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The New Manager’s First 30 Days

September 16, 2012 //
3

How do you handle the first 30 days at a new job, where you are the person that everyone else looks to for how things should work?

For various reasons, I like to think the onward and upward trajectory of my career, I have been an outside manager / administrator to an existing business twice in the last two years. Here are my top ten must do things when in this position and why. Some of these are second nature to me, and come out of my individual management style, and others I have to remind myself to do everyday.

1: Connect with whomever you report to.

If you do not have a rapport with the person who you report to then a good question to ask is why did you take the job in the first place? This is essential. Do not fall into the trap of thinking “I can make this work,” or “they are not so bad when you spend a little time with them.” If you don’t connect when they are on their best behavior because they want to hire you, then you are not going to connect when the gloves come off.

2: Who or what are the major roadblocks?

It is imperative to find out what is going to stop you from being your best. That could be a person, a policy, or a resource (or lack of one). You can’t overcome a roadblock if you don’t know it is there. This should be something that you are always looking for anyway, but it is most definitely a priority when you are newly in the job.

3: Introduce Yourself!

Say hello, good morning – engage in small talk, shake people’s hands. The size of business you are going to will impact how you achieve an introduction to the people at the sharp end; But I would suggest that even if you have a staff of a few thousand there is nothing wrong with touring the facilities and saying hello and introducing yourself to everyone you can. Politicians have been doing this for decades because it works.

4: Look, Listen, Learn!

No two businesses are the same. The day you walk in the door, almost everyone else in the building knows more about that business than you. You need to walk before you can run, but you also need to understand what walking actually is. Show some respect for your new place of work: watch how things work, take notes, ask questions, and don’t be in too much of a hurry!

5: Meet with Everyone (part one).

Meet with as many people as you can.

One on one if possible.

Doesn’t have to be a long meeting, but use it to explain your basic style and philosophy. If you have an open door policy then explain that. I always ask what I can do to help the staff do their job better, mostly because it is my management style, but also so that I can identify any issues that need attention or trends that I might otherwise have missed.

6: Be Humble.

A lot of this comes down to individual management style; however, I feel it is important that the staff see that their new manager is happy to get their hands dirty and to pitch in when appropriate. I think this is an important trait in any manager; however, it is doubly important in a new manager who the staff do not know. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. You can’t know everything straight away and almost no one will expect you to. Having said that it is important that if you are asked a question you don’t know the answer to that you try to find the answer and get back to the relevant person.

7: Find your Allies.

In all organizations there will be people who will welcome change, and others who will not. Try to identify who they are and what their motivations are. If you can be sure of their motivations, the people who embrace change are your allies and will make your job much easier if work with them.

8: Look for the Easy Wins.

The little things that have not got done that drive the staff mad; or just make their lives difficult! The programs that never happened because there was nobody to head them up. The piece of equipment that had not worked properly for ages if ever. These are all examples of opportunities of easy wins. Easy wins will help prove to your new staff that you are here to make their lives better not more difficult. Be careful however, pick things that are not too controversial – remember you have to walk before you can run. Also, make sure that they are things that you do. Not things that you just palm off on someone else to do. The easy win is much more effective if you are the one who solely delivers it.

9: Meet with Everyone (part two).

A general staff meeting to layout some of your vision is important. Just make sure that this meeting is not on your first day. If you must hold such a meeting on your first day, make sure it is extremely short and more of a very brief introduction. Wait till nearer the end of your first 30 days to have a more formal meeting. Hopefully, by this point in time people have got to know you a little and get a sense of your intentions and therefore will be more likely to give you a fair hearing. Of course, it goes without saying, that you have to be really prepared for this meeting. Get it right and you buy yourself an enormous amount of goodwill and buy-in. Get it wrong and you have an uphill struggle ahead.

10: Communicate, comunicate, comunicate…

Make sure that everyone who should know what you are doing, and why, does so. Remember, you are the new guy and so by definition you don’t know everything. The others on your team, however, do know a lot and may be able to prevent you from making a huge blunder. But they will only be able to do that if they know about what you are doing. This also helps your potential allies from becoming disillusioned because there is too much happening that they don’t know about and find themselves too exposed when they try to defend you.

Do you have any tips for new managers in new jobs? I, for one,would  love to hear them!

One final comment, don’t be David Brent from the UK’s original version of The Office!

Categories Business, Leadership, Management

Book review: The Book of Business Awesome by Scott Stratten

August 18, 2012 //
4

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

– Charles Dickens, ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’

Scott Stratten’s excellent new book is actually two books, printed back-to-back under the same cover.  “The Book of Business Awesome,” as its name suggests, is a collection of examples, ideas and concepts on how businesses can deliver extraordinary customer service through actually communicating and connecting with their customers. The flip side, “The Book of Business Unawesome,” shows the price of not communicating, not thinking, and not caring  about your customers.

As you might expect, social media plays a large role in both the positive examples and the negative examples of this book, but it is not a book about social media per say. Those looking for a nuts and bolts how to I do X, Y, and Z on Twitter, Facebook or practically any another sphere of social media would be better served by Arnie Kuenn’s excellent: Accelerate! that I reviewed this time last year. “The Book of Business Awesome,” however, is more of a call to arms for brands and companies to be something other than normal – particularly because normal can be so crappy – and to go out of their way for their customer.

To be funny.

To be honest.

To be human.

And to apologize because they genuinely regret a mistake, or bad customer experience, not because they got caught or called on it.

Really, this book is about culture and people. The stories that are replayed in both their awesomeness and unawesomeness throughout give a window into the soul of the featured companies. It shows ordinary front line employees doing extraordinary things and those extraordinary things having an impact far beyond the normal, or even intended, business interaction.  As Scott states on numerous occasions: social media doesn’t fix anything – it just makes things louder. If you don’t give a damn about customers when you transact with them – this will be heard loud and clear online and will also come across in your social media interactions.

Filled with links to additional content and even the odd QR code (I’d actually would have liked to see more QR codes, the link typing thing got old after a while) the Book of Business Awesome also has an excellent couple of chapters on public speaking and panel discussions. As a side note, if you ever get a chance to see Scott speak at a conference, or on his book tour, do so – for the rest of us there is YouTube!

Not as funny as Scott’s in-person presentations, The Book of Business Awesome is, however, just as passionate and quite amusing. And this is actually a very minor quibble consider that many business books are about as entertaining as a tax audit. It also probably says more about Scott’s skills as a public speaker than any lack of skill as a writer.

The Book of Business Awesome is nothing short of a bible for customer service in the Social Media age.

(Clicking on the cover above will take you to the book’s Amazon page and contribute to my book buying habit / problem.)

Categories Books, Business, Customer Service, Marketing, Social Media

Social Media, ROI, and the Cost of Talking to your Customers

July 29, 2012 //
5

I am all for Return On Investment (ROI).

However, defining ROI in any small service business, particularly in marketing, can be incredibly difficult to be even remotely useful. Most businesses don’t bother except when it is easy. But for some reason, when it comes to social media, ROI is mission critical.

Why?

You can place an ad for discounted services, with a coupon, running for a month, and a unique web address, and  a unique phone number, and track that (but honestly how many actually do this?) But how can you track the person who becomes aware of your business through that ad, spots your sign one day while driving by, and then six months later needs and uses your services unrelated to the ad?

What is the ROI of your fax machine?

What is the ROI of customer service?

What is the ROI of a strong brand?

How do you place a value on communicating with a significant proportion of your clients every day?

Most businesses consider word of mouth one of the most important forms of promotion. It is essentially free and it is highly effective. With social media, we have the opportunity to insert our businesses into the “word of mouth” of our customers, and thereby their friends, and their friends friends. Why would you not get involved and take advantage of that?

Facebook for my business probably takes up 15 minutes of my day on average. An email, or even a call by the time I’ve documented it, to an upset client can easily take an hour. Should I not deal with an upset client when I don’t have to because the ROI is lousy? Yes, you can place a value on a client and on retaining that client. You can even track that you do get some clients from Facebook, but you may also get clients because you have an email address or a telephone number. When was the last time that anyone figured out the ROI of their email system? Even when buying a new phone system most businesses to not justify it with ROI, but rather than as the cost of doing business.

Small businesses often look up to companies such as Nike and Apple and see their devoted, and almost rabid, fan bases as evidence of marketing in action. I would argue, however, that companies like Apple and Nike create devoted fan bases is by being approachable and interacting with their clients – Apple in particular. I’m not the greatest Steve Jobs fan, but there are lots of examples of Steve taking the time to reply to ordinary consumers and being very interested in what they had to say. HP, Dell, et al. for a number of years, sold dramatically more computers than Apple, but it was Apple who held Mac World every year. Nike became cool because they did not go after deals, they went after people who actually used their shoes – athletes. They engaged their most high profile target market.

Of course, there is a lot of other marketing involved, but remember Apple’s most famous ad only ran once in most markets. Apple, and Nike for that matter, opened their own stores that operate on a quite a different model from other retail outlets. There is some argument that this was to help control the customer experience, but I also feel it was to be able to respond, and engage, with customers. Like all companies, they do not always get it right, but I do think that it is the willingness to attempt true engagement, and a real concern for the customer experience, that breeds fierce loyalty.

Social media is not a strategy – engagement, however, is.

So how to do social media and get some results and some traction?

To me, a major issue for small businesses is when they are on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, YouTube, and are doing all of them badly. Focus on one, and only one, and do it well. Then you can move on to another one.

Create things,or provide a service, using social media that other people will value.

Share other people’s content sparingly.

Self promotion has to have value, or at least not look like self promotion.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions of your fan base or ask them to share.

Drive fans to your website, or blog, from places like Facebook or YouTube not the other way round.

Pick your social media sites carefully. In my opinion, YouTube, for example, is very useful and can expose you to an enormous audiences, but the attention span is fleeting and the sense of community is almost non-existent. Embed videos in your site or page. Facebook works for my business and my previous business. Twitter does not. However, Twitter will almost certainly work for my new business, and it works for me personally. This has a lot to do with the small towns versus large cities and the  nature of my business – it may well be different for yours. Google+ has some personal value, and some SEO benefits, but has little real world value at this point in time in my opinion. But it does look very pretty!

Numbers of likes or followers are pretty irrelevant. It is the level of engagement that counts. I’d much rather have two hundred relevant, and engaged, fans or followers than 6,000 just making up the numbers. As someone much smarter than me once said: “If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.”

And finally, don’t cross post, post from one social network to another, unless you really know what you are doing.

And even then just don’t do it.

Please.

I beg of you.

I see people I respect and who should really know better, cross posting and it is counterproductive. Content for Facebook does not translate well to Twitter because of the character limit. Twitter’s special characters are not understood by most Facebook users.

There are social networks where cross posting seems to work pretty well, but again, it is a black art, and if you are questioning the ROI of any social network, cross posting from a different network is not any kind of an investment.

To sum up this long, and sprawling post, the ROI of social media is the ROI of engagement. If talking to existing and new customers is not for you then I wish you well.

That just means more customers for the rest of us.

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues on the Marking in Veterinary Medicine LinkedIn group for the conversation that this post was cannibalized from. Also many thanks to Ali Burden-Blake (@inkspotsocial) for her excellent blog post: “Stop! Why using social media won’t work for your veterinary practice.” which inspired the conversation in the first place.

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Categories Business, Content Marketing, Customer Service, Marketing, Social Media

It’s Basic… Stupid!

July 10, 2012 //
13

Want to know how to increase sales, breed loyalty, and save money on expensive marketing? You would think everyone would. Even if you are not a business owner, or manager, you must realize that if you deal with clients it is in your interest to increase sales, breed loyalty, and save money on marketing.

However…

It never fails to amaze me how many businesses just throw it all away by forgetting the very basics of being in business. I hate buying anything – not because I don’t want to part with the money, I just want to make the process as simple as possible. I can’t be alone in this. Why does me – giving you my money – have to be so complicated?

The Basics:

1: Answer the G.D. phone!

Here is a revelation. If your phone is ringing, and it is going unanswered, then by definition you are not answering the most basic needs of your customers. They actually WANT to talk to you – the least you can do is answer. Please note: voice-mail is not answering a phone call. If you are paying a receptionist to put calls through to your voice-mail all day, why not just get a automated phone tree to do it for you! People really hate those, but at least you’ll save some money on the receptionist, and clients will appreciate the honesty of you not wanting to talk to them.

2: Answer Emails!

See all the above, and…

Email is easy! I’m not expecting an instant response. I have not tied you up on the phone for a couple of minutes trying to give you my money. I am all but inviting you to make me wait. You don’t even have to read my terrible handwriting – I’ve typed everything out for you! But please have the courtesy to at least think about answering my email with 24 hours (I’ll even give you more time if it is a holiday or a weekend). To be honest, there is not a lot of excuse for not answering within a couple of hours – but I understand, who needs customers!

3: Don’t insist that I use your website if a: has the wrong information on it, b: has out of date information on it, or c: has no information on it at all.

4: Don’t ignore me in person…

You know, I hate pushy sales people just as much as the next person; but there has to be a happy medium between being accosted every few feet in a store and being unable to find anyone or feeling you are interrupting a social event with your pesky request to give them money.

5: The Tyranny of Choice:

“I’d like to buy a widget to fix my whatsit”

“What kind of widget?”

“Don’t really care as long as it fixes my whatsit!”

“What color of widget would sir like?”

“Eh, red I guess…”

“We don’t have any red widgets sir.”

“Well I don’t really mind what color it is I only want to fix my whatsit – what colors do you have?”

“*sighs* I’ll go look for you. We have X widgets in green or blue, Y widgets in blue or black, and a Z widgets in green and black.”

“What is the difference between an X, Y, or Z widget?”

“Well they come in different colors and the prices are different.”

“Is that it?!”

“I’ll have to get Terry from technical Support to talk to you about that, please hold…”

“But…”

“This is Terry, I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone but please leave your message after the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as I feel like it… maybe.”

*click*


As I explored in the post Marketing from the Ground Up, what a business sells and what their customers buy are not necessarily the same thing. The staff member in the above example is selling (and I use that term in its loosest possible sense) widgets; but the customer is trying to buy a fix for his whatsit If the business aligned its goals with that of the customer the interaction would have been over  in seconds.

6: Just sucking in general.

Do I really have to call / email you 2 -3 times to get anything done? Could you at least pretend like you are pleased to see me when I walk through the door? How about sweeping or mopping the floor once in a while? If you know you are about to screw up – how about a little warning? And if you are really feeling like pushing the boat out – how about an apology for the screw ups when they happen!

You know, the customer is not always right but the basic concept of a customer can’t be wrong all the time.

For your viewing pleasure, Monty Python open a cheese shop and get a customer!

Categories Business, Customer Service, Management, Marketing

Book Review: The Carrot Principle by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

June 10, 2012 //
0

“When I make a mistake I’m recognized 100 percent of the time; when I do something great, I’m not recognized 99 percent of the time.” – A complaint from a hotel industry employee identified  in The Carrot Principle.

At times it seems like books on leadership and management are a dime a dozen. Yet it is rare to find a book that deals with the traditionally warm and fuzzy areas of recognition and people management that actually tout the results of studies and delves into statistics. That is what makes The Carrot Principle different.

“I’ve come to realize success doesn’t come from being a powerful leader; it comes from leading powerful people.” – The Carrot Principle.

Based on a 10-year study of 200,000 managers and employees, The Carrot Principle’s central theme is that managers who provide frequent and effective recognition generated significantly higher levels of employee engagement, productivity, and retention. Of particular interest, however, is that recognition levels also have an impact on operating margins. This takes The Carrot Principle out of the fuzzy box and into the profit and loss one. What is quite startling about the results of the 10 year study is that the need for recognition by employees from their employers is a global requirement but that the nature of that recognition changes from country to country.

In a bid to seem like a serious business book, The Carrot Principle can at times be a bit on the dry side – we are talking statistics after all for the first couple of chapters, but the book more than makes up for it in the later chapters. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the carrot principle is that the book actually gives useful ideas and tools for implementing its suggestions.Charts, templates and lists and lists of suggestions are all here. My particular favorite section of the book deals with all the usual excuses that managers give for not recognizing their employees and knocks them down one by one – including budgeting and complaints from upper management.

If I have to pick a fault with the book it would be that it is very much written with the large corporation in mind. This, perhaps is not surprising given that O.C. Tanner, the appreciation consultants behind the  research for the book and its supporting documentation, are writing for their clients. However, this is a minor quibble in an otherwise excellent book and a superb set of tools.

(Clicking on the cover above will take you to the book’s Amazon page and contribute to my book buying habit / problem.)

Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management

Dr. House’s Gifts to Veterinary Medicine

April 3, 2012 //
3

As House M.D. ends its eighth and final season I wanted to say thank you to the show for a number of things as they relate to my professional world and give it a (little) bit of a hard time for couple of others. I should make perfectly clear that I am a huge fan and that apart from a couple of minor missteps the show has been amazing television. I apologize for any spoilers!

Parasites and Zoonosis

I freely admit that I do not watch a lot of hospital shows. Apart from the odd episode of ER, House is really the only medical show I have had much time for. But House, as far as I’m aware, has had more than its fair share of parasites. From a veterinary perspective this is amazingly refreshing. As someone who seems to spend their life talking about zooanosis to doctors, staff, and the public, it is great to see some worse case scenarios played out in fiction, with a grounding in scientific fact.

Any one remember the episode with the giant tapeworm? I bet if you’ve seen the episode and your pet(s) have ever had tapeworms you won’t soon forget it. Or there is the episode autistic boy with roundworms, the team members infected with Naegleria fowleri, the homeless woman with Rabies, or the woman who catches Bubonic Plauge from her pet dog. Admittedly these are all extreme cases, but the mere fact that they are on television in some ways is a minor miracle considering that most people do not even want to talk about parasites and zoonosis.

So thank you Dr. House for spreading the word about zoonosis and parasites. Every little helps!

The Diagnostic Process

One of the great gifts that House M.D. gave the veterinary, and probably the wider medical community at large, was giving the public a greater understanding of the diagnostic process. Admittedly, House’s methods are often very unsound, but that fact the he and his team regularly are a loss for what is going on is extremely refreshing. We all in the veterinary profession have heard the complaints:

“Why do you have to do that Parvo test?”
“Why do you need that bloodwork?”
“You did that expensive bloodwork and there is nothing wrong!”

Even a casual viewing of House M.D. shows what is supposed to be one of the world’s foremost diagnosticians performing tests that come out negative and going down blind alleys searching for an elusive diagnosis. By bring the diagnostic process into the living room, House has helped acquaint the public with the idea that a certain level of trial and error are to be expected in any evidence based search for answers.

On more than one occasion I have used the show to help explain to a frustrated client why it took three separate diagnostic tools or lab tests to get diagnosis and why we couldn’t just immediately go to the correct one. So thank you Dr. House for helping to shed light on the diagnostic process!

Superstar Bad Behavior

I went into at some length in a post a couple of months back about what I call “The Steve Jobs Effect.” This is this the phenomena of some doctors, and other professionals, feeling that because they are so good at what they do, it excuses almost any level of behavior. Now House M.D. is very much fiction and levels to which the character of House delves would lead to his dismissal by pretty much any employer – never mind at a medical facility. The sarcasm, plain offensive behavior, and even harrasment, does make for great television, but, although it rarely reaches the epic proportions of House – it does happen in real world.

So not so much thanks, Dr. House, for reenforcing the stereo type that great skill can excuse bad behavior!

The Cuddy Episode

Every now and again on a long running T.V. show the writers shake things up by imagining the world they have created from a different perspective. On the show House M.D. this took the form of a very underrated episode from the perspective of Dr. Lisa Cuddy, the Dean of Medicine (Hospital Administrator to you and I).

The episode (5 – 9), shows the administrator doing very administrator type things – facing off with a vendor, placating the Board, dealing with major H.R. headaches (being short staffed and theft). The episode also deals with the thorny issue of billing and a patient who does not feel they should pay their bill (sound familiar). It is great to see these challenges, admittedly extremely exaggerated for added drama, and that these types of issues as just as much the part of running a medical facility as what the viewers watch Dr. House do every week.

I do have a problem with the episode however. After doing a great job of explaining to a patient why their bill is fair, the episode ends with Dr. Cuddy ripping up the patient’s check. I understand that it is supposed to show how kind-hearted the star of the episode is, but it undermines everything she states earlier in the episode. I also don’t buy that the character would do this.

So thank you Dr. House, sort of, for a great episode showing the role of administrators everywhere.

I, like a lot of people, am going to miss House M.D. But I am grateful that we’ve been able to have eight great seasons of television, and even more grateful that an intelligent show has shown some of the issues that I personally and professionally care about. So long Dr. House, for all your faults, we’ll still really miss you.

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Categories Management, medical, Veterinary

The Cost of Servant Leadership

March 10, 2012 //
1

“There is great joy in leading with authority, which is serving others by meeting their legitimate needs.”

– James C. Hunter, The Servant

For a large part of my management career I have been a strong believer, practitioner, and proponent of Servant Leadership. Servant Leadership is pretty much self explanatory. In a nutshell, a servant leader leads by serving those for whom he is responsible for – employees and customers. In last month’s post we talked about what I call “the Steve Jobs Effect.” Servant Leadership, depending on your point of view, could be called the opposite of “The Steve Jobs Effect.”

However, recently I’ve encountered a darker side to Servant Leadership…

As a servant leader, I believe it is my responsibility to ensure that fairness, standards, and openness are at the center of what I, as a manager, do. I believe it is my job to try and bring out the best in people. To remove the road blocks that staff members might encounter in performing their jobs or specific tasks, or empowering them with tools so that they can overcome those road blocks themselves. To me, Servant Leadership means that, fundamentally, I believe in people. It means that I have faith that people want to do a good job and respond better to encouragement, and a fair process, than threats, shouting, and summary dismissals.

But what happens when certain employees don’t, despite your best efforts, respond to this process? What happens when employees actually consider the process, and therefore you, fundamentally flawed? What happens when trust, fairness, and even faith, turn out to be misplaced?

The answer, of course, is simple – nothing.

While individual failures are disappointing, and extremely disheartening, they are part of the process and they are the cost of servant leadership. Nobody is perfect – including servant leaders – and not everyone will necessarily understand what you are trying to do, or why. However, if you have surrounded yourself with people who you have treated with respect, fairness, and who tried to make a success in both their lives and their jobs they themselves will be the ones to remind you – verbally or by their actions – of a simple fact:

Doing the right thing, whether it is ultimately right or wrong, is never a bad thing.

Certainly we should learn from our mistakes, but individual failures in a sea of success should not make you give up or consider the odd failure anything other than an unfortunate side-effect of the process. To all those disheartened, discouraged, and disappointed, servant leaders out there please don’t loose the faith. If servant leadership was easy, it wouldn’t be special, they wouldn’t call it leadership,  it wouldn’t cost anything, and it wouldn’t have value.


For those who wish to know more about Servant Leadership I strongly recommend James C. Hunter’s The Servant.

If you have any leadership crisis of faith stories or issues please feel free to comment below.

Categories Books, Business, Leadership, Management

Managing the Unmanageable

January 31, 2012 //
5

We’ve all heard the excuses:

“They just care so much…they are very passionate.”

“You should have seen them a few years back – they are really mellow now in comparison to then!”

“They have a lot on their plate at the moment.”

The bottom line is that a lot of people, in a lot of businesses, get away with being badly behaved because of who they are. Maybe they bring in more business than anyone else, maybe they have been around for a very long time, maybe your business genuinely does depend on their work. None of this, however, overcomes the fact that behavior that would not be tolerated from most members of staff is quite often considered part of who these “superstars” are.

This phenomenon can be called “The Steve Jobs Effect.”

I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Jobs. For all that I admire the man for his dedication to the user experience, and to creating great products (I’m writing this on an iPad, while listening to an iPod, and checking Twitter on my iPhone), I can’t help feeling that I would have had nothing to do with the man had I met him while he was alive. That is not a very popular opinion these days, but even if you ignore all the dubious dealings, and less than perfect life choices, it is difficult to argue that Jobs was anything other than a horrible person to work for.

Tantrums, routinely losing ones temper, and humiliating those who report to you, are not how most people want to be treated, and at the end of the day, as a management or leadership strategy, it does not work and it is not acceptable.

There are essentially three ways to deal with people who’s idea of management is to induce fear and to shout louder than anyone else.

1: Accept it.

2: Fire them.

3: Work with them to improve.

It is interesting to note that Steve Jobs experienced all three.

As mentioned above, just accepting bad behavior from any employee is the road to ruin.

Firing them is a viable option, but since they are a superstar, you will have to think very carefully as to the ramifications of termination.

Working with them on their behavior is really the only option unless you feel it is either you or them.

In reality, most businesses are going to accept bad behavior from their “superstar” employees, but ultimately this does no one any good as the employee will probably end up being fired for going too far. Not to mention opening up the business accusations of creating a hostile work environment. It is important to understand that this kind of behavior is about the person themselves – not the people that surround them and are the aledged triggers. Bad behavior makes the badly behaved feel good. It is a way of telling themselves that they are doing something without actually having to do anything other than shout or throw things.

The challenge, of course, is to try and work with these individuals to limit the worst of the behavior and solve the underlying issues that set them off in the first place. This does require a certain amount of “pandering” for want of a better expression, but since the alternative is to fire them you do what needs to be done. It is important to note, however, that the disciplinary action, up-to and including termination has to be an available option, and as a manager you have to be prepared to use this should the situation demand it.

I believe, that the tools you use to work with the badly behaved “superstar” are pretty similar to those of working with an under performing employee. Coaching sessions, inserting yourself into issues before they turn into explosions, and winning enough trust and respect from both sides to come up with workable solutions. If you can show your badly behaved “superstar” that praise, cooperation, and the basic social niceties (please and thank you go a long way) actually work, and makes their lives better, then hopefully they will adopt some of those tactics as their own.

I am however a realist. I can complain that the Arizona Sun is hot, and I can do things to modify the environment to lessen its impact on me, but I cannot change its nature. Many badly behaved “superstar” employees will fall back into bad habits if you do not stay on top of things and call them behavior that crosses the line. It is important not to back down – but also not to fall into their way of handling conflict. They are wrong, you are right, and you have to have the courage of your convictions.

Ultimately, the badly behaved “superstar” employee may have be a superstar somewhere else. The chances are the superstar of your business is not Steve Jobs. If they are, maybe you need to be somewhere else.

The great Malcolm Tucker from the BBC’s superb “The Thick of It” showing how not to people manage. WARNING: Very strong language!

Do you have any experiences with  the badly behaved superstar – Care to share?

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Categories Business, Leadership, Management, Uncategorized

Being a Customer Sucks!

January 3, 2012 //
2

Why does being a customer suck?

Does it at your business?

Are you being honest?

How would you know if it did?

What happens when you walk into a restaurant you’ve never been to before? Do you stand there for a moment wondering whether you need to seat yourself or wait to be seated? Do you go up to the counter and order? How open are they going to be to changing one of their dishes to meet your needs?

O.K., enough question marks.

As a restaurant owner, or any business owner for that matter, it is obvious how your business works to you, but your clients almost certainly don’t walk through those doors every day -mores the pity.

Education of the client is often held up as a key component in a lot of service industries to solve these issues (yes veterinarians, I’m looking at you). Our job, as delivers of services however, should be to hold our clients hands through this process and make it as painless as possible. Clients should not need to become experts in how to deal with us, or the industries in which we work.

As I discussed at some length in this post about marketing and branding, what you sell is not necessarily what your clients are buying. The customer experience should reflect this. I had a recent customer service experience that brought this all into sharper light. Because the owner of the business is a friend, I’m not going to go into that particular experience directly, but it did cause me to re-evaluate what I do, how I respond to clients who do have issues, and do some thinking at length about what “customer service” actually is. Instead, let me tell you about my bathroom…

A while back I had a bathroom tiled. I spent a significant amount of time picking out exactly the right shade of tile that I wanted and the size. At the end of day one of the installation however, I come to find out that the tiles are actually two slightly different shades. I talk with the installer and the answer is “Well that is how they come – It is to give the effect of real marble.” Well, I did not want two tone tiles, I wanted them all the same color. Who is right here, and who is wrong? The store, and the installer, are both perfectly right – the tiles are manufactured that way and I’m sure that for most installations it would have made lots of sense, but that was not what I was purchasing! I was purchasing my bathroom tiled in a particular shade!

Interestingly, I was was in a locally owned and operated store a little while later and happened to look at their tiles. Their display was actually setup so that for tiles of the type I was looking at, all the shades of the same batch of tile were shown together as a single piece rather than just an individual tile. This removed the “different shade shock” that I had experienced when I had bought tiles for my bathroom.

Other than showing my bad taste in tiles, what does this experience tell us? It tells us that it is very difficult to forget information or view things as if we don’t know about that information. Chip and Dan Heath, in their book “Switch – How to Change things when change is hard,” have an excellent exercise that you can use with staff – or even just friends – that shows this in action. Give a volunteer a piece of paper with the name of a very common tune written on it and get them to ‘knock’ out the rhythm of the tune on a table and see if the others in the room can guess what tune it is. Try it with a number of different tunes and people. Those knocking the tune out will find it really hard to understand why everyone else in the room can’t guess correctly. The reason for this is that they are hearing the tune in their own heads along with the knocking. They have knowledge which everyone else in the room does not. Not only are they unable to communicate that knowledge, but they don’t understand how or why everyone else in room does not have that knowledge – it is an alien perspective to them.

This is just like my tile sales man and installer who could not understand why I did not know what they knew about tiles. It is also the same phenomenon that has you hesitant and unsure in the lobby of a restaurant you’ve never been to before – the big sign saying “please wait to be seated” can be a huge relief. I’d also argue that this is one of the reasons why chains are so successful. Familiarity is easy!

So what does this all tell us?

Well perhaps we need to start really listening to our clients and thinking about their experience and how it is not our experience. It might sound trite but customer service is about serving the customer. If we have a lot of education deliver to a client, perhaps the problem is that we have not made things simple enough. Of course, if the client wants more information they need to have it, and we need to have the resources to hand to help deliver. But we also know, from numerous studies, that very little information is actually retained when we deliver large amounts of it in person. We also know that lots of choices actually result is less decisions being made.

Clients are not stupid, but they don’t have, and shouldn’t need, a manual to use our businesses or get the services we are trying to deliver to them. One of the reasons why Apple’s iPod, iPhone and iPad are so successful is that anyone can use them from day one with the minimum of instruction. Our businesses and services should be the same way.

Being a customer can suck – but it is our job to ensure that it doesn’t!

 

A check list for removing suckyness from the customer experience

  • If we have have to explain things over and over how can we stop the need for explaining?

  • Do we get frustrated with our clients lack of knowledge – perhaps they are not the problem?

  • What do our clients complain about?

  • How successful are we with our recommendations?

  • Do we have compliance issues?

  • When issues arise, how could they have been avoided?

If you have any additions to this list, or have any customer service stories to share, please let me know in the comments!

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Categories Business, Customer Service, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Veterinary

The State of Customer Service (infographic)

December 28, 2011 //
2

Found this great infographic  (many thanks to ClickSoftware).

Categories Customer Service, Management
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