Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

General

A culture of doing stuff

By

Dialog drives culture-2

“Only the leader can set the tone of the dialogue in the organization. Dialogue is the core of culture and the basic unit of work. How people talk to each other absolutely determines how well the organization will function. Is the dialogue stilted,politicized, fragmented and but covering ? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions. If it’s the former as it is in all too many companies, reality will never come to the surface.

You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue, one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor and informality.”

Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy (CEO Honeywell Int’l) and Ram Charan with Charles Buck.

Without trust no engagement…

By

Employee engagement seems to be the new buzzword.

Everybody understands that it is important but there seems to be quite a lot of confusion about how one gets to full engagement.

Each year the Gallup organization pours more oil on that fire when they publish their Employee Engagement Overview.

Year after year we see that somewhere between 60 and 70% of the workforce is not particularly engaged. And only somewhere between 15 and 20% depending on the region are actively engaged.

Apart from the fact that it means that a lot of people are leading lives that could be so much more fun, it is also problem seen from productivity point of view.

Engaged employees are anywhere between two and ten times more productive than employees that are not engaged.

From a service point of view there is also a world of difference between the service that a fully engaged employee will give a guest and what that same guest will receive from an employee that is more or less indifferent.

We have all tried both – and we all know what a difference it makes.

So understandably most companies would like to raise their engagement levels.

However in my view lack of engagement is just a symptom. The problem is trust or more correctly lack of trust.

It is great to be fascinated by customer loyalty and the net promoter score – as long as we understand what really drives that metric.

This is also why when we want to implement the concept of the service profit chain we can’t just focus on attracting loyal customers, however tempting that may be. We must start out by examining our own culture.

So how do we create trust

And James L. Heskett makes this point very clearly here:

Managers do what they say they will do. Make few promises and keep them all. Setting and meeting expectations is critical to creating high levels of trust

Simon Sinek says it all boils down to this:

whether a leader puts themselves or their people first, determines if they are worthy of our love and loyalty.

In his book Why Leaders Eat Last he makes this point brilliantly.
in the book he also demonstrates what it really takes to develop trust

There is also an interesting article on trust here:

Great leaders build a culture of courage in a climate of fear

Three slides that capture what this is all about

By

In the current isue of HBR theres is a very interesting and inpiring article on Netflix and their HR policy.

You can see the full deck here in slideshare

There is lot of inspire in stuftt in that deck but three slides realy strauck a cord with me:

Screen Shot 2014-01-28 at 10.42.08

—

Screen Shot 2014-01-28 at 10.42.21

—

Screen Shot 2014-01-28 at 10.42.37

The future of work … continued

By

I was going to write a blog post on this subject – and while researching it i found this, and thought well I can’t convey that message much better than this ;-)

And the reason i wanted to write about this was because i read this wonderfull book by Scott Berkun

YWP-COVER-FINAL

From the books website:

The new behind the scenes book where Berkun goes back to work on WordPress.com. Learn what it’s like to work at WordPress.com, the 15th most trafficked website in the world, where everyone works from home, no one uses email and dozens of improvements launch to customers every day. The Year Without Pants is the best book you will read about leadership, productivity, and creativity in the modern age.

Her are a few of my takeaways from the book :

– Most people doubt that online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don’t work either

– There is nothing wrong with tradition until you want progress: progress demands change, and change demands a reevaluation of what the traditions are for and how they are practiced

– … and the culture’s confidence that the best way to learn is to do – to think (but not for too long ) make decisions, learn from what happens, and repeat.

– the culture in any organisation is shaped every day by the behaviour of the most powerfull person in the room

And if you dont have time to read the book – take a look a this great talk by Scott at Google

And then you will probably want to read the book any way ;-)

Building the emotional connection

By

Here is a great example of a brand making the emotional connection

In my view a brand is a product that you have feelings for – it becomes a brand the moment you ‘care’ about it in some way.

That is also the reason why we spend so much time talking about the importance of generating customer loyalty when we work with implementation of the Service Profit Chain.
Emotions drive loyalty.

Your ‘product’ becomes a brand in your guests head as a result of the emotional connection that your staff makes with the guest.

The first step in brand building is therefore making that connection ( it is not advertising spend) – then you can always reinforce that with clever advertising as it is done here – but it starts with positive moments of truth

What does it mean to be a entrepreneurial learner?

By

“This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. This really means, how do you constantly look around you all the time for new ways, new resources to learn new things? That’s the sense of entrepreneur I’m talking about that now in the networked age almost gives us unlimited possibility.”

John Seely Brown at Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco 2012

Thank you to Jane Hart for drawing my attention to this.

Read Jane Harts follow up post on this here

Customer Loyalty – the magic formula

By

Most of us experience a market situation that can best be described as hyper-competition. Supply out strips demand in virtually any category you can think of.

When that plays out advertising becomes less and less useful because there is already so much of it that few people, if any pay attention to it.

So the name of the game is customer loyalty – trying to draw customers closer to us in such a way that they are less tempted to switch to the competitions latest bargain offer.

Many companies use a variety of sophisticated marketing tools and tricks to do this from simple punchcards that give you your 10Th coffee for free to more elaborate loyalty clubs like what many Air Lines have developed.

But I don’t think that bribing customers to come back is what really counts. It may produce some form of customer renetion but there is no emotional loyalty.

What is loyalty then if not retention or what is the difference you may ask?

Well, there are two reasons we need customer loyalty. One is the obvious, that it is much cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one.That is the Customer retention part.

But more importantly loyal customers tell their friends – in fact the more loyal they are the more they talk about it – and that is what makes the all important difference between mechanicaly loyal and emotionally loyal.

When you have positive emotional feelings about a product or a brand you become an ambassador or what Fred Reicheld calls a ‘promoter’.(Here is a quick overview of the Net Promotor Score system)

Obviously in order for customers to become loyal they must first of all be satisfied to some degree. Customer satisfaction is the prerequisite for customer loyalty. But how much customer satisfaction does it take to create lasting loyalty?

From deeply dissatisfied to relatively happy, nothing much happens. Then, as satisfaction becomes more than just satisfaction and turns into enthusiasm, loyalty increases sharply.

But notice that when we deliver the right service/product at the right price, at the right time, and to the agreed-upon specifications, we score a 3 or possibly a 3.5 if we are lucky.

“Hey! But that is not fair,” you might be thinking, “we are doing everything perfectly and just as agreed, and all we get is lukewarm feedback!”

Doing everything perfectly and as agreed upon is exactly the problem. When clients read your marketing material or listen to your sales pitch, they learn that you will do this, this, and this for them at this price and on such and such terms.

So, who will be impressed when you actually deliver on what you said you would deliver?

You are performing exactly as expected. If you do less, they will be annoyed. If you do more, they will be en route to enthusiasm. If what you do far exceeds their expectations, they will be ecstatic.

But what can we do more than delivering everything we said we would?

We can establish an emotional connection. And because so few companies get it, it is still unexpected. When we touch our customers emotionally we exceed their wildest expectations.

Just think of a wonderful service experience you have had at some point. What made it exceptional? The mechanical stuff or was it because some one touched you at an emotional level some how?

Nine times out of ten you will find that what creates enthusiasm and loyalty is an emotional connection.

So forget the punch cards and the bonus points – what you need to work on is your team.

It is the attitude and loyalty of your team to your business that drives true customer loyalty. ( see my previous post on Employee loyalty here)

Loyal employees create loyal customers – that is the magic formula and that is also at the heart of the Service Profit Chain