The Three-Legged Stool of Business Performance

I never learned how to milk a cow, but when I was in the third grade I learned about three-legged stools. You know why milking stools have only three legs, right? It's because barn floors are never flat or level and a four-legged stool would be unstable. But a three-legged stool is always stable even if the floor is badly tilted or warped. If you had the choice, wouldn't you want your business seated on a three-legged stool so it could weather any kind of uneven business conditions?

You can give your business the stability of a three-legged stool by paying attention to these three factors:

• The right people
• In the right jobs
• Under the right conditions

Together, these make up the three-legged stool of employee performance.

The Right People

What does it mean to have the right people working for you? This might mean different things to different people, but the most important factor is that you have people working for you who have natural talents for doing the work you need to have done. So, of course, you ask what it means to have natural talents for a certain job. Fair enough.

A talent is an innate ability: it's something you're born with. Some of just seem to be "wired" for certain things like remembering names or faces or doing calculations quickly in our heads. Some have a talent for feeling empathy for other people. They make great nurses and salespeople. Others have a talent for figuring out problems and they make great diagnostic mechanics.

The key thing to remember about talents is that they can't be learned but they can be nurtured. Put someone with a talent for empathy in a customer-service role and he will shine. Put someone with a talent for being organized in charge of your bookkeeping and your accountant will thank you. Put someone with a talent for diagnostic work in a job where all the steps are pre-defined and you will create an unhappy employee.

What matters most is to figure out what talents are most needed in your business and find them. They are as important to your inventory (on your staff) as anything you keep on hand to better serve your customers.

Take a look around you. Do you have the right people? Do you have in "inventory" all the right talents to make your business as effective as it should be?

The Right Jobs

What is a job, anyway? It's a slice of all the work that has to be done in a given business. If you are a one-man shop and you have no additional help whatsoever, your job equals 100% of the work that goes on in your business. Once you have more than one employee, the work has to be divided according to a plan. The plan must take into consideration the logical flow of tasks that make up the work you do so the work is done efficiently.

This plan should also consider your customers' satisfaction. Is it best for the person who changes the tires to be the same person who greets each customer and hands him or her a cup of coffee, or would it be better if someone else did this? How you divide up the work in your business has a huge impact on how the business runs.

Most business owners don't think very hard about how they divide up the work in their businesses. Some follow examples set by other businesses they have known or worked in. Others tend to set the roles of each worker according to that worker's particular talents. Each approach has its merits and its failings.

Take a look at how the work in your business is portioned out. Why are the jobs defined the way they are? Does the division of labor make the most possible sense?

The Right Conditions

If I had a dollar for every management book or article that has been written about "how to motivate your employees," I wouldn't be writing this today, I'll tell you that. I'd be in Tahiti or on the golf course at Pebble Beach . The truth is that motivation comes from inside. It's not something you can add to your employees the way you add different chemicals to produce a longer-lasting oil. All you can do is create the right conditions so that when you have the right people doing the right jobs, they'll want to do their very best work day after day.

So what are those conditions? I think the best examples to look at come from the world of sports and from social psychology. In sports, you often hear of top athletes playing as if they were "in the zone." What is this zone? It's a state in which they perform at the absolute peak of their ability. From social psychology we get the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (don't worry, I can't pronounce it either) in which he describes this same state as "Flow." But rather than focus on athletes, he studied high-performing individuals in all walks of life - including people who worked on assembly lines! He found that in order to get into this state of Flow, you need these conditions:

• You face a clear set of goals that require certain appropriate responses.
• The actions you take provide immediate feedback.
• Your skills are fully involved in meeting a challenge that is just about manageable.

When these conditions are all in place, your attention is focused, there is no room in your mind for distractions, you feel stronger than usual, and you're entirely wrapped up in what you are doing.

The goal of every business owner should be to have these conditions in place so every employee can be working "in the zone" or in a state of flow as much as possible.

The question to ask yourself right now is this: "Do I have the right people doing the right jobs under the right conditions?"

Do you?

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