Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Learning

Why learning is your key to engagement

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“When we grow people’s experience of competence, we inevitably grow their engagement”

– Ron Friedman.

A foundational piece of the Service Profit Chain is the dream team cycle:  The seven steps that need to be in place in order for us to foster the kind of environment that ultimately will produce the best possible customer experience.

The third step of the cycle, Build Skills and Capacity, is all about the opportunities we give our people to develop and improve.

We all understand that training and development is useful when there is an obvious need to improve skills. But that is just one aspect. The other and possibly more important aspect is that personal growth and development is a key factor in securing engagement.

This is highlighted in the most recent Global Human Capital Trends 2016 Published by Deloitte University Press where 84% of executives surveyed rated learning as important or very important. This focus on learning comes as organisations see learning opportunities as a driver of engagement and strong workplace culture. Both are more than ever recognised as drivers of performance, according to the report.

“Compared to last year, companies appear to be making strides in adopting new technologies and embracing new learning models.”

That is also why in the Great Place to Work or Gallup engagement survey they ask employees if they have had the opportunity to grow and learn in the past year.

Unfortunately we see time and again that not many have had that opportunity.

It requires leadership capacity to provide learning opportunities for our people. It is not just a question of finding the budget to send them on a course. Learning and development happens mainly on the job. (Check out 70:20:10 – if you are not sure you agree).

It is by walking the precipice between our current abilities and the skills just beyond our reach that growth occurs. But that requires that you as a leader must design a path for your people that will take them out on that precipice from time to time. And that includes being there in case there is a need for a bit of hand-holding along the way.

But a first and even simpler step to ensure engagement in your team is to provide adequate feedback. Without feedback, we lack the crucial information needed in order to improve. And when we do not have a clear direction on what it is we need to do in order to succeed, it just a matter of time before we lose our engagement.

You can download your own Dream Team checklist here and benchmark yourself on how you are doing on all seven steps. The Dream Team Questions on a pdf – click here

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Dream Team Questions

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The Frontline Manager Makes the World go Around

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Despite the fact that we read stories that companies such as Zappos and others are abolishing the role of middle management, the reality out there is that the vast majority of companies rely heavily on middle managers to keep the wheels moving.

So, unless you have embarked on the experiment of abolishing middle managers, there is a high likelihood that you recognize that your frontline managers are crucial to your business.

Take one metric. Staff turnover.

A controllable cost that also has a high impact on your customer loyalty and satisfaction. It is widely recognized that employee turnover is linked to the management style of the immediate supervisor.

Or, change management.

Whatever customer satisfaction strategy and tactics you are developing – the effort is wasted if your frontline is not implementing according to that plan.

The Frontline Manager is the Linchpin

But, how much attention are you giving the growth and development of those frontline managers?
If you are like most of the companies recently surveyed by HBR, not much.

What that same survey shows is that, paradoxically, the same companies that say the frontline manager is a linchpin in the organization also say that the same frontline managers need to develop a number of crucial skills, including organizational savvy, leadership, and talent development.

But they recognize that not much is being done in the company to actually develop those people – go figure.

The reality out there – still according to the HBR survey – is that most development for this level of management tends to be ad hoc, sporadic, or just too brief to actually make a difference.

In general, it seems that leadership development follows the trickle-down model. Most gets invested at the top; and if there are resources left, they are spent on the frontline managers – sometimes.

So, once again, we have a classic knowing – doing gap. The problem is recognized – but somehow nothing gets done.
I wonder why.
Let’s just recap why frontline leadership is crucial to your service organization. We live in a world of Hypercompetition. Customers are flooded with offers and messages. In every imaginable category, supply outstrips demand.

So, if you are not just going to live a mediocre existence trying to survive, you need to stand out and be, if not the absolute best, then at least among the best.

Your aim is customer loyalty. If you can get that right, you will drive profits and growth as a result. This is the basic learning from the research done that led to The Service Profit Chain.

The best starting point for developing your frontline managers is to introduce them to the Service Profit Chain framework.

If you would like a refresher course on the mechanics of the Service Profit Chain and how employee engagement ultimately leads to profit and growth, check out my free video course here: 

The Big Shift – Products to Services

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This is the second post in a series on the new service economy. You will find the first post here.

Before we start dissecting what it actually means to create fantastic experiences and great services, I think it’s useful to take a step back and try to understand the big picture on how the world that we are operating in, as service providers, is changing quite dramatically.

There is a big shift taking place world-wide, and it is a shift that moves away from a focus on producing stuff to delivering services. It is also described as the move from a goods-dominate logic towards a service-dominate logic.

What that basically means is that for thousands of years, we have been used to creating value by taking something, adding to it, and then exchanging it with somebody else in return for their money. The focus has been on the functionality, the specifications, and the quality of the actual product. The better the specifications, the more money we have been able to obtain for that product.

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What is happening now is a gradual shift away from a focus on products towards a focus on needs.

Recently I realized I needed go buy a new power drill in order to put a cupboard up on the wall. My old drill doesn’t work very well anymore because it has been lying at the bottom of my cupboard for the past ten years without being used. So, I decide to go get a better drill. But, do I really have a need for a drill? My next drill is probably also going to lie in the cupboard for a few years before I use it again. What I really need is two holes in a very hard wall. If somebody could provide those holes for me in a faster, easier way that would require less effort, less resources, or less trouble for me, I would grab that opportunity immediately.

If you are in the service industry, you may not have paid attention to this because, in the service industry, one has been, in a certain respect, in the service-dominate logic forever. But what is happening is that a lot of traditional manufacturers and producers are also moving away from their traditional goods-dominate logic, and instead they are thinking about how they can make that shift from product specifications to needs fulfillment.

In a service-dominate logic, the value is not created by a transfer of ownership, value is created in use. When I use your product or service, it brings value to me; and the minute I am not using it, it no longer provides value for me.

A great example of this is Mercedes-Benz, their smart car, and the service they have now created in more than 30 cities called “Car2Go”. You can grab the car off of the street with just your membership card and drive from A to B and then leave the car. Most of us living in big cities don’t need to own a car – in fact, it is a downright nuisance. What we do need is flexible transportation at our fingertips. There are lots of other examples of this new trend if you start looking around.

Why do I think this is important?

Because, what this means for the traditional part of the service industry is that more and more consumers are going to experience higher and higher levels of service. Great service is going to be the new normal.

And, that is going to raise the bar…the level of service expected across the board…is my prediction.

In my next blog post, we will examine the concept of value.

Without trust no engagement…

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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

The future of work … continued

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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

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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 ;-)

What does it mean to be a entrepreneurial learner?

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“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

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.”