Category: Organizational Excellence

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The Recipe For Mediocre

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I hope you had a great  Thanksgiving!

With the New Year coming up, I bet you’re starting to think about new goals for your business. I would also bet that your goal is not to be mediocre in 2011.

I’ve just made a short video that will change your perpective on what makes us great vs. mediocre.
In this video, you’ll learn:
  • What most of us spend 80% of our time doing and how it keeps us from being great.
  • The real meaning of “well rounded”
  • How to create an extraordinary team
Be sure to watch the video right now. Just click here or on the image below). It’ll only take you about 2 minutes and it will dramatically improve your business and your life.

After you watch the video, be sure to check out the tools (team coaching, individual coaching and products) I have available to help you take the next step.

Break through and make it happen!

Mike
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The Golden Rule Doesn’t Work Part 2

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In our last video, we challenged your long held beliefs about the Golden Rule. We talked about treating people the way THEY wanted to be treated instead of how WE wanted to be treated.

The challenge is in finding out how other people want to be treated. Most of us don’t have a clue.

In this video, you’ll learn  
  • Why asking someone how they want to be treated almost never works
  • How do use behavioral interviewing as a leadership tool
Be sure to watch the video right now. Just click here or on the image below). It’ll only take you about 2 minutes and it will dramatically improve your business and your life.
 
After you watch the video, be sure to check out the tools (coaching and products) I have available to help you take the next step.
 
Break through and make it happen!
 
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Argh! Do I have to go to another meeting today?

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Which of these situations has happened to you?

  • In your last meeting, did you walk out without a clear idea of what you were supposed to do?
  • Have you looked around a meeting and wondered why all those people were invited?
  • Have you calculated how much money your organization is “spending” waiting for meetings to start?

We all know that business can’t operate without meetings – meetings to plan, meetings for updates, meetings to keep communication lines open.   However, effectively-run meetings are often hard to find in the workplace.  A survey by Hofstra University projected that over $40 billion is wasted on mismanaged meetings every year.   Since there are between 11 million and 33 million meetings conducted in the United States every day, the business of meetings is critical to everyone’s continued success.

As a result of discussions with a cross-section of employees and organizations, we’ve put together a Top Five list of tips for effective meetings. 

Tip #1:  Communicate the goal and the agenda for the meeting.  Publicize that goal when you schedule the meeting, and then evaluate every topic against that goal – if the discussion doesn’t support the goal, then it shouldn’t be in the agenda.   At Intel Corporation, they keep a poster in every meeting room that says “Do you know the purpose of this meeting?”  How many meetings actually include a firm agenda that is published in advance to all the attendees?  An agenda should clearly state the topics, an approximate length for discussion, the “owner” of each topic, and action steps for each topic. 

Tip #2:  Identify the meeting participants.  Recent research shows that after the first seven participants, every additional person lowers the productivity of the group in a meeting.   Wow!  Consider your own meetings – how many do you go to that have more than seven participants?  Consider who really needs to attend based on the agenda.  Also, remember that the more people invited to the meeting, the longer the meeting will take.

Tip #3:  Establish the ground rules for the meeting.  Some typical items to include in the ground rules are when agendas are due to participants, the use of technology in a meeting, and start and end times.  Designate a time keeper who is not the meeting organizer.  One of the biggest time wasters is meetings that don’t start and end on time – wouldn’t you agree? 

Tip #4:  Use a Parking Lot.   A Parking Lot is a place to put topics that fall outside the meeting agenda – or that should be postponed for later.   Some meeting organizers use visual Parking Lots – such as a piece of large paper posted on the wall where ideas can be posted during meetings so they don’t get lost.  Some meeting organizers simply record parking lot ideas on a pad of paper – or assign someone to capture them and send the list out for inclusion in future meeting agendas.  The disciplined use of a “parking lot” will keep your meetings on track and on agenda.

Tip #5:  Set Clear Action Items.  Establish what is next, how will it be done, who is responsible, and deadline details before you leave the meeting.   How do you hold people accountable in your meetings?  Even if you are not the meeting organizer, you can still push for accountability – remind the host to set clear next steps and timelines.

Bonus Tip:  Evaluate Your Meetings.   Periodically, take the time to review the regular meetings in your organization.  Do they all still have a clear purpose?  Are they the right length?   Are the right people attending?  What needs to change in order to make your meetings more effective?

As a final thought, consider this quote from Patrick Lencioni’s book, Death by Meeting, “Most executives I know spend hours sending email, leaving voice mail, and roaming the halls to clarify issues that should have been made clear during a meeting in the first place … I have no doubt that sneaker time is the most subtle, dangerous, and underestimated black hole in corporate America.” 

What is your biggest meeting challenge?  We want to hear from you.  Write to us and share your stories and your ideas.   And if you want to dive deeper into this topic – and especially how to make your meetings more effective even when you are not in charge of them, email us at mgoldman@pb-coach.com.

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Moments of Truth In The Customer Experience

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Nancy complains, “Why can’t they get their act together? This is so frustrating. The first person I talked to wasn’t even nice. The second person was much nicer but couldn’t make a decision. I got sent to a technician and got lost in their phone system. It turns out they don’t have the fix I need. Then when I try to return what I bought, it sounds like the person in accounting doesn’t even know what to do to give me a credit.”

Has this ever happened to you? Not a pleasant customer experience.

Each organization’s moments of truth are when it touches each customer. Is the customer experience delightful, positive and successful? The whole point of all the company’s strategizing, structuring, systematizing, training, employment practices, service/product creation and testing, marketing and sales efforts, is to get that customer to buy and to buy multiple times. Most of us have heard that it takes 5 times as much money to get a new customer as a repeat customer. Also, we’ve heard that raising customer loyalty by 5% can increase profitability from 25-100%. So creating that positive customer experience (first time and every time) is the focus of everything we do when we build a business. Whether or not we’re thinking about ‘total customer experience,’ the customer is always thinking:  Do I like this? Will I stay? Will I come back? Is the product/service good? Is it worth the hassle if other parts of the experience are not good?  Will I tell other people about my good/bad experience?

So if your organization’s total efforts are not leading to good customer experiences, you are missing the boat and leaving money on the table.

What goes into the Total Customer Experience?

Let’s look at Nancy’s complaint and the ‘moments of truth’ that are revealed. What does it mean ‘to get their act together?’

Emotional Connection – The first person wasn’t even nice. People buy from people they know, like and trust. If someone isn’t personable, caring and relating to Nancy as a unique human being, your company isn’t even getting to first base.

Empowered Decision Making – Too bad Nancy had to get passed around.  It’s frustrating to get passed from person to person until there is finally someone who has any authority.. Companies who are recognized for their superior customer experiences empower the person who answers the phone to make most decisions. In order to make this happen, they recruit wisely and invest in developing their people to make good decisions, to buy into the company’s values and vision, to understand the customer’s needs, to gather feedback. 

Infrastructure – The phone system, the staff’s capabilities using phone and technology, availability of information about each customer (customer relationship management), knowledge database,  technology to track trouble tickets or complaints. This kind of infrastructure allows caring staff to do a better job with the resources they need. It allows for quicker troubleshooting and availability of information on a broader basis for more empowered decision making. It would have allowed Nancy to find out sooner rather than later that ‘the fix’ she needed wasn’t available. But even better it would collect information about how many customers were having the same issue so the company could create ‘the fix’ sooner and take the issue off the table.

Systems – If the accounting team had a documented system for handling returns and credits, and each person was trained in it, then Nancy would not have had such a terrible experience. In fact, if the processes were really systematized and the right infrastructure was in place, the initial person who took the call could have handled it himself.

These are just a few of the things that companies who manage the total customer experience look at. Of course, it all starts with leadership. Leaders who get their heads out of the sand and recognize the importance of the customer experience want to infuse attention to the customer experience as they do strategic planning, diagram the organizational structure, create systems and processes in all departments, design their internal reward and recognition structures, and recruit, develop and empower their personnel. That’s what Nancy’s comment about ‘getting their act together’ is really all about.

If you have a story about a really great customer experience, please share it here along with your thoughts about the components that came together to create the delightful experience you had. Thanks for sharing.