“Dave”—a client for more than two years now—called to tell me the latest in his long list of success stories since he began systemizing his company.
“Hey, Philip. I just implemented the Service Control Checklist with all my lead techs, and one of them, whom I had planned to let go, has become Leonard the Lion-Hearted! You got a minute? Let me tell you about Leonard BEFORE systems,” Dave said, and then continued with some excitement.
“Leonard was a timid guy and not confident in doing his job. He was constantly calling the office asking for direction, and it seemed he wanted everyone else to make the decisions for every aspect of a job before he’d move ahead. It was very frustrating to everyone in the office. But, I kept him around because what I liked about Leonard was the fact that he tried so hard, and he had a heart for doing a good job. He just had no self-confidence.
“The very first time I introduced Leonard to the system—a Control Checklist and other systems that would give him the information to do his job without constant supervision—his eyes lit up and he said he couldn’t wait to try it out in the field.
“That afternoon, he came straight to my office and showed me his signed checklist with other documentation the checklist referenced. He had checked off every prompt, dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’ on that checklist.
“We followed up on the job he had done, and it was one of the best and most complete jobs we had done for quite sometime. The best thing was, Leonard hadn’t felt the need to call the office every few minutes, as he had before.
“This went on day after day with amazing results, and when Leonard did call the office for direction and decisions, it was a simple matter to guide him and then update his checklist or other systems. He was now helping us to IMPROVE our systems, one prompt at a time.”
My client, Dave, calls MY office with some regularity now—often to tell me another success story, like the one above.
Now, I don’t want you to think the checklist mentioned in Dave’s story is just a simple one-page document that was thrown together for Leonard in a few minutes. I happen to know a lot about that checklist because I helped Dave develop it. It is about seven pages long, with hundreds of prompts for what TO do and NOT to do, in various situations—you know, those umpteen variables that some think are impossible to systemize so they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over! This particular checklist took the owner and me around 100 hours to develop.
You’re probably saying, “Are you kidding me? I don’t have that much time to give to developing a checklist!”
Hear this—that one, detailed checklist was not created to heap work on poor old Leonard; it was to organize the steps in the duties he was already trying to perform each day, that had often confused him—and that had caused him to take up other peoples’ time to help or explain over and over. Using the checklist we took the time to develop, Leonard now knows EXACTLY what steps to take—and he never has to worry about forgetting anything.
How many hours do you think is spent handling the chaos in your company or answering the same questions ad nauseum? I would venture to guess someone could build several 100-hour systems in that time
A checklist that empowers an employee to work more efficiently may take many hours to build, but when it’s done, it may turn a “lamb” into a lion—a timid, not-so-confident employee into one of your best!
Have I mentioned? Great system work!
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