The best people to consider first are those with whom you have already worked. Culture fit can be evaluated in interviews and tests, but nothing substitutes for your own real-time observations of someone over prolonged periods of time.

SELECTING GOALS. The next step is to think of one or two important results

you feel you should accomplish in each role during the next seven days. These would be recorded as goals. At least some of these goals should reflect Quadrant II activities. Ideally,

these weekly goals would be tied to the longer-term goals you have identified in conjunction with your personal mission statement. But even if you haven’t written your mission statement, you can get a feeling, a sense, of what is important as you consider each of your roles and one or two goals for each role.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• The goal of an excellent service organization is to deliver outstanding results with average employees.

• Many companies design service models for employees they don't have — for a payroll filled with superstars when, in fact, there's a healthy range of talent and initiative on the team. Capture this reality in the design of the business model.

• Successful employee management systems have four main components: selection, training, job design, and performance management.These components must be internally consistent and aligned with the rest of the service model. There's no such thing as good or bad selection, for example. The issue is whether it's consistent with the rest of the employee management system and whether the system is consistent with the rest of the service model.

• IT solutions can help or hurt your employees' productivity, often in dramatic ways. IT tools that work are sensitive to the employee experience, including how and when data is entered in the rhythm of a particular job.The best solutions are developed in tandem with the role itself — not piled on after a job design is already in place.

• The average service employee is overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of his or her job. When a company identifies a gap like this between operational complexity and employee sophistication, it has two choices: change the people or change the job. In other words, (1) train and hire differently or (2) redesign the job so that your current team can do it.

The fundamental law of accountability

It is important to be clear at this stage, exactly what an accountability sink is, and how they are constructed. It’s not just the way in which the hourly paid worker has been set up to act as a human shield. In order to make the sink effective, you need a combination *of things: that person, plus a policy that there’s no way to appeal the decision by communicating with a higher level of management. (Even if you somehow managed to get the CEO’s phone number, you would come up against the fact that the policy was in place precisely to protect them from making that decision personally.)

So the crucial thing at work here seems to be the delegation of the decision to a rule book, removing the human from the process and thereby severing the connection that’s needed in order for the concept of accountability to make sense. You could even coin a sort of law management here:

The fundamental law of accountability: the extent to which you are able to change a decision is precisely the extent to which you can be accountable for it, and vice versa

The construction of accountability sinks has damaging implications for the flow of information. For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system. The decision has to be fully determined by the policy, which means that it cannot be altered by any information that wasn’t anticipated. If somebody can override the accountability sink and overrule a policy that is in danger of generating a ridiculous or disgusting outcome, then that person is potentially accountable for the outcome.

*If nothing else, you’ll have a few tips about how to set things up in your own job to divert any troublesome accountability that might be building up.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• The goal of an excellent service organization is to deliver outstanding results with average employees.

• Many companies design service models for employees they don't have — for a payroll filled with superstars when, in fact, there's a healthy range of talent and initiative on the team. Capture this reality in the design of the business model.

• Successful employee management systems have four main components: selection, training, job design, and performance management.These components must be internally consistent and aligned with the rest of the service model. There's no such thing as good or bad selection, for example. The issue is whether it's consistent with the rest of the employee management system and whether the system is consistent with the rest of the service model.

• IT solutions can help or hurt your employees' productivity, often in dramatic ways. IT tools that work are sensitive to the employee experience, including how and when data is entered in the rhythm of a particular job.The best solutions are developed in tandem with the role itself — not piled on after a job design is already in place.

• The average service employee is overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of his or her job. When a company identifies a gap like this between operational complexity and employee sophistication, it has two choices: change the people or change the job. In other words, (1) train and hire differently or (2) redesign the job so that your current team can do it.