Martial Arts Professional Magazine

[Editor’s note: Lee Milteer, NAPMA success coach for its Inner Circle and Peak Performers groups, recently interviewed Dan Kennedy. They discussed a number of concepts in one of Mr. Kennedy’s book, The No BS Ruthless Management of People and Profits, the Ultimate No-holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Guide to Getting Really Rich. This excerpt explains the three roles of an employer.]

Lee: Dan, in the book, you use a triangle to represent an employer’s three roles in his or her relationship with employees. One side is leadership, another is management and the third, or bottom side of the triangle, is supervision. An employer must play all those roles, but the supervisor role is the cop role, which is difficult.

Dan: The leadership role is the fun role, and it is the role that much is made of in management books, with the three-day executive retreat to write the mission statement for the year. The management role is not that ugly. That’s just the translation of where a business is trying to go with a plan; but the supervision/enforcement role has the most effect on profitability. It’s the role no business owner likes, and it’s the role that makes the worst of your employees quit, which, ironically, business owners don’t like because of the pain and trouble of replacing the worst employees.

Truth be told, too many employers would rather keep someone who they know is screwing up than face the trouble of replacing him or her. It’s the cop role where everything happens because, otherwise, what you have is a giant illusion. For example, you have a particular way that you want customers greeted, when they call on the phone or walk in the door.

You’ve taken time to develop that greeting process, so it’s exactly the way you want it to be. For example, in the retail environment, it has been proven that you significantly increase sales when you greet a customer with, “Hi, what brought you to the store today?” instead of, “Hi, may I help you?” You force a different kind of answer because the customer’s response to “How may I help you?” is “Not right now, I’m just looking.”

The incorrect question doesn’t lead to a sales dialogue, but the correct greeting question does. It’s great that you, as a business owner, know the correct question and instruct your employees to use it, but if you aren’t constantly policing them, then it is a giant illusion. I can assure you that your employees will not do it, unless they are compelled to do it. If they are on commission, then you might think they would do it because you have empirically proven to them that it makes them more money.

It doesn’t make any difference. As soon as your back is turned, they will revert to old habits. Some will not have bought into the psychology of what you want done. Some resist purely because they resent your instructions, for whatever reason. There is no compliance without enforcement. Now, you will with a small percentage of people, but trying to staff only with that small percentage of people is a hopeless endeavor.

Any attempts to do that never works because as soon as you create a population of employees, it divides itself into one percent, fifty percent and eighty percent. Trying to staff your business with one-percenters is futile because, once ten one-percenters are together for thirty days, they divide themselves again, and only one remains, if that.

When you devise processes or procedures that are beneficial to the profitability of your business, but will be implemented by a human, an employee, if there’s no monitoring, surveillance, supervision, enforcement or consequence for compliance or non-compliance, then you will not be able to keep that procedure or practice in place.

Now, your employees may comply when you’re looking, maybe, but I can guarantee you they won’t do it when you’re not looking, and you can prove it with mystery shopping.

Several years ago, when I still had my mixed-breed of dog coaching groups, everyone in the group insisted that this non-compliance of procedures was not occurring in their offices on the phones. I had everyone call each other’s offices and conduct mystery shops of each other’s businesses. We couldn’t find a winner.

If you don’t give the supervision side of this triangle equal priority with the other two, and, in truth, greater priority because it really controls the value of the other two, then you’re dreaming. Whatever you think is happening, isn’t, and whatever you hope isn’t happening may very well be happening to a great degree, but it is certainly not your vision of your business implemented on the ground by your employees.