John Jonas shows how most work failures come from unclear instructions, not incompetence. He recalls his son organizing toilet paper in a way that blocked towels, then parallels this to remote teams following literal but incomplete guidance. Before blaming workers, review your own instructions and systems.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This episode 363 maybe you didn't give great instructions. So giving instructions is a significant part of hiring someone in the Philippines. It's something that I still do. I mean I hired my first person in 2005 and I am still giving instructions. Obviously I give different instructions now than I did then. I give what's much less instructions now. The people that work for me often are giving instructions to other people now. They are developing systems for us rather than me developing systems all the time. So here's an example of giving instructions I recently had. I recently bought some bamboo toilet paper. I did this to try and do something good for the environment. Seeing bamboo grows really fast and it's easier to reproduce than normal trees. So I tried buying bamboo toilet paper and it showed up all in individually wrapped packages which was super weird, but at least it's wrapped in recyclable things rather than plastic. So I then assigned my 8 year old son to go throughout the house and distribute into the bathroom and he actually did a pretty good job of distributing them in the bathrooms. He. He didn't exactly put them where I envisioned, but he stacked them on top of the tops of the toilet, the backs of the toilet, and he stacked them like in a pyramid, like 4 wide on the bottom and then 3 and then 2 and then 1. So there's 10 toilet paper rolls on the back of every toilet in our house which was, you know, okay, good job dude. But then the extra rolls he took and he didn't know what to do with them so he found a closet and he stacked them inside the closet. Now he did a really good job of stacking them in the closet. He organized them really well. And keep in mind this is my eight year old son. He stacked him inside the closet, but he completely filled the closet which is where towels and sheets go. And he left no place for the towels or sheets that are currently being washed. He just took the entire space and said I'm done. Which really good job. Okay, great. However, it's not what I envisioned and I see this same kind of thing all the time in the Philippines. Sometimes it's with my team, sometimes it's with your people. So you gave some instructions, you asked them to do something, you have something in mind, they go and do it and it's completely different than what you have in mind. Or maybe it's similar, but it's not exactly what you were thinking. And I give this example of my son doing it because I gave him some instructions, but his interpretation of those instructions was different than what I was thinking. And my instructions weren't as complete or as obvious as I thought they were. And I see that same thing with ofs, where you think your instructions are really great, and then it turns out that they're not following instructions, they're not doing it right. And really, most of the time, it's because your instructions aren't as good as you think they are. Now, I've had some times over the years where I have given instructions and things got done, like, completely, completely wrong. And I thought, what in the world? So I asked them to redo it, and they did it completely wrong again. And I thought, how is this possible? And I went back and watched the instruction video that I had created and realized, oh, my gosh, this is horrendous. My instructions are not even close to being complete. They do not explain what I thought they explained. My instructions are terrible. No wonder stuff is getting done wrong. And it's not just me doing this. I see this from you, too. So I remember one time I got an email from someone that said, I can't believe these people. They are so dumb. I gave them such good instructions and they can't follow it. And it's so easy and obvious what to do. Look. And they sent me their instructions, and I looked at it, and instantly I had no clue what was going on. I tried to follow the instructions a little bit more and gave up. And I ended up emailing them back and saying, hey, look, I have no idea what you're asking me to do in these instructions. I cannot decipher anything in them. And you're very angry at the people you've hired saying, they're super dumb. So when you see something go wrong with your team, it's not that they're purposefully trying to do it wrong. It's not that they're purposefully ignoring instructions. At least I've never seen that situation. It certainly could be the case. Usually it's that, well, the instructions aren't as clear as you think they are, and there are things being left out. And the culture of the Philippines says they don't want to disappoint you and they don't want to do it wrong. And so they're willing to try, but only to a certain point. And that point is usually up until when they fear they're not going to do it right. And if the instructions aren't clear, well, that point can happen really early on. And so you may feel like they're not doing anything or they're just taking super long to get things done or that what they're doing is completely wrong and it doesn't make any sense and they're dumb, which is, you know, probably not the case. So now let me give you one last example that happened this morning to me. So we have somebody that their job is interacting with employers and some workers and trying to find problems for us. We realized we don't really see any problems being found here. Is this person just really bad at this? And it's, it's something that we implemented a number of years ago. And then when I implement something, I typically just leave it alone and let it go. And, and we realized, as my partner Dan and I talked about it, that we're pretty confident this is really not working at all. And our first thought was, are they really just bad at their job? But that's not the email that was sent. And this is where I have found a lot of success with this over the years and what I would encourage you with. So the email that was sent was, hey, how often are you finding problems? And then what are you doing with them? I believe that we have kind of handicapped you in what you're doing. Like we haven't given you correct instructions or the instructions we've given you are years old now and aren't relevant. And we haven't really given you the freedom to, to do what should be done. So let me know what you think. And the reason for that was because I know this person is intelligent and I actually recently just saw a picture of them and that really seeing a picture of the people that you work with might really give you a different view on who they are and what they can do. Just the picture tells me they're intelligent, they are hard working, they care, they. And my initial reaction was none of those things. So when something doesn't go right, when something doesn't get done right, I would encourage you to approach it with the. Approach it from the perspective of what have I done wrong to make this not get done right? And if you'll do that, chances are really high that you'll figure out what the problem was and you'll see, oh, this person is intelligent, they are trying, they do want to make this work. I probably haven't given them what they need to get it done. And you'll find you'll create a really loyal, amazing rock star worker for yourself for a long time.
