Held Hostage?

I was recently talking with the new CEO of a mid-market company and he mentioned that two of his “key” employees, people who had been with the company for years, were trying to hold him “hostage” through veiled threats that they would leave the company if he instituted “too much change.”

Change is hard enough. No CEO needs to feel as though his or her hands are tied by the very people they need to depend on most. So, I offered another perspective: Suppose it’s not only the employees who are holding him hostage, it’s also the lack of work processes.

Most developing companies go through a period in which they are very dependent on key people. It’s usually during their early entrepreneurial years when everybody is managing by the seat of their pants and the people who do the most hands-on “doing” become high level experts at their crafts.

In that whirlwind environment there just isn’t time to step back and codify what works and what doesn’t. If you want to know how to perform a complex task, just ask the technician. He may be the only one who knows, and as long as he holds that distinction he may be invaluable; perhaps even invaluable enough that he can make his boss think twice about upsetting his apple cart.

Consider an analogy to a chef who was terrorizing a restaurant owner; threatening to quit almost everyday. The chef was the only one who knew how to make the special sauce that had been bringing in the customers for years. He was in a strong enough position to be making those threats until one day his boss gathered up all his nerve and asked the chef to write down the recipe for the “sauce supreme.”

That was a critical juncture for the boss and the chef. The chef could have left, but he couldn’t say the boss didn’t have a right to the recipe. He chose to stay, provided the recipe and stopped threatening to leave.

As companies continue to grow and mature those that have strong leadership begin to recognize the necessity of capturing the “how to” of essential tasks. The “how to” can be thought of as a recipe, a specification or a procedural guideline, but in any case it should be designed to allow people who are not experts to learn to perform important tasks. In doing so it should also create a clear shift, from dependency on particular people to an investment in basic processes.

Armed with the recipe the restaurant owner acquired new freedom and flexibility. Once he knew that the recipe worked, he no longer fretted each day; he didn’t have to take his most popular dish off the menu when the chef was on vacation, and he was able to employ and train less expensive cooks, not additional chefs, as his business grew.

Processes don’t solve every problem. There is still plenty of room for art in crafting the ways we can provide more value to customers and clients, just as there is still room for chefs in the restaurant trade.

The new CEO sent me an email the other day. He wanted to know if I had a recipe for writing recipes, excuse me, I mean process guidelines.

Tom Aranow is a former CEO who now consults with CEOs and other executives as a Senior Advisor with Harrington Daniels Advisors, LLC. He may be reached at Tom@hdadvisors.com.