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!

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?