Why Leaders Need to Prioritize Human-Centered Processes w/ Derrick Mains
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In this episode of Relationships at Work, Russel chats with 4-time author and optimization consultant Derrick Mains on why we need to prioritize human-centre processes at work.
A few reasons why he is awesome — he is a speaker, 4x author, trainer and optimization consultant as the CEO of the Process Fixer and Process Triage, both organizations focusing on helping us improve and streamline our processes. His methodologies have been adopted by Fortune 10 companies including Comcast, Sprint, Cisco and so many others. He’s also a fellow podcaster as the host of The Process Fixer Podcast, helping us with organizational essentialism and the trends around it.
Connect with Derrick, and learn more about his work…
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“Our job as leaders has to be to create a structure, to create a system where work is user friendly and it is easy to do and people get pride from it, and they don’t have to worry about the fear and finance piece.”
Derrick Mains
Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Derrick Mains and here is why he is awesome. He’s a speaker four time author, trainer, and optimization consultant, is the CEO of the Process Fixer and Process Triage, both organizations focusing on helping us improve and streamline our processes or process. I never got that right.
His methodologies have been adopted by Fortune 10 companies, including Comcast, Sprint, Cisco, and so many others. He’s also a fellow podcaster as the host of the Process Fixer Podcast, helping us with organizational essentialism and the trends around it. Hello, Derrick.
Derrick Mains: Oh, great to be with you.
Russel Lolacher: You as well, sir. We’re gonna get into the humanity of it all, the human-centered process of it all, but before we get into any of that, I have a question for you, sir, which is, what’s your best or worst employee experience?
Derrick Mains: Boy, there’s plenty being an entrepreneur and working in this industry for years. I, I think probably the most profound experience I ever had was coming in to do a takeover, a, a, a turnaround on a company. I was working private equity. Working on behalf of investors. I came into a company that was doing okay, but had some performance issues and very quickly identified that there was one person that was really the problem.
He was extremely disruptive. He just, just made things very difficult and made his presence very well known. And my strategy, got together with the management team was this person was so integral to the work that we needed to keep him around because I had to extract all the knowledge from his head.
But, when that knowledge was extracted the hammer was gonna fall and, and, but the most profound thing happened, and that is that as he saw my persistence in making the system better and improving things for people, about three days before the axe was gonna fall on him, he came into my office and very sincerely stood in front of my desk and said, I just want you to know I am sorry. And I have resisted you.
I have stood in the way of progress. I have sabotaged your projects and you have every right to get rid of me, but if you don’t, here’s what I’m gonna do. And he, and he literally gave me a plan on how he was gonna turn around. And I gotta tell you, he turned out to be one of the best people I ever hired or ever worked with.
This is somebody that I strategized for six months on how to get rid of him, but that quickly, he changed my opinion of him because he was willing to come to me and say, look, I am the problem and I’m willing to step outta the way and not be the problem anymore. So that’s very profound to me. I, I’m a firm believer that people only work for one of three reasons, fear, finance, or because they want to.
And when somebody is working in fear, or because they desperately need the money, they are not operating at the highest level. They are going to do things that might be detrimental to the organization. They’ll do things that’ll be detrimental to themselves. They will do whatever it takes to hit a goal, even if that means hurting the organization, but when somebody is there because they want to be there, all of the sudden things dramatically change because now it’s not just the nine to five. Now they’re thinking about the organization. They’re constantly consumed with the idea on how do I make it better ’cause they want to be there.
And I think so much about our management philosophy, so much about the way we management people falls into this fear and finance piece. We talk about accountability, but we, we say it with a hard ability, right? We’re like, we, we, we, we don’t, we use accountability to say, I’m gonna smack you upside your freaking head.
And, and that’s not the right way to approach it. There are countless, I shouldn’t say countless… There are many stories of how organizations approached the human-centric design of their business in a completely and totally different way, and the results that they got were astronomically better than anything else that anybody’s been able to produce since So, I’m very big on that. I, that moment to me was very pivotal, although it was a two minute conversation with somebody who was a 25-year-old, employee that was, probably $20 an hour or something. That profoundly changed me as an individual, and it made me realize that I think inside of every person, they really want to have pride and joy in their work.
And it’s my job as a leader to, to, to help them find that and accomplish that goal. And, and so, so for me, that would be it.
Russel Lolacher: I, I a bigger… a question I wanna dig a little deeper into that because when I hear stories like that and I’ve worked for similar people or worked with similar people that were brilliant, knew their stuff, but had gotten to a point where they were so frustrated or so… I guess they do career limiting moves every option they get, ’cause they, they wanna speak up.
My question always is, is what led to that. Because as much as the in person can be a challenge, they didn’t get hired that way. So my worry is always the accountability of the organization. IE Why did that people person feel the need to be a roadblock? Why did they feel so undervalued? What was the environment
the organization and the leaders created to make that person so frustrated and wanna fight back? Like, where’s the accountability outside of that person?
Derrick Mains: Yeah, I, I, I, it’s such a good point. And I think that’s why it was a turnaround. Pre, previous management had been discarded because there was some toxicity there. But I do think that that’s a very visible example that you could walk in and see this person, how he was disrupting the business. I think most of us are trapped.
We are trapped in an endless cycle of waiting, looking, and checking. I mean, this is about 25% of our time as leaders and administrators is we’re waiting on things. We’re waiting on the customer, we’re waiting on the signature, we’re waiting on the material, we’re waiting on the specifications, looking for things.
We don’t know where anything is. Where is this at? Didn’t we have this last week? Where did you put it? Where did it get put in this file? Is it over here? All the, and then checking what’s the status? How, how, how’s it going? When do we think we’re gonna get? And all of those things scream, you do not trust the process, and therefore, when you don’t trust the process, it is impossible to trust the people.
When you can’t obtain certainty from the process, how in the world can you ever really engage with the people in the process? Because your belief is, is that there is the process and there is the people, and it’s the people that are stopping the process from working correctly. That’s just not, it’s, it’s functionally untrue.
It’s the system, the structure of the system that is holding back those people from accomplishing the work that they need to do. And our job as leaders has to be to create a structure, to create a system where work is user friendly and it is easy to do and people get pride from it, and they don’t have to worry about the fear and finance piece.
So I agree that I think this is something that, that it churns up from the bottom of organizations, but it churns up because my management philosophy is you can manage three different things, events, behavior, or structure. Events are the everything… you’re chasing the tennis ball all day long. What’s happening? Things are bouncing off the wall. You’re going after it. Behavior is, oh, let me do more culture index. Let’s move to Kolbe versus Predictive Index. Let’s try to psychologically, let’s use the word, manipulate people and get the right people to psychologically work inside of our organization. There, there’s a whole flaw to that concept, but I don’t wanna get into it. But, but to me it’s more about the structure.
McDonald’s does not hire PhDs to work the fry line. They don’t have to. The system is so good. It is so error proofed. It is so impossible to truly make a mistake in the cooking of McDonald’s food that anybody can do it. Now, go through the drive-through and that’s where it all falls apart, right? You order a filet of fish and you get a bag of, a french fries.
But, but there, there is a fundamental focused by that organization on the structure of the organization that creates an environment where people can be people and where people can do the work that needs to be done inside this structured environment where, where they’re cared for and they’re nurtured and they’re not afraid.
And I think that’s the key to me is you’ve gotta start it from the bottom up. And unfortunately, once it’s in an organization, it has to be routed out when, when we’re focused on managing events and behaviors, but it doesn’t take long to fix it. Once you start fixing the structure, people start to understand that and they start to embrace that.
Russel Lolacher: So let’s take a quick step back here because one of the things I’ve really learned on this show is we need to define what the hell we’re talking.
Derrick Mains: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: So before we dive deeper into it, let’s take a step back and define what a human-centered process even is.
Derrick Mains: Yeah. So, I, I think a couple of, couple of of definitions here. First and foremost, when I talk about organizations, I talk about a system of the systems. That is what an organization is. There are systems inside your organization. Not software. I’m talking about there’s a marketing system, a way that you obtain leads.
There’s a way that you sell. There’s a way that you operate and produce and serve and do those kind of things. Those things rolled up together are a system of the systems. Our job as leaders, it’s an organism. It doesn’t compete against itself. Like think about that for a minute, because so many times our departments are in competition against each other.
It is a, is an organism. And when that organism is formed, our job as managers then is to continually improve the structure of that organism and find where there are challenges, things that are restricting that organism. So we call these red beads and it’s, it’s part of an experiment that I do with a lot of executives where I show them in this process of sorting beads that really, it’s impossible for them to sort them properly because I’ve mixed the beads up in the first place. And it’s like they’re trying all of these different methods and tools to fix this problem. And the real problem is that I set up the, the, I set up the experiment incorrectly. So, it’s important for us to understand that that structural piece has to be there.
So when we are thinking about the structure of the organization, we have to understand that the energy, the, the element of energy in that structure is human beings. So we want to create an environment in which it, it’s optimized for them. It is user friendly, it is focused on their health and wellbeing.
And I’m not saying this like in a DEI kind of way, I’m saying this in a performance kind of way. There’s folks here in the US like Henry Kaiser during the 1930s he built Hoover Dam and Grand Cooley Dam and all these incredible engineering projects. Then he went on to become the major, the main ship builder for the US government for World War II, and he took a process that took 244 days and he got it down to four days in 15 hours in a year.
Building an entire boat from 244 days to four days and 15 hours, and people say, how in the world did he do that? Some of it was engineering, some of it was how do we engineer this thing better? Almost all of it though, was offering free healthcare, free childcare, free food, great nutrition. He just realized that if these people want to work here and they’re, they have no fear and, and, and they’re, they’re, they’re set free.
Their ingenuity is set free in the work that I will benefit from it. So you can look at that and say, oh yeah, he’s being woke. Yeah, he woke up and realized that if I hope these people and I help their lives, I’m getting the benefit of it. It’s a reason last year I had a bunch of younger people working for me this time last year in their twenties.
What did I buy them all for Christmas? A high-end mattress. Why? Because if they sleep better, I can see that they were all sleeping on a mattress they got from their 16th birthday, right? I mean, if they sleep better, they will do better work. They’ll feel better and I’ll feel better. So that’s what I’m talking about in the structure.
Thinking about the organization as a whole and saying, how do I make it a place that people, desi… it is a destination employer. The people in high school are sitting there going, someday I want to go work for them. Like we used to do that in the fifties and sixties. We used to say, I wanna work for DuPont someday.
And that was like their life’s dream and then they did it. We don’t do that anymore. So we’ve gotta change the structure of the system. We’ve gotta make the system more user-friendly. We have to embrace people in that process, and in doing so, we will, we’ll take it from 244 days to four days, 15 and a half hours.
That’s the benefit of that human-centric focus on design.
Russel Lolacher: Couple things I loved in that one, the idea of the organism, because I mean the show’s called Relationships at Work, Derrick. I mean it’s about relationships between business other…
Derrick Mains: Yeah.
Russel Lolacher: Leaders, between yourself, and I think an organism really speaks to that against the silos or the, you work for me, or I can only benefit by if you get in my way, or like just this, this push and pull that a lot of organizations do and leaders…
Leaders take advantage of because they love the idea of competitiveness. ’cause they think that drives people even further. I’m like, but we’re all in the same boat as an organism moving forward. I also like the idea that you’re talking about productivity as a result, not a goal. Like it is what will come from this, because there are a lot of people that will hear this going human-centered. Okay, the humans are the cogs in the wheel that get me more money. The humans are like, oh, if we could only do five more hours this week, those humans could work harder to get me more of what I want at the end of the day. So I love flipping that and going, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So I guess the biggest question here is, why are we differentiating this? Because obviously you are trying to fix a problem or you wouldn’t have written a couple of books or started a couple of businesses about this. Why is this not the norm?
Derrick Mains: I, I, I can, there’s a history lesson I have to tell you to do that, but I first wanna make, I wanna make one point. I, I mentioned that at Kaiser Shipyards, they got it down to four days in 15 and a half hours, and then Kaiser realized that was unhealthy. He stopped it. He said, we’re not doing ’em that fast anymore.
We’re doing ’em in 43 days. 43 days is the optimal, where people are not exhausted, where injuries are lower, where we get the highest level of quality. So think about that. He took a system from 244 days, took it down to four and a half days, and then he said, nah, that’s not good enough. And it’s not good enough, not because of the productivity, the goal, but because of the aim.
His aim was that he wanted his people. He changed shifts like he started doing six hour shifts for anybody that did heavy lifting, because he found that if they worked eight hours and five days a week on the fifth day, they didn’t get as much work. So he is like, I’d rather give you eight, five, six hour days.
So he adjusted these things and he did that because he focused on an aim, not a goal. See, this idea of goals actually is not… It, it, it, it’s, it’s a relatively new idea in human business. It, it, it, the idea of a goal came out in 1954, management of my objective. The book is called The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker.
He came up with this idea that we should set a goal for the organization, break it down into, in individual departments, break that down even further, break it down to the human person level, and then hold those people accountable to achieve that goal. And when we have a goal. I, I can guarantee you that Kaiser at 244 days, if he had set a goal, it would’ve been like 220.
He would said let’s, let’s, 10% improvement. That’s a big improvement. But without a goal, with just an aim of, let’s see, let’s see how we can just do it better. He was able to drop that thing like 95%. So the goal stood in the way of the actual objective and the aim. So that’s very important for us to understand as before 1954, goals weren’t really a thing. KPIs were not an invention until 1954. Before that organizations worked on aim, they focused on how do we all work as a team to accomplish something? And we don’t know if it’s a 10% or a 12%. We’re just gonna do what’s best for the organization, for the organism where the best health of the organism comes out.
Because if the organism is more healthy next year, we’ll win again and again and again, and there’s time after time. I’m and, and I’ve gotta get back to the, the point of where this came from, but I, but I’ll do that. Edward… W. Edwards Deming, who, who created really the concept of Six Sigma and LEAN and all of these kind of methodologies.
He, he looked at this in the same way. He realized that the, that, that the worker, if you, if you give them an aim, they will achieve that goal. When he left the US in 1949 after the war, his ideas were pretty much rejected because… I gotta step back even a little bit further. W. Edwards Deming, as well as Henry Kaiser, both had a philosophy that statistical control of process coupled with employee empowerment was the secret sauce to accomplish any goal.
And Kaiser proved it with his shipbuilding. I mean, he, he just blew people’s mind. And statistically… constantly looking at statistical control of the process as it’s occurring and making improvements every day and then empowering his employees. W. Edwards Deming was, was worked inside the war effort. He wrote the the war standards.
He was one of the authors of the war standards for the US and when that was put into place inside factories, it dramatically improved. Everything. I mean, it was unbelievable what the Americans were able to produce during World War II and not with your standard workforce with women and children in the workforce.
11 million women and children joined the workforce to replace these men. When the war ended, unfortunately the command and control mentality that happened on the battlefield came back into American business. And these ideas around employee empowerment and statistical control that both Kaiser and Deming had during the war became Marxist.
Those ideas, that philosophy was considered to be a Marxist philosophy, empowering people in the process. In 1953, 1954, that sounds a little Bolshevik, right? I mean, it’s, it’s not a great thing. So those ideas were rejected and they went off to Japan. And in the 20 years after Japan adopted those ideas, their production per employee went up 600% in the automobile industry. They went from making four employees per, per automobile worker in 1952 to 60 in the 1970s doing the exact same process. Employee empowerment, statistical control, what can we do? How do we make it better together? Working this over and over and over.
So the ideology that came into American management, into Western philosophy at that time was this idea of Drucker, that we should manage people by goals, we should, we should reward them. There should be consequences if they don’t hit their goals. This idea came in and it really stuck for the last 70 years in United States business, and when I show a slide that shows the five points of Drucker’s management system and there’s 150 executives in the room, and I say, how many of you manage this way? Every one of them raises their hands. That is the American philosophy, the Drucker philosophy from ’54. What it replaced was far better. Unfortunately, we forgot about that. And what we really need to do as an, as an organism, as a economy is return to some of those old ideas and say, wait a second, these ideas produced significantly better results than the, than the 70% failure rate we have right now for businesses.
Maybe we should go back and look at those things again. And so to me that’s what it’s about. A long story there, but there’s a philosophy in management that occurred in the 1940s that won World War II for the allies that was thrown in the trash and replaced with this command and control management style.
You’ve probably heard 70% of businesses fail. This is a stat that’s very, very well known. I have written four times in my new book. It’s actually not 70% of businesses fail, though it’s actually only 48% of businesses fail. If you’re a franchise, it’s 15%. So if you’ve systematized it’s 15%. The 70 number actually is very specific.
Derrick Mains: That is to companies that make the Inc 5,000 list. If you are identified by the system as a fast growth company and you make the list of the fastest growing companies in in the economy, then you have a 70% chance of failing. So just think about that for a second. The companies that we all want to have… these fast growth companies that are right on the cutting edge.
When you achieve that, you automatically become, there’s high, lower probability of your survival. Whoa, wait a second. There’s a correlation between growth and going out of business. I like to say people don’t, don’t go out of business, they grow out of business, right? They focus so much on the growth that they never create a structure, and then when they do have to retreat from a, from a position in the market, there is nothing there. And they literally collapse in upon themselves. And I’ve seen it time and time again. I’ve been involved in companies that have been 10, 20, $30 million, and then overnight they’re a million and it’s like, what just happened? What happened is they never built a structure.
So they got someplace and then all of the fuel ran out like a rocket ship and the fuel ran out and they just tumbled and fell out of the sky. So we have got to focus our attention on efficiency in order to gird up our businesses, particularly in a market environment where things are changing and they’re changing quickly.
And I’m not just talking about AI. Talking about, look at some of the economic long-term economic indicators are telling us that we are going to have a pretty major economic event in the next 10 years. Let’s get ready for that now, let’s not focus on growing because growth might not be in the cards next year.
We may have to focus on efficiency, so it’s better to get started on it today.
Russel Lolacher: So what’s the Aha moment for leaders? Because you keep using the word efficiency and most leaders think great, less people like, they think like, we need to cut. Efficiency’s about cutting. It’s not improving, it’s about cutting. So what’s the Aha moment? For them to change. ‘Cause you’re also speaking from the United States, a country not so great about supporting humans. How’s your maternity leave going? Like, it’s just, it’s not really about the humans, it’s about capitalism. And so…
Derrick Mains: We’ve, what, what, what we’ve gotta do is find a new version of capitalism. I love I, I, I love Žižek the philosopher. Slavoj Žižek, a Polish philosopher, and I love the fact that he was raised in the USSR because his perspectives on Marcus, Marxism and Capitalism don’t come from the way that I was brought up.
He comes from the opposite side of it and, and is now working in a capitalistic system. But one of the things that Žižek says is that we can all think of 10 ways the world ends in the next 10 years. And that’s true. There’s lots of global situations where we could go that could escalate. And particularly if you look back on World Wars in the past, the, the, the processional of escalation before World War looks very similar to the last 18 months.
I mean, it’s pretty close. But what Žižek says is that we can, everybody, every man on the street can imagine a way that this ends. But yet if I ask somebody, what is the next version of Capitalism look like? They’re dumbfounded. They, they can’t think of anything. They’re not thinking of how capitalism might evolve and morph, morph into its next version.
And that’s a real problem because it means that it’s rudderless. It means that nobody is at the helm, nobody is guiding capitalism towards a direction that’s better for all of us. And that’s a very serious problem. So for me, to me, it’s about getting out, talking to CEOs, helping them understand that people work that fear, finance, or want to, how do you make an environment where people want to. I believe we can look at what happened in the 1940s in the US and then in the fifties, sixties and seventies in Japan.
And there is a model there. The Japanese after World War II, guaranteed, companies had to guarantee lifetime employment to employees. Meaning that if I hired you, I could never fire you for any reason. You could leave, but I could never fire you. What that did is not only did it create structure in their economy in a time where things were in turmoil, but it also created an environment where people were going, wait, I’m gonna be here for the rest of my life.
If I’m gonna be here for the rest of my life, let’s get this thing fixed. Let’s focus on this thing. Hey, you know what? I got a way of improving. In those contracts, there’s a great docuseries about, it’s called If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? And it was put out in 1980 by NBC television, looking at the difference between Japanese and American economy and some of the things that the Japanese said, like the Japanese in this say we guarantee lifetime employment. Meaning that employees are incentivized to figure out ways to eliminate their jobs. Because if they eliminate their jobs, they make things so easy that they’re not needed anymore, we still are required to pay them. So they go home until we can find something else for them to do. And then the second that they come in, they immediately start to work as a team and go, how do we eliminate this?
How do we make this so simple? There’s 10 of us doing it now how do we get it down to one so nine of us can go home? And they literally are working almost against the system. But if you think about that, what does that mean? It means that an organization is setting forth, I think it was Mitsubishi in the 1970s said of 10,000 employees, we harvest 10 employees that improve productivity from every employee a year. We’re talking a million new ideas a year to improve productivity that are coming from the frontline. Not coming from management, but coming from the people doing the work and going, wait a second. If we had a better tool, we could cut this in half.
Can we get a better tool? Yeah. Now it takes 50% of the time to do it. Now we need less people because they’re not afraid of losing their job. All of the sudden, it’s a game. It’s a game of us, the people against the system. How do we make this system so good? I mean, there are Japanese factories around steel mills in the seventies that reduced labor by 90%.
90% they could reduce labor in a factory by having the employees go out and say, find ways to reduce labor in the factory. It’s, it’s, it, it is a transition. So you talk about things like, maternity leave, it’s gotta be more than that. It’s gotta be something where we have to make a pact with our people and say, look, I’m committed to you if you’re committed to me, and if we both work together.
Let’s sign an agreement. The cessation of hostilities. Let’s make it, let’s bring out the flags. Let’s sign an agreement between us and, and you and say, we’re gonna guarantee you’re gonna be here. We wanna work together as a single organism. Help us do that.
Russel Lolacher: And I’m glad you brought up the humans because that was where I wanted to lead us. Considering this a human-centered process. We’re just talking about executives and leadership, but what about the people? What are their role in this? In defining a process that will improve the organization, is it around feedback?
Is it like, what is their role?
Derrick Mains: Yeah. First and foremost, you’ve gotta give people visibility. This is why my methodology, we call it M4, starts with mapping – map, measure, manage, mobilize. It has to start with mapping. We, you cannot fix what you cannot see, so it is absolutely essential that you have process maps that define what the work is inside your organization.
I’m not talking about work instructions. I’m not talking about click this button, then click this button. I’m talking about high level action results. Get it up on the wall, step back, and be able to say that’s what we do. Each one of those bubbles up there is a to-do that needs to get done in this process.
Putting that up on the wall and then just starting to have the conversations. It’s amazing. I do these workshops every week, and it’s fascinating to me how people just blossom in this moment where they see the work on the wall. They helped put it up there, right? We built it together. We put this thing up and then I say, look, how long does it take to go from here to here? And they go, oh, that takes about three weeks. How could we get it to two weeks? And within 20 seconds, every time somebody goes if we stop doing this, we could do it in 10 days. Oh, okay. Do we need to do that? No, we don’t need to do, okay, we just saved a week. What about over here? And you just start having this conversation and then all of the sudden, the hands of the organization, because we do it, I don’t know if you do it in, in Canada, but we, we call meetings, we call them an all hands meeting. The most derogatory term on the planet. Essentially, I’m saying to you, come to me the lowly hands and hear from the almighty head behind the curtain that is gonna tell you what you should do. The truth of the matter is when I call people the hands, I’m referring to them from the neck down. I’m essentially saying, I hired you. Don’t you dare think. I want you to work. But here’s an odd statistic, a hundred percent of people that bring their hands to work also bring their heads to work. So maybe, maybe we should try to harness some of that brain power. And it starts with this visualization, seeing it and then asking them questions. And I challenge my people regularly, especially with companies I work with.
If I’m walking a production line or I’m talking to somebody in insurance underwriting or whatever it is, I’m like, Hey, how would you do this twice as fast if you, if you were incentivized to get it done, what would you do? And a lot of times they look at me, they’re like, I don’t know, man. This just, just sucks.
And then I’m there two weeks later and they grab me and they go, hey, check this out. And they hand me 10 pages of written notes where they’re like, here’s how you’d cut it in half. And I’m like, wow. People’s brains work in that way. When they’re doing the work. When they’re touching the work, they’re mindless. When I start to engage their brains and I start to say, help me in this. So the way that I do this inside organizations is with a process we call an Idea Foundry, we put it up on the wall. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a poster that we put up on the wall that we ask people to, to submit their ideas. What are your ideas to improve?
Many times I’ll even structure that. I’ll come in and say, we want to find a way to improve quality here, give me your ideas. And they put their ideas up on the wall, but I don’t review those ideas. Every Friday I pay for lunch. The employees get together, they look at those ideas and they, they hash it out themselves. They walk it through, okay, Joe, why did you put this up here? I think this is this. And I think, okay, you’re right. All right. So they go through that, and then they each get five votes, and usually you use dots or pennies or something. Then they lay out the ones that they wanna vote on, and each of them get five votes.
I can put all five of mine on one and throw the weight, or I could put one over here and two over here, and they weigh ’em out, and then they hand me the top two. And they say, here’s the two things that we as employees, somebody submitted, we vetted it out as a team. We talked it through in the workflow. We believe this will improve things, and it is the highest weighted vote of what we came up with.
Can you take a look at this? And then my responsibility as a manager is to play Go Fetch. I take that idea, I go out, I figure out, can we do this? And sometimes we can’t. Sometimes I have to go back to the front line and say, hey guys, I talked to our attorney and he is like, hell no, you ain’t doing that one.
But, but, but I probably, 80% of the time the idea is profound. It’s good. I mean, it’s incredibly good stuff, and some of them are simple. I’ve heard things like, can we start at 8:15 versus eight o’clock? I’m like, why? And they’re like 80% of the people in the office have to drop their kids off at school. And many times we can’t drop our kids off because we have to be here at eight, which means now I have to get my husband to drive like this whole… Okay. Yeah, let’s move to 8:15. Like, alright. I, I, I had one time where I went in and I said, look, we, we have a situation where we lost a big order and there’s not enough work for everybody. What should we do? And you know what the employees came back with? They said, could we work a 32 hour week, reduce our pay by 20%? We’ll work a 32 hour week to get through it. So nobody goes to home, but everybody was like, Hey, now I get Friday off. Okay. And a lot of them, the ones that needed the cash they went and did Uber, they did something else.
So it, it’s really about empowering them at the front to say, how do you solve these problems? And then as management instead of ideas, there’s nothing, there’s no written rule that says all the best ideas have to come from management. Like, we are all thinking human beings, the best idea might come from the bottom of the totem pole.
So let the best ideas come up, and then my job as management is to empower those ideas.
Russel Lolacher: So I am curious and a little nervous about this one because I love the idea of it, but then I think diversity, and we sort of touched on that earlier, is it feels like only the popular kids are gonna win when it comes to, so there will be people that will be, not their vote will not count as much because they’re a different.
And I, when I say diversity, I’m talking culture, age generational. I’m talking geographical and their voices won’t be heard as much. Or say in two years people have left. New people have come in, they have different concepts of what is good or what success looks like. How do you account for that first? That’s two different questions there.
Derrick Mains: Yeah, no, I, I think it’s, I I haven’t seen it where we have a diversity issue and I wish I could show you, lemme see if I can this is a podcast. But I, I, I’m looking at one right now where I did a process map two weeks ago with 32 people. Thirty-two people in the room. And at the end I gave everybody five votes. And I said, on this process map, tell me where it hurts. And we, we walked through the process map as a team. Everybody talked about their steps and what happened. And in the end of the 150 votes in the room, 80% of them went to three areas where there were problems. Why? Because the conversation and the visualization of the work, some people were like, wow, I’m really struggling here. And then they hear the next person and they go, oh my God. Like this guy’s in real trouble. Like he needs a lot more help than me. So the empathetic nature of human beings tends to work. I do work to facilitate those meetings the first couple times. I have a rule to, if you put an idea on the board and you share it with management before it’s approved by your peers, it’s automatically disqualified. So I don’t want anybody cutting the line and jumping up top. You have to do this as a team and vote it out as a team. And I have found, my experience has been, it is very much, I, I do think human beings maybe the bureaucracy in our ideology is what makes us form into these cliques, but in the natural progression of people doing the work and trying to accomplish goals together, they don’t form.
People are like, Joe’s got a great idea, Bob’s got a great idea, and they have that conversation. As long as they put that idea up on the board, it is discussed. So it’s going to get some earplay with all of the people in that room. So we haven’t really seen that in and of ourselves. I, I, I encourage people to submit.
I tell people all the time, look who knows what ideas. I had a crazy one that I wrote about in one of my books. Janitor came up with the best idea I ever heard. Like it was just like hands down. As soon as he said it, everybody in the room was like, why did we not see that? He saw it ’cause he wandered around all the time.
Cleaning things up so he could see a perspective that nobody else could see. So that’s the first piece. Now you ask a two part question, and I tried to answer the first and I forgot the second.
Russel Lolacher: It was just that, how do you keep up with consistency? Because more pe, I mean as much as we’d love, you have a job for life. People do come in, there are new people with new ideas that may not agreed what the last group voted on.
Derrick Mains: Yeah. I, I think that that’s where statistical control comes into the play. That’s why you need both. You’ve got to understand the data. Many executives want dashboards. They’re like, I want a dashboard that shows me what’s going on in their business. Think, think about this. If you were to drive, you’re in you’re in British Columbia, right?
Russel Lolacher: Correct? Yeah.
Derrick Mains: So if you were to drive to Arizona only looking at your dashboard, don’t ever look out the windshield, how, how good would that go?
Russel Lolacher: Ewww.
Derrick Mains: It would not go very well. You’re not gonna make it out of town. I mean, things are gonna be really bad. So, unfortunately, we have this mindset that dashboards tell us something.
Dashboards really are not designed for that. Dashboards are a rollup of data, but, but to truly understand and obtain profound knowledge of data, you have to be there at the point in which it was collected, in which it was created. And that doesn’t happen in our businesses. We roll all this data up. And then we look at it for a macro trend, but we don’t understand what was the conditions in which that data was created.
Let me give you an example. I, I had a a factory I worked with a few years ago where we had noticed a direct correlation. It was in Arizona, so it was very, very hot direct correlation between… we had a couple of industrial air coolers. The area of the factory where those industrial air coolers was performed better than other areas of the factory.
And we very quickly came to an understanding that it was the air coolers that made it easier to work. It wasn’t the people. I could go over there and yell at the guys working in 110 degrees all I wanted, and it would not matter. When I went over to the guys that had the air cooled air that was blowing over them, it was still warm in there, but there was a, a, a, this cool air coming across them. They were a lot more chipper. They were a lot happier. So very quickly we were like let’s go get, let’s go get more industrial fans. Let’s put more fans in. And we saw a direct correlation in the improvement in the statistical control of that process. What do I mean by that? Statistical control of a process is very, very simple.
It’s just an XY axis. Simple XY axis with time on the bottom and what you wanna track on the side, and you’re just every day or every hour tracking that. And then when something falls outside of the medium of that, we can… I even, I even maintain a bulletin board here on my, you, when something falls outside of the norm, you just ask a question.
Look, is that something I can control? Why, why are these guys, oh, these guys are doing better, ’cause they have, they have better air. Oh, okay. Lemme get better air for the other guys. Now they’re doing better. Okay, wait a second. We got improved lighting over here and that they did better over, oh, let me get improved lighting for everywhere.
So it is this idea of building it from the ground up. In Japanese manufacturing culture, they do a process called a quality circle, where once a week. It’s voluntary. People just get together and they, and they bring their statistical control. They, they, they, they bring their little XY axis from the week and they get together and they go, what do we learn? How do we make it 1% better next week? How can we, what can I learn from you? What can you learn from me? Even the ship builders in World War II in the US, the US has this interesting experiment with World War II because FDR actually went to American industry and said, you will not compete. You will collaborate with each other.
So that means when a ship builder like Kaiser figured out a way to do it in four days, he was required to call all the other ship builders and say, guess what we just found? Here’s how you do it. And then they would call him back and go, nah, bro, we found a way to do it. In three days. He’d be like, okay, tell me what.
Then he would incorporate that. It is just this process of continuous improvement. Optimizing the system every single day, reinforcing and building the structure. That’s how you do it. You just keep putting brick, on brick, on brick. And the new people are gonna have new ideas and a new approach.
They’re gonna see things differently. And let me tell you something, eight outta 10 times their fresh eyes are the best thing you can get because they don’t know why we do it this way. And they will point out something in the first five minutes and you’ll go, son of a gun. Why in the world did we not see it?
That’s, that’s, they’ll see what we call the third path. The third path is not the one, so many times…. give you an example with AI. Google created this program called Alpha Go and it, it taught it how to play the game Go, which is considered the most complex human game created. There are more potential moves in a game of Go than there are atoms in the known universe.
The Chinese have been playing this game for 3000 years. Google trained an AI on the game, but they didn’t show it professional players. They only showed it 10,000 amateur games. Then they gave it the rules and they told it to play itself 10 million times. Google put up a million bucks. The grandmaster of China comes to beat this machine and in move 37 of the first game, the machine has a choice. It can play offense or defense. It’s a standard choice in the game. Humans have done it for years. There’s thousands of recorded games of this play happening, and the computer picks the third path. An alternate play that no one had ever played in the history of the game Go. And he won. The, the, the computer won.
And it made everybody realize, all of a sudden like, wait a second. We thought there were only two paths. There was nothing in the rules that said you couldn’t go the third way. Why in the world has no human thought of this? So that’s the reality of a new approach, right? An amateur coming into a professional sport can make many times change that sport because the ideology is not the same.
And I think that is so key with us. All have an ideology on how management works. There is nothing that says that ideology is correct. And if I look at the 67%, 70% failure rate of fast growth companies, I don’t know. That doesn’t sound correct to me. If I have a 70% failure rate in baking buys, maybe the recipe’s wrong.
And that’s what we’ve gotta solve. We’ve gotta fix those problems.
Russel Lolacher: So looking at the time, we are out of it Derrick, so I could talk to you for ages. I know we’ve had some technical problems here, but we’ll power through for the last question to wrap it up. What’s one simple action, sir, that people could do right now to improve their relationships at work?
Derrick Mains: I will tell you what it is. It is go out right now… two things. First, get rid of pens in your organization. Throw every pen away. Keep one in a safe someplace. ’cause you have to sign anything. I’m very big on this concept of pencil management, that there’s two parts of pencil management. There’s the, there’s the, the point.
Which I have to keep sharp, right? And then there’s the eraser. And, and being able to erase things is really powerful. It, it really sends a signal to your people as well, that you are open and, and open to change. You’re willing to be wrong. You’re willing to say, I’m sorry, you’re willing to rethink some things.
The second thing is this. Go get some sticky notes. Stand up against the wall with one of your employees today and start asking them, what’s your process? What, what, what’s the trigger? What starts it? Okay. I get an order. Order received, put it up on the wall. What’s the next step? I, I’ve gotta verify.
Okay. Order verified, put it up on the wall. Walk through their process with them. You’ll be shocked. You will be shocked at what you will find. And then go back to the beginning. And now, how long does this take? Takes 21 days. Oh, great. How would we do it in 10? Huh? We would have to stop doing this and this and this.
Is that okay? Yeah, we can do that. What about this? What, what system, what, what software do you use to do this step? What software do you use to do this step? I just did one here recently with a company, we mapped out the process and in the process discovered three separate project management tools, all of which are being used by different departments. None are connected and communicating with each other. And the CEO told me their biggest problem was internal communication. I was like, hello, dummy. Here it is. They’re all using different tools and nobody’s communicating. It is amazing what happens when you stand against the wall and you obtain shoulder friction with your people and you start to bump into each other and you start to put it together.
And an an, an air of ownership comes over it too, where people start to go, wait, this is me. I do this. I do this, which is great because talk about accountability. Now they understand if there’s challenges and problems in there, it’s my responsibility to speak up. It’s my responsibility to control that aspect of the system.
Get yourself some sticky notes, get some pencils, and go after it today. I promise you. Every person I have given this advice to, usually within a couple months calls me and or hits me up on LinkedIn and they’re like, bro, you have no idea what I found. And it’s gonna take me six months to uncover it and unbury it.
But I’ll call you when I’m done because I wanna do more of this.
Russel Lolacher: That is Derrick Mains. He’s a speaker four-time author, trainer, and optimization consultant as the CEO of the Process Fixer and Process Triage. Thank you so much for being here, Derrick.
Derrick Mains: Thank you, Russel. Appreciate you.
