Art Petty on Management

Art Petty on Management Has Changed and Moved

I don't like to do things small or simple, so in what I sincerely hope is the absolute last time I put myself and you through this, I have moved and changed the name of my blog. 

You will now find me at www.artpetty.com and the new name of the blog is Management Excellence.

As I'm writing this and realizing that most people that have moved blogs have basically had to start over from zero to build traffic, this seems like taking two steps in the wrong direction.  However, sometimes you have to step back to grow, and I've got some compelling reasons for making the move, including:

• Integrating my former corporate web site and my blog under one content management system.

• Creating a simpler url (artpetty.com...12 characters versus the almost 40 for this site).

• Gaining the tools and the control through a hosted blog so that I can easily add planned podcasts, webcasts, forums and other tools that I will roll out this year.

• Aligning my blog's name: Management Excellence with my personal mission to promote high performance, great leadership and the pursuit of excellence in business.  

All of the posts and hopefully, all of the comments have been moved to the new site, so 14 months,  160 plus essays and a tremendous number of thoughtful comments on best practices in leadership and strategy, project management, product management and marketing and sales, all remain part of the library. 

For those of you that subscribe via your favorite Reader or happen across this post via Search, please take the opportunity to visit the new Management Excellence site and click on the site's feed.  And don't forget to check out some of the new tools, including the live polls, free down-loadable tools and links and references to many other great resources.

Thanks so much for reading and referencing Art Petty on Management, and I hope to earn your confidence many times over in my new home at the Management Excellence blog!

Improve Strategy and Execution Planning with Project Management Practices

I’ve danced with this topic before (Struggling with Strategy? Think Project Management), and the more experience that I gain helping clients improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their strategic planning and execution program development activities through project management practices, the more sold I am on the approach.

In my experience, many of the biggest gaffes in strategy and execution planning processes occur because the common-sense steps of the Project Manager are ignored, often because a functional leader or worse yet, an executive is charged with running the project. 

Just a few areas where I’ve observed complete strategy project derailment because good project management practices were ignored:

• The meetings grind down in a never-ending sea of fact-finding, debate and then more debate.

• Instead of focusing on strategic issues, the discussions quickly shift to short-term operational issues.

• Tools are misapplied.

• The deliverables are a powerpoint deck and a bunch of disgruntled participants that realize that they will never get the time that they just wasted back again.

• Insular groups that practice strategic planning like it is a combination of Voodoo and a secret language, complete with a secret handshake for entry into meetings. 

• Ideas are generated, but there is no mechanism to turn them into actions.

• Actions take place but there are no mechanisms to evaluate relative success and gain lessons learned

• A strategy is created but the organization’s employees are not tuned in to the strategy well-enough to understand how to connect their priorities to the strategic objectives of the firm.

• The Voice of the Customer is never heard.

And so on…

Enter the Project Manager armed with skills required to improve the odds of success.  I encourage management teams to treat a strategic planning cycle as a series of projects, and to engage a senior-level project manager to run the process.

Suggestions to Improve Strategy and Execution Program Effectiveness include:

• Creation of a Charter and the assignment of an executive sponsor that is responsible for the success of the initiative.

• Identification of core Strategy Team members, and their responsibilities/accountabilities in the process.

• Development of a clear scope document that defines priorities and deliverables.

• Communication of the Charter and Scope materials by the Executive Sponsor and Project Manager to the broader organization to promote understanding and to gain support for involvement in data gathering and brainstorming as well as future sessions on execution.

• Project Manager working with the core strategy team to define up-front data needs, to help identify the project’s work breakdown structure and to coordinate scheduling and resources for upfront data gathering.

• On-going monitoring of work teams that are handling early phase data gathering, market assessments, customer interviews and competitor analysis.

• Monitoring and control of the project to ensure that it moves relatively smoothly through the phases from definition to data gathering, assessment, options identification, options analysis, options selection and execution program definition.

• Once options are identified and selected, these define logical projects, and the Project Manager and PM team are already in-place to hit the ground running in helping to move ideas into actions.

The Bottom-line for Now

The application of professional project management practices to the strategic planning and execution program development cycles of an organization can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that derail these programs. 

While the Project Manager cannot guarantee that the insights and actions developed during strategy are the right ones, he/she can take away the organizational-risk that so often rears its head to doom the best intended initiatives.  Instead of shooting yourself in both feet while running a footrace, let the Project Manager shoulder the weapon and leave you free to run fast and hard towards creating value for your customers and stakeholders. 

Sustaining Performance Excellence in Business and in Life

It genuinely bothers me when organizations spend years and untold dollars reinventing themselves and succeeding with a quality framework (i.e. Baldrige or Six Sigma) only to show up in the business press as an organization fighting for survival. 

It’s like the obese person with one foot in the grave suddenly committing to health on America’s Biggest Loser and at the end of the program, successfully completing a marathon. For a moment, life is good and our belief in our capacity to do anything that we set our mind to, restored.  Certainly the experience and lessons-learned during the successful journey to improve have changed this individual’s life for the better.  And then, we glance at the tabloid cover in the grocery store checkout line to see a picture of this fat then fit and now fat again individual working out with a box of Krispy Kremes.

I wrote a related post a few days ago with the harsh title of Change or Die, and upon second thought, the title should have been: Change & Sustain or Die.  Organizations and people are fairly adept at changing for a moment at the end of a gun barrel, but they are not so good at sustaining the change when the barrel is no longer pointing their way.

• There’s the former Baldrige winner that lost their CEO in an untimely passing.  The new leader took a cost cutting mentality and ended up cutting out programs and people critical to the organization’s focus on performance excellence.  The ensuing performance included a stint in bankruptcy.  That’s a bad case of the Baldrige Blues.

• Motorola is given large credit for helping create the Six Sigma Quality framework.  Their focus on process improvement and their Baldrige award are legendary and define the culture.  The company is fighting for survival, mired down in completely forgetting the Voice of the Customer in pursuit of endless elegant iterations of cell phones that no one wants.  Their imbalanced scorecard had them losing $12 for every device they sold last quarter and burning through billions with a “b” in cash over the last year. 

• Ford.  Enough said.

• GM, don’t get me started.

It’s not like Toyota withheld key information about the legendary Toyota Production System and the many other business practices that they learned by applying Deming’s principles, studying the writings of Henry Ford and the unique innovations in the operations of early supermarkets in the U.S.

• Circuit City.  See ya.  (OK, this one is unfair…they never achieved any form of recognizable Performance Excellence.)

The Bottom-Line For Now on Sustaining Performance Excellence

Leadership is always an issue when it comes to performance, and in my opinion, it is THE issue when it comes to sustaining excellence.  The various Quality frameworks offer essential directions for the never-ending journey in pursuit of creating value and continuously improving, but the secrete is that there is no final destination.

Achieving milestones and winning awards helps reinforce the progress on the journey, but leaders at all levels have to foster a culture that is perpetually dissatisfied.   The fact is that the market never sleeps, customer issues/needs change constantly and there are always competitors interested in taking your share of the customer’s budget.  

An MBA student reminded me the other night of Andy Grove’s (Intel) classic book and philosophy: Only the Paranoid Survive.  Perhaps we should work on a Balanced Scorecard measure for Paranoia.  Actually, that raises an interesting question.  What do your metrics and measures and scorecards truly tell you about whether you are continuing the upward climb or falling backwards, potentially into oblivion? 

Hey leaders, wake up.  Someone’s going to have you for lunch while you are busy basking in the glow of your latest quality award.  And speaking of lunch, do you know how long it will take you to work off that piece of carrot cake?  Just say no to the dessert and get to the gym tonight.  You're looking a little pudgy.

Another related post: Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measures Include a Warning Light?

In Search of a Quantifiable Return on Leadership Development

Every few months, I run head-on into a discussion with someone (usually a prospective client) about how to value the return from investments in leadership development.  The question is not asked as a means of qualifying my services, but rather as a genuine practitioner-to-practitioner inquiry, not dissimilar to what two MDs might talk about with respect to the latest treatment results for an experimental drug program.  The person asking knows as well as I do that Return on Leadership Development continues to be an elusive issue that no one has substantively put to rest, and that our best answers are no stronger than impassioned, qualitative opinions. 

The venerable consulting firm, McKinsey & Company in their latest issue of The McKinsey Quarterly (2008, Number 4) offers some exciting results showing: “the relationship between financial performance as measured by profit per employee and ten dimensions of global management talent.”  Their findings: “Companies scoring in the top third of the survey (when all ten dimensions were combined” earned significantly higher profit per employee than those in the bottom third."

The McKinsey results showed strong correlations in three specific areas:

• The creation of globally consistent talent evaluation processes

• The management of cultural diversity

• The mobility of global leaders.

McKinsey indicated that the firms scoring top-third in any of these three areas had a 70% chance of scoring in top-third for financial performance.  Alternatively, companies scoring poorly on these practices had a strong chance of ending up in the bottom third for financial performance.

This is exciting information for anyone and everyone interested in gauging the impact of leadership development initiatives on corporate performance, however, before we consider this case closed, it is important to note McKinsey’s own comment that, "the study results do not show any true evidence of causality, but rather that the results, strengthen our belief that these are important areas on which businesses and HR leaders should focus their attention.”  It always comes down to belief.  Welcome to my conversations, McKinsey.

Should it Be Return on Expectations?

Another interesting thought comes from Professor Albert Vicere who describes his experience facilitating a group of executives through a discussion on how to calculate a return on leadership development:

“Discussion on how to calculate a return on leadership development and learning investments were frustrating until we saw the light, stopped talking about return on investment (ROI), and began talking about return on expectations (ROE).  Participants agreed that due to all sorts of complications we may never be able to calculate a clear financial return on learning initiatives, but if we’re clear on what we’re trying to accomplish through leadership development and learning and if we measure our results against those expectations, we may have the data we need to prove the value of our investments.”

OK, at least this group is giving us a reason to accept that valuing leadership development is a tough task. It is good to know that a bunch of smart people sat around thinking about this dilemma and the best that they could come up with was looking at from a different perspective.  They may be right, and the careful expectation setting and measurement around very specific leadership development initiatives may just yield the elusive data that we’ve been seeking.

Is it time to sharpen Occam’s Razor?

More often than not,the rough translation of  Occam’s Razor: “All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best,” proves true.  My non-statistically significant, can’t prove causality hunch is that effective leadership development practices are part of a whole system and that attempting to value them independent of the other components, while intellectually stimulating, is essentially valueless.  This is perhaps like attempting to value the worth of having a healthy heart in a cancer ravaged body or a healthy body carrying an artery-clogged heart.  No matter how you look at it, the body and organizations function as complex systems and a problem in any one part can adversely impact issues across the entire system. 

Aren't These The True Measures of Leadership Development's Value:

•    Quality
•    Financial health and performance (company and versus industry)
•    Innovation
•    Ability to Execute on Strategy
•    Employee Satisfaction
•    Customer Satisfaction
•    Growth versus industry participants
•    Retention and advancement of the right people and elimination of others
•    Fulfillment of mission
•    Growing contribution to community and society

The Bottom-Line for Now

If these items are generally accepted and desirable outcomes of a well-functioning organization, then executives looking at their talent development programs should quit focusing on the search for discrete ROI measures, and instead focus on identifying those practices that are likely to contribute the most to the above.  We may not prove causality, but just like McKinsey, it is my belief that focusing on becoming great at the right few talent and leadership development practices will yield higher performance than not focusing on these issues.  My vote says focus on: individual development planning, feedback and widespread involvement in strategy creation and execution, and the results will come and the other leadership development pieces will naturally fall into place.  Oh, and the decision on how to invest in development activities is a management team decision, not just an HR call.  Leadership Development is everyone’s business.

Has Your Management Team Decided to Be Successful Yet?

It is always great fun to work with management groups interested in growing their businesses, pursuing a new and bold vision or embarking upon new strategic directions.  More often than not, these groups have enjoyed success, established themselves and their firm in a favorable position and have a common excitement about what the future might hold.  They also talk about the fact that change will be necessary for growth, and it is usually about this point that the wheels start wobbling.

For some reason, teams that heretofore were successful often struggle at the point in time where they recognize that the business must change, and that means that they must change along with it.  We all know that the talents and skills that help launch a successful start-up may not be the same talents and skills needed to reach $10 million in annual revenue.  And a $40 million dollar company is much different than a $10 million or the start-up from whence it came.  And so on. 

As alluring as a grand new vision or compelling growth plan for the future might be, everyone on a management team knows that pulling this off will require significant change to what has often been a comfortable situation.  The reactions are fascinating.  People quickly anchor in some form of defensive or offensive behavior. 

• The passive-aggressive type nods her head in the meeting and proceeds to resist change in her everyday actions and decisions. 

• The doom-sayer plays on the very real fear that teams have of not only not succeeding, but of potentially taking steps in the wrong direction.

•  The cultural cheerleader frets about the loss of “what made us great”. 

• The anti-establishment type highlights the burden that the new bureaucracy will impose on the organization. 

Often, the net result is paralysis while the Chief Executive processes on the seemingly real and genuine fears of his or her top lieutenants. This period of paralysis over change is what I refer to as the point in time where the management team has not decided to be successful.  It doesn’t’ mean they want to be unsuccessful, they just haven’t decided that they want to succeed by the new definition.  Prior to this point, success was clear.  Hit our numbers, do our jobs, satisfy our customers and repeat.  Going forward, deciding to be successful means all of those plus creating needed infrastructure, engaging new talent, inviting new faces to the table and much more. 

There is no doubt that the issue of taking a good thing and trying to make it better, bigger and stronger is a complex and emotional one for many humans.  There are scores of books written on the topic of leading change in business. (Some of the best come from John Kotter.)  My issue is simple, and it is generally targeted at the top executive (or executives plural).  There is a time for debate, there is a time to let people vent and posture, and there is soon after, a time to move forward.  This point in time reflects the “decision to succeed” and is manifested by a new set of behaviors:

• Discussions begin to address tough topics with a focus on fixing or improving, not placing blame.

• The “We Can’t” or the “We’ve Never” discussions turn into “Why Can’t We” and “What If” discussions that result in ideas, actions and experiments.

• Dialogue down the organization ladder and across silos starts to take on the tone and feeling of action and forward movement.

• Problems shift to resource issues, project priority calls and the need to create new processes and approaches for decision making.

• Talent identification, leadership development and succession planning take on a new urgency and are called out as key priorities.

The Bottom Line for Now

The point in time when a firm decides to succeed on an agenda of change is the beginning of a great and challenging experience for everyone involved.  We work to live, but it is much more fun to live and work and grow and strive with a team that decided to be a success.  Unfortunately, many teams never move out of the abyss of “not deciding to succeed” and they decline until a crisis shocks the system or they eventually disappear from the landscape.   If your firm has not yet decided to be successful, you owe it to yourself and the firm to help move that decision along.  It’s really quite simple.  Management Team: please quit standing in the way of your own success and get on with it. 

What's A Good Meeting Anyway?

I’ve heard the phrase “We had a good meeting,” or some derivative of it so many times that I’ve lost count.   Whenever I hear this meeting review or it’s ugly stepchild, “We talked about a lot at that meeting,” alarm bells start ringing, my spider sense tingles and I have to resist the sudden urge to scream. 

As best as I can tell, my visceral reaction(s) to “the good meeting” verbiage has a lot to do with the fact that when I politely inquire as to what made it good, I receive wishy-washy, touchy-feely kind of answers like: “ we reached a common understanding,” or, “we got on the same page,” or something else that tells me that there was no point to the meeting. 

With a bit more probing about the meeting outcome, I can usually satisfy my hypothesis that not only was there no point to the meeting and, there was no action-oriented outcome that when realized will move us one step closer to executing on a key strategy.  Last and not least, the “good meeting” vernacular is generally put forth by people that I view as Professional Meeting Attendees.  You know the type…an outlook calendar so full that it’s a lock there’s no time to do any work other than to show up at the next meeting. 

I’ve posted on my perspective about meetings before and offered some reasonable advice for ensuring productivity if you absolutely have to have a meeting.  (See: Leaders Are Your Meetings Straight Out of A Dilbert Comic Strip and How to Improve A Dysfunctional Meeting Culture Without Removing the Chairs.)  While not interested in repeating myself I feel duty bound to raise the flag on this rampant productivity killer that infects so many cultures. 

People grow accustomed to the comfort of the meeting room.  In most cultures, there is little accountability for meeting output, so it is at least in part a paid social experience.  People saunter in, crack jokes, catch up with colleagues and then ten minutes after the hour, the person that called the meeting pulls people to order.  Everyone gets serious for a few minutes, an issue is highlighted and then it is fascinating to watch the meeting masters at work.  A Professional Meeting Attendee knows that if he or she raises some sticky questions everyone will marvel at how on-top-of the issue that they are.  The Pro also knows that a few good questions will ensure that there will need to be a follow-up meeting, thus perpetuating their existence.  It’s Darwinian survival right in front of your eyes. 

The Bottom-Line for Now:

OK, I will end my rave with a few reminders for leaders everywhere:

• Strive to run meetings that have a purpose and a clear, action-oriented outcome.  (Brainstorming meetings are a separate issue..and they still need a purpose.)

• Teach by example with your own meetings.  Your rigor and discipline in managing meetings for productive information exchange and pointed outcome will serve as a model of meeting behavior for your subordinates to follow.

• Show up at the meetings that your subordinates meetings and provide coaching feedback soon after the meeting.  Your goal with the coaching feedback is to elicit behavioral change, so remember that you need to show up again (and again) in the future to monitor and provide feedback on progress.

• High-level executives are some of the biggest abusers of good meeting protocol.  This starts at the top. 

• Always tie meeting topics to strategic objectives.  If you cannot, consider killing the meeting.

• Beware recurring meetings on your calendar.  After a few sessions they tend to degrade.

• Take pride in running great, productive, action-oriented, strategically focused meetings.

• Never ever give up trying to promote effective meeting management!  It's an insidious productivity killer that requires constant vigilance.

Are You Making Progress?

Not surprisingly, it’s often difficult for senior executives and management teams to gain objective feedback on their individual and collective performance.   I’ve worked with clients and in organizations where the management team was generally satisfied with their own performance and would give themselves high marks at a time when the employees would give them lower or even failing grades.  In all cases where I’ve observed this perception gap, there was no objective, systematic means of measuring performance and perceptions in place.

During periods of widespread growth, the rising tide effect and decent numbers tend to support management’s belief that they are doing the right things to secure the future of the business.  Along comes a slowdown in the economy, a movement in the key metrics in the wrong direction and the painful recognition that all is not right in Camelot.  We all know what happens from here.  Top management runs around, holds a bunch of meetings with employees, consultants are invited in to help out, “strategy” becomes the new buzzword, lofty new goals are announced and somewhere in here there’s a reorganization or two.  (I don’t mean to sound cynical, but even in these enlightened times, this cycle is repeated over and over again.)

At least one critical component to avoiding the scenario above and to isolating on problem-areas before they manifest themselves as crises or at least significant organizational performance problems is to consistently monitor employee and leader perspectives on the issues and areas that count.  You can do this the hard and expensive way by investing in outside resources or you can take advantage of some remarkable and free resources courtesy of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program.

Baldrige Is About Performance:

While you may assume that the Baldrige program is focused on quality (that’s part of the story), it is also heavily focused on performance and on the integration of all of the systems and processes that interact to create sustained, outstanding performance.  The criteria for the award are covered in seven categories:

1. Leadership
2. Strategic planning
3. Customer and Market Focus
4. Measurement, Analysis, and Knowledge Management
5. Human Resource Focus
6. Process management
7. Results.  

According to the site, the intent of the program is to: help organizations enhance their competitiveness by focusing on two goals: delivering ever improving value to customers and improving overall organizational performance.

Part of the expansive set of tools available license and restriction free for you to use are two different, brief and easy to use survey instruments: Are We Making Progress? and Are We Making Progress as Leaders?  The surveys follow the seven categories described above, and ask leaders and employees to give their opinions of organizational effectiveness on the most critical issues that drive overall performance.  As a bonus, the site includes the aggregated survey ratings of the companies that applied for the award in previous years for your use in comparing your organization’s results.   All in all, these are some remarkably important and powerful tools available free for your use at the click of a mouse.

Observations and Suggestions: The Answers Are Closer Than They Appear: 

• Thoroughly read and digest the Criteria for Performance Excellence document(s) at the Baldrige site.  You might be surprised how much wisdom has been nicely aggregated over twenty plus years into some powerful and brief documents.  In my opinion, this 70+ page document has more insights between the covers than entire shelves of business books found in stores.

• Assess the gap between employee perspectives on organizational activities and effectiveness and your leadership teams perspectives by using the surveys.  Compare your results to the summary results of past year Baldridge candidates to develop some context for the gaps.  I promise that the results from this survey will be fascinating, eye opening and actionable.

• Leverage the survey results and the vast body of Baldrige tools and materials to architect a holistic and sustainable business improvement program that focuses on the key drivers of organizational performance.  You don’t have to search for the secret formula or even the answers…they are right in front of you, and in this case, neatly organized, well documented and supported by an ample body of cases for your use. 

The Bottom Line for Now:

If you’ve not studied Baldrige, you would be well served to fill that gap as part of your professional development(see my post, Back to School!).  There’s a remarkable amount of good common sense in gauging your organization’s performance and maturity against well-established criteria for success.  You don’t have to pursue a Baldrige award and I certainly am not interested in inviting debate over the efficacy of one discipline versus another (e.g. Six Sigma, ISO, Deming Award Criteria etc.).  However, I am interested in suggesting that a great starting point for figuring out what ails you is to ask people, to understand perception gaps, and to mine the gold from those gaps as part of your improvement programs. 

Do Your Employees Truly Believe That They Can Make A Difference?

I am busy preparing for my fall MBA teaching assignments and I tripped across an interesting survey about employees and change (circa 2006) in the excellent text: Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence by Evans and Lindsay. (Note, contrary to my comments regarding some other management texts that I’ve run across, this one has a great deal to offer both the student and the instructor.)

The survey of Fortune 500 employees offered an interesting insight into what your employees might really be thinking while you as a leader are delivering yet again, another of your famous “take risks, innovate, create and you are empowered” pep talks.  The survey results said that 79% of respondents understood that they were accountable for “taking initiative and bringing about change,”40% of the respondents indicated: “they do not believe that they can make a personal contribution.” 

While employees are often appropriately cynical about the disingenuous cheerleading of many leaders, if you’ve got 4 out of 10 members of your firm “not believing” that they can make a personal difference in the firm’s success, you’ve got a crisis on your hands! 

I’ve written in prior posts that a leader should strive to ensure that everyone in a firm can pass the “Walk in the Door” test.  Simply stated, everyone in the organization must be able to connect their priorities to a firm’s key objectives and strategies when they walk in or log on to begin their day’s work.  Easy to write, hard to realize, but definitely not impossible to achieve.  However, if 4 out of 10 employees don’t buy in to the belief that they can and will make a difference to a firm’s performance, my speculation is that “To Do” lists are filled with Urgent but Unimportant tasks that fill time and ultimately come to represent a person’s corporate existence. 

Leadership Root Causes of the 40% Malaise Organization:

1. Leaders lack credibility to help bring about change.  People have heard the same pitches over and over again, but have not seen leaders step up and remove impediments or make the process and structural changes needed to allow people to create.
2. The leaders talk change, but the bureaucratic procedures and silo politics serve to flush any hope for change down the drain.
3. Leaders have failed to create proper awareness of a galvanizing vision and supporting strategy.  Vision and strategy are likely abstract concepts to most employees in a 40% Malaise Organization. 
4. Communication is likely stilted and tough discussions avoided, or worse, discouraged or even punished.
5. Systems and processes fight change and directly contradict the lofty exhortations of the leaders.
6. Accountability for results is fuzzy.  Malaise prospers and spreads in environment where accountability is kept in the closet, like mildew in a damp basement.

The Cure(s): Apply Some Good Leadership Common Sense Quickly:

• It’s hard to resist the “fire the leaders” that got you here in the first place.  If you are the new leader at the top of your organization or team, give this one some strong consideration.  Otherwise, keep reading.

• Quit talking and start listening and acting.  The problem and the solutions are in your court.  Seek to understand the level and depth of the malaise and why your associates believe that they cannot make a difference.  What are the impediments?  What systems, processes or behaviors confounding attempts at change and creativity?  What management practices have ripped the heart out of any desire for people to solve the big problems?

• Provide people with context for the firm’s situation and build widespread awareness of a clear vision for the future.  Ask everyone how to realize the vision and begin involving a broad swath of the population in defining strategies and actions.  Create and publicize victories for teams and individuals as small changes take root and big changes begin to develop.

• Open communication channels, encourage and reward individuals willing to identify problems and solutions to tough issues.  Hold your leadership team accountable to listening to ideas and acting on removing impediments.  Eliminate the leaders that are more concerned with politics than results and replace them with leaders that understand what it takes to help a culture evolve at light-speed.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Every leader should spend a few minutes at night staring at the ceiling and pondering whether his or her employees are truly engaged in helping the business advance.  If your perception is that the answer is "Yes," ask yourself how you can truly be certain.  A company marches forward on attitude, and if the attitude is that “my input doesn’t matter,” you’re in deep trouble.  It’s time to quit talking and start asking, listening and acting.  How engaged are your employees?

Lousy Customer Service Starts with Sloppy Leadership

Fresh off of a vacation and what seems like a thousand or so “interactions” with various service providers and merchants, I continue to be perplexed as to why we as consumers so easily accept and by default, encourage lousy customer service in our daily lives.  To my observation, receiving poor customer service is more the rule today than the exception. 

I’ve wondered if it’s just me eliciting the questionable service, but I have a standing policy to greet every retail/front-desk/agent/clerk/teller with a smile and a nice greeting in an attempt to create a positive exchange.  I can tell in a nanosecond of my approach whether the experience will be good or bad based on the response.  Too many experiences with large and small organizations end up in the negative column.

While I am fascinated (morbidly so) at the number of people that make their living through customer contact that don’t understand how to contact customers, I am mortified at the sloppy leadership practices and sloppy leaders that allow poor customer service to rule the day.  My armchair diagnosis is that these leaders suffer from an unhealthy mix of arrogance, apathy and ignorance.  They either don’t give a damn or don’t know.  Both are inexcusable. 

Aside from the obvious relationship destroying, bad-will creating outcome of delivering poor customer service at the point-of-sale, consider the bigger picture.   An organization spends an incredible amount of time and money in creating products and services, enticing you to try their offering and just when they finally have you where they want you, they shoot themselves in the proverbial foot by creating a miserable customer experience.   For example, I receive better service from neighborhood kids selling lemonade than most people receive from almost anyone in the U.S. airline industry. 

For decades, U.S. manufacturers ignored the rising quality standards in global competitors, and seemed genuinely perplexed when consumers voted with their wallets in favor of the best product, regardless of origin.  It took a few more decades for the firms that survived to recognize that designing quality into the product and processes wasn’t a new management fad, but rather it was the price of admission.  I see the same thing happening with customer service.

9 Suggestions on Customer Service for Executives, Leaders and Managers Everywhere:

1. Come to grips with the value creating, brand strengthening, loyalty building, buzz generating, lifetime value maximizing power of great customer service. 
2. Alternatively, come to grips with the cost-wasting, bad-will generating, brand destroying, competitor enriching power of lousy customer service.
3. Figure out what “great customer service” means to your customers and turn your organization upside down in pursuit of delivering it.
4. Design customer service into your offerings and processes just as you now design quality into your offerings.  Customer Service is a part of your “augmented” product. Fixing customer service after the fact is a lot more costly in many ways than building it into your organization and offerings up front.
5. Beware the lure of cost-cutting measures that have the potential to adversely affect customers.  Evaluate the customer impact carefully before proceeding.
6. Delegate power to satisfy customers down to the lowest possible point in the organization.
7. Reinforce a culture of customer service excellence by measuring, monitoring and rewarding for performance as well as for identifying and implementing improvements.
8. Seek specific, direct feedback from customers on their experiences.  Surveys are OK, observing, talking and asking questions are all much more tangible.
9. Get out from behind your desk and spend time where your firm comes in contact with customers.  Become a customer and evaluate your own experience.

Suggestions for Consumers Everywhere

• Vote with your wallet every single day. 

• Tell everyone about your experiences…good and bad.

• If you are in a hospitality environment, tip lavishly for great service, and remember to tell the server and the server’s manager about your experience.  (Do the same, minus the tip part for lousy service.)

The Bottom-Line for Now:

There is no excuse for lousy customer service ever.  Poor customer service is either a philosophical failure on the part of leadership or a failure to execute.  Regardless of the cause, the impact is the same. Poor customer service destroys your value proposition in the marketplace and degrades the efforts of everyone in the organization.  Is great customer service more than just a slogan in your organization?

Constancy of Purpose In Pursuit of Success

Deming’s first of his 14 Points for Management reads: Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

The phrase, “Constancy of Purpose” strikes me as perhaps the best way I’ve heard to describe that intangible but palpable drive that propels the most effective individuals and the most successful organizations. 

Instead of being singularly focused in pursuit of our goals, most professionals that I know struggle to find even a shred of time to work on the most important priorities.  It’s not that they don’t have the time, but rather, they allow the noise in the environment to keep them from focusing. 

Other individuals fail to recognize their true priorities, or at least they fail to understand how to connect their priorities to the firm’s priorities, and as a result, they work on what they want to, or they do little or nothing at all.  This is as much a leadership failure as it is the failure of the individual.

I marvel at top executives that talk about “empowered employees” and hold round-tables and town-hall meetings in an effort to create the illusion of focus and connectedness, but that fail to figure out how to light the fuse that creates the constancy of purpose in the minds and hearts of every single individual in the organization.  These leaders understand that they are supposed to do something, and as a result, they drive a lot of activities but don’t necessarily create a constancy of purpose in the organization. In military parlance, they are “all action and no vector.”

Organizations and individuals march forward when they have a clear goal and sight and are driven by some deep collective conviction that when successful, the world will be a better place, that they will be better professionals and that their positions and as a result, their families will be secure.  The earlier that a leader understands that creating “constancy of purpose” is a core task, the faster they are on their way to truly fulfilling their obligation and responsibility as a leader.

Creating Constancy of Purpose on Your Team:

• Don’t assume that everyone around or under you understands why they are there and what their priorities are.  It is up to you as leader to provide this critical context.

• Constantly focus on connecting your team’s output and activities to the organization’s big picture.

• In the absence of a broad organization “constancy of purpose” (most environments), it is up to you as leader to manufacture one for your team.  Better yet, engage your team in creating their own overarching purpose.  Just remember that you still need to plug it into the organization’s pursuit of success, however success is defined.

• The best ideas often reside in the minds of the quietest people.  Create opportunities for the silent but brilliant individuals to contribute.  

• Everyone drifts from the true north of their priorities—you need to allow an appropriate amount of drift for individuals and teams and no when and how to help them reorient.

• If you are at the top of the food chain, you do own mission, vision and values, and they need to be much more than posters on the wall in conference rooms and lobbies.  You cannot spend enough time thinking about and working on making the mission, vision and values come alive for the organization.  It’s not a campaign or a one-off meeting…your goal is to make these often trivial and trivialized words serve as the rallying cry and standards for performance and behavior.

The Bottom Line for Now:

Leadership is profession and leading is a true privilege.  This most difficult of all human endeavors—leading, motivating and guiding teams to achieve can be done by seeking compliance or providing inspiration.  I’ll place my bet on the leader that fuels the collective and individual passions of a firm’s employees.  What’s your firm's Constancy of Purpose?