Part III: Practical applications of requiste concepts to my business

Speaker A By reading some of the books on requisite organization. The one thing, especially as a small business owner, I need practical tools that I can apply in my business. So recently I attended a one day workshop with Barry and Sheila Dean, and one of the things they said right in the beginning of the workshop, we want to give you practical applications that you can go back and apply in your business. So a couple of the takeaways I took from that in terms of creating clarity in the organization, they have a method or process task assignments where a manager wants to put each assignment in context for the direct report. They want to talk about the purpose, type of quality they expect out of assignment, the quantity of it, the resources and the timing. That process to me made a lot of sense, and it's something that I took away and I've actually used within a week with my direct reports. And the hope is, if you have two way communication, you're going to gain a better understanding, the manager and the direct report of what's expected. And that's opposed to giving a broad general goal or asking something to have an assignment done by a certain date, but you're not putting it in context. You're not telling them the quality you want the task done in or the quantity of it, or what resources are available. And really you're leaving the employee a little bit in the dark to kind of figure it out themselves. Again, as a manager, the value you want to bring to your direct reports is being able to see things that they can't see. And the context and purpose part of the task assignment I think, is crucial and would allow a direct report to see the value you're bringing to the role. One of the first things we did do, we looked at strata levels, and then we looked at all the roles in our company, and then we tried to determine, using time span measurement, where those roles fit in terms of strata. And as we looked at that and started to uncover it, what we found the managers were bringing and doing some of the direct work that really was in strata one or strata two. So unfortunately, managers weren't bringing value to the organization. For organization to grow, managers need to be in their appropriate roles. And from listening to a lot of my other Vistage members, it's a classic case, especially when you have companies under 100 employees, that you generally have managers or even CEOs working down a number of levels most of the time. And unfortunately, no one's working at a strata four, strata five. That's really where an organization gets value. And if you're talking about growing from 10 million to 20 million to 30 million, the only way you're really going to do that is you have to have people not only in the right roles, but you need to have strata four strata five people in your organization. We're a technical company. And one of the things that has happened in the past, we've had highly capable people. Technically, the only way they really could move up into the organization was to be promoted to the role of a manager. The unfortunate thing, what I found is they really didn't value the role of a manager. They really still wanted to do the technical work. Highly capable, specialized in certain areas in our market and in our business. One of the things I learned from the workshop with Barry and Sheila Dean is to set up roles of technical specialists, where their role is to do R and D work. Their role is to look at product development over the next 24 months. And they don't necessarily get involved in the role of a manager in that. They don't have any direct reports. And I think that that's going to help a couple key people in our organization who are highly specialized in their technical fields. They have no interest, nor do they value the role of a manager. So we have to give them the ability to work at a strata two or a strata three without having to worry about being, quote, promoted as a manager. One of the things that I know to grow the organization, I have to put in place a couple strata four people. In my mind, I'm thinking about the roles, and then the next step is to really get my managers here and people in strata two and strata three involved in Ro. And I really would like those people to see that they're in the right fit, they're in the right role, and to understand that our organization really does need to bring in strata four people. And then that's the way we're going to grow as an organization. And I think that's somewhat tough when you look at classical examples of small companies growing and people, the Peter Principle, that they just move up in the organization. The problem is, everyone has strengths, and sometimes those strengths might be specializations, but they're only able to operate in strata two and to get the people to realize that without telling them, hey, you're in strata two, but understand, hey, here's the task assignments that you do best. Here's what we need in the organization. And in addition, we need these other task assignments. We need to bring some new people in. That's really where I'm trying to work towards.