Just ONE Thing
More Staff, Less Effort? Get Your Shop Team Pulling Together
Episode 278
with Rick White, 180BIZ
So, good morning. My name is Rick White from 180BIZ, and this is my Just ONE Thing. Have you ever looked around your shop and thought, “Man, I've got more people than I used to have. Why doesn't it feel like we're getting that much more done?”
You've added people, right? To increase your potential, your capacity. And more people should mean more effort, and more effort should mean more gets done.
And it kind of reminds me of a story from Charles Swindoll that I heard before, and I'm actually gonna read this.
“There was an important job to be done, and everybody was sure that somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but nobody did it.
“Somebody got angry about that because it was everybody's job. Everybody thought that anybody could do it, but nobody realized that everybody wouldn't do it.”
Right?
“It ended up that everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done.”
Holy crap. Nothing but good stuff.
So listen, that sounds really, really funny, but as you add more people, the complexity of communication goes up exponentially. I was reading a while back that for every person you add to your team, it increases the complexity of communication by 200%. Let me rephrase.
It increases the complexity of effective communication 200%, right? That's amazing. It just blows my mind that it takes that much more to be effective at communicating. But I need you to understand that sometimes, as the team grows, the results that you're getting actually go down, and it's because there's no accountability.
That's the first thing. When you start out and you have this big picture of what your potential is, you gotta understand what the potential is as a shop, but then you gotta dial it down to an individual person so that everybody understands what their contribution is.
Recently, like last week, I was doing some reading and came across a psychological phenomena called the Ringelmann effect. See, as the size of a group grows, the effort of each person tends to go down.
They actually did this test where they had one person. The scientist hooked up a rope to a meter, and they had one person pull against that rope as hard as they possibly could, and they measured it. And then they had a group of people come in after they measured each person individually, and they found that when they brought the group together, the output went down.
They didn't give it their all. So I need you to understand it doesn't mean that your people are lazy. What happens is, in everybody's mind, including yours, it goes from being “This is my job” to “This is our job,” and that's where individual effort becomes harder to see, okay?
And your responsibility becomes less clear. It's easier to think that someone else is gonna take care of it, and we see this every day. Everybody needs to answer the phone. Somebody needs to keep the shop clean. Anybody needs to check parts in. You get what I'm saying here? It sounds like reasonable expectations, but everybody isn't a person, right?
You can't coach everybody. You can't hold everybody accountable, and everybody can't own a result. When something belongs to everyone, it easily ends up belonging to no one. Ownership gets weaker. Because it's now our job, you don't feel the same responsibility, right?
Your effort becomes harder to see when you mix people in. That's why I recommend silos, right? Where you have teams within your shop so that the team is accountable, then each person in the team is accountable. Because otherwise, you watch everyone else's effort.
I've had friends of mine that went to work for municipalities, and they went in with the work ethic that they had in the private sector, and they got beat up hard by the other guys saying, “Don't make us look bad. Don't make us look bad.” This stuff happens.
And eventually someone starts thinking, “Here's the other side of it. Why am I busting my butt if they're getting away with it?” That's why when you have... Remember what I say all the time: your standard isn't what you talk about; it's what you tolerate.
If you've got two really sharp technicians up here, but you got one down here and you're tolerating this, at some point these guys up here are gonna say, “Why am I bothering?” Now, I don't want you to diagnose this as being lazy. This is where I think shop owners get it wrong. You start to think, “Hey, man, I'm not seeing what I should be. My people just don't care.”
And that might be, but before you blame someone, look at the environment you've created. Have you made ownership clear? Does it belong to one person? Does everybody know what good looks like? Can you see each person's contribution, and are you giving them a measurement? In other words, here's what you should be producing, and here's your daily feedback to what you're getting, right?
Set expectations. Don't assume it's culture. That's absolutely right. 'Cause here's the thing: you gotta make a high accountability, right? High accountability has got to be part of your value system because everybody is on, or should be on, a performance-based pay plan. Now, that doesn't mean flat rate.
What it means is everybody, including the owner, has some kind of performance basis to it. And I have owners argue with me all the time, “No, I'm not. I get paid every week.” And I'm like, “Okay, let me ask you a simple question. Who's the first person that doesn't cash a check when there's not enough money in the bank?”
And the owner slowly raises their hand, and I went, “There you go. That's performance-based pay.” So you've gotta understand: what you have here is not an effort problem; what you have here is an ownership problem. So first thing I need you to say is give things an owner. Give your task, give the outcomes you want, make an owner.
Create an owner for each one. Don't say, “Hey, somebody needs to call Mrs. Jones.” “Hey, Mike, call Mrs. Jones before 2:00 o'clock.” And then second thing, once you've got the owner, you gotta define the result. You gotta show them what done looks like. What are they responsible for? What does good look like? And then the last thing you gotta do is make the individual contribution visible.
Every person should be able to answer, “What do they gotta do, and what should it look like?” And then they should be able to ask themselves, “How am I doing?” But the last part of this is being able to deal with low effort. Because you're not just coaching the person who's giving less; you're protecting the people who are giving more.
Your best people are watching what you're willing to tolerate. So I need you to understand that building a team doesn't automatically multiply effort. Sometimes adding people actually divides responsibility. So when you find yourself saying, “Everybody needs to,” stop, pay attention. Ask yourself, “Who actually owns this?”
What does the result look like? Because teamwork doesn't mean everybody owns everything. Great teams are made up of individuals who know exactly what their part is, and they give their best effort towards it.
Teamwork doesn't mean everyone owns everything. It means individuals who know exactly what their part is in the overall scheme of things, and then give their very best effort towards it. Okay? So this is what I need you to understand. More people create more capacity. Clear ownership turns that capacity into results.
Everybody, I wanna thank you for being here. If you've been struggling with this and would like to talk to me, I would love to have you meet up with me one-on-one. Shannon will put my link in for my calendar. Just pick a time; we'll sit down and talk.
So real quick, what I want you to do here is give things an owner. Once you've got the owner, you've gotta show them the result. Make the individual contribution visual, and then the very last thing is deal with low performance. That's the fourth part of this. So that's everything right there.
So thank you, everybody. Please share this video. People need to hear this, so please share this video. Love you all. Brian, good morning. You're absolutely right. We gotta synergize. That's exactly what it is.
Like, if you think of an orchestra, everybody doesn't play the same instrument. They all play different instruments, and they come in at different times, and they have different strengths, and they add to the piece in different ways. And it's the conductor of the orchestra that's responsible for pulling it all together and making something really, really amazing, and that's what ownership is really about.
It's about creating an outcome, an overall picture of what you want for the business, and then being able to say, “Okay, if you do this, and you do this, and you do this, and you do this, we get this.” And then I step back, and I just help everybody. I train, I coach, I correct, I confront.
I do what I have to do to get that to happen with my team. So I hope this all makes sense to y'all. Have a great week, everybody. God bless. Go make some money. We'll see y'all later. Bye-bye.
