The Most Expensive Problem in Your Organization That No One Owns
Everybody, welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies to help you build a better workplace. We're back. It's a new year. We're excited to to dig into another topic. Before we get too far, let's do introductions quick.
Mitch:If you haven't met me yet, my name is Mitch. I help with some of our strategy and marketing and project technical leadership on occasion. So good to meet you.
Mike:My name is Mike and I lead our apps and automation practice here at Bold Digital.
Matt:And I'm Matt and I lead our communication collaboration practice here at Bold Digital.
Mitch:He's also our brain trust.
Matt:So they say. And I'm gonna be doing a little bit of the kind of emceeing for this podcast. This podcast is gonna be based on a topic that Mitch did in in a previous video that, you know, we both Mitch and I in particular have talked a bit about and feel pretty strongly that we've seen across organizations. And that's the glue, the hidden thing that sticks organizations together and supports organizations. And, again, if you wanna see what Mitch kind of talked about in a kind of formal thing, he's got some props here, etcetera.
Matt:You can see the full production of it in his video. We're gonna talk a little bit more freeform and a little bit more specific, quite frankly, and and a little bit more storytelling in this format. And let's start by just why the word glue? Like, what what are you trying to evoke when you're when with that imagery that you're you're using?
Mitch:Yeah. Real I have one quick thought. Just on your setup. We like Matt said, there's a YouTube video about this that boils it down into like ten minutes. So if you're like, give me the ten minute version, go look at that.
Mitch:This is the forty forty minute version. The YouTube video was one of our worst performing videos of all time. But we had a lot of people leaving comments like, this is some of the most helpful content.
Matt:I don't think we had a single negative comment or a comment that wasn't, this is amazing, I love this concept at all. Like, I think every comment by far was the best response and reaction, but it's gotten not great.
Mitch:Yeah. It's like Very
Matt:strange.
Mitch:Not a huge hit. Was for the YouTube audience, maybe podcast audience will will be a little different. So we would love your feedback if you have some. So the concept of glue, when I think about it, it's it's something that you don't really see. It's just something that is part of a structure oftentimes that holds it together, makes it solid, and it's it's not obvious what someone used to glue it together.
Mitch:It's it's just something is stuck together and and you're not exactly sure why.
Matt:What are the things that get stuck together? Like, can you give a couple examples of like, are you talking about people? Like, oh, we we get stuck together?
Mitch:Don't The wood shelf here.
Matt:Like, maybe
Mitch:it has glue in it. I don't know what glue, but it makes it stronger. I know it does. It would be a lot weaker without glue. It's more it's actually stronger than just screws, basically.
Mitch:You know, like
Matt:But I mean, like, what areas of business? What what what are we what are we talking about that's fitting in between?
Mitch:So most of the time it's silos, it's it's departments, it's it's the areas of your business that have a structure around them to produce something for a certain amount of money and are managed. Okay. Where they are individual parts of the business, but they need to work together.
Matt:So you're talking like finance, they have their own internal processes, they do accounting, they've got all their month end things, etcetera. Mhmm. But then they also have to interact and support with other areas like maybe in a consulting business, the consultants or or maybe marketing or or different areas and there's these interfaces between the two. Mhmm. And you're talking about how to glue those two things.
Matt:How do we stick those together so they work well, so they're they're strongly bonded together, not two silos that kind of work independently of each other and they're like.
Mitch:Yeah. May maybe I'll I'll give some of the illustration from the video that that helped to me explain it. It was two boxes set up where we had these pieces of wood that were labeled different departments, and each one of those departments was stretching from their current state over to their goals. And they could only reach so far by themselves. And naturally, over time, a business's goals will start to expand and they want more and they want to change things.
Mitch:And it's just like a natural part of life that the goals will grow. But an individual department only has so far it can expand to meet those goals in its own silo. And so the the moment of the video was when you stretch out the goals, the departments fall down and they can't reach their goals on their own. So the the glue was an illustration of if I am able to glue these departments together, so visual aid for those of you watching on video, they can reach farther than one individual department on its own.
Matt:So another way to say it might be that when finance supports human resources, both finances and human resources can do more together. They can move further.
Mike:Yeah.
Matt:Cool. What is the glue? Yeah. Like, obviously, people aren't gonna break out crazy glue and start sticking people together and like, hey, let's high five Mike and we'll stick each other together. That's not that's not what we mean.
Matt:Right?
Mitch:I don't think so. No. I bucket them. It's not a new concept. It's the things that we've talked about before, but I think it's an interesting way to think about them.
Mitch:The first one is communications. So how are all these departments talking to each other on the day to day? Closely related with collaboration, which is how are they working together, how are they teaming up on some some goal, some some outcome that they want to produce and producing that together. And then business process, which is how are all of the pieces feeding from one to the next in a streamlined way that reduce inefficiency as much as possible and standardize the way of working so that things are dependable and repeatable.
Matt:Sweet. So these are like the tools that you can use that are effectively the glue that starts to stick things together.
Mitch:Yeah. And we have often we have a whole other podcast episode about why communication is the best place to start because it's the lowest hanging fruit. It's easiest to start talking with people more. And be having better communication rather than saying, I want to improve my business process and streamline my whole thing even though my people can't talk and they can't collaborate with each other.
Matt:So let's talk about that with Mike a little bit. Like, when you think about communications, because you're in the business process space most of the time. The communication space, if I were to use a graphic imagery in your mind, is like, you're kinda like low strength glue. Right? Like, you're making people a little more sticky, a little bit more information.
Matt:I would say that on the business process side, that's making you're tightly coupled with, you know, if you're using business process and automation pieces to kind of transfer information and build that stickiness, that's way more rigid. What's your thoughts about that?
Mike:Well, think the analogy I would offer would be something like the flexibility of the glue, right? Different adhesives have different flexibility. Once you get into the business process side of things, you're building something that's more rigid but also more brittle, right? So it can break and break hard and so that's kind of a good way to think about it. Whereas if you're building that integration between the parts at the communication level, like that flexes a lot easier.
Mike:And so that is the right place to start because you can make adjustments pretty easily. Once you get into business process, need to recognize that we're investing, we're gonna spend more time, more effort to build this thing. And so we wanna do it right so that it doesn't break.
Matt:Got it. Got it. So it's not just that every glue is is useful for every problem or every situation. You wanna choose the right glue for the right problem. And in the case of some things, you need it to be flexible and really be, you know, people focused communication.
Matt:But if you're like, we're doing a thousand invoices a month and I really wanna make that seamless to interact with other teams, you know, business process is probably more in line with what you're wanting to do.
Mitch:I I think it's fun to extend the metaphor a little bit like you're doing where, in my illustration, they're all the same glue. They're all
Matt:Yep.
Mitch:They're all unique, important things that you should focus on in your business. But it would be fun to think about communication as a flexible silicone or something and business process be like construction adhesive.
Mike:Well, think this connects to our our three p's too Yeah. As well. Right? Because there's different levels that a business will take something to. Right?
Mike:Be it people, process what was the third one?
Matt:People, process and projects,
Mike:Projects, I yeah. But it's it's similar to that in the in that you can choose like, we could implement something like you said with a business process, like connect those systems together and make it hard, and it would work. But you might also choose to invest less and just do it with communication. Yeah. Right?
Mike:Yep.
Matt:That could be a starting point and then you could finish with the with the other. It's really interesting that I I agree the metaphor is is kind of an interesting one. Let's move on. We talked about what the glue is and and I think we've done a pretty good job of that. Let's talk about why it gets overlooked.
Matt:Right? Like, this is something that happens in every business for sure. But how it happens is probably less than ideal as I think where you were going with that. But what what can you talk about about the fact that this is overlooked?
Mitch:Well, I think it's interesting to look at these these glue bottles and think about very rarely would I see a business have this sort of effort carved out where it's labeled as this and it has budget allocated to it and it has a person assigned to own it. Granted at bigger companies, it's more readily gonna happen. You're having people think about strategic initiatives and think about these things, But at the smaller size, it's super rare. Everyone is focused on making their project management department work really well, their human resources department really well. And each one of those departments has a leader, a budget assigned, and a goal.
Mitch:And so this in between world that we're trying to glue together usually doesn't have someone owning it. It's just something that people learn by osmosis, and it can feel a little unaimed.
Mike:Or take for granted for that matter. Right? Yeah. If you're thinking about communication, it's like, what do you mean? I have email.
Mike:I know how to use Teams. Right. Right? There's no strategic
Matt:Or or a limitation from the point of view of each one as its own little mini business. Right? Do we do in finance? We do communication really, really well. We have our own little thing that we do and we send it out to people, etcetera.
Matt:Right? But everybody else does it differently. And so that creates confusion. Right? You want to allow, again, flexibility.
Matt:We were talking about it before. You know, not every glue between every group needs to be the same, but it would be really beneficial. You can see improvement and benefits if you have a little, just a little bit of strategic thinking about using compatible glues between each. Right? Like, for example, having a communication that is a platform or strategy that is across the organization can help tremendously.
Matt:Now when people are working with other people, they know where it is. Right? But to your point, people aren't thinking about it at that level. They're thinking about, I'm in finance, I get complaints all the time that somebody doesn't have this piece of data, I'm gonna solve that problem. I need to send this report.
Matt:I'm gonna schedule an email that sends this report to this distribution group once a week. Yep. I mean, yes. Does that solve their problem? Yes.
Matt:Does that align with everyone else's email that goes out once a week that is for whatever other report that they're doing? Right. Probably not. Could we do something better? Is there value in doing it better?
Matt:Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But right now, what you're calling out is people look at this individually. Like, they don't look at it as a something that is across all of them. Mhmm. Right?
Mitch:Yeah. And it, like I said, at a small medium sized business, that responsibility usually falls to COO or above. Like that's naturally where they fit, but that it's easy to get spread thin.
Matt:Or worst case, it gets pushed down to like HR.
Mitch:Yeah. IT. These Distributed. Support Not well.
Matt:Yeah. These support functions and their expectation is, well, communications is an HR problem. So HR is gonna fix that. Right? Mhmm.
Matt:Or, you know, this reporting thing like I was just mentioning, that's an IT thing. Like the IT teams. But it's really like, this is important for your business. This is important to to make your business whole, to make it a cohesive thing. And so you really should think about it, which I think you talk a little bit about, like, let's say you wanted to fix it.
Matt:What should the ideal thing look like?
Mitch:Mhmm. Well, I think I'm reading through my blog and one of the concepts is when there is that problem, you can either fix it acutely, which is what you're just talking about, or you can abstract one layer and tackle the bigger problem. And so maybe it's a little bit more strategic. But when you go one step further and look at it from the organization perspective, it can really show what what the real problem is. So when when they're thinking about solving it, that was your question.
Mitch:Right? Like, do they approach this?
Matt:Yeah.
Mitch:Putting someone in charge of the thing? Who who is Maybe someone who's naturally inclined to want to experiment and try things, who's good with people, who want Well, no. One step before that is budget for something. Like, these things are not free. Even if you're spending only your own people's time, it's costing something.
Mitch:And so at a minimum, labeling this as a priority, something that needs to have some attention and allocating some sort of budget to it, it's a novel concept, but it's a good first step.
Mike:That's probably one of the hardest steps, by the way. Because how does someone assign value to something that's in the in the in between, you know?
Matt:Which you don't have to be super rigid about that. You could say, hey, I want you to focus 25% of your your your time for a person or a team on this problem for the next month and see where you get. Right? You don't have to approach it from a, you know, we're gonna spend think it's gonna cost $200,000 or $50,000 to do this thing, and then just try to go get it happen all the time. Many times these things happen, like you were saying, they're not super acute.
Matt:They're like, you see it, you feel it. Especially as a leader, you'll start to feel that there's a little bit of friction going on, a little bit of of disconnectedness going on. And in those worlds, maybe you don't wanna, like, let's go create a big project to try to solve this or figure it all out. Instead, maybe you just wanna start directing people towards that and put it, like you said, putting someone in charge or a group in charge and saying, hey, you know, I feel like these two things aren't connected. They're not working well together.
Matt:Like, can you look at that? Can you come back with a proposal of what we what should we be doing there? Right.
Mitch:Talking about feeling the issue, I think there's also another line of thinking where people maybe misattribute problems to something that really might be one of these things. So I had a couple examples. One is we're missing deadlines. Right? Clearly, that's project management's problem.
Mitch:They should have been on top of it and we should have hit that deadline. Or
Matt:we just need more people.
Mitch:Yeah. But really, what it is is it's a process problem. Your people are scrambling every time something gets sent in, and it's hard to assign it to somebody. And and it requires a bunch of extra work, and then somebody takes it, but it's unclear of when they like, they have the project manager assign it to them and they can get it done. But then on the other end, it's a little bit wishy washy again.
Mitch:Like, I'm talking in vague terms, but I think the the concept is is that there are steps that things should go through that when there's when there's vagueness, you might miss deadlines. And don't just look at that as a project management thing. Look at it as maybe if we have a repeatable process that needs to happen more than once, we should refine that process.
Matt:Yes. Well, a lot of organizations, especially like project deadlines being moved, is you could say, you could look at that and ask the project manager what's the problem. And if you only have one project that's doing that, that's probably an okay thing to do. If, let's say, 30% of your projects are all missing their deadline, right? You should ask yourself why.
Matt:And you're not asking every one of those project managers necessarily. You're saying, what's the underlying cause? Like what's really going on? Where do we have this disconnect that's creating, you know, is it a disconnect from sales into the project delivery team? Is it a disconnect between the vendor and what the contracting was, you know, depending on your situation, like you're saying, we're trying to be vague.
Matt:We're not trying to be super specific. But the the key is that's a symptom, and you should really understand the why behind that. That is more than just and let the project managers look at it more than just within the confines of their projects.
Mitch:Mhmm.
Matt:You know, it could be a finance problem. It could be, you know, or be related to a finance problem is the best way to say it. Because oftentimes, these things are all related.
Mitch:Yeah. It reminds me of our delivery lead position. At its core, they're a project manager. Right? They take a project from start to finish and have some responsibility in that.
Mitch:But we label it something different so that there's an implication of there is responsibility greater than the project that that person should feed back into to improve the process over time. Calling it something different is like one method. This is the one that we've chosen. It can sometimes add confusion because I've had people who are good at filling up box trucks apply to delivery lead positions instead of project managers. But it's nice that we can at least label it as something that is different than just do this thing.
Matt:Yep. Okay. So, I think we've talked through what we mean. We've talked about why it gets overlooked and why it's not always, you know, something that people immediately are like, oh yeah, this is an area that I need to focus on. What can people expect to get if they try to address this, try to focus on this?
Matt:Like, what's the outcome? How should they feel? What should they look forward to?
Mitch:Yeah. Well, it's a little bit blue ocean is the term, right? Like, it's a little bit hard to articulate, but when you feel it, it feels really good. It's similar to the concept of like you teach the it's an individual skill that gets felt at an organizational level.
Matt:It's in
Mitch:line with all those things where you will start to look back and wonder how the heck did we do it that way before. This is way better. So when you focus on communication and suddenly you're having less back channel conversations with people and it's out in the open and everyone is aware of what's going on and there's no rumor mill because there's just clear transparent communication and makes everything else better. It trickles down to the way people are working, the way they feel about their jobs, similar with collaboration. If when you are thinking about working with somebody and you're anticipating it feeling like a pain, you might hesitate and not want to do it as opposed to if it's easy to collaborate, we just open the same loop page and we can co collaborate on things, as an example.
Mitch:It's way easier to approach and easier for people to be willing to do those things. And then business processes, when you can drop something in one side of a machine and it pops out the other side exactly how you expect, like there's something really rewarding in that because you feel fulfilled, you feel validated that all the pieces that you're weaving together are producing something.
Matt:So Mike, can you give us some examples of things you can think of in your recent memory about when we have had an impact with a customer, some of the feedback that you've received. Much to the same, like what should they look forward to? How should they feel? Like, I know you've been involved in a number of different projects that have produced dividends, like transformed organizations and how they work. Again, primarily on that business process side, but across the board, can you speak at all to like the the feeling and the reaction and and what they have felt?
Mike:Well, I think it's a lot of relief that something actually can work and save them from the meaningless, mindless busy work. Right? Because that's a lot of what we try to erase
Matt:Mhmm.
Mike:With business process or apps for that matter. And so taking systems that are based on a lot of regulation where we have to track a lot of data and like pay attention to all the, you know, little details and making that, as Mitch said, like a simple input and an output that comes out the other side so that an end user is not pressing all the buttons and entering all of the things and shuffling all of the paper. It's incredibly freeing for those people that have been doing that because then they're freed up to go do other things.
Matt:Has that helped, Primary, helped them in scaling their business or scaling the the things that they're doing? Or has it also helped in like making the business, kind of become under control? Maybe it was getting a little unwieldy and growing beyond what they could manage and now it's just okay, cool. We can we can kind of own this.
Mike:Well, I think both things are a scale question. Like both Like even though you said two different things, think it's really all about scale and what you can do once you can scale. Because sure, I can serve more customers, right, that is scale. I can serve more customers with less people maybe, right? And that that is part of scale.
Mike:But the other part of scale is, well, I can serve more customers and now my people don't have to do the things they were doing. So now they're maybe doing data analysis and helping to, you know, predict
Matt:Value add things.
Mike:Value add things.
Matt:They couldn't do before.
Mike:Right. Add add more value for the customers or value for the organization itself to find things that we just didn't know before Yeah. Because we were doing it in either, you know, on paper or in Excel or all separately, right, not together, like whatever that Shared situation is. Or the shared Yeah. Shared mailbox.
Matt:Yeah. I I have similar feedback on on some of the projects I've worked with where, you know, it's primarily more communication and and collaboration side, but, you know, they feel like they can do more. They feel like things that were frustrating them in the past where they would have to send multiple emails and try to figure it out. It's just, you know, they can they can just they can get more done. They feel more in control.
Matt:They feel more empowered and knowledgeable about whatever the whatever's going on in the business. It's it's just an interesting just much like what you said, Mitch, it's hard to say, you know, exactly what somebody's gonna get. And a lot of it is feelings or perspective. But there's also real business value. Right?
Mitch:It's something that's haunted us from a marketing perspective
Matt:Yeah. Hard in some to come back and say, hey, do this project and you'll, you know, double your your
Mitch:20%.
Matt:Yeah. 20% Improvement. Improvement and whatever that is. It's really really hard to do. Especially because it takes it can take a lot.
Matt:This the other thing I would point out about this is this is not something that's going to have to get fixed overnight. This is a mentality. This is a way of thinking. This is a management approach, a business approach. It's not a, we're going do a project and it's going solve all these problems.
Matt:And you don't want that because you want your business to be flexible you want it to, as it grows, still be able to fill in those gaps. So, I think that's pretty much it. I think we've gone through everything. Is there anything I missed, Mitch, on this that we want to get through?
Mitch:I don't think so. I think I do have some other recommendations in the blog as far as like how to build this culture and set some goals for yourself. Like Matt said, it's a long game. And again, it's hard to articulate because we are we live in those world because we we solve this and apply it to our own business. And so we kind of live it and don't know any other reality really except for when we talk to customers.
Mitch:But I know I'm confident I would never want to go back to the way things maybe were at one point in time. Yeah. So hopefully, illustration is helpful to say, if you want your organization to reach big goals, you need to be able to have some glue between your different silos, departments that tie them together, help them work together well. Otherwise, you're gonna be trying to cross a canyon with a yardstick. Yep.
Mitch:Yeah. I think that's all we got for today. You'll hear it in a second for our outro, but I really would love to hear feedback on this kind of topic. Yeah. See if it's valuable.
Mitch:It's bulb.digital/feedback. It's you to a a little form that you could fill out. We read them all and would love to hear your thoughts. So please do that. Otherwise Yeah.
Matt:I think we're good.
Mike:Thanks, Chris.
Matt:Thanks, everybody.
Mitch:Thanks. Hey. Thanks for tuning in to Make Others Successful. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you. There's a couple ways you can do that.
Mitch:One, we'd love for you to rate our show on your favorite podcasting app. And then if you have feedback or topic ideas or suggestions for future episodes, head over to bulb.digital/feedback and let us know. Your input is super valuable and we'd love to hear from you. Don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with others who care about building a better workplace. Until next time, keep making others successful.
Mitch:I'll see you.
