How Process Forms Alignment

Cole Abbott (00:00:00 -> 00:00:14)

We just basically recorded an episode and I didn't fully turn on one of the cameras. Yeah. It happens. Which is awesome. Yeah. So it's almost like we should have a process <laugh> outlined for how to turn on cameras Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:00:15 -> 00:00:16)

And a checklist.

Cole Abbott (00:00:16 -> 00:00:19)

Yes. That'd be really cool if we had that. Yeah. Um,

Mark Abbott (00:00:20 -> 00:00:22)

Ironies of ironies. Yes.

Cole Abbott (00:00:22 -> 00:00:37)

Ironical as my buddy used to say. So today's episode is on processed. Exactly. So process is obviously important. Yep. In especially in larger organizations. Yep. We'll get into

Mark Abbott (00:00:37 -> 00:00:38)

That. Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:00:38 -> 00:00:47)

And, uh, so why Right. It's supporting, but why is that one of the nine core competencies? Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:00:47 -> 00:03:35)

'cause, you know, 'cause ultimately, uh, you know, for organizations, for businesses to evolve into companies, uh, you know, what it, what you fundamentally have is, you know, you have these organizations that Go through these stages of development and ultimately they're consistently doing something right. They are serving a human or a collection of humans, um, with either a product and or service. Um, and they're doing it repeatedly. And so to do that, there's all these processes right behind the scenes that puts that thing or that service into someone's hands. And, um, and, and as we, you know, as you think about it, uh, in the beginning stages of a company, the processes really are not really that important for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is, and stage one and stage two, you're just figuring stuff out. And so, you know, spending a lot of time worrying about processes just makes no bloody sense. Um, you know, you're trying to get product market fit. You're all working together. It's, it's a very net tightly that group of people having things sort of being implicit versus explicit works just fine. Right. But as the organization evolves through the stages and you get into stages three and stages four, and then stages five, the importance of processes just becomes, you know, higher and higher and higher and higher. So, um, and, and, and, and you know, the reality is, is that, is that, you know, we all have scarce resources, whether it's time or money, and, uh, and just investing in process, um, early on, uh, doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. But ultimately, you know, if we don't have good processes specifically around things that we're repeatedly doing, then um, you know, we're recreating the wheel every single day. It's a waste of energy, it's a waste of time. Um, and in particular, sort of when it's processes that are involving your, um, you know, folks at Stratum one or Stratum two in particular. 'cause that's where all the lot of, all the repeating activities are, are taking place. You know, if it's, if if they don't know what to do and why they're doing the things and haven't been trained on how to do the things, then that's not fair to them. And it's not fair to the other people who are dependent upon them. Because guess what, all these processes kind of become somewhat connected. Sometimes the processes are within, you know, a core function, and other times the processes go across core functions. And I don't know what percentage of the time, you know, what percentage of core processes are impacting more than one core function, but the vast majority are.

Cole Abbott (00:03:37 -> 00:03:42)

Yeah. Well, right, when you get into the ripple effects Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna impact, yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:03:42 -> 00:03:43)

Six, six degrees of bacon.

Cole Abbott (00:03:43 -> 00:03:58)

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, we talk about there's the stage component Yes. And then there's the vertical part of that. Yeah. Um, right. And, and there's a lot of,

Mark Abbott (00:03:58 -> 00:05:15)

And there's even an horizontal part of this, right? Yes. So, you know, as, as a company evolves, you know, it not only as it goes through the stages of development, it not only starts to stack hierarchies of competencies, right. Level one work and level two work, and level three work, and level four work, level five work, but it also becomes more and more specialized across the organization. So you go from three core functions, sales, marketing, and customer success being one core function, operations being one core function and accounting and, and finance being one core function to all of a sudden, like, you know, um, where we got, before we went to the C-suite, we had 11 core functions and, uh, and, and, and we had, you know, four levels of work. And so that's, there's a lot going on there. And in particular, right? Uh, making sure that the work at levels, the level one work and the level level two work were being done in a, in a way so that everybody was feeling like, you know, we're all working well together. You know, uh, I I tend to use sports metaphors, right? But if I turn right to pass the ball, or I turn left to pass the ball being an old rugby player, um, you know, the people are there that you expect 'em to be.

Cole Abbott (00:05:15 -> 00:05:27)

Yeah. And it comes back to trust. Yeah. Right? So I know that we need to have everybody, if there's a team of five people doing basically the same thing, right? Uh, similar seats then, or same

Mark Abbott (00:05:27 -> 00:05:27)

C or

Cole Abbott (00:05:27 -> 00:06:01)

Right. Same role. Yeah. Uh, we need to make sure that they're all doing things pretty much the same way. Yeah. Right. Following the same processes. Yeah. And then if we have somebody else on a different team who is reliant on that other team Right. For example, an onboarding or, or, right. Yeah. It's important <laugh> Yeah. That people across the different teams know exactly what the other people are doing. Yeah. Otherwise, if someone's doing one thing, someone's doing something else, or they're changing what they're doing, that is, that's a recipe for disaster. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:06:01 -> 00:06:11)

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. If, if you're dependent upon a group of people for the same thing and they're all doing it differently Right. That that'll blow your brain after a while. Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:06:11 -> 00:07:25)

It's like I had a, uh, it's a little different, but kind of the same things. I had, I had one professor in, in college who defined a term differently than All of my other professors. Right. And he was, we most of the cla or half the class got the question wronging exam. And I had a very whatever <laugh> tense discussion with him in front of the class about why you can't do that. Right. Because if I have, and this is over two schools, right? Right. That whatever's in one of those investment formulas, right. Uh, if I have four professors tell me it means one thing and the internet says it means that thing, but you have a different opinion. I can't value what you're doing with what your opinion. I Sure, I can understand where your philosophy is on it, but I'm not going to take that seriously and I can't remember your thing versus everyone else's thing. 'cause if everyone else is following that process and doing things the same way Right. And you are being an outlier and doing something differently, yeah. That's not fair to the, in that case, the class. But that's not fair to, in this situation. Yeah. It's not fair to the organization that you wanted do something. You

Mark Abbott (00:07:25 -> 00:07:28)

Wanna be unique. To be unique. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Cole Abbott (00:07:28 -> 00:07:28)

Because

Mark Abbott (00:07:28 -> 00:07:30)

We're, 'cause we're playing a game together and

Cole Abbott (00:07:30 -> 00:07:39)

We, we would appreciate an organization, we appreciate the feedback of, Hey, I think we could do things differently. Yeah. But at the end of the day, we all have to agree on the process. Yeah. We have to agree on what everything means like that.

Mark Abbott (00:07:39 -> 00:08:06)

I mean, another good real quick, um, example of that would be, let's just say you've got a professional football team. You've got two quarterbacks and o Omaha. Omaha, Omaha means one thing for one of them, and another thing for another one of them, how's the line gonna deal? How's the, how are they gonna deal with that? Right. So sometimes we have to have right. Processes defined so that we can all work well together. Right.

Cole Abbott (00:08:06 -> 00:08:26)

So, and if you have, you have two quarterbacks and one's a a dual threat and one's a pro style. Right. You, in some situations it's gonna be good because you can tailor the offense to different situations. But you're not gonna have a championship winning team with two different styles of quarterbacks.

Mark Abbott (00:08:26 -> 00:08:57)

Well, 'cause you lose the, you you lose the benefit of compounding. Yeah. Right. Of becoming really good at something. And, uh, then there's always pros and cons to these things, right? There's always tension between sort of, you know, just sort of super, you know, creative situations and super, you know, so effectiveness versus efficiency, right. Stuff. But just you have to call out, this is where I need to be efficient. This is where I need to be effective. Right. Um, and when you mix those things up, that creates chaos. Yeah.

Cole Abbott (00:08:57 -> 00:09:03)

Well, and process is the result of exploiting the thing that has already been explored. Yes. Right.

Mark Abbott (00:09:03 -> 00:09:15)

Because they're repeating, right? Yeah. We're not documenting processes for things that aren't being repeated. So by definition, processes fall into the realm of efficiency, more about efficiency than about effectiveness. Yeah. So,

Cole Abbott (00:09:16 -> 00:09:39)

All right. So, right. And I, bringing it back to structure. Yeah. Right, right. We have our leaders have to go and be more comfortable with that ambiguity and go into that unknown and then Right. Create those processes. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> for the rest of the team. Right? And so what is the process

Mark Abbott (00:09:39 -> 00:09:40)

Around processes

Cole Abbott (00:09:40 -> 00:09:43)

Around creating Yeah. Implementing processes. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:09:43 -> 00:18:47)

So first thing, um, I, and I'm, I'm gonna go back to it, right? So you have to, you have to understand right, the moment you are in, right? So if you're stage one or stage two, don't worry about processes too, too much at all, right? When you start to get into stage three, stage four, stage five, it becomes more and more important. And, and, and, and, and then, so, and, and, and you'll know that moment when you're struggling with people not consistently doing the things that you need to do in order to be living up to the expectations of your, either your internal stakeholders or your external stakeholders. So as an example, right? If the, if someone's expecting to buy something of a certain quality, and that level of quality is all over the place, you've got a process problem, right? Um, and, and, and or if someone's wanting to, expecting to get a certain quantity delivered, and it's not, it's all over the place, you've got a process problem. So it gets back to repeatable stuff. So then the question is, let's just say for the sake that we're at, we're at, we're at, we're at sort of stage three, stage four, stage five, where we know we need to be doing things consistently and, and repeat repeating things, consi and doing it consistently. Then the question is, you know, okay, are, is, are these processes that are gonna likely be here in six months or nine months or 12 months? And if the answer is yes, now is probably a good time to start thinking about those to the extent that you are at that moment where this is gotta be one of your higher priorities. Because as I've said before, process tends to be one of the last core competencies that people matter master, right? Because there's just some fundamental things you gotta get done, um, before then. But let's just presume for a second now that the organization has evolved to the point where the senior leadership team's sitting there during quarterly or an annual, and they're going, you know what? Now's the time. We really need to start working on, on, on, um, uh, on taking our core process comp competency to the next level. So the first thing is just making sure everybody in the company, everybody at the senior leadership team even agrees on what the core processes are. So we start to create a list. Um, sometimes that list is seven core processes. I've seen it over 40 for one of my larger clients that ultimately, you know, uh, raised capital at a, at a unicorn valuation. Um, and so you gotta agree on those, on, on those lists once the lists are agreed on. I like people agreeing on the names of the core processes because words matter so that we all know what we're talking about. And now the question is, okay, you know, how are we gonna go about like eating this elephant? Because it's a big thing, right? And so what I, what I always recommend is, you, you need to decide if you're going to tackle any of those sort of, you're gonna tackle starting to, uh, document those core processes, um, in the next quarter. And if you are, which departments have the or core functions just have the capacity to start going there, or which core functions would benefit the most by, by documenting the, the core processes. So let's just say for the sake of this conversation, that you've got, you know, seven departments and, and two of them decide to tackle, you know, documenting their core processes for the next quarter. So, um, you, you, you create a rock. And then the, what I like having is the people within that organization, uh, within that core function, uh, you know, the function leader comes back and says, Hey guys, we're gonna take this on. Maybe it's gonna take us one quarter, maybe it's gonna take us two quarters, but let's put together a tiger team and figure out what the steps are. So now how do people go about figuring out what the steps are? Well, I always like to think about what's the, what's the penultimate thing you're doing in producing, right? So let's just say sales, sales ultimately is, I'm getting a customer. That's my end goal, right? So I want a customer, let's just say for the sake of a conversation, it's a, it's a business where, um, you get a contract. So the end goal is to have a contract. So what's it take to get to a contract, right? And you work your way, step by step by step, by step by step, by step by step, all the way back to the very beginning, which is, you know, identifying an ideal customer, right? So you say, okay, we agree on an ideal customer. Now we get a list of people. Now we agree this is kinda how we're gonna go out and, and, and, and, and, and, and evolve that list into leads and into potential trials and into demos or whatever, whatever it is. And you develop these 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 steps to go from identified to closed. And then once you have those, then the next question is, does it make sense to put KPIs on each of those step processes? So we understand whether things are going well in our process or not. The KPIs are there to help us understand whether there's an issue in that particular step. Remember, these steps are taking place repeatedly, so multiple people tend to be involved in them. And so, you know, if there are issues, it'll show up in the KPI. And then once the issue show up, the classic question is, alright, what's the issue? Is it we haven't trained people well on this? Is it, this step actually makes no bloody sense, right? Um, or is it, you know, we've got people who just basically don't like to follow rules and think they can get away with ignoring the steps. Um, but there's usually something going on. And so we need to figure that thing out. And that's really, you know, what we do is we take it, we, we make sure that we get all these processes, we make sure that we have good KPIs on the steps, in particular in areas where it's really important that we do this consistently back to efficiency. Um, and then ultimately where I like to get to is I like to have every single one of my core function heads own KPI own process mastery and own KPI mastery. Those are two separate, separate roles and accountabilities and responsibilities that we have them own. And on a scale of one to 10, how strong are your processes within your organization? That doesn't mean how strong have you documented? That's how strong are they? Are they working really, really well? Are 90% of the time all the KPIs associated with your core processes, are they green? Right? And it's pretty straightforward stuff. And, and, and, and, and so ultimately, you know, where you wanna get to is every single one of your core functions has, has the right level of processes documented as I, I don't think we talked about this, but you know, you don't want to document everything to 99.99%. It's just a waste of, of effort for a whole host of reasons, including processes tend to be relatively tropic. What you want to do is sort of document the 20% of the activities that generate 80% of the value, um, and really focus on those. And so, you know, maybe there's five, maybe there's seven, 10 steps usually doesn't get much further than that. Um, where if that process step is not working well, it's a problem. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And so ultimately, you know, where you want to get to is we've documented everybody's processes, we've developed training materials, um, they're literally, you know, sort of n 90 in the knowledge sharing tool or in the process tool. You can go in there and see all the training materials, make sure everybody's trained up on the, on the, on the, the skills, the competencies they need to be trained up and make sure the KPIs are in place, and then stand back and, you know, uh, every single six months to 12 months, you just might wanna check in and just sort of say, Hey, you know, our processes working really, really well. Our vision for 90 is within, you know, one to two years that you don't even have to do that because we're gonna give you a, um, we'll let you know, we'll let you know, right? Because we have all the docu, you know, you've documented it all, it's in there, the KPIs are in there. And, um, if you're following that process, and we can even tell you whether or not you have people processes or training processes, or you have, um, you know, sort of process deficiencies, right? And, and, and, and then last thing I'll say on, on all this is, um, that once again, why is it the last core competency to be mastered? It is hard, number one. And number two, you need to figure out when the cost benefit is there for the documenting of this thing, right? As an example, if you know that you are going to take a group that's, let's, let's just say back in the early days you have sales, marketing and customer service, and you're now gonna split those three things into three different core functions. You may wanna wait until you now have those three core functions. Those leaders are in place, they're getting their act together. Then work on documenting the core processes. If you know something's gonna change in 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, maybe months, right? You may wanna wait. But if you know, we're gonna be doing this and we're gonna be doing at least for a year, if not two years, if not forever, then it's a no brainer to the extent that you have the capacity to take that rock on for that quarter.

Cole Abbott (00:18:48 -> 00:19:29)

Yeah. I, I, I always think of it as sort of the scaled business routines. There's a lot of things that you do during the day that you don't wanna have to think about doing, right? Yeah. Right. It's like making your bed brush your teeth. Yeah. And if you're bringing in people that don't know how to do that, for example, this is what, not the best analogy, but bringing people that don't how to do that. You don't want to have to teach 'em how to brush your teeth every day. Right? Right. Yeah. It's like if you have a child, you teach them to do that, and then once they get it, like, okay, do it. Right? You, you got it, I trust you. Right? Yeah. And then, but you gotta keep doing those things and yeah. If you're doing that every day, it's like that's not something you want have to be top of mind. That's not something you should be worried about.

Mark Abbott (00:19:29 -> 00:19:44)

Yeah. We don't worry about whether we put our left leg or our right leg into our pants first. It's just automatic. Right? Yeah. And it's those, it's those, it's those repeating disciplines that ultimately should be pretty automatic. That should be documented. Yeah. Right.

Cole Abbott (00:19:45 -> 00:19:49)

Because that's just, it's Right. All comes back to trust.

Mark Abbott (00:19:49 -> 00:21:07)

Yep. Yep. Yeah. And then, like I said, um, you know, ultimately, uh, the last thing we haven't talked a little bit about is we do the training, and then once the training materials are done, just let you know your department know that, hey, we're going through this process to make sure that we all are on the same page in terms of what our processes are. And, um, we've, you know, we, we now have the all documented, they're all, you know, in 90, they're all in the knowledge sharing tool. You can go in there and you can, um, make sure that, uh, you understand, you know, the processes that, uh, not only you are responsible for, but it's helpful for you to understand the processes that are, you're on your left side, right? If you're thinking about it, you take the ball and you pass it, take it from the left person, you pass it to the right, here's my pro, here are the processes that I am connected to on my left side and on my right side. So it's flowing from them to me to someone else. And I just have an appreciation for that. And ultimately, I think that's super healthy for people to understand not just their own thing, but how their thing relates to others. It gives 'em more context and appreciation for, um, you know, sort of the, the nature of the game they're playing.

Cole Abbott (00:21:08 -> 00:21:34)

Yeah. And if you're overwhelmed by the things going on left and right, which I can think of some people Yeah. Some, some coworkers Yeah. Who are in that situation. And those people tend to like creating processes, but also they need to in order to function. Right. And, and Right. 'cause we have a lot of people, uh, project managers Yeah. For example, who have to deal with a bunch of things and Yeah. They, they're,

Mark Abbott (00:21:34 -> 00:22:07)

They're like, they're their own version of OCD like I am. Right? Yeah. There's certain stuff, right. If it's not reasonably well organized, if there's just too much chaos in front of me, um, you know, it's, it's not debilitating, right. But it is, it, it, it causes friction, it causes anxiety, it causes, you know, us just to be not our best selves. And so, you know, some of us have more needs for process than others. And of course, those people are great to involve Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in, um, in the process of setting up our processes.

Cole Abbott (00:22:08 -> 00:22:43)

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And if you have somebody who You Right. You, you want those people in the right seats, and then that's a whole Right. That's a people thing. And then that's also goes back to Colby and all that. Yes, exactly. And making sure that they're there. But if it's one of those situations where if you are making things more complex, 'cause you're not falling a process Right. Then those complexities are compounding. Yes. And then it's really easy to just fall into a mess. And, uh, and, and I think it's even more apparent when you see those people go out of office for a little

Mark Abbott (00:22:43 -> 00:22:43)

Bit.

Cole Abbott (00:22:43 -> 00:23:10)

Right. And it's like, oh, wow. It's really easy to just kind of slide out of it. Right. And that's when we go back to saying that processes and tropic, you have a lot of forces, some good, right. Somewhere it's like, this is, this is healthy, this is helping it evolve. And then somewhere it's just a lack of discipline. Yeah. And following those things. And then when you add 20 people involved in that whole process Yeah. It's, it takes actual work to keep that in order and to keep it together. Yeah.

Mark Abbott (00:23:11 -> 00:23:16)

Yeah. Anything more on process?

Cole Abbott (00:23:17 -> 00:23:19)

I think, I think we're good. Awesome.

Mark Abbott (00:23:19 -> 00:23:22)

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.