You need to understand every business process that happens in your area. In absolute detail. There is a misconception that being successful in business is something of a dark-art, a mystery, that only a select few have access to.

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Why understanding your business processes is the key to
success
You need to feel frustrated in order to move forward. Not only is it natural, it is one of the key
signals that you are ready for your next opportunity. I’m not talking about the ‘gosh, I feel a bit
frustrated today’ feeling, I’m talking about the ‘if I don’t do something my chest and my brain
are going to explode’ kind. You can learn how to create it, to embrace it, and then watch what it
can do for you and your career. It all starts with understanding your business processes.
But first, let’s look at the two types of people, and types of frustration, in business. The first
group contains people like you and me. It consists of those who are in the top 10% group of
everyone in their respective businesses. We are the ones who have big goals, and work
diligently at them day-in and day-out.
Their frustration comes from having exhausted the possibilities of the role they are currently in,
being ready for the next opportunity, and being frustrated because the opportunity hasn’t arisen
yet. This is good frustration.
The other group of people are those that know they should be moving forward, but, for whatever
reason, have been conditioned to put the responsibility for their career, their progress and their
happiness onto to someone else. You’ll know these people because of their ‘victim’ mentality.
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If they don’t get the promotion they want, it’s always
someone else’s fault
They will blame everyone else on the planet before they ever start looking at themselves and
their actions. This is bad frustration.
The third group, in case you were interested, contains people who never feel frustrated. This is
actually the worst group to be in, worse even than the ‘victim’ group. This is the group who
have reached their self-imposed limit of potential and have simply given up on moving forward.
At least with the ‘victim’ group, they know they need to move, they just don’t know how to do
it.
Humans are designed to have the constant ebb and flow of frustration. When you are in a role
that you have outgrown, one that you have extracted every last of opportunity from, then you
will feel that tightness – that overwhelming urge – to move forward.
It creates an energy and then, when the opportunity presents
itself, you focus all of efforts on taking it
Once you have moved into that new position the feeling of frustration will disappear. It will often
be replaced by a feeling of excitement, fear, and anticipation for what the new role will bring.
Then the cycle repeats again – you learn, take action, and maximize every last drop from that
role – and the frustration will slowly start to build again.
This is the cycle that moves us forward, and it is critical for our personal growth, as well as the
growth of our bank-accounts. You may have felt this frustration before, without really
understanding where it came from, and then have never been able to find it again.
The good news is that it is a skill that can be learnt, and
applied over and over again, driving more success than you
ever thought was possible
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At the heart of it is the concept of the power of understanding. Your ability to understand what
happens within your business is the base for all of your current and future success. Imagine it
as a muscle, one that can be exercised, fed and controlled. If you give it the focus it needs it
will grow incredible strong, and will become a key asset in your business arsenal.
It will grow to be incredibly powerful and it will set you apart from everyone else in your
business. Make it something to be proud of – make it the thing that you pat yourself on the back
for. Make it the thing that you have, that no-one else in the business has.
How big is your muscle? For you to be truly successful, it
needs to be bigger and stronger than everyone else in the
business
It will add massively to your self-confidence, and it lays the foundation for creating influence in
your business. It will help drive your career as an individual and will help you to become a
powerfully effective business leader as you move into management positions.
So, what is at the heart of this concept? It’s quite simply this: you need to
understand every business process that happens in your area. In absolute detail. There is a
misconception that being successful in business is something of a dark-art, a mystery, that only
a select few have access to.
The reality is very different. Success is made up of a few very simple concepts that, when
ruthlessly implemented, will drive anyone further forward than they could ever imagine. If you
are just starting out, these concepts will kick-start your career and move get you to your first
management position.
If you are a manager already, then understanding your
business processes is even more critical to you
As a manager, if you don’t know the detail of every task within your area, then you, your team,
and your career, are at significant risk. I can guarantee you that the people working underneath
you don’t know enough about the detail of what happens in your team.
And to make it worse, most of them won’t even care that they don’t know. They just want to
know which buttons they need to push to move tasks off their desk so that they can get out of
the office and go home. In short – you are sitting on a time-bomb, and the clock is counting
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down.
If you don't understand your business processes in detail, then you won't be feeling the good
frustration at the moment, and if you are frustrated, then your feeling the wrong kind. If you’ve
never felt it, or if you’ve felt it before but don’t know how to find it again, then read on.
I’m about to show you how to create it whenever you want
First of all, check your level of understanding of what you currently do, and what happens in
your team. This is an easy one. Instead of asking, ‘am I the expert?’, ask yourself this
question, ‘is there anything else I can learn?’ If the answer is yes (and it will be), then great,
now you have your starting point. Do this exercise:
Grab a piece of paper & draw a quick flow-diagram of how your departments business
processes. Draw every in-flow, every out-flow, and every transaction within the team. If you
can’t draw them all out, then you know you have things to learn.
Check with someone else in your team, check with the senior person, check with your boss.
Don’t be shy about it – shyness is a business killer (see my post on influence) – treat it as an
exercise in learning.
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Once you have clarified all the flows and tasks within your team, pretend that you are explaining
them to someone from a different part of the business. You are explaining it to someone who
knows enough to asks questions, but doesn’t know the detail, and they’re looking for you to fill
in the gaps.
You may want to do this in your head while you are at work, you may want to do it driving home
from the office, or you may want to do it out loud at home.
It doesn’t matter how you do it, just make sure you do
Imagine also that this person knows the secret to getting to the crux of any process - that they
understand 5-Why. This means that, for every explanation you give them, they will ask ‘Why’
5 times. Now, don’t take this 100% literally, because depending on what you are explaining,
they will ask ‘how’ and ‘when’ as well.
Write down every question that you can’t answer. Once you have been through each part of
your flow-diagram you will have a list of questions that you weren’t able to cover in detail.
Don’t kid yourself, and say ‘I’m pretty sure’ to any explanations. I hate it when my guys say
‘I’m pretty sure’ or ‘I’m 90% sure’. That doesn’t help me.
As long as there is any uncertainty, then there is a chance of being wrong. Let’s say that you
have 50 processes in your team, and you are only 90% certain of each of them. You pretty
quickly start to see that you don’t actually know that much about how your area works. And it
means that you are exposed to being blind-sided.
I was heading up a project team, and one of my development team came to me saying that the
functionality they had built was finished, and was ready to be deployed for testing. So, I let the
client know to get their testing resources lined-up, so they would be good to go the next
morning.
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The next morning came around I confirmed with the developer that it was ready to push
through. They said ‘yes, it’s all ready to go’. Great, I said, I’ll let the client know. Then they
said, ‘yep – we just need to get it deployed now’. Slightly confused, I said ‘ok, let’s do that
now then’, and was not happy to hear them say ‘oh, we can’t do that yet. We need to get ‘x’
person to do ‘y’ task, and that will usually take them a day or so to do’.
‘So it’s not ready to go to the client yet?!’ was my response. ‘Well, it is, but it’s not deployed
yet, and that will take two days’. Again, I said, ‘So it’s not ready’. And so the discussion went
on. Now, I was frustrated because I thought it was a pretty straight-forward question, but
The responsibility was my own, because I didn’t have a
detailed-enough understanding of the process
From that day onward my first question when someone said that a piece of functionality was
ready to go, was ‘when can we get it deployed?’.
The other key reason for knowing 100 percent of your business processes is that it builds a
massive amount of management confidence in you as an individual, and this is critical when you
move into management positions. Your boss will be keeping a sub-conscious report card, like
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a piece of paper with positives and negatives.
On one side it will have all the things you know, and on the other side it will have all of the
things you don’t know. Now, under each column will also be the successes you have had as a
team, and the problems that have come out of your area of the business.
All internal problems within a business ultimately come down to someone not having a detailed-
enough understanding of a process, all of them. For example, imagine that you are selling a
service to customers.
They will pay you for that service and, unless you are accepting cash in your physical offices,
then you will be receiving payment files from a bank. These will come through overnight, and
will usually be called ‘payment batch files’.
Now, your overnight IT systems will have a specific process that they follow, and the receiving
and processing of payment files is one of the first things that will happen once your business
shuts for the day. Payments need to be processes before any of the debt reports are created,
or any of the credit control reports are run. Usually, in order to process payment files, no other
background processes can be running.
It all sounds very logical, but look at this real-world example: One of my senior technical
specialists was trying to be proactive and kicked-off a large report before she went home for the
day, so that she could get in early the next morning to work on it.
What she didn’t realise was that this report would take twice as long as she thought , and
because it was still going when the payment upload process tried to run, it locked out the whole
system, and no payments were able to be processed.
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When we got into the office the next morning we realized
what had happened, but it was too late
Payments hadn’t been processed, and that also meant that billing files couldn’t be run (they
are done after payment files are processed) and it caused a significant business interruption.
Now, not only did I have major issues to try and resolve, but I also had to get on the phone to
my boss to explain what had happened and what caused it, and that’s not a nice conversation
to have. When they ask ‘why don’t your team know that running these processes will impact
overnight processing?’ there is no other answer than ‘we should have known boss’. On the
list in your bosses mind they have just written in the right-hand-column ‘major business
disruption caused by team not knowing enough of the detail’.
Be clear – this is not a good thing.
And it gets worse, because now my boss needs to call the Chief Executive and have the same
conversation with him. The CE will put on your bosses’ list (and yours’) that your area caused
a major business disruption because both of you don’t know enough of the detail about how the
business works. Many people thing that the bad stuff just rolls down-hill in a business – let me
assure you that it rolls up-hill too.
Oh, and as you can imagine, I also made a note on the list of the person who actually made the
error. Even though they were very good at what they did, in the back of my mind a bit of the
trust that I had in them had been eroded. They were still an asset to the team, and even the
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best of us make mistakes, but still….
So, as you are going through your exercise of explaining each part of your team’s area, be in
no doubt that one day your ability to understand the detail of what happens in your area will
either cause, or prevent, major business issues. And I don’t need to tell you what side of the
ledger you want to have the most writing on. Too much on the wrong side and you’ll soon be
looking for another job.
The great news is that, at your current level in the business,
all of this is knowledge is directly under your control
It gets more difficult when you are in management, because you will need to rely on, and trust,
people who won’t be as passionate about success as you.
So, once you have the list of questions you weren’t able to answer, you will go out and find the
information. Don’t be scared that you’ll be a burden on others, or be wasting their time by
asking these questions. I guarantee that you will find some of them will not be able to be
answered satisfactorily be anyone in your team – not even the person who is supposed to be
the expert.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a tip. Your team will receive reports from somewhere external to
your team, maybe from an analytics team, or maybe from your IT department. Ask your team-
mates if they know all the parameters for those reports. And I mean all of them. Do they know
what is included in the report, and what is excluded? What are the exclusion criteria? Who is
responsible for those parameters? When was the last time they were reviewed?
Drop a comment on the end of this post and let me know
what you find out
Note for existing managers. Once you have done the flow-chart exercise, rank each part by the
number of gaps in your knowledge. If there are 10 processes related to the creation of daily
billing files, I can guess as to where your next problem is going to come from.
Rank them, and then use this ranking as your priority list. Be in no doubt that your next problem
will come from one of the processes that you don’t understand. The clock is ticking, and you
are in a race against time. You are in a race to understand each one of these processes before
they blow-up. If you don’t believe me, then simply do nothing and see what happens. You
have been warned.
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Whatever position you currently hold, make it your mission to learn, and put in writing one
process per day. Yes, I know you’re busy. I know you don’t have time. Neither do I, and
neither does anyone else that I know of. Do it anyway.
Key Takeaways:
1. Create a flow-diagram of all the business processes within your area of the business
2. Imagine that you have to explain each part to someone external to your team
3. Write a list of all the questions you couldn’t answer
4. Make it your mission to learn and understand one of these processes each day, until
there are none left
5. At that point you will feel the frustration of having extracted every last piece of value
from your current role. You will be ready for your next opportunity
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