Health is Mostly Maintenance and how The Healthy Company Framework Heals Your Business
Health is mostly maintenance. Healthy companies 1) know their capacity and have achievable objectives, 2) both adhere to and adapt their processes, and 3) have a systematic way of maintaining strategic and tactical work. The Healthy Company Framework shows you how to achieve this.
Health is Mostly Maintenance
If you’ve seen Remember the Titans, you may recall Coach Boone saying, “Water makes you weak. Water is for cowards.” That’s what came to mind when I read an opinion from someone:
“Kids these days live in constant fear of dehydration. We never worried about that growing up!”
I don’t exactly recall being afraid of dehydration, either, but someone followed up with some very good food for thought. They said, ‘You didn’t think you were dehydrated because a) no one was talking about it, and b) the effects weren’t immediate.’
They went on to say that their adult massage clients were chronically dehydrated because their skin kept absorbing the lotion. They could tell the dehydrated clients had more knots because the soft tissue fibers were dried. This made them stickier and therefore glued together. These were all symptoms of chronic dehydration!
Sure, other factors come into play, but chronic dehydration is certainly one of the larger contributing factors.
They concluded with a memorable phrase:
Health is mostly maintenance.
You can’t go “couch to 5k,” let alone “couch to marathon,” in a day. You can’t undo decades of overeating to lose weight. You can’t solve a simple dehydration headache with one glass of water.
They are absolutely right: health is mostly proactive maintenance!
Another way to say this is how I start my book, The Healthy Company Framework:
Pain is a lagging indicator.
These two ideas go hand in hand. I’m not writing about your physical health.
The health of your business is mostly proactive maintenance.
Healthy Companies
If you want a healthy company, you must have healthy individuals. This health is instilled with proactive maintenance.
But how do you do this? What does a healthy company look like?
A healthy company stays on top of work, keeps the workforce strong, maintains top-tier customer satisfaction, and out-delivers the competition.
There are several components required to achieving these objectives:
1. A clear understanding of capacity with achievable objectives
2. An adhesive that ensures your systems and process can adapt
3. A systematic way of maintaining strategic and tactical work
When work is put in terms of how the frontline thinks of it and includes with it inherent, time-based criteria, you create a measurable, built-in capacity that everyone in the organization can understand. When your employees and management understand inherent capacity, and that capacity aligns with achievable work, you can stay ahead of things.
In addition to these things, you must include two things: something to make your measurements stick, and the ability to adapt. For the first piece, use rich documentation that eliminates single points of failure and allows for team expansion. This allows people to step up as leaders and expand current teams, step into new roles as your company evolves, and keeps you whole as those key performers leave for other opportunities. Add to this a problem-solving approach that encompasses both the reactive and proactive approach, and you have a two-part epoxy that combines your capacity to the work at hand.
The work at hand must be dealt with in a systematic way that addresses both the strategic and the tactical. To do this, you must move beyond the heads-down, blinders-on approach that focuses solely on the work. While the work is 60% of the job, another 40% is communicating with those who hand you work and with those you hand your work to. Splitting this into two halves and bookending your work, you arrive at a 20-60-20 approach that ensures work is handed to you well, completed fully, and handed off to the next person well. This isn’t just in how the frontline does the work, but strategically up and down the corporate ladder and horizontally across the organization.
The completion of The Healthy Company Framework encompasses these steps in three simple principles:
I. The Foundation
II. Two-Part Epoxy
III. Know What You’re Doing
The Foundation connects people to where your company is headed and equips them with these inherent capacity measurements that go beyond your corporate numbers. The Two-Part Epoxy (or simply, Two) is how you maintain up-to-date documentation and get ahead of problems. The 20-60-20 approach is how you fully Know What You’re Doing. When you build the full Framework, you complete The Foundation Two Know What You’re Doing.
Is it a little cheesy and corny to call it this? Sure, but that’s kind of the point. Because when you have a company full of healthy individuals that stay ahead of their work, are strong and motivated, maintain long-lasting customer relationships, they out-perform the rest of the market, no matter what market you’re in.
If you’re tired of putting out the same fires and struggling to keep your company healthy. If your team keeps turning over and you’re struggling to retain the lessons from repetitive work, give me a call. There’s a difference between doing one thing a thousand separate times and gaining the experience of having done something a thousand times.
Turn your business into an unstoppable force. You can do it. The Healthy Company Framework can show you how.
It’s important to stay hydrated, especially in hot weather. What equivalent does your business need to make sure your company stays “hydrated”?