In this episode of freedom in five minutes, we talk about “Speaking to Everyone” when it comes to your system and how essential it is to avoid being the bottleneck of your own business.
Overview & Episode Content
- Being the Bottleneck of Your Own Business
- Be Generic and Specific
Being the Bottleneck of Your Own Business
This happens a lot with people, especially when they’re training or creating things for other people. When you are building systems, you should not be talking to an individual; you should be talking to everybody because you don’t know if that person’s going to be there in the future and don’t know what situations are going to change. There are always unforeseen circumstances that might come to your employees and your business.
This is one of the big pitfalls of a lot of people who create systems or try to develop systems is that they are speaking to one person, and they are assuming many things based around speaking to that one person. It is like personalizing the system to that one specific individual.
You must create an instruction or a system where it should be understood by people in general, not just the person you are speaking to. And so why is this important? It’s important because you are starting to create a flexible system for your employees and your business—a system in which everybody can grab it and understand it.
Be Generic And Specific
When creating a system, you must picture it like a computer program with many users, like Google. They know that millions of people want to create accounts, so they have a whole system that allows millions of people to create accounts by themselves. So an individual can create a system based on a generic instruction. The same goes for systems; you have to set things up in a generic but specific way basically. Generic, but specific, generic in the sense that it’s a form, and this is where the forms are but specific as this is what you do with that form for the given circumstances.
For example, when you instructed an employee to send an email to the HR department after completing a task. You will not say, “Send an email to this person.”, because you don’t know if that person will always be there. You will tell your employee to send an email to the HR department to make it generic and specific at the same time. Because the HR department will always be there, but the person in charge of the department might be gone for some reason.
Conclusion
Remember that the only person irreplaceable to your business is you. And so, you must avoid being the bottleneck of your business by creating a generic system for the people around you. Your system must be in layman’s terms so that it can be easily understood by your employees. If you do that, your business will flow like a stream.