I grew up in a small farming town in South Dakota. One thing I’ve carried with me through the years is my respect for the South Dakota farmer. They can do anything. The typical South Dakota farmer has ingenuity, is a superior tradesman, knows more about networking than Bill Gates, and can make anything run with a length of baling wire and a roll of duct tape. Where I work, we teach our customer service people to be South Dakota farmers.

Most articles in trade journals are about rules. You know, articles about the rules of selling, rules of managing a business, succeeding with others, making an apparel presentation, etc., ad nauseum. The fact is there are a lot of rules for just about everything, and if you follow the rules, you often do succeed. The hitch is that not everybody follows the rules, many have not yet learned them, and the rule makers often are not qualified to make the rules. So, I have adopted one simple rule that has served me well over the years: The fewer rules you have about how business ought to be conducted or how employees should behave – the easier it is to be successful.

It sounds a bit scandalous, doesn’t it? But, let me suggest that if you relax some rules, or drop them altogether, you won’t get so upset when the real world ignores your rules. The principle works whether you are selling, managing people, or dealing with a rebellious teenager.

Years ago, our company had a lot of rules and procedures for customer service people. Every little thing had a specific procedure. The paperwork was mountainous, and the penalties for violation were a severe tongue lashing and a write-up for the employee file. Agents were experiencing high levels of stress attempting to satisfy all the rules, and passed that stress along to the customers.

Then, I discovered something called the “85/15 Rule.” It states that 85% of the problems in a company are caused by the systems (translated rules) a company uses, and only 15% are caused by the employees. I discovered that most of our challenges had very little to do with the people we had hired to do the job. The rules we had put in place were fostering confusion and were often the cause of the problems.

One day, we realized that our customer service personnel, who were intelligent individuals that had daily contact with customers, were in fact our best source of information about customers and how to satisfy them. That was the day we threw away the rule book and started writing everything in sand. In effect, we started letting the patients run the asylum. Who knew the system better than anyone? The employees. Who understood the problems of our customers best? The employees. And, most importantly, who were the best qualified for uncovering problems in our systems and fixing them? The employees. Then we came to another realization: Once empowered in this way, they became like South Dakota farmers: they could do anything.