Describe Your "Above and Beyond" Behavior

As a business owner, I’m sure you’d love a team-full of employees who go “above and beyond.” Yet, you may have also heard the backlash surrounding this “above and beyond” mentality in the “Quiet Quitting” conversation that has circulated on social media.

Employees are saying, “Nah, I’m not going above and beyond, thankyouverymuch.”

And in response, many employers are like, “Hey, that sounds pretty lazy.”

I’m about to take sides on this argument, but stick with me until the end because I think there’s a way for both employer and employee to get what they ultimately want.

So who’s right in this “above and beyond” debate? The employees.

I’ll tell you why…

No Standards = A Bad Time

When you purchase a Big Mac at McDonald’s, you are making an exchange. You, the hungry person, are exchanging money for a particular type of burger.

You expect this burger to contain two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. You also expect it to be hot, put together in the correct order, free of debris, and wrapped in a wrapper. You wouldn’t want to get anything more or less than this, unless you specifically asked for it. In short, you want the Big Mac to follow the McDonald’s standard.

When you agree to hire an employee, you are also making an exchange. You, the employer, are exchanging money for a particular set of services.

But somehow when it comes to employees, many employers seem to think it’s just fine to hire someone and be vague about the standards that need to be met for that role. And so whatever your employee thinks is the best way to do it is how it will get done… for better or for worse.

Would we accept that with a Big Mac? What if McDonald’s hadn’t gotten around to defining the Big Mac standard, so it was always kind of a… surprise. Sometimes it might be without the lettuce. Other times, the bun might be upside-down. Or even better, sometimes they might go “above and beyond” and nestle a few Chicken McNuggets in there. No?

Well, if we won’t settle for ambiguity on what we’re going to get from a $3.99 purchase at McDonald’s, why do we think this is acceptable when we exchange thousands of dollars for services from our employees?

And I’m an employer too - I understand what the sentiment of “above and beyond” is. Hell, I’ve probably used that phrase before. (I try really hard not to.) I think most employers have the best of intentions and mean something like, “I want someone who’s committed and really cares.”

The problem is, many employees are reading it to mean, “They want me to do more than what I actually get paid to do.” And when you’ve never given them clear standards for what “good enough” looks like, can you blame them?

But what if we could make this a win-win for employees and employers?

The solution is for employers to codify their “Above and Beyond” behaviors BEFORE they hire a new employee.

Here’s what that means…

Let’s say you need to hire an amazing receptionist. If I asked you, dear employer, “what does it look like for a receptionist to ‘go above and beyond’ in their role at your company?” you might say something like:

Well, it means they would greet every client with enthusiasm and kindness, they’d proactively clean and organize the lobby during downtime, they’d offer water to clients who are waiting, they’d look for ways to make the front-office processes work better… you know, that kind of thing.

You know what’s wonderful about this answer? You can now take these “above and beyond” things and turn them into the standards for the job, thereby rendering them NOT above and beyond at all!

WHAT?

Standards = Freedom & Clarity

You see, the beauty of codifying what your “above and beyond” looks like on-the-job for each role is that now you can use these standards to…

• screen applicants in the hiring process

• provide coaching day-to-day

• give specific, actionable feedback during 1-on-1s and performance reviews

It’s a win for employees, because when they know the expectations from the start, they can hit the target every time without feeling like they need to do more than what’s expected. Or, if they realize they don’t want to do those tasks to those standards, they can pass on the job or begin to look for a role that’s a better fit for them. What clarity! What freedom!

It’s a win for employers because it takes away so much of the subjectivity of whether or not an employee is good at their job AND makes it more likely that their clients will get the experience they expect.

When you give employees clarity about the bounds and requirements of their job, you give them a clear definition of what you’re looking for. As their employer, it’s the least you can do.

Your Business Can Change the World

This afternoon, I had a work-related appointment in an old-fashioned business center with quite a grand staircase. As I was climbing the stairs, absorbed with how oddly regal the decor was for a Phoenix office, I heard a voice above me say, “Hello.”

I looked up to see a kind-looking man in his 70s or so smiling at me as he came down the stairs carrying a gorgeous white bouquet. He was dressed in jeans, a western-style striped shirt, and a classic straw cowboy hat.

Everything about this moment felt unusual - definitely not my normal setting and characters.

But I happily replied, “Hello!” and he asked, “How are you?”

“I’m just fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“I’m good.”

As we chatted this way, we were slowly nearing each other on the staircase. When we met on the large landing, he asked, “Can I tell you about this?” nodding his head towards the flowers.

“Of course!” I said.

He quickly seemed to change his mind, “Oh, I shouldn’t bother you.”

“No!” I said. “Please tell me about them.”

I could sense the importance of what he was about to share.

He went on, “My wife died six years ago today. And when I came into this office for a meeting, they gave me these flowers. These serious, tough, business people. Can you believe that?”

He was shaken that this had happened in real life. These business people had made this beautiful gesture.

I could feel my throat catch and my hand went straight to my heart. “Oh, isn’t that just wonderful?”

“Yes, I can’t believe it.”

I saw how deeply touched he was and asked him if I could give him a hug. He obliged and I noticed his eyes welling up a bit.

“And now you’re here!” He said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Tamara. And who are you?”

“I’m Steve. You know, this world seems so crazy sometimes, but then there’s people like that. And there’s this. Maybe people are all better than we think.”

I smiled and told him I agreed completely.

The whole exchange lasted maybe 2-3 minutes. And at the end of our short conversation, my new friend Steve said something about how maybe he shouldn’t have bothered me. But I told him he’d just made my day by reminding me of the love and humanity that’s always there - we just don’t always see it.

And so I pass this story along to you to hopefully make your day too. And to remind you that businesses are, after all, just a bunch of people.

A person at that business decided to buy Steve those flowers. And that person started a ripple of connection from him to me and now hopefully to you.

My wish is that we never underestimate the power that a small-yet-sincere gesture of love can have.

Yes, even from a business.

Results of The Summer Rest Experiment

Today is the first day back from our team’s very first “Summer Rest” - a week-long break for all of our team members ALL AT ONCE.

When we started informing our clients about it several weeks ago, we were surprised at how surprised everyone about this. They were all so supportive and happy we were doing it, but we also heard a common question… “You can do that?!”

Yes. Yes you can.

Because for our team, this summer rest is more than a vacation. It’s an expression of our values. And in 2022 it’s a key initiative in our annual plan. Let me tell you more…

It all started when I first read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman at the end of 2021 (Easily the most impactful book I’ve read in the last year.). In the book, Burkeman describes a 2013 Swedish study by Terry Hardig showing a correlation between happiness and the number of Swedes who were off of work simultaneously. “When many were on vacation at once, it was as if an intangible, supernatural loud of relaxation had settled over the nation as a whole.”

When I reflected on my own experiences of “taking vacation time,” this checked out. Of course it’s always lovely to have some down-time, but when everyone else is working, there can often be a nagging feeling that you “should” be checking in. Or worse, the dread that settles in the morning you return when you realize all of the tasks and emails you need to catch up on from the time you were away.

Meanwhile, when one person is away for too long, it’s no fun for the rest of the team either. We’re a small team, and although we’re all cross-trained so we can cover each other in case of emergency, having to fill in for a full week is a lot of extra strain on the team.

This idea of taking a “rest” together was starting to really sound great. But like many inspiring ideas from books, it might have just stayed in my head if it weren’t for two important aspects of our business…

1. Our Annual Planning Rhythm

2. Our Core Values

Every year in December, we take stock of the successes and challenges of the previous year and make a plan for how we want to shift things to move us ever-closer to our vision. This year, one of the things that came to light was that we have an A+ team and needed to take intentional and systematic action to keep The Process Mavens an awesome place to work.

We use the OKR framework for writing our annual goals, and it was clear we needed an annual objective that was all about sustaining a remarkable work culture. But what should that objective be?

To figure it out, we went back to our core values. Since core values are the shared set of values and beliefs of EVERYONE in the business, we knew that whatever we put in place needed to align to them.

• LOVE HUMANS - We put people first in the work we do.

• LEARN & EVOLVE - We are curious, we love a challenge and are obsessed with learning and growing.

• OWN IT BRAVELY - We all have a high degree of ownership and can’t stand letting people down.

• MINDFUL PRESENCE - We know that giving our mindful presence to others is a gift and make it a priority.

So as you can see, we have a bunch of highly-committed, striving, empathetic people who love to do hard things but also could run the risk of taking on too much. This means, there was a delicate balance to be struck. And so we came up with “The Process Mavens is a challenging and nourishing place to work.”

Like any good OKR, there are some key results that we’ll use to clearly measure whether we reached our objective or not, but I’ll spare you the details this time around. But what is relevant is that our first “Summer Rest” was born out of is objective, in service of “nourishment.” (And we’ve got 3 more weeks planned throughout the year!)

Since we communicated this break months in advance, we were able to avoid negatively impacting clients.

Since we were all off at the same time, there was no need to fill in for others.

And here I am, coming back from a WHOLE week off, and I can honestly say I don’t feel a bit overwhelmed.

We still need to do some analysis with the team to make sure there were no negative impacts, but so far it seems like nothing but a nourishing win. I highly recommend this.

Perhaps it doesn’t make sense for you to do a week-long summer rest for your business, (Although, I’d invite you to really reflect on the “truth” of that), but is there something you can do to create a more nourishing place to work for your team? Even an extra Friday or two off this summer might feel SO WONDERFUL, allowing families to get away for some long summer weekends.

Remember, it’s your business… YOU get to create the experience you desire for your team. (And it can be a work of art.)

How to Define Success Metrics with your Employees

I’ve talked a lot about clearly articulating “what success looks like” to your team members. But what does that mean in practice? Here’s a quick-and-dirty way to work with your team to define what success looks like for them!

1. Gather some or all of the individuals who fulfill a particular role (depending on business size).

2. Decide which problems that role solves for the business. For example, one of the problems a customer service rep might solve is “making sure all customers can access their accounts.” (Notice I didn’t say “answer customer emails.” That’s a task they do to solve the problem, not the problem itself.)

3. Come up with one weekly (or daily!) metric for each of the problems that role solves. In our customer service rep example, perhaps one of the main ways they make sure customer access their accounts is by quickly resolving email tickets. So a metric might be “0 open tickets at the end of each day.”

   And remember, when it comes to metrics, you’re allowed to change them as you get smarter about which numbers to focus on to really move the needle. Don’t stress about getting this perfect if you’ve never done it before!

4. Fire up a spreadsheet where the employees who perform this role track their weekly metrics. Chances are, if they’re responsible for reporting their data, they’ll be the ones proactively coming up with ways to improve those metrics.

Now you’ve clearly defined what “success looks like” for that team and any new employee coming on board will be crystal-clear from day one about what it takes to do an awesome job.

Even better, with clarity on the results that matter most, you free your team to innovate and build true ownership over how they get the job done.

And that’s how you keep A-player employees engaged and excited to come to work.

Building a Boring Business is a Choice

I was talking to a colleague the other day about how I don’t really work with “boring businesses” anymore. In my mind, being boring has nothing to do with industry. Rather, it’s a business that provides a product or service that’s just fine and provides decent jobs for its employees, but there’s no drive or hunger from leadership to do any more than that. They might be profitable for now, but there’s just no… magic.

And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with having a boring business. But most of the leaders I work with are playing a different game. They’re building something remarkable.

A product or service that delights those who buy it and brings measurable value.

A client experience that people can’t wait to tell their friends about.

A work culture where people become fanatic ambassadors for the brand and never want to leave.

These things don’t happen accidentally. They take time and effort to create and sustain. They’re the result of values-driven decisions and an aligned team where everyone is moving towards a shared vision of excellence. It takes…

• Clear and frequent communication about your vision of excellence to every member of the team.

• Naming your core values and explicitly weaving them into every little thing you do.

• Deciding on the most important results to work toward every quarter and managing to those results. (Which means letting go of the 5,897 other things you could’ve worked on.)

• Explicitly training your new team members on what it looks like to embody your core values on the job.

• Giving new team members clarity on “what success looks like” from day one.

• Implementing systems where team members have frequent opportunities to receive AND give feedback.

• Adopting hiring practices that systematically screen for alignment to your core values and strengths in the skills needed for each role in your business.

• Identifying leading and lagging indicators of success and excellence for every area of your business and regularly using that data to drive decisions.

• Loudly celebrating when team members embody your core values and quickly addressing anything that runs counter to them.

…. just to name a few.

Building a remarkable business isn’t easy. But it will never happen if you don’t take the first step: Decide to do it.

3 signs that your core values aren't real

You probably care a whole lot about making sure the way you do business ACTUALLY reflects your desired culture and core values. Of course you do.

But how do you know for sure that your clients and employees are getting the right experience that's aligned to your values each-and-every time?

Here are 3 ways to know that your core values aren’t consistently being applied in your business:

1. Every single employee (including you) can’t list your core values and explain what each one means in their own words.

2. You haven’t documented your core business processes.

3. If you HAVE documented your core business processes, you haven’t assessed them for alignment to your core values.

If you checked one or more boxes above, take heart. It’s totally doable to move those values out of the haze and make them stick in your day-to-day business. But don’t try to tackle it all at once - each little step you take in uncovering and clarifying how “things should be done around here” makes an impact.

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Need help communicating your core values or documenting your core processes? We do that every day! Set up a free call to see if we can help!

How to Document a Broken Process

All business leaders want to have clear and efficient systems and processes documented in an easy-to-use and always-updated tool. But how do you build your “Business Playbook” if your processes aren’t even close to “clear and efficient” yet?

The answer: You don’t.

Now, there are certainly exceptions to the rule, such as if you need to urgently train someone or delegate a key process to another team member. In those cases, it does make sense to go ahead and create some “good enough” videos or process documents, just to get the job done for the time-being.

However, if your processes are truly broken and wildly inefficient, it makes sense to spend time identifying and analyzing how you’re doing things today so you can find opportunities to clarify and improve your systems and processes. Because if you write down the broken way to do things, you’re just going to further solidify those inefficiencies and pass them on to the next generation of employees.

When tackling broken process, we recommend the following steps:

1. Identify the broken processes. This can be done through a combination of interviews and observations.

2. Prioritize the processes to target first. Which ones are costing you the most? Which ones, if addressed, would bring the greatest return on investment? That’s where you start.

3. Gather the team. Identify at least one representative from each team that is a part of the process to participate in the process improvement project. THIS IS ESSENTIAL.

4. Map the existing process. Hold a meeting with your identified team members to visually map out the EXISTING process step-by-step. You’ll likely come up with all kinds of ways you can make things better during this conversation, but just write them down for later.

5. Analyze the process to find opportunities. Review how you’re doing things and flag the parts that are inefficient, could be automated, or just plain suck. Ideally, you should identify how to measure the success of the changes you’re making so you can check for success at the end.

6. Map the new process. Now that you know what you want to fix, create a new version of your process map to represent the changes you’ll make.

7. Implement the changes. This could be implementing new software, communicating policy/process changes to your team, or completely restructuring a team. This is could be a 5-minute task or a 5-month project.

8. Test, monitor, and adjust. Your changes might not work exactly the way you’d hoped. You need to spend some time assessing whether you’re getting the result you’re looking for and making tweaks, as necessary.

9. Document the new process. Now that you have clarity on how things “should” work, you can start writing down the step-by-step of how things work.

If you’ve got someone on your team who’s great at facilitating a project like this, great! If not, it’s definitely worth the investment to get an outside expert to come in and look at things with a fresh perspective.

One-by-one you can fix each of the key processes in your business and get them documented and communicated to your team and watch your team’s efficiency soar.

It’s great fun.

It Works Better with Friends

Chances are, there’s someone in your network who has the key to your biggest problem. (And the more you invest in growing the quality of your network, the higher that likelihood.)

Instead of sitting alone in your office trying to “figure it out”, ask yourself, “Who do I know who can point me in the right direction?”

Entrepreneurship as Play

I’ve had more coffee dates and deep conversations with ridiculously cool humans in the past few weeks than I have in months.

And yet sometimes I find myself doubting my own abilities as a leader in comparison to these brilliant souls.

I’m seeing the clients I’ve worked with for months (or even years) getting REAL results with the work we’ve done together.

And yet we’re still not 100% dialed in on the “best way” to do things and there are so many ways it’s not quite right.

Our growing team is finding its stride and creating beautiful experiences and outcomes for clients with very little help from me.

And yet we have so many challenging projects on our plate that need to get figured out.

AND ALL OF IT IS SO MUCH FUN.

Some days it can feel so triggering to run a business. So overwhelming. It can feel like there’s no end in sight to the stress and troubles.

But in the same way my 9-year-old son wouldn’t want to play a video game that didn’t have some scary parts or an epic boss battle, it wouldn’t be much fun to do this business-building thing without the hard parts either.

Hold them lightly. They’re all part of the game.

It can all be play, if you choose it to be.

It takes bravery to let someone go

The last few days have been filled with conversations with leaders about people on their team that are struggling in their current role.

They’re great humans.

They’re well-loved.

But they’re just not getting the results that are needed for their position.

Sometimes you can coach the person to develop the skills they need to be successful. Hopefully direct and frequent feedback is always the first approach. But sometimes there’s no getting around a role change (or sometimes to let that person go altogether.)

This is SO HARD for caring, empathetic leaders. I’ve felt it myself.

A few rules of thumb…

Consider if the person quit today - would you feel relieved?

Consider the feeling you get when you think about this person - is there a nagging dread?

Consider if the position were empty today - would you hire them?

Once the answer is clear, take action as quickly as possible and of course, with extreme kindness. If they’re a great culture fit and there’s another position on the team they can do well, go for it. If not, it’s time to part ways.

Because keeping someone in a role they aren’t suited for doesn’t just hurt you and your clients and your team. It hurts them too.

They can feel your disapproval.

They can feel the friction, the tension.

They can feel it’s not working too.

Sometimes these changes are extremely painful in the moment. But remember that everyone has talents and changing someone’s role can be a gift that helps them get ever-closer to finding the work they love.