Draw the workflow before you hire

You are about to post a Chief Operating Officer job to fix a problem you cannot quite name. The salary band is set, “scale the company to the next level” is in the second line, and a recruiter says the pool is deep.

You run a roofing and sheet-metal company with a little over six million in revenue and fifty-some people. Your operations manager has been with you seventeen years, since the shop was a rented bay and a phone. He is loyal. He is also resisting the new systems you bring in and holding decisions close, and in the last year two strong hires quit and both told you he was the reason.

People keep telling you to let him go. You cannot do that to the man who was there when the work was thin, and you know things cannot stay as they are.

Is the problem the person, or the way the work moves?

In my experience it is most often the way the work moves, and the owner is closer to the cause than anyone wants to say.

A COO hire and a firing both assume the problem is a person. Neither starts with a drawing of how the work gets done, so either one is a guess about a person.

I read the market before I looked at the man. Three years ago your revenue came from residential re-roofs. Since then the money in your town has landed somewhere else, with the school district’s bond projects and two property management companies that run office parks. Those buyers pay well and pay on time. They also write response clocks, documentation and reporting into their contracts. You said yes to all of it, and you were right to.

Here is why I think of this as a weight and balance problem. A pilot who loads different cargo into the same airplane has to work out where the weight now sits before takeoff, or the airplane flies nose-heavy. Your market changed the cargo. The balance of the work was not recomputed, and the one map of it lives in a single man’s head. You did not outgrow him. The market changed what his job is, and the job description stayed where it was.

So before I ask about the hire, I ask who says he is the bottleneck. Show me, in time, cash and turnaround.

What does it mean to draw the workflow?

It means you put the whole business on one page, in boxes a stranger can read. The book calls this the workflow map.

A workflow is the map of how value moves from a state of mind to something in a customer’s hands. Each box holds the same four things: the input that comes in, the technique applied to it, the tool used, and the output that moves on. Then you color each box. Revenue boxes deliver value and bring money back. Protect boxes guard what you already hold: quality, risk, compliance, the customers and people you have. Exception boxes handle the callback, the complaint, the leak on a Friday night. A company that has drawn only its revenue boxes has planned for good days.

In the version of this I watched, we drew the map in one afternoon at the shop’s break table. Eleven boxes, from the call that came in to the invoice that went out.

When we put times on the page, the longest wait was not at the operations manager’s desk. It sat between a signed estimate and a crew on the schedule, and it was waiting on an approval that went to the owner’s phone. The second-longest was a box with no name on it: training a new estimator. The two strong hires had been told to ride along with him. He had no hours set aside to teach them, no budget, and no pay that rewarded it. He did what a good mechanic does without instructions. He protected the machine.

The resistance had a cause. A lot of it was a man who had heard “new system” four times in seven years and had watched two of them die in the owner’s inbox. He did not believe the follow-through would come. The owner had created that condition without meaning to, and in my experience that is where most of it starts.

What happens to the hire once the map exists?

Often the role you were about to fill turns out to be a different role, or a smaller one.

The page showed that the role the customer’s value flows through was his. Seventeen years of judgment about the roofers, suppliers and inspectors in your county is capital. A stranger would do the job differently, and you would likely accept that from a stranger. So give him the vision and the tools first. Then sit with him for an afternoon and ask what he wants from the next five years, instead of what is wrong with him. In the version I watched, he wanted to stop taking the middle-of-the-night calls, and he wanted a person he could trust to train.

The COO ad came down. Two boxes on the map were thin, so the owner hired a scheduler to own the box between estimate and crew, and wrote a training budget into the operations manager’s seat. The approval that sat on the owner’s phone went to a named person with a dollar limit.

Notice the order: value on one page first, the roster second. Skip the map and every new hire learns by trailing somebody and guessing. Owners call that culture. In my experience it is often a missing map.

What do I do this week?

Take one sheet of paper and a marker and give it one sitting, two hours at most, before the job goes live.

• Name the value that has to move in one sentence: from what state of mind to what deliverable, for whom.
• List every step from start to finish, even the obvious ones.
• Draw a box for each, with input, technique, tool and output.
• Color each box revenue, protect or exception.
• Walk two allies through it cold. A trusted customer and a supplier are good choices. Wherever they squint, redraw.

When someone outside your company can read the whole business off the page without you narrating, you are ready to talk about people.