Why Employees Don’t Do What You Ask

0:00I'll give you the little management diamond um that I do for employees, which is a really good framework for having hard conversations. But if you want someone to do something and they're not doing it, you have like four or five reasons that they're not doing it, right? The first is they just didn't know that you wanted them to do it. [laughter] Most common. Hey, did you do that thing? And they're like, "What thing?" You're like, "Damn it, I didn't write it down, did I?" Okay, so we have to write it down. We have to we have to put a deadline on it. Fantastic. So now I say, 'Why didn't you do that thing? They say, 'Well, I didn't know how to do it. Okay, well fine. So they didn't know how to do it. Now let's say we train them. So I told you that you needed to do it. You know how to do it, but um you didn't know when I was going to do it by Oh, I need to do that tomorrow. Okay, so I knew that you needed to do it. You knew how to do it. You knew when to do it.

0:51The next is you have something that's blocking you. So I knew that I knew how. I knew you wanted to do it tomorrow. But you also told me to do three other things. Which one did you want me to do? And then finally you get into this which is that I didn't want to do it. Which in my experience is the first place that we go to as entrepreneurs and typically the last one that's reality. Most people I have found when they have a job prefer to keep it. And I've also found that most people prefer to feel like they're doing a good job at their job. And so it's usually one of these other issues.

1:29And so this provides a really good framework for having those conversations. Now, the reason I bring this up is because we can also have these conversations with ourselves. I know I need to do more. Why am I not doing more? Did I not know that I needed to do more? Well, now I do. Okay. Do I not know how to do more? Oh, I don't know how to do more. Great. Well, now I have something to attack. That becomes my to-do. If I don't know how to do it, I know what to do, which is to figure out how to do it, right? Um, is it not urgent enough, right? Or is there something blocking me? I would go recruit more people for my HVAC company, but right now 80% of my time is dealt with these customer service issues that are coming up onesie twoosies all day.

2:08Okay, great. How much does it cost to replace the onesie twoosy thing? Cost me $60,000 a year. I have $400,000 in profit. Am I willing to go from 400,000 to 3040,000 in profit in order to get 80% of my time back? Yes. But that means I'm going to make less money, yes, today. But then I'm going to get 80% of my time back so that I can then focus on how to figure out how to do more. And so it's just it's taking second and third order consequences down to their natural end. And then ultimately being like, okay, this is what I need to do. I literally went through this process. So post launch for me, I was like, okay, I have this bandwidth back. What's the next trend of the business? And for me, it was six questions down for me to be like, that's what the issue is and that's what I'm focused on. And so right now 80% of my time is dealing with that constraint which is I'm heavily recruiting executives right now. That's what I'm doing with my time. Yesterday I had four executive meetings and I have follow-up notes and and connections afterwards that I have to do. That's what my time's right now because that's the constraint of the business. And then once that finishes because those people get onboarded and they do a good job, I'll go through this again.