Hey, what's up, Toby? It's episode five of Processed Net, the podcast.
We are going to just shoot for 10 minutes now.
We've failed. Whoa, whoa.
Time. We're going to go.
It's going to be the 10 minute podcast.
And, you know, eventually it'll be like maybe the eight hour podcast.
I'm just kidding. I think that it just I hope that I hope that listeners.
I was about to say readers, maybe readers, too.
Appreciate how much value we're trying to pack into five minutes.
I mean, it's really our goal. It's value add.
It's key.
One of the topics we want to talk about today is a process that is
the new employee conundrum.
And the new employee could be a new boss or the new employee could be a junior intern.
But I think one of the one of the.
I don't know if it's the best, like one of the one of it's not the best.
It can't be the best.
The most problematic,
percent problematic and maybe invisible, like process debts or just
the new employees, if you're a junior, you see it right.
If you're a new employee from the outside, what do what do new employees,
especially the executives that come in, what do they say?
They always say, well, at my old company.
That's right. And that is the start of process debt right there.
I love that you touch on
welcome to the company.
And at least in my experience, you know, having consulted now for for 20 some years,
they're like, oh, yeah, I've got it right here.
It's out on SharePoint.
Oh, or yeah, I've got the thing you're looking for.
It's on system X, you know, at least in the old filing cabinet world.
It was there or not there.
Yeah. Now, I don't know if it's Schrodinger's files or not going on,
but, you know, it may be there, but I can't find it.
And then they tell me you're in the wrong universe.
So but the piece you just touched on, though, a new employee,
that's that's a junior resource already, right?
We can say, well, this is how it works.
Yeah. And the earlier they are in their career, you know, myself included,
I'm like, I have no idea. I've never, you know, I've never served elephant at a dinner.
So you tell me how we do this.
Yep. Whereas a manager coming in is a very different dynamic, right?
They have experience. They also have authority.
Yep. So they don't have to necessarily take what you're offering.
Yeah. Oh, I'd love to hear it sounds like you might have a story around
onboarding a manager to process.
Well, what I can what I would say is that the junior employees
are kind of the canary in the coal room, right?
Where like they literally and my brother has said this for a really long time.
He has this quote where bad process kills good people.
And and I feel like those new employees or the more junior employees,
they're just given it everything you've got to follow the rules a lot of times.
And they don't know what rules can bend, right?
Like as you get older in your career, you're like, well, they're excited.
But I'll just let them say, yeah, that'll be fine. It's OK.
Knock yourself out. Yeah.
You're like and then the new, you know, the new the new employees
just running around on fire, just like losing their mind.
And I remember being that junior employee and being like,
why are all the old people just they don't care about this?
Do they not see how important this is? Right.
Apparently, it wasn't important, but I had no idea.
I had no way to know. But so like so again, when you bring a new employee in,
like they if you lean on them to say, hey, look,
anytime you see something that you don't understand or can't find,
you will find broken process to the left, to the right.
You will find it, like you said, in one drive, you will find it in confluence.
It's all these knowledge based sources that are scattered all over the place.
And then on the opposite side, like you have just new bosses that come in.
And they the problem with the challenge with the new boss and I, you know,
I do the exact same thing, which is like
you come in with like that just that confirmation bias
and that like idea of like what I'm used to.
I know really well.
Right. Like you just you just that that known that known intelligence of like,
well, that might which is why they say, well, at my old company.
Oh, sure. Right.
It's because they knew it and they understood it like probably like.
Even subconsciously, they understood some stuff that they didn't understand.
Whereas in a new company, you're learning new rituals.
You're learning new, new norms, new standards, new ways to do thing.
And so there's always going to be when you come in with authority,
there's always going to be this push towards.
Wait a sec. This is I'm going into the unknown.
Let's go back to the known, which was the old company,
which it won't work in your new company. It just won't.
Yeah. Chris, let me ask, because this the other distinction here is,
is, you know, the frame of reference that a new
less experienced resource has, they don't have the context.
They don't have the work experience or familiarity with the generic process,
let alone the unique versus a manager who has a little bit experience.
And so if we were to flip this, you know, we all have process debt
and anybody coming in with fresh eyes is going to ask a lot of obvious questions
that we don't have good answers for. And so let me start with the new hire.
So we jokingly refer to it as like new employee hazing.
Yeah. And that's not our intention.
It's just that we can't, we don't know what we don't know
because we've been at it for so long.
So for those that are listening, they're like, hey, I've got a new guy
I'm bringing on or I've got this awesome young woman that I'm excited to join our team.
What is it that that new manager could do for that new employee
to reduce the fatigue from process debt?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Can I pass? Can I phone a friend?
Can I phone a friend?
No, it's a really tough one, right?
Like, I think it depends on how mature your processes are. Right.
And like, like, where where does where's the home for things?
Right. Like some of it's easy, like HR, their home is in whatever.
Yeah. Oftentimes, a scare system.
Yeah. But they say they roll in.
Yeah, I think some of that is just is just letting them know that, like,
you as a manager want to know what's going on.
Like, you want to know where those pain points are, because and I've said this before this
where like oftentimes when we run into bad process or bad design,
we think we're dumb as human beings.
And the reality is, is we are not we are not dumb.
It's just bad design.
And so if you think of like this.
This comes from a book.
I'm going to forget the name of the book, so I'm going to just move on.
I'll remember it later.
I read the book once. But. Yeah.
But if you just think of like doors, like just doors to buildings,
like one of the places where I've worked in the past, they had a door that like is like a slider.
It's like one of those barn barn sliders. Right.
And but it has the long pole.
And so people will basically push on that pole to push it open or pull it.
Oh, my God. And it's a slider.
And so like every time every time, you know, some new person comes into that into that
bill into that room and doesn't know, it's just like this embarrassing thing.
And like, I think for new employees, they run into that a lot.
And instead of, you know, building psychological safety in the team
and really helping people like just understand that, like, look, we're not perfect here.
And especially if it's a fast growing company or a startup like, yeah, it's just going to be chaos
on top of chaos. But like asking about that and then not trying to change everything, but just pick something.
Yeah.
Make a home, find a home for it.
Where's the home for this?
Because we're smart.
People are smart.
But if they don't know where home is, they don't know where to go and find if they don't know the first step,
they'll just give up or spend an exorbitant amount of time looking for something.
Chris, I, I, you just reminded me the the door is a great example,
because we have these virtual doors all over our business process.
Right.
And so one of my favorite clients that I had the opportunity to work with for several years said,
I just need somebody to take a first pass at try to document what we do.
Yeah.
And so sometimes that new hire who doesn't have a lot of context yet, what they can do is capture what they're being told.
Yep.
And then try to put those things into not just the sequential order they were presented in,
but then to suggest, is there a better way to do that?
And then to suggest, is there a better, more logical way that makes sense to you as a with fresh eyes?
The magic in my mind becomes not the first person that documents it, but the next person that comes in.
And now we ask them, here's whatever crap level of process documentation.
We want you to listen as we describe it and make notes about where we're following and where we're not following it.
With the time you've taken two or three passes, not only do people have a higher level of ownership in the process documentation,
because their fingerprints are on it, but they also know that it's not theirs to care and maintain for.
And so some of the stronger work teams, and you mentioned on a past episode, the power within silos,
but a lot of the culture becomes when one leader says, well, we'll get there.
We're not there yet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We'll iterate across new team members.
We'll take turns.
Yeah.
So, and some of it is just building that culture of like, I'm not going to answer your question.
Because in every company, Bob somewhere knows everything about everybody.
He's been there for 15 years.
He's been on some days.
But if you want to know where the skeleton is, you just go to Bob and Bob will give you the answer.
Right. But the reality is, is building that culture around, did you go to this place first?
Yeah, I'd love it.
And like the reality is, is most of the time we're at time again, it happens so fast.
Anyway, what's interesting is that time can, like what happens for those new employees is they
instantly, how are they being trained to learn the business?
And I would say most of the time by week four, they basically are finding the internal power
structure and they're going to people. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
But the problem is, is like the problem from a process debt standpoint is it's not going to be
consistent. You're consolidating power among certain people. You're building little fiefdoms
versus saying, hey, look, did you check the X, did you check the XYZ first?
And it doesn't matter what the XYZ is. It could be Confluence or Sharecoin.
Sure. Yeah.
It's all spreadsheet. The word doc, a folder does not matter.
On tablets. Yeah.
Yeah. But did you go to that one place to check it for you? Did you bring your yes?
Don't tell. Chris, I love that. Hopefully we'll have some listeners share stories as we kind of
forward. But I really like that as an alternative model. And it's like, here's the five keepers of
our stories and our knowledge. And so on topic A, go talk to Bob. On topic B, go talk to Sue.
B, you and I, and I realized we're almost at 12 minutes, but you and I are this crossover.
We're starting to see boomers. We grew up under boomer leadership and now they're all retiring.
And so a number of organizations have this enormous exposure where people leave with all
that information in their head. So yeah, it's just about capturing that and putting it in and
pointing people to just that one page. Right? Like a hundred percent of like, look, and these
are living, right? These are living documents. Someone owns it. You know, or you rotate ownership,
but you just get it. You just build that culture of like, let's build a culture of documentation.
And you know what? With AI coming around, a culture of documentation is going to be a
different year. It's just going to be. Yeah. What happens when your learning model is based
on how you would do work? Your actual work. Cause like a lot of stuff, it's just a mess.
And it's hard, right? Like it's an infinite problem because you're always learning,
you're always growing. So you have to have a lot of grades, but you also have to have a
discipline and culture that supports it. So we are done. You're finished. Bonus, bonus episodes.
Bonus minutes. We're going to, man, we're just going to keep making it longer. So what's going
to happen is like our, our, our listenership is going to go from 10. These guys are terrible.
All right, man. Thanks for your time. All right. All right. See it.