Just One Thing: Services ARE Performances

May 20, 2012 By 6 Comments

Just One Thing

The “Just One Thing” Series offers ideas for professional and business improvement in small, digestible pieces, one at a time.

From the book: Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic:

“Services are performances. From the customers’ perspective, the people performing the service are the company. A careless bank teller is a careless bank. An arrogant waiter is an arrogant restaurant.”

Few things evoke as much negative emotion in otherwise kind and gentle souls as a bad experience as a customer. Focus in your mind on your last really bad customer service experience and you can sense the tension in your neck growing along with the rise in blood pressure. That bad experience becomes “the company” for us.

The Aetna Rep who yelled at me for seeking clarity on how a claim was handled is the face of this firm to me.   (I escalated that one and was correct.)

As managers and leaders and individual contributors who serve external and internal customers, we intuitively know that every encounter we have…or our people have, is an opportunity to represent the organization. Why then are good customer experiences the minority and great customer experiences a rarity? The fault is ours…for poor hiring, for failing to establish and reinforce values, for lack of accountability…and for generally not giving a shit enough to make sure our organizations are properly represented by people who care and who serve.

The phone representative who agreed with me that Frontier Communications was pretty screwed up, is the face of Frontier to me.

All of the strategy plans, reorganizations and training sessions in the world won’t make up for the failure to respect and serve and honor the customer. It’s arrogant and deceitful to believe you as a leader are representing the interests of your stakeholders if you fail to create remarkable customer experiences through your team members.

Poor customer service is an outcome of a series of flawed and sometimes fatal decisions by people not invested in a cause beyond biding their time and collecting a check.

The battle axe of a grumpy, rude receptionist at the local Doctor’s office is the face of that practice.   

We are all of us at times consumers of healthcare services. These purchases find us at our most vulnerable, our most frightened and even our most ignorant. We are placing ourselves and our family members in the hands of strangers…shedding our clothes and dignity and hoping our trust is not misplaced. While there are some institutions that get this right more than they get it wrong, few that I’ve encountered do it on the scale of Mayo Clinic. I’ve no doubt from my time there that it starts with careful hiring for the right values…and comes from an unyielding commitment on the part of everyone in that institution to reinforce the core values.

Mayo is remarkable in part, because they recognize that every encounter is the face of Mayo. From the workers in the cafeteria to the receptionists greeting and serving patients to the nurses, doctors and administration, the performances are choreographed to serve customers.

What do your team’s performances say about you as a leader and about your firm?

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Filed Under: Just One Thing, Leadership, Performance Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine-7 Suggestions to Strengthen Your Group’s Performance

May 7, 2012 By 5 Comments

image of a coffee cupPerformance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results.

The pursuit of performance is something that is too easily lost in some of the kinder, gentler content that is found in the leadership literature today. My advice: don’t forget for a second that you’ll only be successful if the team you are leading is successful.

In contemplating the “set context and communicate expectations to promote performance” theme for this post, I drew a portion of the content below from my book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership. Our focus in the original section was on building the operationally excellent team. While you may use different labels, the concepts will support your efforts to promote high performance.

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Operational excellence starts with you setting the expectation that your team will perform at a level necessary to achieve or exceed objectives.  In seeking to establish standards of performance and behavior, your very public and very frequent statements of expectations are some of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Your ability to grasp your true priorities in support of your firm’s goals, provides the ability for you to articulate these priorities and objectives to your team and begin setting the expectation for success.

Everyone on the operationally excellent team must understand their responsibility for execution around key objectives, and be aware that their performance and progress are both important and are being watched.  The operationally excellent team always knows the objectives, where they stand in relation to achieving them, and what they are going to do to get there. 

7 Suggestions to Promote High Performance on Your Team:

 1. Communicate expectations for achievement of operating objectives from day one of your leadership role.  There should be no ambiguity about your intentions and your expectations for performance, progress reporting and ultimately, achievement.  Remember to link yourself as ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the team and to let them understand your role to both coach and support the team and individual efforts.

2. Kick-off all operations oriented meetings with a review of the key business objectives and progress towards those objectives.  Conclude every session with a reminder of the objectives—especially near term deliverables.  This is equally important for individual review sessions as it is for group situations.

 3. Praise, celebrate and reward milestone achievement and positive progress frequently and liberally.

 4. Acknowledge roadblocks, misfires and general problems quickly and calmly.  Your appropriate reaction to these occurrences will contribute to building an effective working environment where people can honestly and openly deal with the negative as well as the positive.

 5. Foster a culture that treats problems as opportunity for creativity and innovation. More than lip-service is required here. Let teams experiment and implement new ideas to fix or improve and challenge them to keep improving.

6. Seek out and deal with poor performers promptly and fairly.  As the saying goes, one bad apple can ruin the whole bushel, and the same is true with teams. Your handling of poor performers (professionally and timely of course) sends a powerful message to your team.  You build accountability into the culture by reinforcing that a mistake is a learning experience, repeated mistakes are a developmental or training opportunities and chronic poor performance is a reason for reassignment or dismissal.

 7. Set and share expectations for your own performance and be open about your progress and your own misfires.  The team needs to see that you practice what you preach.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Great performance is a function of many factors. While the formula may vary a bit from team to team, alignment on goals, a culture of accountability, clear expectations and constant assessment of performance versus expectations are core to the recipe for success everywhere.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com/blog/

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , , ,

Leading in the Matrix-7 Ideas to Cultivate the Right Skills

April 11, 2012 By 5 Comments

The sub-topic in a recent research release by Global Consulting Firm, Hay Group, suggests the skills needed in effectively leading in matrixed environments (empathy, conflict management, influence and self-awareness) for those below senior management “proved to be scarce across Hay Group’s database.”

While the primary topic of the research release, “Women Poised to Lead in Matrix Work Environments” is provocative enough for me to have invited an executive from Hay Group to an upcoming episode of The Leadership Caffeine Podcast, it’s this secondary issue that truly lights my fuse and should light yours as well. (And OK, raise your hand if you didn’t intuitively suspect there was a gender difference for the above described attributes.)

If speed, adaptability, learning…and the need to innovate are more than buzzwords and corporate clichés, but in fact are the requirements for success in this fast-moving world, then building cultures, teams and people capable of succeeding in the matrix must be a priority.

This type of “stuff” tends to get lumped into the squishy, touchy-feely bucket by many leaders. That’s too bad, because the need for people who display those skills is critical, and the opportunities for those who cultivate and apply them, nearly endless. 

7 Ideas to Promote Better Matrix Leadership Skills Across the Organization:

1. Build a common vocabulary for the matrix leadership skills. Terms like emotional and social intelligence, empathy and influence are not foreign to most of us, but our definitions and understanding of them are often very different. Ensure that you identify and describe the behaviors that reflect those skills as well.

2. Don’t immediately relegate this cultural change issue of strengthening matrix leadership skills to an HR or Training task. Those groups are enablers and even stakeholders, but the CEO must be the Executive Sponsor and Champion of this culture change, and there’s much more to effecting culture change than simply creating a program or initiative in HR or Training.

3. Senior Executives need to model the behaviors. If Hay’s research applies and if your firm happens to be mostly male at the top, these behaviors/skills may not be on display. We love to mirror those in authority, and if “the do doesn’t match the tell,” talk of a culture change will be just that…followed by laughter and sarcasm.

4. Start small by working with the “integrators” in your organization. Consider working with groups of professionals who serve as integrators…those who primarily work across boundaries and who have the ability to influence broader groups. A great starting point…focus on training and coaching your project managers and work with them to bring approaches, tools and even accountability to their project groups.

5. Land and expand. Leverage the results of smaller and early initiatives to create awareness of and promote good matrix leadership behaviors by building tools (training, coaching models and accountability tools) to support strengthening of this cultural change. Move from the integrators to the managers, supervisors and team leaders.

6. Create heroes and heroic stories out of successful teams and individuals. Nothing supports a culture like heroic successes. Bring visibility to project teams and leaders who create value. This is a powerful means of building institutional memory.

7. Accept that what gets measured gets done. Find ways to assess performance and growth in matrix leadership skills. Expect to experiment here…but get started and keep improving.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The whole premise here is that speed, adaptability, the ability to motivate, inspire and succeed in an ever-changing and complex matrix environment is more and more the way firms and people work and succeed. If the premise holds, then it’s up to us as senior leaders to support the movement away from 19th century management approaches to something that looks and feels right for this squishy, ever-changing world we live and work in.

Oh, and by the way…for those of you waiting for your organizations to support your development here, cut it out. You own your own development. Strengthening your ability to lead in the matrix is a great place to start.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com/blog/

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Why You Might Want to Pause Before Voicing that Decision

April 2, 2012 By 2 Comments

image of a coffee cupThe next time an employee or a group is looking to you to make a tough decision, you might want to screw up your courage, boldly look at them and…say nothing.

Teaching others to employ effective decision-making processes is one of the most important and often ignored responsibilities of those in leadership roles. Unfortunately, training your team to look to you for the calls on how to fix problems and move forward is much easier than teaching your team members to stand on their own for most issues.

You are fighting inertia when you pause and look to someone else or to a group to process on a decision. More than likely, you’re in a leadership role specifically because those above you developed trust in your decision-making abilities. It’s part of what got you this far, and now, you’re being asked to pause and to teach. Not voicing your decision is likely much harder than making it.

Too many managers incorrectly wield their decision-making authority, either because they are particularly comfortable in this role, or, because they view it as a symbol of strength or even power. Some use decision-making authority to control others.

Almost counter-intuitively, it takes more strength to not make a decision for someone else, especially when the answer is clear. And as for power, the old adage of you have to give it to get it is particularly relevant here.

7 Reasons Why You Should Back Off and Let Others Make Decisions:

1. Placing the responsibility for decisions on others is a sign of confidence and respect.

2. Showing others you are comfortable delegating decision-making enhances your leadership credibility.

3. Nobody learns anything when you make the decision.

4. You’re not always the smartest one in the room, even if you’re in charge.

5. The point in time when someone asks you what to do is one of those powerful teaching and developmental moments. Don’t squander it.

6.  You are able to assess where people and teams are at based on how they approach and make decisions.

7. Your skillful use of questions in lieu of immediate answers, helps people understand what’s important and how decisions potentially impact goal achievement.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

While I suggest pausing (in non-emergency situations) instead of offering up your quick solution, you still own the responsibility for the decisions of your team and team members. There’s no shirking responsibility for outcomes, particularly for the tough calls. However, you are also on the hook for developing others, stimulating innovation and promoting high performance and all of these are better supported and more often realized when you teach others how to make decisions. We know that you know the answer. Your real test is whether you can teach others to reach an answer as good as or better than yours.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

 

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , ,

Leaders, Principles and the Pursuit of High Performance Teams

March 28, 2012 By 2 Comments

“In high-performance teams, the leaders managed the principles and the principles managed the teams.” –Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto via Jim Highsmith in Agile Project Management-Creating Innovative Products.

Larson and LaFasto in their assessment of high performance teams offer us a profoundly powerful and simple to comprehend answer to the question of how to support the emergence of effective teams: clear, strong, actionable, livable principles beget an environment for effective collaboration and innovation.

Every high performance team I’ve experienced as a participant, a sponsor or an outside advisor, was governed by an overarching set of principles or values that formed and framed the culture. And while good words alone don’t create success, the combination of the leaders and participants living and acting according to those words everyday made things work.

On successful teams, the team leaders…and ultimately the participants eat and drink the principles for breakfast, communicate them constantly and most importantly, they live them in how they collaborate, problem-solve and challenge themselves and their team members forward in pursuit of success.

And since as we all know, even the best of teams face dark days when nothing goes right, the guiding principles serve as bedrock for self-reflection and guidance for navigating the way forward.

There’s a cautionary tale here. As Highsmith warns us, “Grand principles that generate no action are mere vapor.”  When engaging with an organization for the first time, I make it a habit to understand a firm’s values, and all too often, what I find are nice words…unarguable in their intent, that serve only to occupy space on a wall in a conference room. It’s a wholesale failure on the part of the leadership of an organization, when the guiding principles aren’t a visible part of everyday life.

Teams are a fact of life. We execute strategy via projects. We innovate on teams. We develop new products, improve processes and search for ways to better serve our customers via projects and teams. We darned well better figure out how to succeed at this more often than not. Right now, in too many organizations, “not” is winning.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This intangible, sticky, squishy topic of operationalizing guiding principles or values doesn’t lend itself well to a prescriptive list of steps-to-success. The onus is on you as a team leader, project leader, functional leader, informal leader or organizational leader to ensure that your best efforts are supported by meaningful, actionable guiding principles. If you can’t articulate what those principles are and what they mean for behavior, accountability and performance, then it’s time to take a step back and tackle this issue. The effort will pay dividends going forward. Larson and LaFasto are right…leaders should manage the principles and the principles will manage the team.

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Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Performance, Project Management, Strategy, Values Tagged With: , , ,
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