People Leave Their Bosses,

Not Their Companies (Part 2)

33 Percent of an employee’s salary.  That’s the cost of turnover.  Not to mention the lost time and production.  Does your employee underperform? Are they a bad hire or are they misplaced?

This is part two on “Implementation.” How are you going to get $#!T done?

 

Listen to the podcast here:

Listen in as Karla and Allen discuss the Implementation Process

Karla Nelson:  Welcome to The People Catalyst podcast, Mr. Allen Fahden.

Allen Fahden:  Hello, Karla. I’m excited. It’s part two, and part two is always more fun than a part one.

Karla Nelson:  Especially for us that want to wrap something up and get onto the next thing, right? Us movers.

Allen Fahden:  Exactly.

Karla Nelson:  Well, it’s so exciting to share this today. Really, we broke this up into a two-part series, and it is about why people leave bosses, or that people leave bosses, not companies. Even though we know this inherently, we’re approaching work with a 19th century mentality when it’s the 21st century, and this has been going on for as long as, well, probably as long as time.

  Gallup has done a really great job, Forbes, there’s tons of research that we actually went through and what we’ll be communicating with you is that, even though we know this is a huge ginormous problem, and we know that the two biggest costs to any business are turnover and a bad hire. Okay?

  Obviously, we’re not talking about a bad hire here today. We’re talking about turnover. Forbes just recently did a study that the cost associated with turnover and a lot of reasons we give this corporate word, buzzword to employee engagement, and then they leave you, is 33% of the salary of an individual. So if they make $100,000 a year, the cost of them turning over is $33,000 and that’s directly to the bottom line, the tangible.

Allen Fahden:  And then there are the intangible costs. Number one, the performance drops. If you’ve got a bad hire in there, there’s a missing link in the chain, and everybody’s performance goes down because they can’t depend on this person they’re trying to depend on. Secondly, it’s the longer that person stays, the more negative thought comes in that drains your energy and kills your momentum, so it’s a very, very destructive destructive thing. Ultimately, the whole company can start going down. The other thing is, if you’re their boss, and you’ve got to a bad hire and you’re part of the problem, that impacts on your career, your reputation. That research, by the way, about the people leave bosses, not companies, that comes from Gallup once again, and 50% of the people less their job because of a bad boss.

Karla Nelson:  Isn’t that crazy? That’s just crazy to me. You had said bad hire even though we’re talking about turnover, but you actually prompted me to think that’s two sides of the same coin and a thin coin. Because think about it, they could say bad hire because you didn’t do the work. Think about that for a second. I’ve never thought about it that way. How are you classifying it because 94% of failure is process failure, not people failure. We’ve talked about that all the time from Edward Stemming, so we call people a bad hire, but they could just be miscast, and then all of a sudden that leads to turnover. I’ve always thought of those as separate, but actually the top to costs to any businesses are completely enfolded in each other.

Allen Fahden:  Absolutely true. If you don’t fit, that’s a big problem, and we’re going to talk about that again in part two here that the key to all this is is fit and sequence. Bad hire? Maybe they just don’t fit. Maybe they’re miscast.

Karla Nelson:  Think about it. I mean, there’s obvious reasons, right? That you just shove them over to a bad hire because, you know. But most of the time, I bet you those are completely entwined in each other. And the society of what is it … Human Resources Management. Everyone calls them SHRUM, even though … SHRM. They call it SHRM. One of those acronyms you forget after using it for so long, but 77% of the cause of turnover is preventable.

  So if we know we have this huge problem, we know that what we have done isn’t working. We know that 70% of people hate their jobs. Like, hello, what are we going to do about it? And it reminds me of that. Also Harvard Business Review identified that we spend almost $400 billion worldwide on training, and at the end of this really great report, awesome report, it identified that, oh, how you fix it? Systems and processes. Good luck. It was like, well, give me a system, give me a process. Because they’re correct, right?

Allen Fahden:  Knowing is the booby prize. Just because we know it, it doesn’t mean we can do it.

Karla Nelson:  Yes. And that’s what we are talking about today here. Implementation. Part one of this podcast was about ideation. What are we going to do? And it walked step-by-step through the process that you can use in order to figure out what to do. For this podcast, we are going to talk about implementation. How do we employ it and how do we do it?

Allen Fahden:  Interesting, there was a Fortune Magazine article about CEOs who get fired, and 90% of them lost their jobs because they couldn’t get a new idea done in their own company. And I can’t tell you or anybody else, the amount of times that we’ve been in a company and done a bunch of ideas, and somebody pipes up and says, “Oh, we had that idea 20 years ago. We just couldn’t get it done.” Okay, is there a problem here?

Karla Nelson:  No kidding, and that’s exactly the “throw people under the bus” piece, right? Without the process and the system in order to get it done, that’s what corporate America does is they start pointing fingers. I couldn’t believe that stat, though. 90% of CEOs get fired because they can’t get an idea done because, just like you were saying, Simon Sinek, 10% of any market are projected more in Crossing the Chasm. There’s a whole bunch of different research you can look at there.

  You can trip over 10% of the market just by being someplace at the right time. So if 90% of them are getting canned because they can’t get the idea done, look at the balance of the 10%. It’s kind of interesting if you think about it.

Allen Fahden:  Yeah, 10% accidentally got an idea done. Well, there’s some pretty interesting examples of that too. For example, Chrysler, Lee Iacocca turned the company around by inventing the minivan. By marketing the minivan, an extremely successful product changed the way transportation worked. But the funny part of it was that Chrysler didn’t really intent the minivan. It was GM, General Motors. I can see the meeting. Somebody sitting in a meeting and saying, “Well, nice idea to do a minivan.” And they got everything right except for one thing. That’s going to kill our station wagon business.” And they were right about it. It did kill their station wagon business, but because they didn’t have the minivan.

Karla Nelson:  The didn’t have the minivan.

Allen Fahden:  So not only does their station wagon business get killed, but Chrysler, instead of General Motors, got all the revenue from it.

Karla Nelson:  Man, the minivan really did decimate the station wagon. I know we’ve talked about that before. It’s been a while, but you’re right, it just crushed the station wagon and still, the minivan is the most popular types of vehicle.

Allen Fahden:  And after that, the SUV then came along too, and that buried the station wagon, one might say.

Karla Nelson:  One was just a shallow grave. The other one was ten feet under.

Allen Fahden:  Yeah, that’s right. The other great example of that is the digital camera. Basically digital put Kodak under because why? They were a legacy film business. They didn’t want to give up their film business. It was extremely profitable. They owned all the stuff, the silver and all that, but they are the people, actually, who invented the digital camera. So they’re responsible for not coming up because they kind of said, “I don’t think we’re going to put that out. Do you know what that’s going to do to our film business?”

Karla Nelson:  No kidding. Well, you can’t have a digital camera. Remember we had all those Polaroids and all those really fun things with flashy lights that you’d buy the crystal to stick them. We’re dating ourselves here. We actually know what those are. By the way, the Polaroid actually has come back recently. Kids are running around thinking it’s the coolest thing ever that they can click on it. I was like, okay guys.

Allen Fahden:  Well, there’s a whole other story we probably shouldn’t get into about that, but the opposite of any truth is oftentimes an even greater truth, according to Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist. IBM sold their Electric typewriter business to some former employees and they ran that business profitably for about 20 years after the invention of the PC. So go figure. There’s always, you know, for everything the opposites always true, too.

Karla Nelson:  And that’s true. Well, I was just noticing today as I walked by one of the desks that the mail was sitting on. Remember when it went down to almost nothing? Well, now all of a sudden everybody’s marketing via mail again because everyone’s going electronic. So now what was old is new.

Allen Fahden:  The funniest part about that, I think, is that whenever you want to get something new that’s digital, the killer of the mail business, how do you get it through the mail? Everybody orders all their digital stuff so they can do all their emails, but if they get it through the US mail, from Amazon, for example.

Karla Nelson:  That’s hilarious when you think about it, and actually, we’ve got a really great process for that on another podcast, but we’ll have to put that on the list of things to do.

Allen Fahden:  Absolutely.

Karla Nelson:  Opposites. And so, wait. We have to tell one more story about you, and how you invented the jumbotron. This is amazing to me. It just blows me away. But this happens every day. Great ideas are killed every day and that’s what we’re going to talk about, how to still get a good idea done using a process. But you’ve got to share this story, Allen.

Allen Fahden:  Just think about this. If you want to invent a great product, just think about what annoys you. I happened to be in a time where they had just gotten instant replay on television, and I had season tickets to an NFL team. And so if I stayed home and didn’t pay for a ticket to the game, I could watch replays, which were great, but I couldn’t watch them at the stadium because there was no way to do that at the time.

Allen Fahden:  So I came up with an idea of let’s build a giant TV screen, and I know a technology company who can do this. They were just doing a lot of imaging and digital technology way back then, and so we put together a few people and decided to pursue this idea. We’re going to put jumbo TV sets in every stadium in the NFL.

Allen Fahden:  Now, the beautiful thing about that is that in the television advertising, it’s very hard to reach wealthy males. Well, guess who was at the football games at the time? Mostly wealthy males. And there were also two products that couldn’t advertise on television at the time, and that was cigarettes and liquor. So how much would the liquor companies pay to get in front of an audience like that, with the persuasion of a television commercial. Same thing with the tobacco companies. I had no morals at the time, so we put together all the right people.

Allen Fahden:  We got an all the way to Pete Rozell, the commissioner of the NFL, and he said no. And we said, well, why? And he said, well, okay, because if we put replays in the stadiums, think about that they’re in the stadiums today, he says people will kill the referees.

Karla Nelson:  I bet you used the prover.

Allen Fahden:  Yeah. And if we’d have had our process, then we could have just simply said, well, you know, be selective about which replays you show. If it’s controversial don’t show it. That’s pretty much what they did. They show almost everything today, but in fact they’ve got the guys changing the plays now if the replay shows the referees were wrong. So anything like that can be solved in a very short time, but we didn’t have the process at the time. And so, 10 years later, at the Superdome in New Orleans, I think they introduced the first jumbotron, with instant replay.

Karla Nelson:  Crazy. You know what this reminds me of, too is, we hire trainers, consultants, right? You have people in your team that you assembled to go get research and all of this stuff, and when somebody has absolute power, it’s even worse. I mean, we talk about the skeet shoot meeting, and that’s exactly what this is. You threw out the idea, commissioner of the NFL goes bang. Right? So it’s idea, bang.

Allen Fahden:  Shot down.

Karla Nelson:  It’s crazy. And what happens is, and this is actually why we have an agreement when we do training, because absolute power is the old way of doing business, and these millennials are running so quickly from it because they know that if I can just walk in and say no, because I said so, it’s like that’s just not the facilitation and what they want to be a part of.

  They want to be a part of putting the dent on the universe, not just being the minion which, by the way, is what schools were actually created for way back in the day. Think about it. They were creating manufacturing workers and that’s a whole other conversation we can go off forever. But this absolute power thing is a big problem for people that leave their bosses.

Allen Fahden:  Oh yeah. The old quote from Lord Acton. “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Karla Nelson:  So true.

Allen Fahden:  We talked last time about the average millennial stays at a company for 18 months. They have the dream. They go into the company to change the world, and after two months the dream is crushed, and so the rest of the other 16 months they’re out interviewing.

Karla Nelson:  Yeah.

Allen Fahden:  By the way, you can tell because they come to work dressed up, and that would be the only time, probably, a millennial would come to work dressed up because how the hell are you going to play ping pong or air hockey wearing a suit coat or a dress?

Karla Nelson:  Yeah. That’s so true. And so the solution to this is the relay team and what we’re going to talk about today.

Allen Fahden:  Yes. And it’s a place where people just haven’t looked at this. They don’t know what they don’t know, and so what do they do? They try to sophisticate all the old ways of doing things.

Karla Nelson:  And the other piece is so many of the large companies have the big budgets to be able to use and implement this process. But I’ll tell you, it’s necessary for all. I don’t even care if it’s trying to get your house built or anything. This process can be used in implementation with anything. But instead of doing a relay team, you get people crashing into each other running down the track instead of staying in their own lane. I mean, can you imagine doing a relay and you were skipping down half the time, and kicking at other people? Better yet, all four people running down the track at the same time. Doesn’t that sound like a really great idea when you’re trying to get across the finish line, right?

Allen Fahden:  Especially if they’re all holding onto this tiny little baton, tripping over each other, and then somebody falls down, you kind of have to drag them the rest of the way. It really slows you down.

Karla Nelson:  Exactly. But yet, that’s exactly how we run our meetings. That’s exactly how we try to implement is this juggling effect of just, okay, this is where we’re at. This is what we need to do, but the truth of the matter is we need you all, all four core natures of work. However, we need you at different times, so the solution is to use the process.

  Now again, there are two parts to the process and they are different. They have the same players, movers, shakers, provers and makers. However, the process is different, and what we’re going to talk about today is the second part, which is the process in regards to implementation. How are we going to do it?

  It starts with fit and sequence with the relay team.

Allen Fahden:  Absolutely. And it’s interesting because implementation is quite a bit, just look at the results. Implementation’s a lot tougher than ideation, but what you do is the whole thing kind of moves over one core nature. Whereas an ideation, it’s the shaker, the mover, and the prover, and the mover’s the point person that’s running everything. Once you get to implementation, it starts with the prover who runs everything and who actually takes the idea and gives the instructions to the maker who can implement it into the process.

Allen Fahden:  The mover is part of that as well. The mover’s monitoring it, looking for breakdowns to make sure that the prover and the mover don’t get frustrated or uncomfortable, and go and change the plan back to what they were doing before because that can happen all the time.

Karla Nelson:  Because, remember, the mover’s output is the plan. They hand the plan off to the prover, and then they create the instructions to hand to the maker and then make the rules and follow the process. The mover is a part of the process, but a very different part of the process in implementation than ideation.

Allen Fahden:  Yeah, because their input with instructions, and then their output is reality. That reality can come in a couple of ways. One is the reality is making the whole new plan work and be installed as part of the processes of the company, but then it can also be they can be in a meeting and like the prover who generates reality and then ideations, a mover can generate reality during implementation or, excuse me, maker. Thank you.

Karla Nelson:  I got your back.

Allen Fahden:  Thank you. Right. I appreciate that. Oh, fell down again … it can generate reality just simply by saying, well, you know that’s a really good idea and everything. If we get real detailed about it and say, well, we’ve always shipping things out at the loading dock but we’ve never taken anything in it before. Where are we going to put it?

Allen Fahden:  So they’ll fly it about 50 feet up and they’ll see things nobody else saw, and so then you’ve got to still work it out and oftentimes the prover can work it out by just changing the instructions, but then it’s something maybe the prover can’t solve. Then it kicks back up to the mover and the whole thing could kick right back up to ideation. If the obstacle problem is big enough to solve, then you need an ideation back on it, so it’s tricky.

Karla Nelson:  It is, and it’s a dance between the two and that’s why we did two separate podcasts. But understanding that it’s a science and an art because you have to be able to understand when you have to go back to ideation, if the challenges are so large that you move back to ideation, right? Or it could be just a meeting that now all of a sudden the maker kicks it back to the prover, the prover doesn’t know how to exactly adjust instructions, goes back to the mover.

  Now the mover can also just go find the shaker and say, hey, give me some input. Take it back to the prover. Poke all the holes in it, and that dance, again, if you want to learn that process, go back to part one of this series where we go through it in detail. And then what happens is, as you shift to implementation, you have to know when that is.

  All right? So there’s a big trust there and that’s why the mover must check in on the process. You can’t just go, good luck. We still need you all. We need you at different times. We need you at different amounts of time at different parts of the process, even. That dance between ideation and implementation is so critical, and I think one of the biggest obstacles we talked about earlier, Allen, is the commitment that you need from the prover.

  So let’s talk about a couple of the pitfalls. When you’re utilizing the process, in implementation you’ve got your prover as the point guard, because remember he got handed over, or she, got handed over the plan. They’re going to take that plan. They’re going to create all the instructions that need to be handed over to get to the point of replicating it, which is what makers do extremely well. Okay.

  However, what happens, Allen, when the prover doesn’t commit to this because we’ve seen this happen all the time. It’s one of the biggest pitfalls. We’ll talk about some others, but this is a real big one. If you don’t have that.

Allen Fahden:  Its huge and it happens all the time, and there are several of you out there who are maybe listening right now and reaching up to your head and lining up the large clumps of hair in your hand quite separate from your head over this. It’s the prover who says, “Yeah, we kind of tried, but we really couldn’t make it work. I know that Eugene was getting upset about all this because it kind of messed up his routine.” And so what happens is that it’ll put people in a place where they’ll make enormous decisions about the company and the company’s strategy and their execution in the future and all that. They’ll change the whole course of the business because somebody is uncomfortable. It’s a tragedy.

Karla Nelson:  Yeah. Essentially all during the trade, right? It’s altering. And it’s even worse if you’ve got a prover shaker because their secondary core nature of work is just to come up with the idea and fix it and sometimes change it completely. And now all of a sudden, we call this culture, or we call it personality differences. Right? We give all these labels to it, but the truth is you just abandoned your process.

Allen Fahden:  Yeah. And it can be a disaster for the company if they’re depending on making a big change to something. If somebody makes a change just single handedly and doesn’t tell anybody, you may not even realize what they’re doing for days or even weeks.

Karla Nelson:  So that’s why the mover must … They’re in charge of the project as far as the plan and facilitating it. They have to check in. So either having a regular, hey, how’s that going? Or a lot of times there’s even project management, base camp and asana.are all used. There’s tons of them, but I would have to say they are not overlaying the core nature of work to then check in. Right?

  We have a game we play with this and it’s hilarious. It’s the most absolute ridiculous thing in regards to project management when you don’t use the process, and I don’t identify as somebody with a core nature of work, it just falls back, then, on what their title is and what we deem they think they should be responsible for or not responsible for or even were silent. It goes to the complete different way where everybody’s trying to control everything, and you have to get approval from 50 different people to even make a decision. Right? There’s a whole other side of it if the company and the entire team isn’t engaged in adopting the process.

Allen Fahden:  That’s a knee-jerk reaction is, an old friend of mine used to say rules are people you don’t trust. And so, something bad happens and what happens? Manically cracks down and puts in more stage gate innovation processes where you’ve got to get permission to do everything, and the company will calcify, become bureaucratic, and that can be the end of the company too.

Karla Nelson:  Absolutely. Believe me, everybody knows the story. I love it. We were doing a training one time and Allen, you said, we’re just putting words to what’s already common sense and known. The unfortunate is we’ve also heard that common sense isn’t so common. It is a dance, like we were saying, and it’s an art and a science.

  So it’s super simplicity on the other side of complexity but at the same time climbing to the top of Mount Everest is really, really simple. Put one foot in front of the other. But there’s a reason why there’s a whole bunch of people died trying to accomplish it because it is not easy by any stretch of the means. Right? So we have to make sure we get this commitment because this is a big pitfall. Make sure the mover’s checking in so you don’t shift back to the old way of doing things. And, remember, it’s a dance between ideation and implementation. So then the other piece is, that leads to what we call the run home to mommy factor that Allen was talking about. Just going back to the old way. Going back to what was comfortable because change is, again, easy, or simple, but not easy, right? Until we’ve used the process over and over again.

  I would venture to say with that pitfall, Allen, the best way to overcome it, make sure your movers are trained and make sure that they know the process. Take the time to get them up to speed, and give people the ability to lead. Every one of them. Your shakers need to lead in the way that they do best. The movers, the provers and the makers. Leadership is for everybody. When the object of the exercises to get something done, you must hand that baton Baton off and give them the power to do that and not even let the CEO come and say, I’m just going to blow it up. Right?

Allen Fahden:  That’s right.

Karla Nelson:  I felt like I was on a soapbox there.

Allen Fahden:  I like that, and I’m going to edge you off the soapbox and say one more thing, and that is in order to accomplish that, there is a person who should be running the process. They should have the authority to run the process and to make sure that everybody stays on it, and that best person is the mover because the mover is most easily able to straddle both worlds of ideation and implementation.

Karla Nelson:  And the reason why is because, and as a uber mover, it’s because we don’t have a dog in the fight.

Allen Fahden:  Correct.

Karla Nelson:  Remember, 15% of the population will say yes to an idea. That’s it. 15%, and the reason why is because they don’t have a dog in the fight. Shakers will say no if it’s not their idea, right? Provers say no because there’s too much wrong with it. And makers are like, “I just cleaned this place up two months ago. I just cleaned this place up two months ago. No. You are not coming in and messing this up when we just got to the point of being able to replicate this process that we talked about.” And so it’s really critical … Go ahead.

Allen Fahden:  You remind me of a meme I saw the other day online and it said, kind of a parallel thought, it said, “You know, I dusted the house. It came back. I’m not falling for that again.”

Karla Nelson:  That’s really funny. It’s a good one. I got to try that one out because it does come back, right? And the crazy thing is that, although this has been used by 25 plus of the Fortune 100 and these big corporations and people that in the past would have had a budget. Obviously, technology has helped us in getting this into … we’re even working with our certified trainers in startups, brand new startups, right? And those guys, your whole focus is to use momentum and get to profit as quickly as possible so you don’t become a statistic of 96% of companies failing within the first 10 years. So this is important.

  Remember, it doesn’t matter if you’re a huge company. It doesn’t matter if you’re thinking about starting a company, and I would even venture to say, Allen, that if you were starting it and you started using the process from the day of launch, or at least, get an agreement. Sometimes we’ll work with VC’s that are putting money into companies because they want to make sure they’re protecting their investment. An agreement is “you’re going to use this process. You’re going to be learned in this process.”

  That’s probably easier, don’t you think Allen, that sometimes when we go into these large companies, because they’re just not nimble. A lot of times there’s a lot of past issues. We call it culture, but it’s basically not having a process. It’s all this stuff in this, as you would say, junk in the trunk that you have to deal with. So with those earlier stage companies, not only do they need it to survive, but they also can be quite effective and nimble when they’re implementing it.

Allen Fahden:  Absolutely. Their problem in the startups, oftentimes, is that nobody’s shutting them down, and so what they’re doing is around focusing. They’re trying to do eight different things at once. So then, the other side of the coin of calcification, is you’re not going to get anything done that way either. Just as you won’t get anything done if an authoritarian shuts everybody down and it has to be done their way. So how do you deal with that? You don’t use that coin anymore. You throw that coin away because it’s not doing anything for you.

Karla Nelson:  Yeah, I love it. And in any company … I love this Allen. I don’t even know if this is written anywhere, but what Warren Buffett said. Allen was speaking at Fortune’s Animation Forum and Warren Buffett gets up to the mic and goes, “I don’t know why I’m here. I hate innovation.” I can imagine the audience when he said that, right? The number one investor in the entire world goes, “I don’t know why I’m speaking here. I hate innovation.” And you know why? Because you got to get to printing money. You have to get to the repeatable process and everybody-

Allen Fahden:  That’s right. He just buys companies later on. They’ve already established that replicable pattern.

Karla Nelson:  Exactly. And then that reduces the risk when you want to get to the point of repeating the process. And what they’d like to call them, business printing money, you’ll never get to printing money if you don’t repeat a process. And if you don’t know how to do research and development and be innovative and agile, you’ll never keep printing the money because somebody will come and eat your breakfast.

Allen Fahden:  And your lunch.

Karla Nelson:  Yeah. And your lunch. And your dinner. Awesome.

Allen Fahden:  And this is why everybody’s overweight.

Karla Nelson:  Or they’re overweight because 70% hate their jobs and they have to comfort food.

Allen Fahden:  Emotionally eat.

Karla Nelson:  Emotionally, do something because, and again, we’ll just end it with that. 70% of people hate their job. That’s what Gallup has reported in the past 30 years they’ve been doing this study. Numbers are almost equal across the board. We are on a mission to revolutionize the way work is done because think about what that does to people’s finances, their wellbeing and health. Their relationships, especially with their family. We spend more time working than we do anything else in life. And so go back, listen to part one of this series in regards to ideation. What are you going to do? And then, hope you enjoyed this series, part two Implementation. How are you going to get it done?