It depends, do you hire people for their hands or their brains (or both)?

“Why is it that I always get the whole person when what I really want is a pair of hands?” – Henry Ford

I remember the first job I quit: I was asked to sit at a desk and cold call people from about 6PM to 9PM in the evening to entice them to buy a service.  I was handed a script and told to read from it verbatim, and that the calls were being monitored. I was assured that the script was infallible, and if I just followed it, my conversion rate would be high and I would make lots of money. Wow, did they ever hire the wrong guy! I just couldn’t interact with real human beings on the phone while pretending to be a robot.

This methodology isn’t flawed, and is still used to this day with great success (except I am replaced by a much more competent call-centre worker in India). What was flawed was the owner/operator of the telemarketing business had an affinity for hiring smart people that could think independently. If you go through the effort of hiring smart independent thinkers, don’t give them a script! [I think I just pissed off some actors. -ed.]

I love the idea of finding best practices in a business and then replicating them for greater business efficiency, but there is a cautionary tale in the telemarketing example above: You have to be very careful when evaluating and promoting best practices; you have to make sure you have great visibility to the customer and employee context, and how core the activity is to your brand.

For example, if you run a bank, you have branches in many different neighbourhoods, cities and perhaps even countries. Do the best practices for a bank located in a low-income urban setting apply to one in a high-income suburban neighbourhood? Do you staff locations the same way?  [If you did that by cloning please contact us, that is another service we would like to offer. -ed.]

Inevitably the answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

Some activities lend themselves well to widespread use, and for good reasons. Customers like consistency, so they don’t want different protocols to access their accounts at each branch; they want the bank card that works at one ATM to work at the next. Various laws can also prescribe best practices for activities.

On the flip-side, processes can create a situation where the customer feels like they are a square peg trying to be slotted into the companies’ round holes. See if this line sounds familiar to you: “Sorry sir/madam, but my <computer system, regulations, manager> doesn’t allow me to do it that way.” If you haven’t heard that recently, then you probably haven’t been on a phone talking to a large business in quite a while.

When you have a firm grasp of your companies brand (promise to customers) this provides you with great guidance on where to apply best practices, and where to leave white space for innovation. The areas that are core to your brand require special attention, and are the most likely to need best practices; but if you create them everywhere it stifles your best employees.

At Starbucks –for example– the need to staff their counters with baristas who create a rapport (and even relationship) with their customers is a core part of their brand.  The HR methods used to select talent must be codified and captured so that the hiring of staff adept at this role is consistent. The art work that adorns the walls is not core to their brand, so Starbucks HQ allows local managers to make decision on the art work that is placed each location (an example of allowing white space). This allows a link to be made to the local community, and resulted in at least one great innovation: A local photographer annually uses his talents to stock the walls with fabulous photographs of the baristas that really capture their unique personalities. This isn’t only good advertising for the photographer, but a synergistic link between the clients, the staff and the community.

The point is, don’t get carried away with best practices, if you make the effort to hire smart, creative people, let them use their own tools to create excellent customer outcomes.  Make sure that –outside of activities identified as core to your brand– you give your smart people the white space to innovate and find the best way to use their own talents to create excellent business outcomes.