Cats, Beware!

I’ve always been disturbed by the saying,

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

I don’t even really like cats – but still.

Though the visual is a bit messier than I prefer, the concept is one that every leader must be both aware of and comfortable with in order to lead a group with varying personalities and methodologies. I recognize that in leadership, we are responsible for skinning many cats on a given day – even though we may not be the ones doing all the messy work. Keeping our hands dirty on the ground level of our organizations is key to staying in touch with how things are really functioning but, if we are doing things correctly, we will have many more cats than we have time to take care of. This means that inevitably, cats will be skinned in ways that you didn’t see coming, wouldn’t do yourself, or are generally just foreign to the way you think. Take a deep breath. And let’s do a little, high level history lesson together…

Almost a century ago, Henry Ford transformed the auto industry by introducing the concept of an assembly line. He made a lot of cars quite cost effectively and started a trend of process standardization that would revolutionize how business operations would run for the next 100 years. Process standardization (every cat getting skinned the exact same way) raises quality of production, increases output quantity and allows for a large measure of what every manager desperately craves – CONTROL OF THE DEVELOPMENT AND PRODUCTION PROCESS.

Every accountant, engineer and manager loves Henry Ford because he gave us the ability to control basically everything.

Here’s the problem…process standardization is so 1900’s.

Electricity, automation, robotics, and computers make process standardization a given. We don’t even need people for that anymore. The leaders of this century must get over our craving for control. Here’s why…our greatest resource is not in getting every process to look the same. It’s in leveraging HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CAPITAL to think differently. We can either spend our energies trying to get everyone to do things the same way or we can spend our energies releasing people to get to the desired result in the way they excel. Less control; exponentially higher potential.

The last ten years of leadership research screams at us, “Let people work from their strengths and your business will explode!” And here we are, still clinging to Henry and his standardization because we love the way it makes us feel. We have robots to pacify our need for control. Let’s take a few risks and invest in our people power, our human intelligence capital that can do what the robots can’t – come up with new ways to skin cats. 

Every person thinks differently. This is such a huge opportunity for those willing to loosen their grip on the metrics just a bit and watch their teams really come alive with innovation and discovery. Don’t worry accountants, engineers and managers…there are plenty of people whose strengths are in your “safe and quantifiable zone”. It won’t devolve into complete chaos.

As leaders, let’s follow Henry’s example and be willing to do things differently than ever before. Who knows, we might end up with 100 years of history to tell our success story, too.

Lean Forward,

Bekka