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How to Get Bean Counters and Kumbayers Serving Both the Company and the Customers

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

10-Point Plan – Align Values with Value Proposition

The Clean and the Unpredictable

The core of any great business is the business model that drives it. A company without a viable, thriving business model — a process which consistently yields a growing profit — is a hobby not a business. The mathematics of the process — the return on investments — has to justify the decisions and directions of the business. Human relationships — intelligent, trust bonds with employees, customers, vendors, partners — are vital to the true and ethical execution of those decisions.

Mathematics and numbers are a comfort. They add up to clear, clean, predictable answers. We can reach the solution to a mathematical problem with the right algorithm, good data, and a trusty calculator. People are not so comfortable. Their behavior can be unintelligible, messy, and unpredictable. To reach the solution to a people problem requires experience, leadership, and gray matter decision making.

In any business, some employees are drawn to the bottom line clarity of the mathematics – the bottom line, the sales figures, the profit and loss statement. Other employees are taken with the less tangible, but equally important, human relationships – customer service, product experience, community building.

Some folks call the two groups the Bean Counters and the Kumbayers. Both terms discount that group’s value. In great businesses, every employee belongs to both groups. In not so great businesses, employees haven’t yet discovered the strength of getting those two groups together.

See the Values in the Value Proposition

So how do we get the bean counters and the kumbayers to come together?
The two groups aren’t so far apart if you consider their best intentions. One group wants to protect and grow the company; the other group wants to protect and grow the customer base. Without a company, neither group would be here. Without customers, the company wouldn’t be here either.

Serving the company serves customers and serving customers serves the company.

No business can thrive if every employee isn’t doing both. What if every employee could align customer values with the company’s value proposition. Here’s how to bring the two groups together.

  • Bring together a dozen leaders who represent both bean counters and kumbayers. Seat them at mixed team tables of four. Point out that: It’s no secret that our strengths are also our weaknesses. It’s human nature to be drawn to and value what we’re good at and to discount or overlook what isn’t our strong suit. Truth is, we think people who think as we do are smart and those that think differently are … well … either not so smart or being difficult.
  • As a group define the company’s reason for being in business. Write it large on a flip chart or white board. Ask them to record it at their tables.
  • Tell the teams, each individual has five minutes to write three words to represent the highest values their job role brings to executing that value proposition. Explain that they should focus on what they uniquely bring to their job role that adds value to the organization.
  • After five minutes, have the teams share their words and explain them to each other. Suggest that people listen for what others do of value that they themselves would never want to or could never do well.
  • Ask each team to choose rewrite the value proposition including three values words that represent the entire table. Explain that the new values proposition should reflect a focus on both growing the company and customer relationships.
  • Have the teams share and defend their new values-based value proposition. Challenge them to give examples of how their value proposition in action — decisions they might make — would support both growth of the company and customer relationships.

People who think differently than we do often care about things important to the business that don’t draw our personal interest. A discussion of company and customer goals can lead both groups to value every kind of contribution. Seeing how passionately one person cares about the profitability to maintain a stable business unit while another cares about totally satisfied customers opens the door to dialogue about how one can’t happen without the other. When that light goes on, people start to get interested in what they used to find difficult and the organization can develop and grow exponentially.

How do you get the bean counters and the kumbayers to serve both the company and customers?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

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

Thoughts on Effective Teams

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What exactly is meant by the word “team?” A team can be defined as “a small group of skilled people who work together toward a common goal or purpose.” The most effective teams are those that consist of no more than 20 people. If a team grows larger than that, it becomes increasingly difficult to get everyone in agreement to work toward a common purpose and goal.

A team also is composed of skilled people. If you think of a sports team, the most obvious example of teamwork, the coach strives to place the most skilled players in the appropriate positions. A person whose skills are insufficient for that position is either moved to a more suitable position or is removed from the team altogether.

An effective team also works together. Interdependence among individuals is a key characteristic of successful teams. If a group of people don’t need to work closely together and they don’t depend on one another to complete a task or reach a goal, then there really isn’t a need to form a team. A team’s success is largely determined by the team members’ ability to work interdependently. A key hallmark of a high-performance team is that all the members work toward a common goal or purpose.

While the characteristics and requirements for successful teamwork are most obvious when it comes to athletic teams, they hold true in any team building effort.

Building an Effective Team for Success

Use the following steps to build a successful team:

  • Define the team – Identify the members of your team and determine the role each team member will play in the success of the entire organization.
  • Define specific team goals and an action plan – State the primary purpose of the team. Identify goals the team is to accomplish:
    • today
    • this week
    • this month
    • this year
    • this decade
  • Identify specific behaviors that support team goals and a team environment – Specific actions and behaviors mark the most successful teams. Among these behavioral characteristics found in team members are a positive attitude, commitment, persistence, and discipline. Team members who demonstrate these qualities are generally considered successful team members. Not only are they considered successful themselves, but their winning attitudes and actions have a positive, constructive effect on the other team members.
  • Outline how you and others will be held accountable – Recognizing team members for their specific contributions to team success with positive feedback encourages continued high level achievement. Give verbal or written feedback one-on-one to the individual, or if appropriate, give public praise to individuals or the team for meeting goals. In contrast, consider the consequences to team members who fail to uphold certain responsibilities or attitudes. Address unmet expectations before they drive a wedge into working relationships and negatively affect the team. Some personnel issues, by nature, should be handled under the organization’s policies. But be careful not to ignore the impact that unfulfilled responsibilities have on your team’s morale.

What would you add to this list? Share below in the comments.