📍  Hey everyone. Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm your host, Sarah Beth Herman. I wanna start today with something that happens to me occasionally, and I actually saw this originally on social media. But I imagine if you own a business or you've spent years building a career, that you've probably experienced some version of this too.

Someone finds out that you own a business, or maybe they know you've built something successful, and they say, "It must be nice." And I always think that's such an interesting thing to say, because what I think they actually mean is that it must be nice to have a successful business, or it must be nice to have a successful career.

And yes, it is. I'm incredibly grateful for the businesses that I've been able to build, the people that I've had the opportunity to employ, and the opportunities that have come from years and years of relentless hard work. I wouldn't trade being an entrepreneur for anything. But I also think that there is a misunderstanding about what it means to own a business, especially one that has grown beyond just you.

People see the finished product, or at least what they believe is the finished product. They see the company, the employees, the customers, maybe the building or the revenue. They don't necessarily see the responsibility that comes with keeping all of that functioning.

They don't see the decisions that you make when there isn't a particularly good option. They don't see the payroll responsibility, the customers who need answers, the employees depending on you to make good decisions, or the operational problems that can quietly consume an extraordinary amount of your time.

I have interacted with countless individuals who always wanna start a business with me, or they wanna pick up a business that they started with me, or they want to start a new venture, but always include me. I've learned over the years that picking up a new business or starting a business with someone else who doesn't quite understand entrepreneurship

it's not always the right thing to do. There are many situations where it is the right thing to do

A successful business doesn't become successful because the owner somehow reaches a point where there's no more problems. That day doesn't come. The problems change, the stakes change, the decisions become more complicated. And if you're doing your job, you're learning how to recognize problems earlier and solve them before they become part of the way that your company operates.

And that's really what I wanna talk about today, because I think one of the most expensive things a company can do is become comfortable with something that isn't working, and it happens much more easily than I think people realize. Last week, in episode 144, we talked about looking at the work before deciding to hire another employee.

I challenged you to consider whether you actually needed more people or whether your company had accumulated responsibilities, processes, and unnecessary work that nobody really had stopped to question. And today, I wanna take that conversation just a little bit further. I want you to think about the problem in your business that everybody already knows exists.

You probably don't need much time to come up with one. It's the process employees complain about, the department that consistently falls behind. Maybe it's the information that never seems to get communicated correctly, the customer issue maybe that keeps coming back, the system everyone knows requires a workaround of some sort.

And what's interesting is that these problems rarely begin as something leadership deliberately chooses to tolerate. Usually, somebody makes a reasonable decision in a difficult moment. A system isn't working, so an employee creates a spreadsheet to track what system was missed A department is short-staffed, so another department starts helping with the workload.

A customer needs something outside normal processes, so we make an exception. Those decisions may have been completely appropriate at the time. I've made them myself, actually. The problem comes when the temporary solution stays in place long after the circumstances that created it have changed, and eventually, the workaround becomes so familiar that nobody questions it anymore.

I think that's where business owners have to start paying attention because there's a difference between solving a problem and getting really good at living with it. Let me give you an example. Imagine you have a department that consistently misses a deadline. It's not a huge disaster every time. Maybe the work is a day late, or another department has to follow up, or somebody needs to remind the team that something hasn't been completed.

Eventually, another employee starts checking on the work before it's due. A manager creates a tracking sheet. Someone begins sending reminders. Another person reviews the sheet to make sure that nothing was missed, and after a while, the customer stops noticing the problem because everybody has become so good at catching it.

Leadership looks at the situation and thinks things have improved. But I wanna know whether they actually have because if we're paying several people to monitor, remind, double-check, and compensate for something that should have been completed correctly in the first place, we may have reduced the visible problem without actually fixing what caused it, and I think that distinction is really important here. You can build an entire operation around compensating for something that doesn't work.

The company gets bigger, and more employees become involved, and the process becomes more complicated, and eventually, someone says, that's just how we do it around here." I really don't like that sentence, and not because every process needs to be perfect, that's unrealistic,

Because I wanna know whether the statement, "That's just how we do it," means we've intentionally designed the best process we can or whether it means we've stopped questioning something that never really worked particularly well. There is a concept in organizational research. It's called normalization of deviance.

Sociologist Diane Vaughan examined it in her work surrounding the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Her research explored how departures from established standards can gradually become accepted when repeated exceptions don't immediately result in visible failure.

Obviously, we're talking about very different circumstances and consequences when we're discussing everyday business operations, but the underlying behavior is worth understanding, I think. Something happens that shouldn't happen. It doesn't create an immediate disaster, so people become a little more comfortable with it.

Then it happens again, and eventually the exception doesn't feel unusual anymore. I've seen versions of that in business, and I think you have too. A quality check gets skipped because everybody is busy. Nothing terrible happens, so the next time there's a deadline, somebody skips it again. An employee doesn't complete a required step, but another employee catches the mistake.

A manager doesn't follow up on something because they assume someone else will. And over time, the company starts relying on the fact that someone will probably catch the problem. That's not a system that I wanna build, and I don't think it's a system that you wanna build because eventually somebody doesn't catch it, and then everybody wants to know, how did that mistake happen?

 , Sometimes it happened because we've been allowing the conditions that produced it to exist for a very long time. I also think business owners need to be careful about what their employees learn from the problems that we don't address. We can tell people, "Value communication. Value accountability, efficiency, and even quality."

We can write those things into our core values and talk about them during meetings, but employees are paying attention to what actually happens. If somebody brings you the same concern five times and nothing changes, eventually they're going to stop bringing it to you. That doesn't necessarily mean the problem disappeared.

It may mean that they've decided there's no point in mentioning it anymore, and that's when I get concerned because I would much rather have an employee tell me something uncomfortable about my company than have them quietly work around it for the next three years. I need that information. I can't make a good decision about something I don't know is happening, and I don't know everything that's happening.

It's impossible. My largest brand, I've hired over eight hundred people in nine different countries. It's impossible for me to know everything. But I also have a responsibility to do something useful when people bring me that information. That doesn't mean every suggestion gets implemented. There are plenty of times when an employee sees one part of a situation and leadership has to consider the financial, legal, operational, or even customer implications of changing it.

 Sometimes the answer's no, and that's fine. Explain the decision. If we're testing something, tell people what we're testing. If the problem requires a larger investment, be clear about that. If something isn't going to change, people deserve to understand why. What I don't want is a company where employees are encouraged to speak up, but nobody ever knows what happened to the concerns that they actually raised.

Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety is really relevant here because employees need to feel able to actually raise those concerns and discuss mistakes without unnecessary fear. But I think business owners have to remember that creating an environment where people speak up is only half of the responsibility.

I have heard many leaders say, "Yeah, I have an open door. Come talk to me. My employees can tell me anything." Is that always the case? Those of you that have worked lower level management or entry-level roles, you are shaking your head right now. You're thinking, "Yeah, I know what that means." The other half is making sure that information doesn't disappear into another meeting, and I wanna come back to something I said at the beginning about people looking at successful businesses and saying, " It must be nice," because I think this is one of those things that separates the appearance of business success from the actual responsibility of running a successful company.

There are days when I would love to spend all my time working on just new ideas. I really love to build businesses. I love seeing opportunities. I love creating something that didn't exist before or finding a way to market something that no one else has ever thought of marketing before.

I could spend an entire day thinking about what we might build next. Maybe I could spend weeks, months, probably years, I don't know.

But that isn't the only responsibility I have. I also have to make sure that things we've already built are working, and that part of entrepreneurship isn't always particularly exciting. Nobody is impressed when you spend three hours reviewing why a department keeps missing a deadline. You're probably not going to get invited to speak at a conference because you discovered that two employees were maintaining different versions of the same report.

But those things all matter. Sometimes I'll get to a Wednesday in my schedule and I'm like, "Oh, great, I need to call my attorney because I need to redo this contract," and I'll spend six hours redoing a contract. Or I'll re-record onboarding videos because we need to have better processes. All of these things matter.

And when you are responsible for a company, you don't get to ignore the ordinary work just because you're more excited about the next opportunity. I think that's where some business owners get themselves into trouble. They become so focused on growth that they stop paying attention to the condition of the business that's supposed to support that growth.

And then they wonder why every new customer, new employee, or new location seem to create more problems. Sometimes the problem isn't the growth. .. It's that we are asking a company with unresolved operational issues to handle more volume.

Here's another example  let's say your company has a recurring problem with customer onboarding. Every time a new client signs on, something gets missed. Maybe information isn't entered in correctly. Maybe a department doesn't receive the handoff. Maybe the customer's expectations aren't documented.

Maybe nobody clearly owns the next step. And every time it happens, somebody scrambles to fix it. A manager gets involved, somebody calls the customer, another employee works late, and eventually the problem does get resolved, and then everybody moves on. And a month later it happens again, and leadership says, "Well, this time it was a different employee."

Okay, that may be true, but if the same type of problem keeps happening with different employees, I wanna know what the process is allowing I'm not automatically interested in finding someone to blame. I want to understand why the mistake was possible in the first place. I'm gonna challenge you to think that same way.

What information is required before onboarding begins? Who verifies that it's complete? Does the receiving department know exactly what it should be receiving? What happens when something is missing? Earlier this year, I was really tired of my employees having an excuse for not knowing something about one of our offices in my largest brand.

So I created a process where when a client was going through onboarding, we would have these exams that our team would take. I created these exams based off of the information we received during onboarding. I put them into our online dental school, and our team was required to receive a ninety-six percent or higher in order to pass and be able to begin working on that office.

The first round of people that took the exams, in fact, all of the people that took the exam failed, and then failed again, and then failed again, and they just kept failing. I mean, not even partially getting it, but they weren't looking at the information. They weren't on it.

One question I think leaders should ask more often is, what would we have to change to make this mistake difficult to repeat? I'm gonna say that again. What would we have to change to make this mistake difficult to repeat? Because that's what I was asking when I was having a challenge in our onboarding process.

And believe me, this isn't the only challenge I've ever had in onboarding. We've had many challenges, different ones that had nothing to do with our employees saying they did or didn't know something. There will always be new things that come up that we weren't prepared for, but we have to be ready for.

Because I'll tell you this, telling everyone to pay closer attention may make us feel like we are addressing the problem, but it doesn't necessarily change anything about the process. Of course, employees should pay attention. That's part of doing the job. But when the same problem keeps coming back, I want something more useful than another reminder.

And if you think I don't have time to go look at that, I don't have time to fix that You are part of the problem. There is no other time than right now. I'm gonna challenge you to have the mindset I do. If I see something that's a problem and I think, "I've got way more important things that I need to do right now, and I don't have time for that," I immediately pause on the things that I think are more important, and I evaluate who can take care of those for me.

Because if I can pass the baton and one of my admin or someone on my operations team or in my leadership team can actually handle that for me, I need to pass the baton because I'm the perfect person to fix a standard operating procedure in my own companies. There's no one else more qualified than me.

But everything else, I've hired, enabled, trusted, and groomed the most perfect team I possibly could, and they know how to pick up where I lack. They get it. Now, I also wanna be clear that not every recurring problem is a process problem. Sometimes you have a good process and somebody simply just isn't following it.

Sometimes an employee needs additional training. Sometimes a manager isn't holding people accountable. And sometimes somebody has demonstrated repeatedly that they aren't willing to meet the expectations of the position.  We talked about that during The Human Side of Leadership, my summer series this year.

And I still believe accountability is one of the most important responsibilities a leader has, but I don't think accountability and operational improvement are separate conversations. If the process is bad, we've gotta fix it. If the process is clear and reasonable, but someone refuses to follow it, leadership needs to address that.

The mistake is treating every operational failure as an employee problem or treating every employee performance problem as something that can be solved by redesigning a process. Neither approach works particularly well, and both can become expensive when we refuse to recognize the difference There's another cost to recurring problems that I think gets overlooked, especially in larger organizations, and that's management time.

Think about how often your leadership team discusses the same issue. Maybe it comes up for 10 minutes during a morning meeting, then somebody sends a message asking for an update. Later, a manager calls another manager, someone has to review the work, a customer complains, and now the CEO is involved. None of those individual conversations seem especially significant, but imagine four managers each spending 30 minutes every week dealing with the same recurring problem.

That's two hours of management time a week. And that's before we've counted the employees involved in the actual work or the customers affected. I don't need to turn every minute of your company's existence into a financial calculation, but I do want you to understand that unresolved problems are consuming resources even when they don't have their own line on your financial statements.

And the longer we allow them to continue, the more normal that expense begins to feel. This episode of No Silver Spoons is sponsored by Dentistry Support, and I see this issue in dental operations all the time. A dental practice might consistently struggle with insurance verification. Patients arrive for appointments, and the office discovers information is missing or inaccurate.

Now, the front desk is trying to resolve insurance questions while checking patients in. The treatment coordinator gets interrupted, the schedule is moving, the patient is frustrated, and everybody is trying to figure out what in the world happened.

Eventually, somebody says, "Insurance is always a nightmare." But I don't want to practice accepting that as a normal part of the day. Insurance can absolutely be complicated. There are things outside a practice's control. But verification should still have a defined process, clear ownership, appropriate timing, documentation, and a way to escalate unresolved questions before they become a patient-facing emergency.

The same applies to billing and accounts receivable. If claims consistently age because follow-up isn't happening or information is repeatedly missing, that's something leadership needs to understand and address. Dentistry Support helps dental practices with eligibility verification, billing, and accounts receivable, and phones, and so much more.

So the administrative work is handled through more consistent systems, and the in-office team has greater capacity to focus on your patients. And if you aren't ready to work with us, please use our free training. I really mean that. I don't believe you should have to become my client before I'm willing to help you improve something in your business.

Visit dentristysupport.com/freetraining. Dentistry Support, delivering results and simplifying everything. Now back to the show. There's one more part of this conversation I want to spend some time on because I think it's particularly important for business owners. Sometimes we allow a problem to continue because solving it requires that we make a decision that we don't particularly want to make, and I've had to recognize that in myself.

Maybe I need to replace software we've already spent a tremendous amount of money implementing. Maybe I need to change a process that a manager has defended for years. Maybe I need to acknowledge that something I approved wasn't a good decision. Or maybe fixing the problem is going to create a temporary disruption, and I know the team is already busy.

Those are legitimate considerations, but they don't automatically justify leaving the problem alone. I think we have to be careful about using the fact that a decision is difficult as evidence that timing isn't right. Sometimes the timing genuinely isn't right. Other times we just don't wanna deal with it, and those are different things.

When I catch myself saying, "We'll address that when things slow down," I literally have to ask whether I'm actually expecting things to slow down. Because in a growing company, there's almost always another priority, another customer, deadline, project, issue that needs immediate attention. And if we keep waiting for the perfect time to fix something, we may be waiting for a time that doesn't actually exist, and meanwhile, the company continues paying for the problem.

So here's what I want you to do this week. I want you to ask your leadership team a question, and I would encourage you to let people answer without immediately explaining or defending the situation. What is the problem in our company that everybody has learned to work around?

And I don't want the biggest strategic challenge facing the organization. I want the thing that comes up during an ordinary workweek, the issue employees complain about, the process they warn new hires about, the thing people have stopped reporting because they assume leadership already knows.

Listen to what they tell you Then find out how often it happens. Who is affected? What does it cost the company?

You may discover that the solution is relatively simple. You may also discover something that requires a larger operational change. Either way, I want somebody responsible for moving it toward resolution, and I want a date when leadership will review what changed. Not another conversation that ends with everybody agreeing that communication needs to improve.

I want an actual decision because I don't want you listening to this episode and simply becoming more aware of the problems inside your business. I want one of those problems to stop surviving because you finally decided to address it. And I'll leave you with this. When people say, " It must be nice to have a business.

It must be nice to be so high up in leadership. It must be nice to have that position," I think they're often imagining the freedom, the opportunities, and the successes that come with entrepreneurship, and those things are real, and I am grateful for them. But what makes building a business worthwhile to me isn't pretending the difficult parts don't exist.

It's knowing that the decisions we make can actually change something. We can improve the way people work. We can create better experiences for customers. We can stop wasting resources. We can build companies where employees aren't constantly compensating for problems leadership refuses to address, and we can create something that operates better next year than it does today.

Running a business is hard. It really is. There are challenges that I would have never imagined that I would have to face. When I first set out to start a business "You know what I'd love to do? Work and deal with problems and have challenges. I wanna work through those challenges."

I never thought that. I thought I wanted freedom. I wanted a different life, and I did get that. But make no mistake,  owning a business, being high up in leadership, it has its challenges. It is the hardest thing I have ever had to do

 We're going to create businesses together that operate better, and it doesn't happen because we finally reach some magical stage of success where the problems just happen to disappear. It's going to happen because we keep paying attention to the business we're responsible for. So find the problem everybody has learned to live with and ask yourself why it's still there.

If it's worth fixing, decide what happens next. And next week, I wanna talk about the decisions we keep putting off because we know they're gonna be uncomfortable. Because avoiding a decision doesn't necessarily mean you've avoided the consequence. Usually, it means somebody else is already dealing with them.

I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and this is  📍 No Silver Spoons. I'll catch you on the next episode