Camille: So today we are talking about a high performance business. And we're gonna talk about two topics at once because we can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Camille: One of my pet peeves is that black and white are either or, like it's this or it's that. I'm like, What if it's a little of above? So I like when we merge these concepts together. While we might want to make things more like black and white that's not really how the world works.
Camille: So we're gonna honor that and talk about these two ideas. One is this idea of a high performance business, and I'm gonna introduce the framework that I use when I work with companies on how do they level up and turn their business into a more high performance business.
Camille: We're actually gonna start by talking about the role of reflection in creating a high performance business because that's a theme that's been echoing in our conversations.
Camille: I think you brought it up, you're like, reflection seems to keep coming up. When you said it, I realized that's so true. It is this fundamental component of all the work that has to happen. And so I really wanna talk about that in relation to this high performance business framework.
Camille: So this is really gonna be part one of like a four part series in the podcast. We're gonna introduce the high performance business framework, and then in the following episodes, we're gonna go into each one of those components. There's three components to it, and we're gonna go into them in more detail and just kind of like pick 'em apart and talk about what's in there.
Camille: That is a z plan for today. Sounds great. Ready? I like it.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille: First always like to start with, what the heck are we talking about? Let's define this puppy. So what is a high performing business one might ask? Well, the obvious answer is of course, it's consistently meeting your financial needs or hitting its financial targets.
Camille: Cause as we've said before, Business pretty much exists to do one thing, which is make money. Like that's its true job.
Camille: But I am curious, what else would you say about high performance business? What comes to mind for you, George?
George: I gonna tell the audience here, I'm gonna cheat a little bit.
George: We have notes, we have some notes that we use to guide us through these podcasts. We're not just a hundred percent like off the top of our head. We could be, We totally could be.
Camille: Oh my gosh, I hope people don't think we were just that smart.
George: What happened was I was thinking about this question and I had some answers.
George: Then I read your notes like, Oh yeah, what she said, Everything she said is what I would think. But then I had a couple more thoughts.
George: So, first of all, I would say I like fault tolerance in a team, in a business, you know, no single points of failure. So like, if any person gets sick or goes on leave or, or leaves the team, the rest of the team rapidly fills in so you hardly notice a failure.
George: High performing businesses are fault tolerant. I think high performance businesses have both systems that are well established and they have not lost the ability to improvise. Cuz there's always something that comes up at a corner case and people are too rigid about systems who can't deal with that.
George: I don't count them as high performing, count them as prudish.
George: The last thing I would say would be just thinking about a comment that people would observe about that business. You go into a restaurant and at they're high performing restaurant, and you go into some business and you notice yourself or somebody else saying, Wow, those guys really know what they're doing.
George: You get a high performing business there. If, if somebody comes in, they don't know the business and say, Whoa, wow. Impressive.
Camille: It's funny what you said about Making sure everybody knew that we make notes about this. It reminded me, this is a little digression, one of our favorite podcasts, The Cinephiles, I was listening to them recently.
Camille: The two guys just did 300th episode, like q and a, the q and a. That was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So there was a part where he mentions how, one of them is the guy who's is prepared with all the notes and he shows up and he has a plan. And then the other guy just shows up.
Camille: Yeah. And he always takes them off the plan, but he said 99% of the time it's brilliant because it's the conversation that needed to happen.
Camille: Yeah. And I was like, Oh, that's what George and I are doing. I show up with a plan, George comes with all these other ideas to like enhance it, but the plan makes sure that we sort of stay back on track with things.
Camille: Yeah. Again, back to why planning is important. I'm not making you say every single word on this plan, but I'm giving you a way to follow the conversation and my way of thinking. So anyhow, I just, yeah. It made me feel good to hear our lovely Cinephiles guys say that they're running their podcast basically the way I'm running mine.
Camille: Made me happy.
George: Yeah, they are fantastic.
Camille: You know what, I love this fault tolerance is such a great phrase. You have these great terms to bring into this. My thoughts on this were basically that and you know, that there is a way for you to effectively do continuous improvement, which is about your thing of, I have systems, but I can also adapt systems.
Camille: I'm not creating systems and then getting stuck with them, which can be a bit confusing for people when we talk about doing process improvement as you establish a process and then it just sits there.
Camille: Which is why also we say it's messy. Because that change process can be a little bit messy and, but you can also put systems in your business that make that change process a little less messy.
Camille: You can't get rid of all the mess and all the chaos, but that's why there's a process in place for doing continuous improvement, is it's a process for improving the process. Which I know is a little meta. But it's important. You don't wanna just chaotically do it.
Camille: The other part of this too is that a high performing business has a long term view and a plan for what this business is going to do and be in the future. So how am I gonna have either continued growth or more stability, or both, depending on what you're trying to accomplish in your business at any given stage?
Camille: I think having that long term view and a plan is what high performance businesses have. And then again, the idea of you're not doing it alone. When you talked about the culture, I was like, Yeah, I think even with small businesses, they tend to overlook the importance of a culture.
Camille: Like you're creating a culture, even if you're just a culture of one. Again, you're always interacting with other people and you stand for something.
Camille: When it comes down to just as a business owner and you think about, how am I defining my high performance business?
Camille: That's probably the most important part is while these are some general terms, there's a bunch of like, how you accomplish all of that, That is up to you. So at the end of the day, high performance business is not defined by how much money it makes, as in you don't reach that goal until you've make a million dollars.
Camille: It's not that kind of a measure, it's what you choose. So if you choose to have a business that makes 60 K a year, because that's exactly meeting the needs that you have and the amount of effort you wanna put in, then that's your version of a high performance business. That's you defining it. So I think that's one of the most important, but also difficult parts for business owners is we're constantly pushed into, it's gotta be more, it's gotta be more.
Camille: It does not have to be, you do not have to scale up your business just because everybody says you're supposed to do that. If it's meeting your needs today, that's for you to decide. And meeting your needs financially, but also, you know, personally, intellectually. Is it satisfying and fulfilling?
Camille: Don't go out and build a business that you hate because you're not gonna do it well.
George: I have an example from what's happening right now. So right now I'm running a campaign to apply for school board.
George: And I'm getting this advice, great advice from people who are good at doing this at the local level, and they're telling me all this stuff. And one recurring theme is, basically give up your last six weeks of your life until election day. Cuz you're gonna spend every spare moment you have doing that.
George: And that's cool. However there are things I will not compromise on for the sake of the campaign. So like, I have scheduled times for picking up my son at school, or I take him to swim class on Saturdays. I am not gonna violate that boundary for the campaign. Even if the campaign people say, Nope, give up your life.
George: I'm doing this from the context of my life. Actually the same thing is when we decided to adopt Avi and raise him, we raised him, but we weren't gonna give up our lives just for him. We were gonna incorporate him into our lives.
Camille: You're giving a really good example
Camille: this gets back to one of our belief shifts, right? Yeah. Right. You are choosing the trade offs that you're willing to make for this thing that you want to achieve, but you're not willing to sacrifice everything.
Camille: That's the tricky balance every business owner has to work within and design for themselves, in their own business.
Camille: What does it look like for me to make the right trade offs, to create the type of business I want? And not get caught up in trying to just do the advice that everyone else is giving me of, Hey, if you want this to work, you're gonna need to go all in on this, this, and this, and give up that.
Camille: And that, by the way, you need to double the revenue of your business next year. I know people who have been told this by other people, and they'll ask me like, Do I really like, is that what I'm supposed to be doing?
Camille: And it just really has to come down to what you need. Are you getting your financial needs met? Is there a long term plan here? What do you wanna do? And what's important to you right now?
Camille: So there's also phases of your life you have to consider, right? Are you raising kids or are you not? That changes what you're willing to do, how much time you're willing to spend on anything.
Camille: If you didn't have a little Avi, you wouldn't have that Saturday conflict. But you do. Yeah. So someone else may not have that conflict because they don't have kids.
George: That's so true.
Camille: It just comes back to the, whatever you choose, however you decide to define high performance business as a business owner, that's the most important thing.
Camille: And to just be really honest with yourself about what you want from that. And some of the best clients I have are the ones that are really clear about that, and they just tell me right up front, I don't want this, and I do want that. Great. Now, we can really design a business to just get as close to that as possible.
Camille: Maybe we can't do it perfectly, but boy, we can get really close and we can at least make sure it doesn't turn into something that is making you miserable. That I think is ultimately a high performance business.
Camille: The other definition is a high performance business is not making you miserable.
George: As you're talking about this one I'm thinking is don't lose yourself in this. Yes. Make sure Yes, you, yes. Don't completely lose yourself.
Camille: Yes. It is not worth all of that.
Camille: So let's talk about how we make one of these high performance businesses actually happen. What do we do? And so we just talked about what I think is step one.
Camille: You do have to define it first. You really have to get clear about what it is.
Camille: But we're gonna talk a little bit more now about what are the things that you need to do? And this goes back to what I said. We're gonna talk about two things in this episode.
Camille: One is just what is my framework? So just to give you a way to think about what are the main components of a high performance business.
Camille: And then we're gonna really focus on this idea of reflection. Cuz I do think it's sort of this most fundamental, essential component. It's the place to begin if you're really just starting to think about these ideas.
Camille: Even if you're not, it might be the thing you need to get back to. Maybe you've been struggling with this and it's a thing you need to start incorporating more into your business.
Camille: First, let's talk about, again, definitions. What does reflection even mean? We've used this word a lot, but what do we even mean by this? So reflection means putting serious thought or consideration to something. Slowing down, applying critical thinking identifying what's working and what needs improvement.
Camille: One of the best frames for me in thinking about this has been this book that I read a long time ago. It's called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Conneman. He's a noble prize winner in in economics. In 2002, he won the Nobel Prize and when he, in this book, I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but I will warn you, this is a super fat book.
Camille: So I see George commented in the notes to me that yes, but haven't read it yet.
Camille: Blinkist by the way. Awesome way to go through that book. I'll put a link to this too in the show notes, but for those of you who don't know, there is an app, it's called Blinkist, B L I N K I S T.
Camille: It is a way for you to basically get the cliff notes on all these fabulous books that you don't have time to read. So I highly recommend it, especially for this book, cuz it is fat and the type is tiny. You're like, Oh yeah, Nobel Prize winner did write this stinking book because there's no way I'm getting through it.
Camille: But it is really fascinating because what he talks about is that there we have two modes of thought. It's system one and system two.
Camille: So system one thinking is this fast, intuitive, really sudden, and it's often we're not even having conscious thought around these thoughts. We're so quickly doing that and reacting. That's system one.
Camille: And then system two is when we're slower, more deliberate. Have logic and reasoning in there.
Camille: What he talks about in the book is the challenge of us moving into systems two thinking. We need both. So systems one does serve us. Sometimes we gotta be quick and fast and able to make good decisions.
Camille: But the reason that Systems One thinking has become so important to us is it is a way for us to just shortcut things. And to expend less energy. Our brains are taken up energy and our bodies are designed to conserve that. And so we're like expending less energy as well.
Camille: Systems two it takes a lot more energy and effort to do it. But then because of that, we don't do it enough.
Camille: So I always think of this, I love this idea of, well, you've got Systems One and Systems two thinking and how our brains are working.
Camille: But why do you think, George, just off the top of your head, if we think about like, why is it so hard for us to be more deliberate and do the systems two, thinking what's getting in our way?
George: I think it's about when you get the payoff for systems two thinking. We have a hard time dealing with long term gratification.
George: Thinking about things now that will have an effect later. We don't see the direct connection now ,that's hard for us as human beings to do. Lots of studies about this stuff and we also, I don't think our train our, our young humans well enough to think about long term gratification. So it's not a muscle that we usually build in. Some of us do.
George: That's my thought. What do you think?
Camille: Yeah, I think that's spot on. I think that in society we tend to value decision makers and the faster the better. Everybody's so happy when somebody's finally told us the direction to go or the thing to do.
Camille: But if people are thinking about it, we don't have any respect for the thought that goes into it.
Camille: Sometimes like we're expecting a big business to, something happens and we're like, Oh, that business needs to make this X decision, and why are they waiting for?
Camille: Well, they're, they're actually probably off doing some systems to thinking to make sure that the way they execute on that decision is right, as opposed to just throwing that out there. We don't tend to respect that process. We're in a society where we really celebrate our heroes and our firefighters.
Camille: They're all doing systems one thinking, and we need them to do that. But what happens is then we are one, sometimes when people are doing that, they're also doing damage. This is a really silly analogy, but it made me think about how in the Marvel movies with the superheroes, how we're like, Oh, superheroes are saving the day.
Camille: But then there's that whole thread of the story of how all the like repercussions and the damage where they've destroyed all these cities. Nobody's getting them for doing that. We're just celebrating their superhero-ness. But they're leaving like all this like mess in their wake.
Camille: That's kind of the world we live in. Right. And we don't tend to honor the people who are like, Wow, they're being really thoughtful and taking their time with this, cuz we don't have any patience for that. So I think part of it is just the way that our culture is sort of designed around what we put value to.
Camille: And then I think the other one is just this idea that it just takes energy. Like it really does. It takes more energy for you to slow down and just think through a problem or think through an idea, and I think we're all exhausted, right? Yeah. I mean, the world is exhausting right now.
Camille: Those are kind of my thoughts about why this is hard. I want people to take that to heart because it's not hard because you are lazy, because you don't know what you're doing, because whatever label you give yourself that you're blaming yourself, it's not your fault.
Camille: All of our brains are wired this way. And so the struggle for us and the challenge to everybody that I have to everybody is how can you start to slow down more in order to make sure you're making the right choices?
Camille: There are times when you're gonna have to be just quick and on top of things, but can you start to recognize when it's an opportunity to slow down and think a little differently about things, such as the strategy of your business or the plan for this launch, or whatever it is that's, you know, that's big that's coming up.
Camille: Couple other things that are in the book that I thought were really interesting and you guys can go Google to your heart's delight more about these ideas if you're curious, but this gets back to the way that our brains are wired.
Camille: It's not about us individually, it's really about how we are wired. And so there's the idea that of our biases, so this is one of the things that prevents us from slowing down our thinking is we're always trying to either confirmation bias or whatever the bias is, that's sending us into this quick decision.
Camille: Heuristics, which is literally shortcuts to help us make decisions quickly. It serves us in many ways, but not in all ways. And so how do we recognize when heuristics are causing us to jump to conclusions?
Camille: Also, he talks about how we're really not good at making meaning out of statistics. And he talks about how there's statistics that show up in the news and how awful that is for us. They dumb them down so much for us and make it mean something in a headline. Oh, interesting. Statistics are more complicated than that.
Camille: What it's doing is it's reinforcing the idea that is already a problem for us, which is that we tend to focus on what we expect rather than what is most likely to occur. Which I think is a fascinating concept of Yeah, I expect XYZ to happen and that's often counter to statistically what is most likely to occur.
Camille: Yeah. And these are all related. That will happen because of whatever bias I have or whatever's going on.
Camille: The last couple ones are interesting cuz one of them is laziness. He's like, system one is easy, that's cognitive ease vs. And system two is hard, that's cognitive strain.
Camille: So yes, sometimes it's just pure laziness. Which gets back to my, I get it because we're all overloaded as it is.
Camille: And then just overconfidence, he says also that people tend to overestimate how much they understand and they underestimate the role of chance. Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: And I love that thinking because I think absolutely we are overestimating what we know and the role of chance in business I also think is misunderstood as well as just underestimated.
George: How do you mean?
Camille: I think sometimes we underestimate how much luck went into business success. But also that you like, there's this idea that you can create your own luck.
Camille: And I don't think of it as that, as much as I can prepare myself and my business to take advantage of luck when it shows up.
George: Yeah, I see that difference.
Camille: Whether you call it luck or opportunity or whatever you word you wanna put to it, it's am, am I preparing my business for when that thing happens that I'm waiting to have.
Camille: I see people have lucky things go by them, and they're not ready to engage. They're not ready to use it. All these things are passing them by because they're so focused on something else and they haven't been preparing themself to jump on that opportunity. So there's a little bit of both there.
Camille: I don't wanna undercut a business then say , Oh, well most of their success was just based on luck. It was then also, They took advantage of that. They were prepared to lean into it and leverage the luck that was coming their way. Whether it was good timing or good choice a lot of businesses timing, right?
Camille: So those are all my thoughts about why it's stinking hard, but we gotta do it.
Camille: How do we do it? What do we do, George?
George: I'm confident we can figure this out.
Camille: Well, what do you do? Do you have ways that you slow yourself down? You're probably one of the people I know better at this than most of just slowing down and being thought like, Okay, let's just be thoughtful and think this through for a minute.
Camille: How do you do that? What are tricks that you use?
George: I think I have a natural advantage, and then I have a curious mind. So I tend to always be asking to understand what's going on, which is slower thinking, you know, as analytical thinking. So I got that advantage, but I'm, There's a few tricks. I have one trick, which I is like this universal trick.
George: When I'm not good at something, I'll ask myself, whom do I know who is good at that thing? And then I'll try to impersonate them, try to imagine how they'll think.
George: Or like, if I'm in a situation here, if things seem too fast to me and I can't really slow myself down to sit and think through it, I'll try to see who around here doesn't seem to be caught up in the speed of just seems to be fine and calm or gets what I'm doing. And then they'll ask him like, How are you fine? You know, how are you thinking about what we're seeing? We're both seeing the same thing, but I can't really understand what's going on and so I'm caught up in the things are too fast, but not for you.
George: So understanding how they'll think about it. Maybe they'll respond, Oh, well look, yeah, so it's going by really fast. Here's what I think through as how I prioritize it. They'll have some way that they've thought through it. That's a good trick.
George: Another trick I'll have is, going back to my curious mind, ask myself why is this happening? Or go through the five why's, which slows you down. Why am I seeing this? Get an answer for that, or think through that and keep asking.
George: I guess related to that, imagine I'm trying to explain what's going on to somebody else. How would I do that if I don't quite understand it myself? That definitely slows me down because now I'm in build a story mode. The best way you learn something is by teaching it.
George: So if I imagine, okay, how am I trying to explain this to somebody else, to my boss, or somebody else taking over that naturally slows me down. Those are some tricks I do to slow myself down. What about you?
Camille: I like those. I really like the one about looking to others because I think we forget so often that everybody's experiencing any given situation so differently.
Camille: And if you can see that other people are experiencing this differently than you are, it's such a great way to just, wow what's going on in their head? Are they seeing this in a completely different way? That is a great way to think about this.
Camille: This is a complex problem that we're talking about. We're talking about how do I get my brain when it's stuck in one way of thinking, to think another way?
Camille: There's no magic here, right? Yeah. So whenever there are problems like this I always go to the idea first it's about awareness, which is really what we're doing here. Like trying to bring awareness to why this is hard.
Camille: So instead of us just being like, Oh, I'm just not good at that, to actually have a stop and have some awareness around, Oh, this is really what's happening. And have some understanding. So I think awareness is like number one, just know.
Camille: And that kind of speaks to as you were talking about it, you just having the awareness that this is what's happening and I need to look around for some other perspectives. That's awareness, right? So you couldn't do that if you were just sitting in your own head space and not having that level of awareness to see that you should get some help. So I think that's always number one.
Camille: And then the second is just really acknowledging like it does take effort and that's okay. But that's also what makes it worth doing. I want people to just acknowledge that it is going to take some effort, but that's almost what makes it worth doing is that effort that you're gonna put in.
Camille: Think about as a business owner, if you're willing to do this extra level of effort in your business, knowing that so many other businesses are not. Guess what that means? Now you got a little leg up. Because you were putting in that little extra, and even though it's more work, it doesn't have to be as heavy a lift as you might think it is.
Camille: I just kind of wanna lay that out there. Yes, it's gonna take effort, but maybe it's not quite as hard as you think it might be. We always make things out to be bigger and scarier before we do them. So that's, I'll just say that about it.
George: Yeah, that's a good point.
Camille: The last part of this I would say is really the, what's the purpose?
Camille: And so why do I even need to bother? Which kind of gets back to what I just said, which is one, like most businesses aren't doing a very good job of systems two thinking. And there's a reason a guy wrote an entire book about it, because it's a challenge for us. And how think and how we work.
Camille: But it is essential if you wanna get to that high performance level of your business, you're gonna have to do some more systems two thinking in order for that to happen. That would be the purpose.
Camille: The final step in this, of course, is to then take some action . So everything we talk about, it can't all just live in your brain. It also has to then turn into some action. So we'll talk at the end a little bit about how you can do that as well.
Camille: But I wanna talk about this in the perspective of my high performance business framework and how this idea of reflection or systems two thinking, we'll just call it reflection for now. Okay. But what we mean, right, Reflection again, is this systems two, slowing down being more critical. Thinker, we'll just use the word reflection to represent that way of thinking.
Camille: So the framework, there's three elements. It's clarity, systems, and mindset. Those are the three elements that you are continually improving in your business to achieve a high performance business. We'll talk about them at a high level, and then like I said, in the subsequent episodes, we'll go into a little bit more detail into each one.
Camille: Like what do I actually mean? What's going on in here?
Camille: And they are all interdependent. So if you only have clarity, but no systems and mindset, No high performance business.
Camille: If you only have mindset and systems, no high performance business.
Camille: You have to have all three that are elevating together. They're all interdependent and connected.
Camille: Let's just tackle clarity and talk about reflection and clarity and why this is important. When I say clarity, I mean things like, do you have a clear purpose and vision for your business? What is the strategy? What are the plan?
Camille: What are the goals that you're heading towards? So it's basically answering the question of, what's my business for? Who does it serve? How does it serve them? How will it operate?
Camille: How is it going to make money? What, like what, what is the whole point of this thing that is a business?
Camille: So you do have levels of granularity in clarity and it starts with that big picture vision, but it just keeps getting more and more granular as you work it down to your goals and the specific efforts you're gonna do.
Camille: So having clarity about that direction that you want your business to go, and not just what you want it to do, but how you're actually going to do it. That's clarity.
Camille: The role of reflection and clarity is huge. Like you can't get clarity without reflection. How would you do that?
Camille: Because that reflection is what's gonna keep you from one, it's gonna keep you from falling for the quick fixes. So instead, it'll have you focus on how am I developing more long-term, lasting solutions into my business? And that slowing down of your thinking is what's gonna have you make the most of any data and information you have as you're trying to make decisions.
Camille: If you're being too quick about assuming and not really looking at the information in front of you, you're gonna make bad decisions.
Camille: It's also about instead of just jumping to conclusions, you're gonna slow down and reflect and define what you actually want, but define what is this clarity of my business?
Camille: What do I want this to do? And it's gonna keep you from ending up with a business you don't want.
Camille: And I do see this happen where people say yes to a lot of things that are all about like, Oh, that'll make me money and that'll make me money. And maybe I say, Yes here, maybe this is a good idea, but they didn't think it through and they end up with a business that they don't really want to run.
Camille: It's not how they really wanted this thing to go. And without really thinking that through and gliding clear about what you want this business to do, or being clear about each of those decisions and what trade off you're willing to make, you can end up with a business you don't even really want.
Camille: In order to have true clarity in your business, you've got to do some reflection.
Camille: Question to you, George. What do you think the results would be if you were trying to get this level of clarity in your business without doing any reflection?
George: I really think you said it above, but when I think of this trying to get clarity without reflection, without observing results, you know, thinking about what you've done, you are setting a path.
George: You may be absolutely clear about your path, that if you never examine it, you never reflect on it, maybe the path is slightly off and over time you're getting off.
George: You are never course correcting. Look at my hand, it's off screen.
George: That's the main thing for me.
Camille: It gets back to you know what I've talked about in the past, which is that that cycle of improvement, right? That plan, do, check, adjust. And it is that, that is reflection.
Camille: You gotta plan, do check, reflect, check, and then adjust. And if you don't have that, how are you improving that? Or how are you staying on track?
Camille: It's not enough to just say, Oh, I know what I want my business to do. I have a clear vision for it. You have to constantly be looking at the how I'm getting there, what's my strategy and what's my plan or the things that I'm doing to get there and reflecting on that and making adjustments.
Camille: Cuz none of that ever really goes to plan.
Camille: A high performance business is heavily using reflection in their process for developing the strategy and the plans and setting goals in their business.
Camille: Yeah. They are not just setting them based on what they think is supposed to happen. They are setting them based on past information and future aspirations. They're using both of those things to come to the, What does that mean? I do now.
Camille: Most business owners I think do some level of reflection. I think we're just not doing it either enough or with the right maybe structure to it. Yeah. So yeah, if your reflection is, I'm journaling, that's a great start, but it somehow has to work its way into an actual plan for your business. So that's all I have to say about clarity.
Camille: We're gonna talk about that a lot more in the next episode, and we'll talk in more detail about all these elements of clarity and how do you get there and blah, blah, blah. That's cool.
Camille: But I now wanna talk about the second element of a high performance business, which is systems.
Camille: So systems does include the things you might normally think of, which is maybe your technology systems, your apps, your tools, but it's so much more than that.
Camille: And it's beyond just your business processes. It is also the systems around you. You should have a system for planning. What is my system for how I continually do planning in my business? What is my system for how I implement change into my business? What's my system for just daily management, personal management?
Camille: What is my system for accountability? And that's a big one for especially solo printers or micro-business owners where it's just kind of you on your own. You need some system to create accountability for yourself. So systems play a huge part in how your business operates more smoothly. This is where you are building stability into your business.
Camille: If you're gonna move out of the chaos mode and into more stability. So startups always start in this chaos mode. If they sort of inherently you start a business, it doesn't have any of these things, right? You don't have any systems, you don't have any set way of doing things. You don't have a set way of even taking care of your clients and onboarding them.
Camille: You're just, making that stuff up in the beginning. And so what you wanna do is over time start creating more stability in those processes by really getting clear about how should it go, how should it work?
Camille: And then you can improve on those, of course. I was thinking about reflection in this idea of systems cuz it's really obvious, I think how it shows up in clarity, but how does it show up in systems?
Camille: So I think there's a couple of ways to think about it. One is that reflection is what helps you, one, develop effective systems.
Camille: So if I'm not really slowing down, this is a daily challenge, especially for a small business owner who's just trying to crank out the work. You get a lot of high demand from clients, you're just trying to serve them. And you don't have time to step back and slow down and create a nice, solid, smooth system for doing it. You're just delivering.
Camille: So I don't have time to make this go easy right now. Make a plan for it, document the process. I don't have time to do any of that. I just have to do the work. Just slowing down long enough to document and decide what this process should actually look like is really hard.
Camille: But that's the role of reflection in this process. You have to do some reflection to just stop and document the system or design the system. Just decide how you want this to go so that you aren't every single time doing it in this mode of chaos where you're kind of reinventing the wheel every time.
Camille: That's one of the big roles of reflection is just developing it and deciding, where is it important to do?
Camille: But then I also think there's sort of a, a flip side to this, which is that you should also be looking at systems as a way to enable regular reflection in your business. Yeah.
Camille: And I think that this is a great way to think about the value, again, of strategic planning and deployment. So once you've made the plan, you have to deploy the plan. That deployment process is a reflection process. That's what you're doing.
Camille: You and I have talked about this in the idea of, companies doing QBR or quarterly business reviews.
Camille: Yeah. The whole point of that is reflection. But it doesn't always turn out that way. So one of the tricky parts I think about reflection is when we put a process in place that is intended to be about reflection, but that's not what actually happens.
Camille: That's never happened to you, George, right?
Camille: Yeah. No. For me, a quarterly business review is exactly about that. The word I use with my team is steering, but really is reflection. We're trying to observe what we did in the last quarter in order to make course corrections to steer our future actions, which is exactly this.
Camille: When I see a lot of QBR has gone wrong, they focus too much on, I don't know, pat themselves on the back or the celebration. The celebration is great. I tend not to use QBR as my celebration mechanism because I'm telling people we don't have a lot of time. We're trying to make decisions here. So can we please spend our time observing what we thought we were gonna do last quarter than how we did compared to those thoughts.
Camille: And what drives us to reflect is, look, the outcome of this thing is gonna be some course corrections. What are we gonna do differently? And that kind of washes everything else away.
Camille: Yes. When the QBR are only about, Hey, nice job, everybody it turns into a way for people to just say, you know, Hey, look, I, I did all the stuff I was supposed to do and not use as a tool for course correction, like you said.
Camille: That is the most important part. Back to the, the first thing we talked about in clarity, which is if you're gonna do this, it's about being able to reflect and make those quick adjustments before it takes you too far off track.
George: It's so weird too. One of the things I do is I make my team members the presenters for their different areas of the business that we work with.
George: And it works out great because everybody's a critic anyway. So like when you have this orientation about, as you said, let's focus on patting yourselves on the back, and you'd kind of lose sight of, well, what should we improve? You can easily turn it around by saying, Okay, you are in charge of presenting for this area of the business and I want you to be critical of it.
George: What's your critique of your own area? You have to train people a little bit to break them outta the habit of Yeah, but I wanna tell you all the cool things I did. Don't care. Be a critic.
Camille: I think what it requires and I don't know if I've ever really seen this done really well in an organization, but I think what that would require is that an organization isn't celebrating accomplishments. It is celebrating that approach. So when somebody shows up and says, Here I am gonna critique the work I've done, then they should get the, Wow, that was an amazing critique.
Camille: You're doing a great job. Instead of, Hey, I met all my numbers. You're doing a great job. We should say, thank you for that too. Yeah. But I think that's what's missing. Back to the, What kind of culture are you designing in a high performance business? A high performance business culture is one that actually would celebrate this idea of, Hey, I'm bringing out all of these problems so that we can all work them together.
George: Everybody's reflecting.
Camille: Yes. Everybody's reflecting.
Camille: Which goes right into number three of my high performance business, which is mindset. Look at that segue.
Camille: When I was coming up with this, I just said leadership, and then I was like, No, it's about so much more than that.
Camille: Leadership is a component of mindset. So the mindset, I guess you could say culture, but I say mindset because I think especially small business owners, you might not think of this culture of your organization and it's kind of your own mindset as a business owner. So whether you're a business owner or a leader in a small business, I think you focusing on your own mindset around how you're gonna show up in this business is what's important.
Camille: So it includes things like your approach to your own personal development. It includes having that continuous improvement mindset that we've talked about over and over again. Am I in that cycle of improvement? Plan, do, check, adjust. It's about having this open learning mindset, which it requires reflect.
Camille: It is about leadership. Your leadership approach. It's about teams, the way that you form and support and develop teams. It's also about how you participate in a community. So externally thinking about am I participating in a community of other business owners, or do I have a mentor?
Camille: Do I have a coach? Which it kind of gets back to the personal development aspect. I wanted to call that out as a very specific, we have to tend to that. You just trying to go it alone and improve your own self just by reading books, that's not going to be the optimal mindset development, right? You need to reach out.
Camille: So all of these things go into really thinking about the mindset of your business and of you as a business owner. So I think the role of reflection is just obvious here, but we'll just say it and it gets essential for personal development, for continuous improvement.
Camille: As a leader, you've gotta be able to be great at reflection. You've gotta reflect on your personal performance and that's slowing down of your thinking, I think is actually what leads to your best leader behaviors. That's the challenge you have as a leader is in a team full of fast thinkers, you have to be the one who can slow it down for a minute when it's, when it's needed and say, Okay guys, I hear you, but let's just step back for one minute and think about what we need to do next.
Camille: Especially when there are problem solving and there's fires to fight and all of that, you have to decide whether, yes, go fight fires or slow down a minute. And a lot of times they're fighting fires that don't need to be fought that moment. The kindling is just starting to fire up and you have time still and you as a leader are deciding that.
Camille: So that slow thinking is really your job. All of that it's essential obviously in the mindset component being able to be really good at reflection for yourself and for others. Hmm. Yeah. How do you, how do you do this with your team?
George: I've had a bunch of different ways. I can think just one example though.
George: I'm in a group where we have quarterly goals that contribute to determine my team's quarterly bonus. At the beginning of each quarter, I tell people, You tell me what you're gonna do. What are you gonna do to move the needle? And I give some overall guidance. Here's what I kind of wanna see in your goals, but you tell me what's important to you.
George: And they do that. We write it down, and at the end of the quarter we assess, what was your attainment versus those goals? Get a number that determines your component of your bonus. So we do all that. That's not really what I think of the reflection. That's just in accounting, bonus attainment.
George: During the next one-on-one, after that, on the conversation with them and ask them, Okay, let's review. How well did you set your goals? You created your own goals for the quarter, how do you think you did? Were they too easy? Were they too hard? Sure you did stuff, but the stuff that you did, did it really make a difference to the business or was it just stuff that helped you keep busy?
George: Those are really good conversations. They have opinions when they stop and think about it, they always do. It's something I built into the process, so we're not just worried about the bonus. We're mapping that back to reflection here.
George: It's a great easy tool.
Camille: You know what I love about what you just said, there's another little nugget in here that I think is often missing, which is we do not often reflect on whether the goal we set in the first place was good or not. And it's such a huge miss in business to just not ask ourselves, first of all, is this even the right goal?
Camille: Cuz there's always room for improvement in setting the goals. We get so focused on achieve the goal that we forget to stop and ask ourselves, is it still even the right, Should we be working on it? Do we set a good goal? That is an amazing level of reflection I think every business would benefit from just stopping to ask that question, Should I even be working on this anymore?
George: It's a very simple question. And when it's presented to you, if you're not used to answering, it's a little bit difficult at first, but not for long.
George: I've got a great team. They do really good work and so they're often presenting these fantastic attainments versus goal. And then, what used to throw them off was, I'd say, Oh great. Wow. You got a great percentage. I'll sign off. I see all the work. But how well do you think you designed your goals in the first place?
George: Were those decent goals? And like what?
George: Sure I'm gonna give you the bonus for the money, but really, are you any good at designing goals?
George: That throws 'em off and it really forces 'em think, Oh, I see. It's not just a game to determine how much money I'm getting and it draws them back into the business.
Camille: Yeah. Oh, it's so good. This is one of the biggest benefits I think small business owners have, which is I watch bigger businesses get into the trap of we can't change those goals, cuz now they're set and they're tied to this compensation package, so we're stuck with it.
Camille: I would love to hear if anybody's worked in a business or maybe you have George, where there was a process where midstream you could change a goal at that level.
George: Oh, that's a great idea. I I've never seen that. I do it. But I always feel like I'm breaking rules to do it.
Camille: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It feels like rule breaking. There should be a process, like you shouldn't do it willy-nilly just cuz you're like, Oh, well I'm gonna miss that goal, so I'm gonna just pick another one.
Camille: Yeah, right. No, you should have to make a business case for this. Yeah. But this is the benefit small business owners have is you're in control now so you can create a strategic plan and deployment process that has built into it the question of, am I still working on the right goals? And if not, what should I be doing instead? What is the case for that and how do I do it?
Camille: That's what every small business owner should do. Do not, That's one place where I would say don't get caught up in how a big business does it, because I think it's to their detriment when they're just making every goal have to be completed without questioning it.
Camille: I think they assume too much in that, look, we already vetted that goal. I'm like, Well, you vetted it like six months ago. Why isn't it worth vetting again now? Has nothing changed in the business landscape to warrant looking at that goal?
Camille: That's not true. Right? It's just like that's not true. And it gets back to all the things that we talked about and why it's hard to do.
Camille: Evaluate your goals people. Don't let them just stick there forcing you to go do some work that may not actually be sending your business in the direction you want. Yeah. Especially if you decided I gotta change the direction of my business.
George: Yeah, absolutely.
Camille: To wrap things up, George, I have a pop quiz for you. Ah, are you ready? No. Okay. Let's go.
Camille: Do you remember those eight belief shifts that we started out talking about in the very beginning?
George: You know, shame on me. I should have like a list on my wall here, but I know I don't.
Camille: I might have given you a cheat sheet in the notes. Cause your sister is nice like that.
Camille: Which belief shifts do you think relate to the conversation we had today?
George: For me curiosity over self-criticism plays into this. Curiosity will drive you and if you're self-critical, you're not gonna get this done.
George: I think trade offs over sacrifice.
George: Definitely process over outcomes. We're all talking about process. I'm gonna stop with those three cause I'm not sure that's all of them, but those are three big ones for me.
Camille: I think you're getting to the essence of reflection with those.
Camille: I would say too planning it over winging it. A good plan requires good reflection. And of course, we already talked about systems over chaos and systems as being a core component. If you wanna reduce chaos, you're gonna have to slow down your thinking and do a bit of reflection and design your way out of the chaos.
Camille: Trying to work your way through it, that's what most people, I'm just gonna push through and I'll come out the other side of the chaos and everything will be fine.
Camille: Well, for a minute. And then the next pile of chaos is gonna come at you. So you have to design systems to temper it.
Camille: That's really the point of that.
Camille: So yes, we probably could make a case for all of them, but I think you hit on the big ones.
Camille: I really do love what you said in the beginning that your ability to do good reflection actually comes out of your curious mindset.
George: I think so.
Camille: I think that's like the most important thing. Just continue to be curious.
Camille: Well that's all we're gonna talk about today on a high performance business, but we're gonna talk about this a lot more in the upcoming episodes.
Camille: Your takeaway is to prioritize reflection and slow thinking and recognize it does not come naturally. So you might have to put a little bit of effort into it, and that's normal. We're all doing that.
Camille: You can do this by building the systems and the processes and routines in that will have it embedded into your world. Like schedule time for reflection. Don't just try to do it randomly, make a little process or a routine around that.
Camille: One of the best ways you can do that is in having a nice, fluid strategic planning and deployment process in your business.
Camille: And I do have a workshop that is in development right now that I'm gonna be launching at the end of the month. It'll be a free workshop that will walk you through really, what am I talking about? How does this tangibly happen in my business?
Camille: So if you're really curious about starting strategic planning in your business or doing it a little better, I'll have more on that in the next episode. We'll talk more about how you can register.
Camille: But that's just sort of a little teaser of a thing that's gonna be coming where it'll be a way to help you in more level of detail than what we can do in the podcast, cuz we'll get on Zoom together and kind of interact around this topic.
Camille: So, okay. That's a little teaser for what's to come.
George: Cool.
Camille: Any last words, George?
George: No, I'm good. This is fun.
Camille: Well thanks everybody, and we'll be in your ears next week.
George: See everybody.
