Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

GROW

Do the post-project review before you start the project

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Sounds nuts, I know, but according to research by psychologist Gary Klein, it’s a great way to improve the actual outcome of your projects.

But before we go into details, there is an additional benefit that fits in with this month’s theme of improving how our top management teams function.

You see if you perform what Klein calls a pre-mortem on your projects, you are also providing a psychologically safe space for your team to voice disagreement or worries without being labelled as negative spoilsports or even worse being seen as disloyal.

So how do you do it? You make a plan for the project in your usual way, or maybe it is just a plan how you are going to execute the day with your team. When everyone is happy that we now have a plan, you announce:

“I am sorry to tell you but it has turned out that project (X) was an unprecedented disaster. Please give me your ideas as what could have happened to derail the project so badly.”

This is a very different question from asking: “So what could go wrong?” When we ask the ‘what could go wrong’ question, voicing your doubts on the team can be much trickier and often decidedly outside the psychological safety zone.

Now, everyone gets out a pad of paper and brainstorms with themselves 3-5 ways that this project could have been totally derailed, or that this day that we planned so carefully ended up a total disaster.

On a whiteboard or a flip-chart, draw a 2×2 as shown below:

Now ask each person to read out their ideas as to why this day/ project went wrong. As they do, note the item in the appropriate square.

Now you have an overview of what problems we might encounter, sorted in a practical way. Discuss how to create proactive solutions where you can see the need and make a backup plan for the issues that you can see could happen under a certain set of circumstances.

You have now achieved two things:

1) You have proactively identified a number of issues that you would probably not have discovered until it was too late.

2) More importantly, you have provided a safe space where it is possible to actually discuss the proverbial elephant in the room. Instead of a messy feedback session loaded with blame and critique, you have made it possible to voice doubts in a constructive way regardless of hierarchies or departmental boundaries.

The method is called ‘prospective hindsight’ and according to Author Karl Weick, it can improve people’s ability to predict the reasons for future outcomes by 30%.

Your top management team may need a hard ‘reset’.

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Harvard professor Dr. Robert Kegan says:

“Let’s be blunt: In the ordinary organization, nearly everyone is doing a second job no one is paying them for — namely, hiding their weaknesses, looking good, covering their rear ends, managing other people’s favorable impression of them. This is the single biggest waste of a company’s resources.”

And the way I look at it is that the better they are at that second job, the more dysfunctional the management teams become…

So what to do about it? How to stop the madness?

Again, according to Kegan, it requires a different mindset, a culture that goes something like this:

“We hired you because we thought you were good, not because we thought you were perfect. We are all here to get better, and the only way we will get better is to make mistakes, reveal our limitations, and support each other to overcome them.”

And that, says Kegan, is the starting point. That is the basic foundation of how to create what he and co-author Dr. Lisa Lahey have labelled the DDO a Deliberately Developmental Organization in their book: An everyone culture.

In that culture, we would not need to spend time on our second job at all but would use the time more productively to develop ourselves each other and the organisation. This is not as utopian as you might think, but it definitely requires a hard ‘ RESET’ of how the team interacts with each other.

A good place to start might be to go off-site for 2-3 days and agree on a new set of ground rules for collaboration development and growth. There are various ways to do that. One of my favourite frameworks is using Peter Blocks six conversations as the agenda for the retreat.

  1. Invitation conversation. Transformation occurs through choices, not mandates. Invitation is the call to create an alternative future. What is the invitation we can make to support people to participate and own the relationships, tasks, and process that lead to success?
  2. Possibility conversation. This focuses on what we want our future to be as opposed to problem-solving the past. It frees people to innovate, challenge the status quo, break new ground and create new futures that make a difference.
  3. Ownership conversation. This conversation focuses on whose organization or task is this? It asks: How have I contributed to creating current reality? Confusion, blame and waiting for someone else to change are a defense against ownership and personal power.
  4. Dissent conversation. This gives people the space to say no. If you can’t say no, your yes has no meaning. Give people a chance to express their doubts and reservations, as a way of clarifying their roles, needs and yearnings within the vision and mission. Genuine commitment begins with doubt, and no is an expression of people finding their space and role in the strategy.
  5. Commitment conversation. This conversation is about making promises to peers about your contribution to the success. It asks: What promise am I willing to make to this enterprise? And, what price am I willing to pay for success? It is a promise for the sake of a larger purpose, not for personal return.
  6. Gifts conversation. Rather than focus on deficiencies and weaknesses, we focus on the gifts and assets we bring and capitalize on those to make the best and highest contribution. Confront people with their core gifts that can make the difference and change lives.

In my experience, it is well worthwhile to have a person who is not part of the team facilitate these conversations. So that each team member can participate freely without having another job to as well.

On the first evening, I also like to add a Life Map exercise in addition to the Six Conversations. After dinner, each participant takes 15-20 minutes to reflect on the path they have come along in life. They draw that as a graph or map using a template (you can have a copy  by simply entering your email below). Once everyone has completed the Life Map, they take turns sharing their story using the life map as the guide. This ALWAYS produces a much better understanding of why each of us is who we are. And ultimately that contributes to higher levels of trust in the group.

I also recomend the book: Community The Structure of Belonging By Peter Block

Why are so many top management teams borderline dysfunctional?

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“When we create something that is separate from something else, we create limits to our ability to see the interrelationships”
– Gregory Bateson.

For all practical purposes, organisations need organising in a way that makes it clear who does what. Departments, division or whatever.  But what we don’t always realise is that doing so comes at a price. Each entity is technically a holon; an entity on its own and part of something else and with that comes to ‘drives’, a power drive to realise itself and a ‘love’ drive toward unity with the bigger whole – What author Adam Kahane describes as a polarity of power and love in his book of the same name.

A polarity that is not well managed tends to tip to one side and become dysfunctional and ultimately self-destructive.

And therein lies the problem of the dysfunctional management teams. It is built into the system, no one pays attention to the need for a balancing of the polarities. On the contrary, in most organisations, there is a built-in bias to feed the power polarity. Heads of department, division etc. are held responsible as opposed to encouraging taking responsibility.

Success as the head of a holon often produces career benefits, personal bonuses but rarely is there a bonus for valuing the common good over own interests. The focus from the CEO is nearly always on optimising each section in the hope that by doing so we will have the best total sum. They may talk about unity and one-team and all that but the way they design meeting agendas, reporting remuneration and bonus systems contradicts the nice intentions.

Only very rarely do I see a CEO (or management team for that matter) where there is a focus on balancing this polarity, which means that there is a more balanced focus on driving unity, wholeness, and interdependencies while toning down the hard boundaries.

Holding managers strictly responsible for their units ( holon’s) performance they will automatically react by insisting on very clear boundaries. This is my department, that is your department. How else can I take responsibility for what is not under my control? But that thinking completely overlooks the reality that all the departments are interrelated and that my success or failure is closely linked to your success failure. In fact, success is not entirely under their control at all.

The only way out of the rigid boundaries is to foster a culture where individual managers take responsibility, which is a totally different story, and where the management team holds themselves collectively responsible for the overall performance.

“Categorising your peers as either stupid or evil is a failure of empathy.”
– Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership by Peter Hawkins

The key driver of unity is obviously relationships. The better the personal relationship we have on the top management team, the easier it becomes to balance the polarity and think outside own personal interests and gains. But relationships, as we all know, don’ t emerge out of thin air, they require a serious effort, and maybe more than anything else they require an attitude from all concerned that: I will do whatever it takes to makes these relationships work.

Collaboration is a habit of mind, solidified by routine and predicated on openness, generosity, rigour and patience. It requires precise and fearless communication, without status, awe or intimidation. It’s hard because it allows no passengers.
– Heffernan (2013) “A bigger Prize”

If you are an eager student of leadership you will probably also have noticed that the polarity of power and Love is also the polarity of Management and Leadership.

Dysfunctional management teams are a bigger problem than you might think.

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It’s Monday morning. It’s time for the weekly management meeting. As they filter through the door, they look as if they are attending a funeral. They take their usual seats, open up their laptops and locate the agenda, not that they need to, they know it by heart, it’s always the same 5 items and the CEO starts out with item 1 and every one goes through the usual motions. The 5 people on the management team have been together for the past 3 years. They know the routine by heart. In fact, they know it so well they can almost predict how each of them will answer the questions from the CEO.

If you ask them individually, they all dread these meetings, they just want them to be over and done with. The CEO especially is frustrated. This is his team and they are so far from what we would consider a team as you can be. They are just a group that convenes to share some information that could probably have been just as easily shared on an intranet.

So some people would argue to change the meeting format, make it livelier, sit in bean bag chairs and use lots of post-its etc. But that is not the core problem. When the meetings play out like this, it is just a symptom of something much more serious going on. The core problem here is relationships, the top management team at best don’t have healthy relationships with each other. In the worst cases I have seen, I would even characterize them as toxic and dysfunctional.

Furthermore, the problem here is not so much that they have boring meetings that they all dread, that is their problem you could say. No, the real problem is that if they have rotten relationships with each other, it filters down throughout the organisations and contributes to the dreaded silo thinking. Invariably, employees take sides with their team leader and the relationships across departments suffer accordingly.

Not the best scenario when we are trying to create end-to-end seamless and breath-taking customer experiences.

Company culture starts with the culture in our management team; that sets the tone. That culture is primarily defined by the relationships in that group. If you really want to create a strong culture, you will need to invest time and effort in improving the relationships on your management team. Until you do, not much will change.

What is your experience of top management cultures and how they influence the rest of the system? Leave your comments below or contact me, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

There is more to a great employee experience than you think.

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When we design our customer experience, we typically focus on the touch points, moments of truth or my favourite moments of need. Whatever we choose to call them, these are the moments when the customer enters into contact with our service delivery system.

Typically (but not exclusively) the contact takes one of two forms: a human touch point or a mechanical/technical touch point, like a website, a check-in console or even an airplane seat. These are important moments that combined make up the full customer experience.

As I argued in my previous blog post, the human touch points have the highest potential to create the emotional connection that is crucial in our efforts to build loyalty, but they also carry the highest risk. If our human element does not deliver, it can be much worse than an automated experience. The mechanical touch point can generally be engineered to be emotionally neutral but rarely produces something that makes your heart sing. I recently checked in to one of these fully automated hotels. It was late, I was driving and just needed a bed for a few hours. All the automation worked, but I felt terribly lonely, with no human interaction whatsoever. There was nothing wrong with the product. But there was also nothing in that experience that would entice me to do it again or tell my friends (positively) about it.

The front line employee makes or breaks it

Our front line employee has the power to make or break the experience for our customer and if we want to make sure that our customer has the best possible experience, we need to make sure that our employee experience is the best possible. Sounds so evident, but that is not always what I observe out there.

So how do we design a great employee experience?

The starting point is behaviour.

When you think about your customer experience, your dream scenario is that your employee does ‘something’ that will make the customer feel appreciated, valued, looked after etc. This is why a lot of companies invest time and effort into training their staff to do certain things in a certain way and that is great. But it only takes us halfway to where we need to be. Because when our staff does things right, we only score 3-3,5 on a satisfaction scale of 1-5. The reason is that from a customer point of view, good is the expected level. You are not surprising them by being good, that is what they expect, and anyway most of your competitors are also ‘good’ otherwise they would not have even been in the game.

So in order to take the experience beyond the 3.5, we need to make an emotional connection. In practical terms, that means that the frontline staff need to invest a bit of themselves in the transaction. They will need to be flexible and adapt to each interaction and add to that interaction what they think would be meaningful to exactly this customer situation, be empathetic. It is not enough to say: ‘have a nice day’. That is not much better than the voice at the end of the escalator at the airport that says: Watch your step… watch your step… watch…

What drive positive service behaviours beyond just mechanically doing things right?

Motivation drives behaviour.

Motivation, engagement, mindset, call it what you like. But whatever you call it, let’s agree that it is some form of inner drive. The best service employee wants to do this. They enjoy being engaged and that is driven by how they feel. What influences how they feel?

The two primary drivers of how we feel on the job are: The culture that we are part of and the systems we are working with.

When we put all this together, we have the consultant’s favourite 2×2 matrix, but this one is a bit different because it is actually a very simple version of Ken Wilbers four quadrants in Integral Theory.

These four quadrants are interdependent. Change something in one and you affect the other three. If they become unbalanced in the sense that what is going on in one quadrant is not congruent with what we would like to see in another quadrant, then the ‘whole ‘ is not functioning optimally.

A simple example

A CEO called me to work with his group of middle managers. “They are not a team, they do not collaborate with each other and it is driving me nuts,” he said. “Can you please work with them and make that happen?”. So I asked him “What kind of remuneration system do they have?” Oh, he said, ” They get a handsome salary and they can earn a substantial individual bonus depending on how their department performs.”

Game over. As long as he maintains this ‘system’ of remuneration’, the ‘motivation’ for each of them is to do their best in they own department. There is no reason for them to collaborate. If he then further reinforces this by very strictly follow up on individual department performance, it just makes things even worse.

Understand the employee perspective through the 4 lenses

If you start analysing your service business using these four lenses, you very quickly start uncovering all sorts of things that are not congruent and therefore counter productive. The obvious ones are often in the ’System’ category. ‘Process’ or ways of working that are frustrating for front line employee but that nobody has done anything about. These we can often flesh out using Service Design tools like employee journey maps.

But the less obvious sources of disengagement come from the culture box and is typically related to what kind of psychological environment the supervisor and the supervisor’s boss is creating. As I have written about before here, culture beats strategy, always. We will take a closer look at that next week.

This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

Developing a customer centric experience strategy is not rocket science.

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Applying “outside” in thinking is at the heart of Service Design thinking and it is actually not as complicated as you may think. First of all, it is a question of shifting perspective as I have already explained in my previous post.  But then what?

We can learn the theories, understand the principles and all that good stuff. But nothing much happens if we don’t do something. And if we are looking for change well then we obviously need to do something that we have not been doing until now.

Here are a few ideas for you to get started.

1. Talk to your customers

Most of the service businesses I encounter do not build this into their service delivery time with the customer. By that, I mean encouraging front line staff to talk with customers. This is hugely important. Research has proven time and again that a superior service experience from a customer point of view is an experience where the person serving you talks to you about something that does have anything to do with the transaction. Small talk. This applies to Doctors, Libraries, Restaurant etc Always the same pattern. The obvious presupposes that you are delivering the basic product – If you can’t serve the hot food hot and the cold food cold as Bill Marriott writes then you need to go back to basics first

2. Actively harvest their feedback

While your front line staff is talking to customers, train them to harvest what the customer is experiencing.  Asking questions that explore the customer’s need. This requires more than just ‘ Is everything alright here?’  from a passing waitress.  What is needed is genuine interest, questions that show empathy. Make sure you have a way to capture what they are learning. This can be electronically on a notice board or you can gather teams of front line employee for a brief team session and ask them the question: What is something new or unexpected you have learnt about our customer this past week?

3. Act on their feedback

A hotel that I have been staying at quite a lot over the past years asked me to fill out feedback cards in my room.  On one occasion, I mentioned that their tea mugs on the self-service coffee tray in the room had no handle, and so when I filled it up with boiling water for tea, it becomes impossible to hold. On my next visit, there was a different cup in addition to the standard ones and a small note “Hope this works better”. And 4 weeks later, the handle-less mugs had disappeared. When we show our guests that we are listening, it encourages them to talk to us. On the note, make sure that someone answers comments on TripAdvisor, Facebook, etc. This is a basic psychology of reinforcing feedback loops. If you give nice feedback in return especially to people who praise you, and you thank them in a personal way, you are encouraging others to also want to give you positive feedback.

4. Make a fuss of your most loyal customers

Mechanical loyalty programs don’t cut it here. You need to show your most loyal customers that you actually do care about them, that you recognise that they are special. The only airline I know that does this really well is Air France. Yes, they have the frequent flyer miles and all that jazz, and that is fine. But when the stewardess singles me and maybe one or two others out on an otherwise full flight, addresses me by my name and then initiate some small talks about how it must be nice to be on my way home, I’ll be honest, I feel special. Much more than at my new barber shop that insists on stamping a loyalty card every time I come but still can’t remember my name, or that I actually do speak half decent French. Forget the bloody loyalty card, get personal with me and I will be loyal forever….

What else? What are some of your favourite customer centric actions? Click here and drop me a note.  Take the opportunity also to let me know if you are finding these blog posts helpful. It is always fun to hear from my readers, and hey! I got to take my own medicine… No?

 

How do you achieve the best value fit: Inside out or outside in?

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Everywhere you look, every ‘expert’  on service is telling you that the name of the game is to provide values. And that is true. No value, no business. Everytime you see a high profile brand or product tanks and disappears from the horizon, just think Nokia, Polaroid Kodak, it is basically because they lost it. From the customer perspective, they were no longer providing values.

In the drawing above, the square box represents the company’s offering. It is deliberately drawn as a square to illustrate that we often fall into the trap of having a set solution, a basic service package, our way of doing it. The polygon illustrates the uneven, ever-changing needs of our customers. So, when we overlay what we offer with what they need, we get three zones. The overlap represents the fit (A) where we meet customer needs. The better the fit, the more values we are providing. B is the part of our offering that we charge for, but what the customer does not actually need. And C is the money left lying on the table, in the sense that this is what the customer would really like, but they cannot find it with us and, therefore, either go without it (frustration) or source it from someone else.

Market leaders in a given segment easily get wrapped up in the beauties and benefits of their own products. When they do, the value fit shrinks.

Typically what happens is that they drift slowly from being the customer-centric companies that they were when they were created, and  as a result of over-focus on their own attributes and brilliance, they gradually become more and more product-centric.

This is the danger that lies in the asymmetry that is at the core of the service purchase. What the customer purchases is not what the supplier thinks he is selling. When we forget that, we get lost.

In order to avoid that, we need to understand the the crucial difference between an inside-out and outside-in  customer strategy

Basically you have three options:

  1. I stay behind my own walls, convinced that what I do is great. Great service, great product. It is so great that the world will always beat a path to my door, as they have done in the past. Those who are not here with me must be idiots.As a consequence, I become a hostage of my own past patterns. I look at and understand the world through a filter that is primarily composed of what has worked previously, not realising at all that none of the tomorrow’s problems will be solved with yesterday’s solutions.
  1. I venture to my window from time to time to look out and observe the world. Still, from the security of my own tower, I shake my head at what is going on out there and thank the Lord that I have the right solution. I may feel some concerns, or even frustrations, that out there “they” don’t get it. Maybe I should start thinking of ways to make them listen and understand, possibly turn up the advertising, or make more noise. Or maybe I should start by sending out a survey. I delude myself that I have understood the world by looking out the window.
  1. I leave the security of my tower. I stand next to my customers and together we look at what it is that I am offering. I even try to walk in their shoes for a while and gradually I start to understand what it really means to be in their place. It scares the living daylight out of me to suddenly be in such a vulnerable position.

Only option three will enable you to maximise the value fit.

That is is why the whole philosophy of Service Design Thinking is so important. This is the toolbox that will help you transition from inside out to outside in thinking in your organisation.

 

The real key to creating the eternally fantastic experience

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The Kano model teaches us that a service experience has 3 layers. There are basic attributes that need to be in place and that all services in a given category need to have to even qualify as a service. Then there are the performance features, attributes that define the better experience from the very basic experiences.  And finally, there is a category of attributes that we call delighters. Things that make our most loyal customers come back again and again. Not only do they come back, they also tell all their friends.

But as we saw in my previous blog post, the trouble with delighter is that they have a tendency to fade over time.   There is this notion of drift. Free high-speed internet in a cafe is a great example of this. So this puts all service providers under pressure to constantly innovate. They need to come up with new ways to delight their audience or risk fading into oblivion.

But there is actually another way to do it. There is one type of delighter that somehow never goes stale, that always stays fresh, and that is incredibly difficult for your competition to copy.

The key to understating this is likability.

Think about your own patterns. There are some services that you’re frequent not because of their physical attributes or technical specifications. You may even visit these services despite them not being quite up to par on some of these physical attributes. But there is one or often a whole crew of people that you find likeable. When I lived in Cape Town, we often used to go to Roberto’s. It was not the smartest cafe in town. It was also not the most elaborate culinary experience. But Roberto’s had one thing none of the smart cafes could match; there was Roberto and Roberto was immensely likable. Ah, you may be thinking, but that is a question of DNA, the Italians, the Greeks they know how to do to that, the rest of us don’t have those genes.

Not true.

As Rohit Bhargava explains in his lovely book Likeonomics, research has made the secret available. We know the components of likability and we can apply them to our own way of working and when can train our crew to practice these principles as well.

The key ingredients are: Truth, Relevance, Unselfishness, Simplicity, and Timing.

– Truth: you trust them. When the waiter says the special today is delicious, you know he would not say it if he did not actually mean it. He knows you and when he says you won’t enjoy that wine, you are so grateful

– Relevance: The service provider is not trying to upsell you like a robot (I so hate that expression “upsell”).  They make relevant suggestions that actually enhance your experience.

– Unselfishness: They go out of their way no matter what to make sure that you have a great time, even if it is not always the most convenient for them. A hotel where I have conducted workshops recently has two crews working the restaurant. One crew always sets the lunch table for my group in the window area where there is a pleasant view and lots of light. But it is the furthest from the kitchen. The other crew always sets the lunch table at the other end of the restaurant, not nearly as nice.  But it’s closer to the kitchen. One crew is likeable, the other one much less so. It comes through in all the little details of how they work because likeable is also an attitude.

– Simplicity.  As my vegetarian chef friend says to create a great salad, use only three ingredients; that is what makes it delicious and elegant.  As opposed to the salads where they dump the whole fridge into your salad bowl, they mean well I know, but…

– Timing:  The person servicing you understands empathy. They are aware of what is going on for you and they adapt their service delivery to suit you.  They understand the difference between coming in for dinner before a movie and coming in for dinner to celebrate your spouse’s birthday. And that is all about timing.

Now think again about some of those service experiences that you keep returning to again and again. I will bet you that it is because they are likeable.

And if you can implement these basic ingredients into your service experience, you have discovered the Holy Grail of delivering fantastic service experiences.   The concept is simple. The execution is what makes it hard.

Check out the book: Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth Behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action

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