Extreme Ownership & Compensation Discussion

[irontriangle]

Hello to all out there. Like many of you here I read Extreme Ownership and absolutely loved it from start to finish. I am currently on my second read through and have recommended reading it to friends, co-workers and family. To give a little background about myself before my question - I work for an international last mile delivery company. The division I run services an online retailer: We take the packages ordered on their website and deliver it to the customers. This account/customer is very difficult to work with and treats my employees often in an unprofessional manner. I treat my management team incredibly well, but I also push them incredibly hard to achieve what sometimes look/feel like impossible goals. I often find myself thinking about how this customer (the online retailer) treats my employees so badly that attrition is through the roof (on their end too). This customer often threatens to cancel our contract or shrink our business even though we hit top marks according to their own metrics. My question is how am I supposed to apply Extreme Ownership or expect my managers to apply it when our customer constantly berates us even when we exceed our targets? It almost seems to me that using Extreme Ownership in this situation would be a mistake because then our customer would have no reason to improve on their end and morale would continue to decrease on our end. I am curious what the community thinks about this. If I were an individual contributor and a boss treated me this way I would quit and find another job, but in my situation, there are more than a thousand jobs employed just for this one customer so we as a business are not going to drop the account. How can I apply extreme ownership to my team and help them keep up morale keeping in mind that the customer is not going to change its attitude any time soon? 

[mynewunit]

This is a very good question. I was in a situation that had similarities to this one. I worked at a professional firm that having to re-evaluate how they actually made money. This meant they wanted a ton of information about the day to day and highly criticizing employees who had poor looking numbers. This really hurt morale for our team too. Specifically those who were under 40. So, I started a young professionals group. We talked about how to do the rest of life better. We had classes on public speaking, saving for retirement, poisonous plants and insects, doing music and food better, working on your marriage, local hiking, and an introduction to Australia. I intentionally built others confidence, told them to focus on other areas of their life. Guess what happened. We had happier people. And a lot of them went to work elsewhere. We even had one team member take an unpaid leave to drive across the country with their spouse.
So what do you do? Control, what you control. You can't own your boss, or your client. But you can own your team, and their morale. Basic training is miserable. But everyone looks on it fondly. Jocko explains this as "Do hard things, together". This does a bunch of things. Shared suffering is meaningful suffering. Know your team - You learn who your team is. Share knowledge - You can learn from each other. My little group met one lunch per month. The goal of the group was to make the team better. I let people share something they think we can all learn from or something they are passionate about.
If Anything, I would burst the bubble of wanting to leave the company and harsh work environment but starting with something like writing a resume, searching for a new job, or how to leave this company well.

Once this becomes something, a dozen people meeting and people talking about it, you will get some questions. Be ready for that. The more honest the better. "That group was a suggestion from a guy on the internet to help my team be happier because we have a difficult client."

Keep it up. If this goes well, it will be what you talk about at your next dozen times people are looking to give you a new job or task.

[irontriangle]

Thanks MNU, very insightful and food for thought. I really like the idea of a monthly or semi-monthly group meeting. My question though is when a client or boss leverages extreme ownership to their advantage so they can give less, or provide fewer resources while maintaining output - how do you handle that? For example, let's say an employee is able to produce "X" quantity in a given work day. The client/boss notices the employee is doing well but thinks they can do more so now they assign the employee "X+1" amount of work without an increase in compensation or resources. This is a classic problem - the employee who takes pride in his/her work will say "Yes! I can do that no problem!" but eventually the client/boss will then pile on more and more ad infinitum. The employee now has to do "X+2" and so on until the point is reached where the employee is doing "X+10 or X+15, etc..." and the pay has not been adjusted nor have additional resources been given to help with the additional workload. At some point, I believe there is a line that is crossed that goes from extreme ownership to being taken advantage of and I think we have all experienced that either professionally or personally at some point. In my situation the client comes to me and says "Now I want your employees to do X+20 (up from X+19 where they were already overloaded), but if you ask for more money or resources we will fire you and find another vendor who can get it done."

This is the situation we are in as a company with our current client. As I mentioned previously I think if I were an individual contributor and this happened to me I would just move on to another job, but as there are thousands of jobs at risk which I consider my responsibility to preserve to the best of my ability. How does one fight/navigate/negotiate/handle a client who uses extreme ownership to take advantage of employees? I've used almost everything in my bag of tricks and we as a team have beat so many competitors and somehow fought and won so many impossible fights. I am extremely proud of my team, I consider my managers to be extremely talented and capable but they are fatigued by the client and from being overloaded. I don't believe in no-win situations: I'm wondering what I'm not thinking of or what I might be missing so that I can come back to the team and breath life back into the morale.

[mynewunit]

This is a multi level question. The first question ended with how do we improve morale. The answer is you focus on improving morale. How do you fix being over worked and under paid? Control what you can control. What do you control? Honest. I assume you have tried a little because you understand some of the friction points. Lets do a few single dimensional analysis.
1A. Over worked - solution more staff. Can you increase the number of staff? Typical corporate projection is grow the work till you have more than enough work for additional staff, then add additional staff. Have they reached that level? Asks when that trigger happens. What can you do to add people, find them, get them, train them, use them?
1B. Over worked - reduce your production. Can you change your region, sector, limits, to maintain your output per person and create a void another team can fill. Do you have power to refine the work that that you are responsible for to have a smaller amount for your team to deliver?
2A. Under Paid - Salary. If you are legitimatly under paid gather evidence of what your pay would be for other institutions. Look at variables like number of people overseen, credentials, failure rate or performance in general, # of dollars handled every year. Then have a meeting where you sit down with your boss and show him all your homework and don't ask for a raise. You can also ask what they would pay your replacement. Eventually you make the argument that you should get an adjustment in pay. You might ask, what level of performance do I need to get a 20% raise.
2B. Under Paid - performance based pay. See if you can get compensated for specific levels of performance. Maybe each piece above a X per week and a consecutive kicker or quarterly. This concept is a small level of commission or proffit sharing. This needs to emphasise you getting more pay when the company gets more pay. If you never have been in commission they tend to be on the order of 1% for small markup sales.

3. Consumable - big green machine. There are industries that are based on turn over. Large chain retail and food service would rather train new employees than pay consistent performers. They specifically poach the great employees and move them to management and let the others wither and leave. If the replacement employee has similar output to the current employee, there is no motivation to treat employees with any respect or rewards.

4. You can't affect the overworked or the under paid. What can you control? I would focus on the team. Give them the tools they need for every aspect of life. Have them say "I am glad I worked for that distribution center where I learned how to communicate my value to employers, so when I left that job I got a better one." And that is where they met their boss, who went and started his own center where he treated his team better and we worked even harder.

[mynewunit]

So I reread your question. And it appears that you are asking more about how to get results from the client. This is simple. Build that relationship. Have meetings with them. Learn how to help them. Learn their critical path. Learn how they measure your performance. Learn how you add value. Then learn about their people. Learn who pays you. Learn who has control over your work. Learn what they like, sports, teams, family, cars, home towns, food, etc. They need to know they are talking to a person. They need to know that when they ask you to go beyond your limits that there is some resistance. Christmas rush then a little coasting January and February.
Let them know they can't push when you are on vacation. Then ask when you should go on vacation. The more They think of you as a person, the more they think of you as part of their team.
As you build that relationship with the company and the people in it the more you will be able to control who you talk to, adjust their demands and help them when it counts.