Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

GROW

A great manager is a rare bird…

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According to a recent blog post on HBR Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. But mostly they get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Gallup finds that great managers have the following talents:

They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
They create a culture of clear accountability.
They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

But…

Very few people are able to pull off all five of the requirements of good management. Most managers end up with team members who are at best indifferent toward their work — or are at worst hell-bent on spreading their negativity to colleagues and customers.

However, when companies can increase their number of talented managers and double the rate of engaged employees, they achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than their competition.

Read the full article on HBR her

What comes after the Service Profit Chain?

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What is great service?

Great customer experiences have an emergent quality. They arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Each one of them separately is quite simple – together they form a complex pattern that becomes an experience.

The challenge therefor lies not so much in the individual transaction – that is relatively easy – the art lies in the getting the combination right. The timing, the sequence the ’temperature’ – just like when you are baking a fruit cake.

When you bake a fruit cake you are in sync with you – hopefully. But when providing a great customer experience you need to be in ‘sync’ with everybody else (including the guest.) There needs to be a certain resonance between you and the rest of the crew.The better we ‘understand’ each other the easier it is to get it right.

The key word therefore is relations.

The way we interact with each other – the quality of that relationship – drives our collective thinking and sensitivity to the situation.
The way we think and feel about what is going on has a huge influence on the quality of our actions. And as we all know the quality of our actions at the end of the day drives the quality of our results.

Which then brings us back full circle to where we started, because what we achieve and the way we achieve it drives the quality of our relations.

So what will it be?

We can go round this loop with a positive spin and things will steadily improve… or we can chose the downward route and things will go from bad to worse.

It all depends how we decide to relate to one another.

I only just recently discovered Daniel H. Kim’s model, I realize that is has been around for while. But nonetheless it struck me with great force because suddenly here was a way to describe what I have intuitively been working towards with many of my clients over the past years. I have just not been able to articulate it so clearly before.

In 2013 this kind of thinking is going to be at the foundation of what I shall be working on. It is the next step after many years of working with the Service Profit Chain.

Once we understand and how the Service Profit Chain works the next logical step for me is to look at our organizations from a relations perspective.

And the tools we shall be working with in order to achieve that are:

• Building a Common Vision
• Personal Mastery
• Mental Models
• Team Learning
• Systems Perspective

These five tools are also not new – they are at the core of Peter Senge’s The 5th Discipline. But although quite a lot of industry managers have heard of The 5th Discipline I see few who are actually working with or implementing this kind of thinking. ( That was also the the experience I had when I first started introducing the Service Profit Chain – People might have heard of it but it remained something relatively abstract – and very few were actually implementing it).

So what do you think? Do you have a team or and organization that would benefit from taking a walk down this path? Or do you have something you would like to contribute?
Let me know I am very curious as to how this resonates with you.

Applying Power & Love to the Service Profit Chain

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One of the misunderstandings that I often encounter when implementing the Service Profit Chain in organizations is that managers suddenly become reluctant to manage. I.e. they are reluctant to be directive or to set and enforce performance standards even when it is glaringly necessary.

They worry they will adversely affect the sacred employee satisfaction that is at the heart of the service profit chain thinking.

The problem is that it has exactly the opposite effect.

The team becomes uncertain, delivery of service sloppy and customer satisfaction goes out the window. And in the worst cases they conclude that creating a great place to works is a bad idea: “ just look what happens”.

They have not understood how to manage the polarities involved.

In order to explain what happens I use the work of a Adam Kahane on Power and Love.

First, we need to start with Adam Kahan’s definition of the two terms.

Power :“the drive of everything living to realize itself with increasing intensity”

Love : “the drive towards the unity of the separated”

So as we implement the service profit chain we definitely turn up the volume on the love part. In the process create a sense of unity, belonging and contribution from the ground level and up. That becomes our foundation

But now we have a situation from a polarity point of view that is often slightly lopsided. In order to balance the polarity and not end up in an anaemic, wishy-washy lovey-dovey kind of culture, it is important to increase the power side of the equation by raising the bar and setting high standards for performance and results.

When done in that order the result is a remarkable increase in commitment, motivation and performance.

This is actually quite logical if you think about it. Just feeling good (but getting nowhere) is not nearly as much fun or challenging as feeling good and achieving something significant.

So what happens is that when we increase the power side of the polarity in order to balance the love side we in fact increase employee satisfaction and loyalty as a result.

Martin Luther King put all this in a nutshell in this great quote:

”Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economical change…

And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignations of power and power with the the denial of love.

Now we have to get this thing right.

What we need to realize is that power with out love is reckless and abusive and love with out power is sentimental and anemic. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

The future of adult education is DIY

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A week or so ago I posted a video on the future of education because I found it most thought provoking. Read it here

But since then I have been wondering about what is happening to adult education, what we generally know as professional training and development. Over the past 10 to 15 years we have seen huge growth in companies specializing in all kinds of professional development: leadership communication, assertiveness etc. The list is endless. But I’ve noticed that over the past 2 years a lot of those companies are now mere shadows of themselves. They are just not doing the business that they used to. When I ask my friends and clients in the conference hotel business, they agree – that part of their market has decreased significantly.

So what has happened, have professionals stopped learning?

That is unlikely. The rate of change surrounding us is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and the need for further education and development has never been higher than it is now.

Something is changing

I think that 3 factors are influencing what is happening and that eventually will lead to a significant change in the way we think of professional development in the future:

70-20-10 – Learning frameworks is becoming a standard. That means that the focus is on, on-the-job-learning (70%) supported by peer coaching (20%) with just a dash of actual instruction added (10%).

Time – what I hear from HR managers again and again is that no matter how interesting, exotic and high flying propositions they come up with – they still have a very hard time getting people to actually sign up for the training offered. This has to do with the fact that everybody feels the pressure of more and more things that need to be done and not enough time to do them. So trainings that were previously considered a perk are now often considered an added burden.

Money  – the ROI of the stand alone 2 day training course is questioned. It is expensive to run and if on top of that you need to drag people in to actually attend – it is not the best starting point for any learning to take place.

So, invariably bosses are asking themselves could we do this differently?

My guess is that the onus is going to shift and the companies are going to come to the conclusion that they cannot take responsibility for the personal development of individuals. The competition for great jobs is only going to increase and therefore it’s going to be natural to say to those who would like the good jobs that they need to take responsibility for their own development.

Great companies will encourage and provide the space and opportunity for on-the-job learning, the best ones will also add (peer)-coaching and reflection as part of that package but the last 10% new knowledge is going to be left to the individual in some kind of DIY format.
My guess is that this will be e-learning driven to a large extent.

Not because e-learning provides the best training environment but because it solves the problem of time and money.

And in the same way that when we had to give up our music on vinyl and shift to CD’S and again to shift from CD*s to Mps3 we all cried: “Never will I live with that loss of quality” at the end of the day money and time made us accept a more convenient solution, although it was not as good as what we had.

What is your perspective on all this, I would really like to know?

Happy staff make more money… for you

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“…companies that effectively appreciate employee value enjoy a return on equity & assets more than triple that experienced by firms that don’t. When looking at Fortune’s ’100 Best Companies to Work For’ stock prices rose an average of 14% per year from 1998-2005, compared to 6% for the overall market.” read the Forbes article here

This is a quote from study cited by a new book out by Dr. Noelle Nelson entitled : “Make More Money by Making Your Employees Happy,

For regular readers of this blog this is a well-known theme.

I’m always amazed how much attention this kind of message actually gets: Everybody goes . ohh surprise.. look at this…happy staff is important.

Because if you think about it it is so self evident. In a hyper-competitive world where products are more lookalike than unique, ultimately what makes a difference is the relationship factor.

And the relationship factor is what takes place between your front-line employees and customers.

The missing link

What a lot of people however totally miss in this connection is what it actually takes to keep front-line employees happy and comfortable with their jobs. The big misunderstanding is that it’s a question of more money, perks or friendly pats on the back. It’s not.

As Hertzberg taught us many many years ago, the basics, money work conditions etc, need to be on par with industry standards and if you get that right you can prevent dissatisfaction – Hertzberg called these hygiene factors. But it does not create motivation or the kind of enthusiasm that is needed for front-line employees to actually enjoy building those crucial relationships with customers.

From my perspective employee satisfaction is relatively uninteresting – what really counts is employee enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is what makes a service organisation stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

And the primary driver of enthusiasm on the job – which has to do with job content , what a person is allowed to do – is that person’s immediate supervisor.

The immediate supervisor builds or kills enthusiasm.

So if we want to build a service organisation that is among the best we need to make sure that our middle management team understands the crucial role that they play in this connection.

It is as simple as that.

Social Media management …

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is just like Service Management

In a recent article in S+B “Brand Transformation on the Internet” Aaron Shapiro, CEO of the digital agency Huge explains the shift from customers to users – also the title of his new book – Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business.

A key point he makes is that most business will need to see themselves as two business. Their original core product / service and then the online version of that same business – which is an interesting thought – makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

But what really caught my attention was this :

To be effective in social media, you have to empower junior people to be brand ambassadors, to communicate online rapidly. That seemingly tactical, small move can lead to massive organizational shifts. Somebody 20 levels down in the hierarchy who’s responding to a tweet has to know and understand the whole company’s strategy around things like pricing and social responsibility. There has to be a tremendous amount of training and a very big cultural shift.

This is no doubt true – but it is also the essence of what it takes to run a great service company.

Only when front line staff see themselves as brand ambassadors in everything they do, do we get that very special customer experience.

At the heart of a great customer experience is the sensation that the person who is looking after you has the knowledge, skills and authority to do what ever it takes to provide a great experience.

But that requires leadership who understand what it takes to put that in place

Culture. The intangible competitive advantage

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Great article in Fast Company

Although cultivating a great culture demands a lot of emotional investment, leadership wisdom, and a genuine care for people, it is a financially low-cost investment with a high economic return. This is why great leaders pay attention to it. An authentic culture, at the very soul of a business, is something competitors cannot imitate. Like soul, culture is intangible. Yet given a little inspiration, this intangible commodity can be converted into untold wealth. Incredibly, the next big wave of growth will come from businesses whose leaders know how to convert low-cost intangibles like culture into high bottom-line value.

There are great teams and not so great teams

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Here is a great blog post from Brandon Curry

There are great teams and not so great teams. The best companies are networks of great teams. When you look at organizations, there is a huge range in performance team by team by team. There are differences within high performing teams compared with underperforming teams. These differences impact not only business outcomes, but lead measures like the ability to attract and retain talent that create the valued product or service that customers trade money for.

This is just so much up my alley…

Read the rest on Brandons blog it is well worth your time