Hello podcast friends. I am back. I am so excited to be here. It has been a hot minute since we've been on the podcast. We have been in the dumps since then. Every single one in our family has slowly gone down. From whatever the sickness is that's going around, I swear every single one of my clients is telling me about how half their team is out sick.
It just seems to be plaguing everyone right now. So, it took us down, we lost voices, and as you can tell, mine is still coming back. Bear with me, I have a little bit of a scratchy voice on this one. But I could not wait any longer to jump on and record a podcast. Like, this is just my happy space, is being on here, I love it.
So with that being said, let's dive right in, you know, we've waited long enough. So what we're talking about today is process bloat. So if you have ever said anything to the tune of, you know, getting work done, even the simplest tasks on our team seems to take forever.
We're constantly jumping through hoops. We're spending a lot of time in meetings talking about work. It just feels like it takes all of our team's time and energy to just push work across the finish line. I, as the leader, am having to get in the weeds to push work across the finish line. Like we are running ourselves ragged just to keep like the status quo working, moving, getting things done.
Like, every Monday, when your team shows up for work, they're preparing for battle. They're like, here we go, it's another week, we gotta put the armor on, the fire drills are gonna start coming, the emails are gonna start rolling, and we have got to go to battle. Because we've got to go all in to keep work moving.
It is, not going to be pretty, we're going to have to put everything into it. We'll probably wrap up Friday completely drained and on the edge of burnout because we have just given it all to try and keep business as usual afloat. If you have been anywhere near that, it is a very good sign.
that your team probably has process bloat. So we're going to talk about what process bloat is, and we're going to get into how to solve process bloat in today's podcast. So in order to talk about what process bloat is, we have to talk about. Why the heck processes even exist? Really? Why the heck teams even exist?
And that is that our teams exist to create value, right? Every one of our teams were created to produce some sort of value to help drive the business forward. If I'm a marketing team, I'm here to, you know, generate interest into our company. If I'm a sales team, I'm here to generate revenue. If I'm an operations team, I'm here to, you know, execute this service in a way that leaves our customers happy and wanting to come back.
If I'm a, legal department, I'm here to protect the company and make sure that we are operating in a way that will stay safe, and compliant. So, every single one of us exists to create some value. And if we were able to strip it back to when our team very first started, like probably way before you, cause you've probably inherited this team over years and years of different leaders.
But If we stripped it back to when, let's say your marketing team, and this is the first time we had a marketing team at this company and we're like, okay, are the value we produce is, you know, generating new interest in our company to increase sales, right? That's our value. So when that marketing team first started their workflow looks something like A, like doing task A plus task B plus task C equals value.
Like, that's like the simplest version of how we create value. You know, we do these, you know, three, four, five major buckets of work. When you put them all together, that creates value. So for this marketing team, it could look like, you know, we strategize the campaign. Plus, we develop that campaign, plus we deliver on that campaign, equals our value.
Effective campaign that increases sales. That is what we call their value stream. It is the buckets of work that this team does to create value. And when we first start out, that value stream is really, really simple. It's simply, most teams have like about three to five major buckets of work. And if you do these, string them together, you create the value.
That's it. It's pretty simple. We come into work each day. We do those three to five buckets and we're good to go. But what happens is as companies grow, as teams grow, as time passes, as we bring new folks in. Folks leave. That value stream starts to get more and more complex. I wish I had a whiteboard.
I need to get to the point to where I can video these and have a whiteboard so I can draw. I am just a whiteboard girl at heart. I have to have a whiteboard. If you picture that like A plus B plus C equals value, your value stream. What happens over time is we're slowly adding complexity to this value stream.
So it's things like a small problem comes up, you know, something comes up when we're developing campaigns and we're like just slap a quick fix on it. Just make it go away so we can keep going, delivering these campaigns. It's things like we'll just keep playing with our marketing example.
So maybe it's the social media team and marketing and engagements down, we're not really seeing the results we want to. So we just are like, okay, let's just, we're posting three times a week right now. Let's do six, let's just double it. Make it work and figure it out and keep going.
There's not really any strategy behind it. There's not really any root cause analysis as to what is going wrong. Why those three posts that we're doing every day aren't working. We just simply slap on a solution and hope it works. Another example, our team is growing so fast. We have so much work. We just need bodies like I don't care who they are we get the candidate pool and it's not really what we want it, but just hire the person because we just need people to do the work, but that's adding complexity to that value stream that a plus b plus c equals value because now In order to solve this, little problem, we've likely made another problem a bigger problem for ourselves down the road.
Because, let's say, those three social media posts every week, they weren't working. Well, now we're doing double, and double the work. Double, we're sucking up capacity for our team and let's be honest, if the three weren't working, the six probably aren't going to work either. So we're adding more work to our team with less value.
Same thing with just, hiring a warm body. We think that just by somebody here to pick up the work, that's going to be a quick fix. It's going to solve the problem if we don't have enough people. But in reality, by not taking the time to really do the root cause analysis and understand what do we need here and hiring strategically and taking the time to wait for that.
We just throw a body in there and they're not the right fit. They're not getting done what we need to do. In fact, having the wrong person in could actually decrease the team's productivity and therefore decrease the team's, value that they're able to produce. So these are just two small examples, but as you can see, what happens is over time these small problems come up and we are just hustling and grinding out and we don't have time.
to we just slap on these band aids, these quick fix solutions that give us a, immediate Hit Solve. that make us feel better immediately, but they actually add complexity to our value stream down the road. And like, these are just two small examples, but like this happens every single week in teams, every single week, we are just slapping these little band aids onto that value stream.
Over time that builds, it builds and builds and builds and the complexity you're adding to your value stream builds to the point where it's bandaid together with all of these little quick fixes. That are slowing your team down, that are decreasing their ability to add value. So that's just one of them.
Let's get into the other ones. So we have, these quick fixes. The next one we have is errors. Okay. So what happens is. Teams, in producing that value stream, the A plus B plus C equals value, errors start to happen. People make mistakes. Balls get dropped. And what do we do as leaders? We freaking panic.
Because we, most of us, are operating in, a fear of failure type culture. Our necks are on the line. We got to do something about it, and we do not want to be in this place again, where there are drop balls and errors happening. And so what do we do? We go into protection mode. We say, what do we need to do to make sure this error never happens again?
I want sign offs. I want processes. I want structure. So this error, this dropped ball never happens again. But here's the thing. Every time we add those sign offs, those red tape, that overly rigid like compliance esque type pros we are adding more complexity to that value stream. So like picture it, it's like A plus B plus C, but B has part like, it's like B part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
Plus C, because part one, two, three, and four are all the different sign offs and steps and compliance that you need to go through because somebody screwed up once. So now we added all this stuff to our value stream to make sure it doesn't happen again, right? My all time favorite example of this is I have a friend who works in government, and He was talking to me about, how he was going to a conference and he was getting travel approved through his company.
We've, you know, most of us have done that before. It's not the funnest process in the world, but you know, it's a necessary evil. At the, in the government, at his, particular agency, what he had to do is, he was traveling to this location, he had to get all his flights, all of his hotels and all of that and submit that, but he also had to do cross, comparing analysis from like What are the different transportation options to get me from the airport to the hotel and like cross comparing what it would cost to like rent a car versus take like an Uber versus like whatever and submit all of that to justify why he picked the specific mode of transportation.
Now, this individual was not a cheap role within this company. He was a subject matter expert that was getting paid a pretty fine salary. And yet you are wasting. An hour at minimum of this individual's hefty salary doing cross comparis analysis that's gonna save you like 20 bucks. And I get it.
Somewhere down the road, somebody took advantage of this system and they said, nope. Never again. And so we put in all of these processes to prevent that, but in what it has done is actually created more harm to our team than if we just said, yeah, that was a mistake, but how likely is that mistake to happen again?
What is the real negative impact here? You know, we lose 20 bucks. Okay, what is the negative impact of us adding all of this complexity? We are wasting this giant salary that we are paying this individual who could be applying it to doing real value add work. So when there are errors, we are so quick to jump into, add all the things to the value stream to make it stop.
To make it never happen again. But we need to be so clear that every time we add a sign off, a racy, an SOP, a tracker, a check in, whatever it be, it actually comes with a cost. And that cost is adding more complexity to your value stream. And every time we add more complexity to that value stream, it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger because at this point, our A plus B plus C equals value, it's, you know, it has all those band aids across it from all those quick fixes we did.
They're barely hanging on. It has, the B one, two, three, and four. So we've expanded it and made it even harder for our team to create value. And we're already halfway through. We're only halfway through. So let's get on to the next one. The next one is misalignment. This starts to happen as teams start to expand.
So you know, your team is growing, it's doing well. We start adding new people and the processes that served us well when we had a smaller team of, you know, three, four, five, where we could all interact and we all knew each other and what each other was doing. And we've, probably helped develop these processes together.
They are our own. We didn't really need a whole lot of alignment. We kind of all got it. But once you start adding new people into that system, things start to go off the rails because when we first have our value stream. So if we just created a marketing team in a small business, small startup, that a plus B plus C equals value.
It's likely that A through C is owned by one person, right? It's just one person. It's a small company, so they are the person. Well, then, the company grows, and A plus B plus C equals value. Like, we're not just doing that for one region, you know, now we're doing it. for the whole continent. So, okay, well, what do we need to do here?
Well, we gotta add new people. So, okay, we need to slice up this value stream so everyone has their role. I'm gonna take A and B and they're gonna take C. Still pretty straightforward. Well, what happens is we start to, you know, now we're adding new products and we need to do marketing for different products and we're doing it for different regions.
So, okay, and we're Maybe we're starting to hyper, focus on different customer segments, you know. People just starting out versus more loyal because we've expanded and expanded and expanded and now A plus B plus C equals value we have like four different of value streams going and we have like matrix structures where like people own all of A across different value streams and then someone owns B on one and then like C we've divided into like Three roles.
And so you can see how we chop up this value stream over time as our team grows. Well, now it's really hard to understand how this flows and who owns what parts, because, you know, we understand maybe a and B, but when we get to see, there's like three different people who own C, but in different contexts, and that's where misalignment starts to happen.
We don't even know how to execute. That value stream to produce the value our team exists to create. So, what do we do? These misalignments start happening, it looks like, people stepping on each other, doing redundant work, pointing fingers, pulling in different directions, you know, we're all here to, produce that effective campaign that increases sales, but A has a different idea of what that looks like.
B has their own idea and C has their own idea and we're all pulling against each other. So we're unable to come together and create that value. Anyone resonate? So that's where our misalignment happens. And so what we do is we start to put in things like races. To try and create role clarity, we start to put in trackers, check ins, status meetings, project, Like Trello, monday.
com, anything we can to try and keep everyone on the same page around who's doing what, what's a priority, and like make sure we have all of these like status meetings and things like that to make sure Everyone's aware of what's going on and who's doing what, but what happens is when we add all of these different things, these, you know, status tracking meetings, these, you know, cross functional meetings, these trackers that we're constantly updating, these racy documents that we're constantly having to reference.
We are adding complexity into that value stream. We are adding extra steps that our people now have to make in order to create value. It's like. Different branches coming off your value stream. It's like A plus B plus C, but A, it goes up and branches off into two different directions because you got to check this racy.
And then based off of what this racy says, you go over here. And then based off of that, you need to, go have this meeting with this team over here. And then you got to go check this status tracker and then you can hand off the work and you're good to go to B. It's adding complexity, it's adding steps, and this is where I most see teams fall into a state, there's the cough, of them spending more time coordinating work than actually doing work.
So instead of just doing a plus B plus C equals value and driving that stream forward, they're spending more time saying, okay, guys, How are we going to do this today? Who's doing what? What's our priority? Let's have some meetings to talk about how we're going to go about it and who's going to do what first.
Let's have some meetings to talk about where everyone is on step A, B and C and understand how those things happen and what's gonna get like we're spending all this time Talking about the work, documenting where we're at in the work, updating the status trackers about the work, telling each other about where we're at in the work, sending, you know, endless emails about the work, and we're not doing the things.
We get so distracted by just coordinating work that we lose sight of simply driving the work forward. When in reality, all of those solutions don't actually address the root cause, which if there's so much misalignment in your team's value stream, then we've probably overcomplicated how we're dividing it up and who's doing what.
And no amount of like status trackers, racies, things like that are going to solve that. If your value stream is so complex that people don't understand it, They don't understand their role versus the person's next to each other's. It's too complex. And that's the problem. That's what we need to solve is how do we bring it back to what value our team exists to create.
What are the major buckets of work we need to do to create that value and how we're getting that one done? Who's owning what and how can we bring it back to the simplest form? Okay, let's get into our last one Our last one is inevitable this one. We cannot Counteract it's just going to be natural and that is we add work to our value stream as our team grows we're going to add work to our value stream.
It's inevitable because it might be, you know, we're expanding our impact. You know, we were just creating that value, that effective marketing campaign that increases sales in one region. And now the company's growing and now we need to go across the continent. Now we need to go global. So we're going to have to add work.
We were just focusing on doing. Producing, you know, generic marketing campaigns and now we're really segmenting our audience. And so now we need to have campaigns for, people just starting out in our company, like just getting awareness all the way through to our most loyal customers.
So as we grow, we're going to add work. The problem that arises. Is that oftentimes we are really, really, really, really good at adding work, but we are really, really, really bad at removing work. When is the last time you stopped and looked at your team's value stream, all the work that your team is doing on your plate?
And audited it and remove stuff, stop stuff, said, we cannot do that. And because I've worked with hundreds of teams at this point and ask them this question, they look at me as you're probably doing right now. And they're like, Oh, we can't stop anything, Holly. Like, no. Everything is critical. We have got to do it and I get it.
I get it It's because we've grown up in this value stream and you know at first it was that a plus B plus C equals value And then we added, you know, a D and an E and an F and then we added, you know A4. And we kept on growing and growing and growing to the point where we think that we need to have all those steps to create the value.
But in reality, as our team grows and the value that we're producing is changing, is growing and adjusting with it, then the equation has to change. And things that were once critical and once served us or served our team in a season may no longer be necessary. It's like your closet. Always equate it back to your closet.
You know, in one season you had all the, work clothes and your day to day clothes and your workout clothes and all of that stuff. Well, then, you know, you went work from home. And while that giant, thing of work clothes in the back of your closet made sense for a season, now it's taking up space and capacity and overwhelming your closet.
And if we just took that out and said, this isn't serving us for the season. It would open up so much more capacity, so much more free space. It's the same thing with your team, but we never take the time to look at it and really think through if this is the value our team exists to create is every single body of work really.
And this is where we start to get into some of the stuff we talk about activating strategy is you have to be really clear on your value here and what your team's unique value is versus what other teams exist to do. Because what happens is as we grow over time, we grow our value with us. And to the point where we feel like we need to be everything to everyone, but in reality, there's a very specific thing that only your team can do that.
There's a very specific type of value that only your team can provide that no matter if they went out and you know, if you have a shadow organization within your company that does work similar to you. If there's other options externally to your company, like still nobody could provide this one thing because you have the unique skill set, knowledge, background, history, whatever it is.
And like, that's what we want to be basing this off of. It's your ability to do that. And that's where this becomes really effective is us getting clear on our team's unique value and how every single thing we're doing, but butts up to that, because there are things you're doing that you think are critical, but in reality.
Somebody else can probably serve that purpose. And it's distracting your team from doing that one thing that only you can do. That unique value that only you can provide. And the more we can strip out the noise from our value stream, the better, faster, easier your team will be able to provide that value.
So now, going through just these four things, you're starting to see all the ways that you can be hatting without even thinking complexity to your team's value stream. And now if you look at this value stream, that once was so simply like a plus B plus C equals value. It's convoluted with all these extra steps and these workarounds and go back and, you know, You A plus, A one plus B, A two, A three, A four.
Like we've just expanded it and broken it down to so many different roles and things like that that no wonder everything that we talked about at the beginning of this episode is occurring. No wonder your team is so exhausted every week just trying to deliver the value they're here to provide. No wonder your team.
Is constantly, you know, feeling like they're having to fight against their processes instead of their processes enabling them. No wonder everyone's confused about who's doing what. No wonder you as the leader are constantly having to get in the weeds to push this thing across the finish line. No wonder we're, you know, getting work done just in time.
We're not hitting those goals we want. No wonder there's all these errors and missed handoffs and gaps and things like that because this thing is so complex that it's hard for anyone to keep up with.
What the heck do we do about it? Well, the first thing that I want you to focus on is The pattern that we just talked about, which is that the response to every one of those four things, the small problem, the error, the misalignment, whenever something came up, what did we do? We defaulted to adding.
A problem comes up, we add a quick fix to our value stream, our process. An error comes up, we add a sign off to our process, we add a SOP, whatever. Misalignment comes up, we add a tracker, we add a meeting. We're always adding. And every time you add to your value stream, you are making it more complex and harder for your team to create the value.
They exist to create. So the number one thing you can do is Really think through any time you add something to your team's processes really think through the sign or the Complexity the cost of adding that thing and is it really worth it? Is it really worth making it harder longer? more painful more steps to your team creating that value Or is it not?
That's the first thing. The second thing you need to do is start to map out your team's, core value stream. How work flows through your team and what are those steps to create that value? And start to pinpoint where this complexity has built up. And how can we strip it back as much as possible to that A plus B plus C equals value?
The simplest form. What is the simplest way? That we can get work done and still create the same amount of value. How can we do it better and still create the same amount of value? How can we do it faster and still create the same amount of value? How can we do it easier and still create the same amount of value?
How can we make it more fun and still create the same amount of value on our team? Because the reality is if you're able to do that, If you're able to make it less, make it faster, make it easier, make it better, you're going to introduce more capacity for your team, more energy, more, you know, mental capacity.
And that's going to free them up to produce more value because now they're not wasting all of their time, energy, and talent on all of this complexity. And it frees them up to work on that deeper work, that more meaningful work, that more strategic work. that more transformative work. So we're always looking at our processes and saying, how can we do this with less?
How can we strip it back to its most simplest form? The answer is not in adding, it's actually in subtracting. That's what helps you get to the state where work is able to get done simpler, where work is able to get done with ease, where your team is fully supported in order to get work done, that you're not gonna have to constantly get in the weeds because they have a simple process for executing.
They don't need you constantly in there explaining what to do and who's doing what, and, you know, playing referee. And when we strip it back to work being so simple, it frees them up to do bigger, better, sexier, more meaningful work. But we've got to strip out. All of this complexity that we've added to our processes over time that are currently eating their energy and capacity alive.
And this right here is exactly why I created Radically Simple Workflows. It is a new masterclass program, where it's going to be four weeks and we're kicking off March 10th and you are learning. All about what we covered today. So we're going in to understand how to map out your team's value stream.
I'm going to teach you exactly how to identify where that complexity is building up, and then we're going to go deep and I'm going to teach you how to solve it, or we're going to get the for our framework. Which is how I go through all of my team's processes and think about how to strip them back to the bare minimum.
So we'll talk about how to define your team's requirements, what's actually required to create eight value. We'll talk about remove, how to remove all that waste that we've talked about. You know, those quick fixes, those sign offs, those extra steps, that we've added over time. We'll talk about how to weed all of that out.
Then we'll talk about how to redesign, how to really think creatively, strategically about ways we can produce the same amount of value better, faster, and easier. And then last but not least, we'll talk about record. So how do you create? And then you can actually bring structure and standardization to your processes.
So everyone's aligned and clear on what needs to get done without adding more complexity to your processes. So we're covering all of that in radically simple workflows, and I'm so freaking excited because this Right now is going to be the only time that I do this program live. So after this it will be a DIY program.
The cost is staying the same. But I'm running it live. So you guys have an opportunity to go through these four weeks with my hands on support so I can be tailoring it. Specifically to you and your teams, we're going to be workshopping. We're going to be improving our, processes in real time. So you're not coming out of these four weeks with just another notebook full of, a bunch of notes that we never actually apply.
You're walking out of these four weeks having actually made tangible progress on simplifying the way your team works. So I'm gonna drop the link for that program in the show notes below. If you're listening to this right now as it goes out, you have until the 28th in order to get that at the pre sale price.
So this is the lowest price it will ever be offered. Even when it becomes a DIY chorus, so if you want to go ahead, grab it now while it's at the pre sale price. And if you're listening to this after the fact, after the four weeks are up, no worries. It is DIY and you can go ahead and get that as well.
Okay guys, let's go do some freaking work.
