Episode 822 - Standardization Saves Lives

0:00You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage, built for this new era. Welcome to a Gentech Revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale. With agents and animations for every job in Revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock, built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Granola, Modal, and Edget, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent to CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Picks up leads at 2 a.m. Catches renewals before they slip, hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash iHeart. That's adio.com slash iHeart.

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2:08Hello, everyone and welcome to the seven minute leadership podcast. It's episode eight, 22. There is a reason an airline crew uses a checklist. There's a reason a surgical team follows a procedure. There is a reason emergency responders train on the same basic processes over and over again. There is a reason your organization should have a standard way of doing the things that matter because when the pressure goes up creativity is not always your friend. Sometimes standardization saves lives. And even when lives are not literally on the line standardization can save your business, protect your employees, prevent expensive mistakes, improve the customer experience and keep a small problem from turning into it. I've spent a large portion of my career working in environments where procedures matter.

3:11In EMS you cannot have five people approaching the same critical task five completely different ways because everybody has their own personal preference. In aviation you don't get into an airplane and say I think I'll try a different pre flight inspection today. There are things you do there is an order in which you do them. There is a reason behind that order. And when everybody understands the standard the team becomes predictable in the best way possible. That's what I want to talk about today because somewhere along the way standardization got a bad reputation. People here standardized and they think rigid. They think bureaucracy. They think somebody sitting in an office writing a 97 page manual nobody is ever going to read. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about making the important things repeatable.

4:11Think about something as simple as a shift change. One team leaves, another team comes in. What information needs transferred. What equipment needs checked. What problems need communicated. What unfinished work needs identified. If every person handles that differently eventually something gets missed. One employee gives a detailed handoff and other says everything's good. Another assumes the incoming person already knows. Another sends a text. Another forgets entirely and eventually everything's good. Becomes the sentence someone remembers after discovering that everything was definitely not good. The problem isn't necessarily the people. The problem is that the organization never established what good looks like. Standardization answers that question. Here's how we do it here.

5:12That's one of the most powerful sentences a leader can give a team. Here's how we open. Here's how we close. Here's how we inspect. Here's how we document. Here's how we communicate a problem. Here's what happens when something doesn't look right. Now people don't have to invent the process every time they perform the task. And that matters because human beings are incredibly capable. And human beings are also incredibly forgetful. We get distracted. We get tired. We rush. We assume. We get interrupted. We think we already did something. We believe somebody else handled it. Standardization creates protection against normal human behavior. That's why checklists work. A checklist isn't an insult to your intelligence. It's protection for your intelligence when your attention is somewhere else. I've flown airplanes enough to know that there are procedures I could probably recite from memory.

6:17I still use the checklist. Why? Because I'm pretty sure I remembered everything is a terrible risk management strategy. Your business shouldn't operate that way either. Look around your organization. How much of what happens every day depends entirely upon someone remembering to do it. That's a vulnerability. How much depends upon one experienced employee who carries the entire process around inside their head. That's a vulnerability too. What happens when that person goes on vacation? What happens when they retire? What happens when they call off? What happens when they leave your organization? Suddenly everyone realizes that Linda was apparently the operating system for the entire company. And nobody bothered to write down what Linda knew. That's not Linda's failure. That's a leadership failure. Leaders have to get knowledge out of people's heads. And into systems the organization can repeat.

7:18And you don't need corporate BS to accomplish this. Start with your recurring high consequence activities. What absolutely has to happen correctly? Identify those processes and ask one question. Do we have a standard for this? Not does everybody pretty much know what to do? That's dangerous language. I want to know whether two competent employees performing the same important task are following approximately the same process. If they aren't investigate why, maybe one employee discovered a better method. Great. Learn from it. Improve the standard. Then make the improved process the new standard. Standardization should never mean freezing an organization in time. A good standard evolves when better information becomes available. The goal is consistency with continuous improvement built into it. And here's another leadership lesson.

8:19Never confuse standards with micro management. If I tell you exactly how your desk needs organized down to where your stapler sits, we're probably wasting everybody's time. If I tell you exactly how a safety inspection needs performed, that's leadership. The difference is consequence. What I realize where inconsistency creates meaningful risk. Give people room where personal preference doesn't threaten the outcome. That's an important distinction. You don't need a policy telling employees whether they should use a blue pen or a black pen when either one works. You probably do need a standard explaining how money is handled. You need standards around safety. You need standards around customer complaints. You need standards around equipment inspections. You need standards around hiring. You need standards around critical communications. You need standards around things that can injure people, damage your reputation,

9:23create legal exposure, or cost your organization serious money. And once the standard exists, leaders have another responsibility. Enforce it. A standard nobody follows is decoration. I see organizations create beautiful policies, procedures, checklists, training programs, and expectations, and then somebody ignores them. Nothing happens. Someone else ignores them. Nothing happens. Soon, the employees who are following the standard start asking the obvious question, why am I doing this? That's when standardization begins collapsing. People watch what leaders tolerate. When employees see that the official standard and the actual standard are different, they will eventually follow the actual standard. And the actual standard is whatever leadership consistently allows. So if something matters enough to standardize, it has to matter enough to inspect.

10:27You don't have to become the policy police. You do need to occasionally verify that reality matches expectation, ask employees to walk you through the process, watch how the work actually gets done, compare the written procedure with what happens in the field, and listen to your experienced people. They may tell you something important. Paul, nobody does step six because step six doesn't make sense anymore. Good. Let's fix step six because bad standardization creates work. Good standardization protects work, and there is a massive difference. And here's where this becomes bigger than procedures. Standardization creates confidence. When people know what happens next, they can operate faster. When employees know what their teammate is going to do, coordination improves. When a new employee enters the organization, training becomes easier because they're learning the organization's method.

11:32Instead of whoever happens to be working that day, that's huge because without standardization, every employee becomes their own training department. One trainer says, here's how we do it. Another says, forget what they told you. I'll show you the real way. Now your new employee is standing there wondering which version is actually correct. That's how organizational inconsistency gets passed from generation to generation. Leadership has to stop that. Your standard should survive personalities. It should survive shift changes. It should survive retirements. It should survive leadership transitions. And when the pressure hits, people shouldn't have to debate the fundamentals. They should already know them. That frees their brain to deal with the unexpected because the purpose of standardization isn't to remove thinking. It's to preserve thinking for the moments when you actually need it.

12:35That's the lesson. Standardize the predictable so your people have the capacity to manage the unpredictable. So this week, identify one important recurring process inside your organization. Watch it. Don't assume you know how it's being done. Actually watch. Then ask different employees to explain the process. You may discover you're running four versions of something you thought was standardized. Fix that. Create one clear process. Train it. Test it. Improve it when necessary. And then hold the standard because when the pressure arrives, your team will rarely rise to the level of the policy manual sitting on the shelf. They're going to fall back on what they have practiced. Make sure what they've practiced is worth falling back on. So great organizations don't leave important outcomes to memory, personality, or luck.

13:36They build repeatable systems that help good people perform consistently. When the day gets busy, the pressure gets high and mistakes become expensive. Take one important process this week and make it clearer because consistency isn't boring when the outcomes matter. Sometimes standardization saves time, money, and sometimes it saves lives. This has been the seven minute leadership podcast and I thank you for listening. For more Paul Felle Valito podcasts, visit PaulFelleValito.com. You already know how AI is changing how everyday work gets done, how much ground you can cover, and how fast a team can scale. To stay ahead, you need the tools to give you a competitive advantage, built for this new era. Welcome to a GENTIG Revenue. Adio is the CRM for this world. It meets you where you work. Compounds every customer signal into context, then acts on it across your pipeline to let you move it on match speed and scale.

14:36With agents and animations for every job in revenue, Adio orchestrates your work around the clock. Built to handle the scale of your workloads, extensible with API, and MCP, and with the infrastructure to keep up with your most ambitious agents. Loved by high growth startups like Granola, Modo, and Edget, Adio runs the work behind every win. That's Adio, the agent at CRM, the intelligent system that never sleeps. Picks up leads at 2 a.m. catches renewals before they slip, hands you the answer before you ask. Try Adio free at adio.com slash iHeart. That's Adio.com slash iHeart. Listen, keep where you're at. Yeah. That's the sound of money doing business. Tens of thousands of Fintech and finance professionals cutting deals and courting investors. So come and meet them. Live and in person this October at Money2020, the place where money does business.

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