the freedom from being measured by the expectations of the world that isn’t yours.

–Jon Swanson, You can find Jon at the Levite Chronicles

Is the world of “many” or the world of “much” where your blog makes the most difference?
— Liz
Work with Liz!!

12 Detailed Checklists to Spit Shine and Promote Your Blog

July 10, 2007 by Liz 11 Comments

In Case You Missed It

Vovo over at Business Traffic Ideas threw this idea to me. He caught it from Patrick Schaber at The Lonely Marketer who spotted the idea originated by Matt McGee over at Small Business SEM.

The thought is that so new subscribers in recent months might like to know about posts from times gone by.

12 Detailed Checklists to Spit Shine and Promote Your Blog

Every human is drawn to what we like and away from what we don’t. The beauty of a well-written checklist is that it checks for what we might have forgetten. The best blog promotion is quality — content, design, and linking. Use this dozen checklists to give your blog a spit shine and show it off.

Classic Revisited: The Blog Review Checklist

Checklist for Linking to Quality Blogs

Editing for Quality and a Content Editor’s Checklist

Choosing for Our Readers: A 5-Point Pop Quiz

Blogs Arenâ€™t Books, But Revising Is Still Revising: 6 Gating Questions to Make Revising Easier

6+1: How-to Blogging — Stomp Out Swiss Cheese Knowledge

Eye-Deas 3-Photo Content Checklist

Editing for Quality and a Content Editor’s Checklist

A Blogger’s Personal Narrative Checklist

Checklist for Starting a Directory Listing

Blog Design Checklist

Taking care of the details, any designer will tell you is the killer app in the most elegant and well-cared for presentations. Any great writer will agree with that opinion. Yes, one after number 7 is missiong. 🙂

Quality feels satisfying to generate and to use. Quality is a blog’s best promotion of all.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you’d like Liz to help you find your strategy, click on the Work with Liz!!

Do You Know the Difference Between Quality and Cost?

December 19, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

When Quality Is Wrong

Writing, designing, tweaking anything, we work to bring what we do to the highest level. Who decides what the highest level is? Who determines the definition of quality? At first we think we do.

But we don’t.

The customer does.

If the customer can’t see what we add, it’s not quality.

If the customer doesn’t value our additional tweak, that’s not quality either.

If the customer doesn’t want that bell or that whistle, we may have gotten her way, we may have actually taken something from him.

If the customer can’t tell shades of blue as well as we can, we may have just made the customer wait.

In each of those cases, we weren’t adding value by investing our time what we added was . . .

COST.

What’s really silly is that some of us will sit back and wait for a thank you, a thank you that will never come from customers who want what we called quality. Thanks come so much more quickly when we give our customers something they want.

I don’t want a new chair. I want this one fixed.

Liz's Signature

Quality, Schedule, Budget

April 30, 2006 by Liz Leave a Comment

Taking This Show on the Road

In an hour or so, I move my computer downtown to a hotel in Chicago while I attend a literacy convention. I know. I know. I live here. I could stay at home.

It’s a bit of a financial hit. Convention hotels in Chicago aren’t particularly inexpensive, but I see it as an investment in my customers and myself.

It’s hard enough to give my clients my undivided attention at a convention of 15,000 attendees. I want to have the flexibility to be at their exhibit booth when meetings inevitably are rescheduled. I want to be around for the after-hours events when relationships become real.

An adage in publishing, perhaps in every business, says:

Quality. Schedule. Budget. Pick Two.

What’s the right choice? Is it always the same two?

Besides it will be fun, sending you notes from the convention. Any advice you have for me while I’m there?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

GAWKER Design: Curb Appeal as Customer-Centered Promotion

February 22, 2006 by Liz 2 Comments

The Qualities of Great Curb Appeal

Great design is branding that whispers. Like a house with fabulous curb appeal, a uniquely-inspired stained glass window, or the fine lines on a fabulous car, design is promotion that draws you nearer. It entices customers or readers to come closer–to see for themselves what’s being offered.

Don’t think for a minute that looks don’t count. First impressions tell customers that a business understands who their customers are and that the business knows what their customers are looking for. GAWKER understands curb appeal and uses it to deliver customers to their own front door.

Product is the what and the how. Product is the content and the quality that gets customers coming back. But whether it’s a blog, a bistro, or barometer, product is nothing if it never gets to a customer. If no one comes to read it, or dine there, or buy it. Then how can you say that the product is good?

That’s where design–curb appeal–comes in. Design is the why and the romance. Like quality product, good design starts with the customer. It tells the customer what this product is and who it’s for. Design done well makes the promise that the product keeps. It says, “Come here, and try this. You won’t be sorry.” If the product is quality, you’re not sorry. You’re delighted you tried it.

Gawker and the Curb Appeal Checklist

GAWKER passes a Curb Appeal checklist with flying colors.

The name of the product, GAWKER, is big, bold, and colorful. GAWKER speaks to the audience that the product is made for. Cover all but that word–GAWKER–and you still know this blog is not meant for your grandmother’s golf team or your little brother’s playschool. GAWKER looks and sounds slightly irreverent and obviously self-content.
All things on the page speak to 21-34 year old, mid-high to high income professionals. GAWKER shows their achieving, metro-readers an environment they’re comfortable with, one that says, “you belong here with us. We speak the same language. We do the same things.”
Even the ads make readers feel cool. As the New Yorker pointed out, you won’t see pharmacutical ads in GAWKER, because all GAWKER readers are “young and beautiful.” At least, that’s how they want to see themselves.
In other words, you can tell by looking, that GAWKER has one BIG IDEA–CELEBRITIES ONLY–Content and Customers. You’ll read about them and feel like one too. No confusion here. Customers know right away whether this is their gig or not. GAWKER doesn’t waste your time if you don’t want what GAWKWER”s got.

In terms of the curb appeal the closer a reader gets, the better GAWKER looks. GAWKER has mastered brand-niche marketing.

Promise and Product Perfectly Wed

As a reader, I find exactly what I expected–the jazzy, snarky, celebrity gossip that makes me feel like a slightly smarter, sharper celebrity than the folks being talked about. GAWKER passes the test because everything they do says they know who their customers are. That knowledge shows in every detail of their product. The promise and product are perfectly wed.

The key to GAWKER-level design is knowing your customers so well that your customers can see themselves in every detail of what you do. Top-notch design and product-driven packaging require complete attention and constant awareness of customervalues and customer needs.

When was the last time you checked in with your customers about the curb appeal of your blog or business? Are you sure your product and promise are perfectly wed?

–ME “Liz” Strauss