Hands, not systems

You hired because you were drowning. The logic was simple. Too much to do, so bring in someone to do some of it, and get your time back.

Now there are three people, or eight, or fifteen, and you have less time than before. They ask you twelve questions a day. Not because they're bad at their jobs. Because there's nowhere else to look. When they can't reach you, they guess, each in their own way, and the client meets three versions of the same company. Whoever picks it up fastest becomes the one everyone else asks, and now there are two queues.

They work hard, and they care. You spend the day answering, and the evening doing the work you meant to do in the day. And the next hire starts at zero, with the same twelve questions.

Why it happens

There are two things you can hire: hands, or a system. You hired hands, because hands were what you were short of. Someone to do the thing. Then that person needed to know how the thing is done, and the how was never built. So they learn it from you, one question at a time, and it never ends.

Hiring hands without a system doesn't take the weight off. It puts a layer between you and the work, and the layer needs you more than the work ever did. Whatever they work out alone, they work out the hard way, and it leaves when they leave. So the weight moves from desk to desk, and the company never learns a thing.

A team without a system isn't a team. It's you, repeated: a queue at your desk, and another at the desk of whoever learned it from you.

What's underneath

The questions wear you out. They're also the part of the day that tells you who you are here. Every "how do we handle this?" is someone walking to your desk because you're the one who knows. Write the answers down and anyone can know. Then a quieter question arrives: in a company full of people doing the work, what are you for? So on the rare day nobody asks you anything, you don't feel free. You feel left out.

And your people learn the other half. With nothing written, every call they make alone is a call they'll answer for if it goes wrong. Asking hands the risk back to you. So they ask, you answer, and each of you gets something from the queue: you feel needed, they feel safe. Only the company loses, because it learns nothing from either of you.

How it's solved

Hire people into a company without systems and every how lives in someone's head. Yours first, then the head of whoever has been there longest. Which client comes first, what was promised, what to do when an order goes wrong: each person answers it their own way, or waits for the one who knows. Not because they're careless. Because nothing was ever built to answer. So the person you hired stands still until someone replies, the questions follow you to the car park, and the next hire starts from the first question again.

Imagine Disney opening a new park and hiring the best people it can find, with nothing written down. Every ride would run a different way, every guest would get a different park, and the best people would spend their days asking each other. Hire twice as many and there would be twice the questions. Systems exist so the answers belong to the company, not to one head: the how written down and trained, a method for the calls that come up, one place to look so nobody has to ask twice. How you win clients, how you serve them, how you keep them growing with you, how the whole company runs day to day. And the people you hire into that don't just follow the how. They carry the standard and think for themselves, so they improve it, and it rises with every person you add.

The answers stop living in anyone's head, yours included. Choose the who, a person or technology, and decide which way the company heads.