Bill Canady outlines four rules for organizational simplification: no surprises, data-driven decisions, staying on pace, and focusing on results. Clear communication is critical because employees without information imagine worst-case scenarios and disengage. Leaders must give staff ownership of the vision and adapt processes as conditions shift.
I think the number one piece is communication. You have to get out there and you have to tell people what's going on. You have to tell them where we are, where we're going, and how we're going to get there. If you don't do that, people will fill it with the worst possible scenarios in their head. We always think of it, and I think I'm as guilty as anyone else is, not from, hey, this is going to be great. It's more like, is this going to cost me my job? Am I going to be doing the same job? I don't have the same skill set for it. I don't want to go learn a new skill set. And it goes on and on and on. What you find though is that people want to be winners. They want to be part of a winning team. They want to be on something bigger than themselves. If you can share that vision, allow them to have ownership in that vision, all of a sudden they feel again, they're back in control. They have an opportunity to participate in the way they want at a level they want. But if you don't give them the information, they for sure are going to make it up into something that's going to be way worse than anything you'd ever thought about. And worse is you're probably going to lose that person, right? They're going to go to where they have clarity. So in the In the darkness, monsters prevail, right? But shine the light of day on it, the people know what's happening and they're going to take everything they've got and give it to the organization because they want to be successful as well and they want to be part of that winning organization. It makes us proud. It makes us really proud to be on a winning team. And if you think about it, we talk about these 4 areas, we call it the 4 Commandments. That is no surprises, data-driven, be on pace, and results matter. As an employee, it's important that you do each and every one of these. We're, we're going to do the best we can. We're going to give the information that we have. We're going to help the employee get what they need to go forward and make great decisions. They've got to meet us at the same way, right? They've got to come forward and, and own that. And it's up to them to really make that a success. Well, we'll ensure they have the tools, but at the end of the day, it means things that we were doing before we probably aren't going to be doing anymore. In some cases, not all. They've got to have that flexible mindset, right? They got to be able to take and have that coming at them and deal with that, understand what their part is and make the changes necessary. How do they decide what changes? It's looking at the data, right? And then once you go in that data and you start understanding it, you're going to find that things change sometimes. Today, uh, it may work— make very sense to do product A, but maybe the competitor changes, or maybe the Manufacturer of the product's not doing it anymore, or maybe the supplier of it's doing something different. As these things change, we have to be flexible enough to deal with it, go back, reevaluate the data again, and make the appropriate decision. I just look back over the last few years. We've gone through things in this country that none of us had ever seen before. We've gone through recessions, we've had pandemics, you name it, it's happened to all of us. We were all in offices, then we all went home, and today we're somewhere in the middle with hybrid. No matter how that happened, as leaders of the organization, it's our job to make sure that we keep taking care of our customers, we look after each other, we take care as best we can, we treat each other with dignity and respect. It's incumbent upon all of us to do that. I think we have the right tools there to do it, but it takes a person, it takes an individual who really wants to be a part of that and is not anchored to the past of what we were. Half the people aren't even in offices anymore, right? Today, a lot of people working out of their bedrooms using Teams or Zoom and things like that. You have to be comfortable being on camera all the time, right? It's just changed. I will assure you what it is today is not what it's going to be tomorrow, and we'll have to flex and go and figure out how to deal with that. But as long as you're using data, as long as you're working together, collaborating, understand what's going on, being communicative across it all, we'll figure it out together. But it takes that person on both sides willing to step up and make it happen.
