Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Service Profit Chain

Because you will drift, you need to learn how to shift

By

Maybe you have now decided for yourself: ‘I will never, ever again fall into a drama triangle’. I know I’ve tried that approach more than once . Well, I can tell you something. It’s not going to work. It doesn’t work because we drift. In the post I will show you how we need to shift instead

Here is the video version and the sound track version for thos on the go

We start out with some degree of presence. We are totally ‘here now’ And then something happens. Something that causes us to drift out of presence. It could be beep on the cell phone. “Oh, sorry. Just a minute , oh no, not again. Yeah, sorry. Where were we?”

Or we just, can’t stay concentrated. Our mind starts floating: I wonder what’s for lunch? These interruptions and many more we call drift. And when we drift, we easily slip below the line. ( because left to its own devices our Ego loves to run the show) And before we know it we get caught in the drama triangle again.

Develop your awareness – understand what is going on

And so the issue is not to never ever get caught in the drama triangle because you’re not going to solve that. The real challenge is you need to develop the awareness to realise when that is what is happening.

The drift shift model - how to get back above the line and away from the drama triangle

And then you need to develop the skills to shift yourself back out of the drama triangle and up into presence of being fully ‘here now’. A simple first step of shifting is to take a deep breath, and re-center. Then you ask yourself the key question: I wonder how we could fix/solve/develop that. By activating a ‘creating’ question we come back to the present. A question that seeks to create something that would contribute to the current situation. That’s the core skill and that’s what we need to practice.

More Vblogs in the pipeline

This concludes my first six-post series on leadership skills, based around this model of above and below the line.

I will continue these VBlogs in the future, and will continue to explore the leadership qualities that we need to develop in order to become great team leaders.

Here are the previous post in this series

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

As a leader do you have the courage to examine your mindset model?

Feeling right you are probably wrong

Great team leaders do not get sucked into drama

Mike Hohnen, MBA is a coach, trainer, author and public speaker who supports leaders, managers and their teams in implementing the principles of the Service Profit Chain.

Great Team Leaders understand the difference between respond and react

By

Summary of React or Respond


For the full version watch the video or listen to the audio as you prefer


In every situation there is a space, and in that space you have a choice. The choice to react or respond.

Victor Frankel wrote:

Respond or React will position you above or below the line

Above the line and below the line is also the difference between responding (above the line) or reacting, which immediately puts you below the line. When we are hijacked by our emotional system, we automatically fall into the trap of the drama triangle. And we choose a role for ourselves. When we choose a role for ourselves, we at the same time try and push the people around us or the circumstances of whatever into one of the two other roles to get the drama triangle going. And as we mentioned last time, this only serves the purpose of creating a lot of emotional friction, hot air, whatever you like. But it never leads to any constructive solutions. As long as we are caught in the drama triangle, we have no possibility to, create anything meaningful or useful. We just go round and round in circles like cats chasing our own tails.

List to your own language

Try and listen for your own language and notice how your own language will determine whether you are starting a new drama triangle or whether you already are responding and trying to pull the whole conversation into a completely new sphere above the line where we’re outcome-focused, constructive and trying to find solutions. And if you can manage that, and if you get good at that, then you’re going to see how people love to work with you.

Catch up on previous posts

Previous blog posts in this series on Team Leadership Skills and working above and below the line:

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

As a leader do you have the courage to examine your mindset model?

Feeling right you are probably wrong

Great team leaders do not get sucked into the drama

Mike Hohnen, MBA is a coach, trainer, author and public speaker who supports leaders, managers and their teams in implementing the principles of the Service Profit Chain.

Feeling right – You are Probably Wrong

By

Have you ever had this feeling of just knowing that you are right?

Well, I have some interesting news for you. It is just that, a feeling. An emotion, in the same category as anger or love and likewise it has no connection to reason.

When you have this feeling about just how right you are – you could just as well be wrong. In a complex world there are not many simple answers.

You may not realise it but this feeling that you are right comes with some serious consequences for your role as a team leader.

Below is the video version and below that the text version – whatever works best for you:

Leadership skills series

In my previous blog posts, we started to explore this model that we call above and below the line and we looked at the disadvantages of being below the line.

Just to recap: Below the line, we are in a reactive defensive position where it’s more about our own survival, the survival of our ego than anything else. There is no learning and we are closed to new ideas.

It’s not the best place to be, when as team leaders we are trying to create followership or build relationships with other people.

Feeling is not thinking

Now, pause and digest this for a moment. When you have this feeling of being right, it is not the result of a careful thought process. It’s just a feeling.

And only when someone challenges your ‘rightness’, will you perform a post feeling rationalisation and come up with arguments that supports your original feeling.

Your sense of being right about something, the sparkling clarity of certainty, is not a thought process, not a reasoning process, but an emotion that has nothing to do with whether you are right or not.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Ah, you will say but when I tell you that 2+2 is 4 then I am right and it’s not a feeling it’s fact! Yep – the problem here is that people will not challenge you on what is to all an accepted fact. They will challenge the complex stuff that you feel so sure about but which is possibly not as simple as you think feel. I will post some reference at the end where you can read more. It’s fascinating stuff in my view.

Defend your rightness and dive below the line

Above and Below the line model

The reason this is intersting from a team leader’s perspective is that when we give in to that feeling of being right we also automatically shift down below the line. We desperately want to defend our ‘rightness’ and the more insecure we are in our leadership role the harder we will defend our rightness. As a result we become reactive, defensive and ego driven.

This is what Jennifer Carvey Berger in her wonderful book, “Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity” calls falling into a mindtrap.

Caught in this mind trap we are in a really toxic unconstructiv place and the sooner we get out of it the better.

How do we do that?

The magic question you need to ask yourself

The first step is to be aware. You must actually notice that, this is what is happening. As soon as you register yourself moving into this pattern of rightness, then all your alarm bells should go off and you should try and stop the process. The way you do that is by awakening your own curiosity.

The easiest way to do that is to ask yourself a question beginning with :

I wonder…

  • … why they disagree with me?
  • … what am I missing here?
  • … what does she know that I maybe don’t?

Jennifer Carvey Berger says, you could ask yourself the key question: ( I wonder) How could I be wrong?

It works like magic.

When you have the courage to question your own knowing you also have the key to shift yourself back up above the line. You awaken your curiosity, you awaken your ability to learn and you start engaging with others without the defensive boundaries you otherwise would have erected.

Chances are you will learn something that would have been completely lost if you’d stayed stuck down below the line.

There is much more to discover below the line

So I hope this week’s post has inspired you to try and catch yourself feeling right and to experiment with asking yourself, “I wonder… “

Next week I’m going to explore with you what else is going on below the line. Besides just wanting to defend being right there is a whole swamp of toxic emotions that are activated automatically and they are not helpfull at all.

Reading that might inspire you:

Jennifer Garvey Berger: “Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity”

Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp: “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Success”

Previous blog posts in this series on Team Leadership Skills and working above and below the line:

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

As a leader do you have the courage to examine your mindset model?

The knowing-doing gap

By

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that I have decided to switch format in 2018 and try my hand at vlogging. Here is the first video in a new series about learning developing and getting better at stuff.

Next week, we will explore how your mindset contributes to the knowing-doing gap for many of us.

Culture is the foundation of your employee experience.

By

The holy grail of Service Design is the much-talked customer experience, but as I have tried to argue in the past few blog posts, if you just paste the elements of Service Design thinking over a terrible employee experience, you are just spray-painting your rusty car in the hope that no one will really notice. Once you hit a bump, the mudguard will still come off.

Culture evolves over time. Sometimes, it just gets better and better but very often it just slowly deteriorates.

If you have ever been part of a start-up or a hotel or restaurant opening, you know what I am talking about. We started out with fantastic intentions and this one-for-all and all-for-one spirit and…

Well then something just happened.

What happened is nothing.

Nothing… in the sense that nobody actively did anything to maintain the culture. Just think of any type of strong culture that you are part of or have been part of.  What keeps the culture alive are rituals, conversations and most importantly, someone who calls it when we step outside of boundaries of the culture.

But in our very busy day-to-day lives, we are typically always working on the systems and the behaviour, creating new processes, initiating training programs, all of the tangible stuff. We forget that we need to maintain and reinforce the culture, and maybe that is the most important job of all.

“Our culture is how we work together as employees to serve our members and grow. Our culture has been instrumental to our success and we keep improving it; our culture helps us attract and retain stunning colleagues; our culture makes working here more satisfying”
– Netflix

What does it take to maintain or even correct the current culture?

Culture does not emerge out of thin air. Culture is the sum of our action, behaviours and conversations.

What we do and how we do it is our culture.

So we are already working on it but possibly not fully aware of how what we do influences the culture.

Don’t confuse action with movement

Great cultures are characterized by their bias-to-action, including taking corrective actions when it is needed. What is typical about rotten cultures is that nobody takes action when it is obviously called for; they do nothing and slowly the culture starts to disintegrate or become toxic. The classic dilemma here is always the brilliant jerks. Bad cultures tolerate them. By tolerating the jerks, leadership shows what their true values are.

In my experience, bad managers are not so often bad because of what they do, it is what they don’t do that makes them bad. There is no action when it is called for.

Do as I say, not as I do!

Some managers think that is a great joke. But it is a terrible thing to say. If you are a manager, you are always under observation. People observe you in order to try and understand their future. They are searching for clues as to what is going to happen and what is important. They don’t pay attention to what you say, they watch your behaviour. Who do you talk to? What meetings do you attend? What projects are you interested in? How you do what you do makes up the clues they use to navigate by.

Many organisations try to regulate behaviour through rules. As time goes, they grow and add more people. Obviously from time to time, somebody does something that is not acceptable and they add a new rule for everybody.  The weaker the culture, the more rules they add. In a strong culture, there is very little need for rules because it is easy for people to work out for themselves what is the right thing to do. And if someone makes a wrong judgement then we have a chat about it to help them see why this is not part of how we do things around here.

Change the conversation and you change the culture.

We become what we talk about. Our conversations make up the glue of our relationships but they also weave the fabric of our culture. If we are always trying to work out who to blame or whose fault something is then we become a drama culture. On the other hand, if we are always asking “What can we do about this?”, we create a culture that focuses on opportunities and possibilities. In the end, there is a world of difference in productivity and engagement.

But it’s not just the subject of our conversations that shape the culture, it is also the quality and the frequency. Solid cultures typically have strong, candid and frequent conversations with each other. Robust feedback is considered essential to healthy relationships. Wishy-washy performance reviews once a year are not part of the fabric of strong cultures

In toxic cultures, people don’t talk to each other about what really matters. They are constantly trying to protect themselves and play cover up. And endless dance in the drama triangle.

No matter how many fantastic new service strategy programs you initiate, they will fail if they are built on a dysfunctional culture. Culture beats strategy every time.

If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, check out my course here

Why the Service Profit Chain is more important now than ever before

Your customer experience will never be better than what your employee experience was designed to deliver.

By

Service Design Thinking is a fantastic toolkit for improving our customer service experiences. Mapping out customer journeys, identifying touch points and understanding different customer personas is going mainstream as everyone chases the elusive super loyal customer.

But did we get the wrong end of the stick?

Let just backtrack for a moment and ask ourselves the fundamental question: why are we so focused on the ‘experience’?

Because in order for something to qualify as service, it has to fulfill two criteria.

It needs to deliver a certain result and there needs to be a positive experience.

If you walk into your favourite coffee shop and they serve you a horrible wishy-washy cup of latte, the setting may be nice and the lady may be ultra friendly but your basic result was not delivered.

Or the other way round.

The coffee is great, but the place is filthy and noisy, the lady is rude. The result was delivered but the experience was horrible. You could just as well have made that cup of coffee at home and saved yourself quite a few bucks. When you opted for going to the coffee shop, you were looking for a service, not just a product.

Ok so far so good. Sometimes it can be sobering to get back to basics.

So assuming that you know how to deliver the result part of whatever service you offer,  let’s examine the experience part. As Seth Godin says, customer service is all about changing feelings. Experiences are emotions in action. No emotions, no experience. How was your train commute to work today compared with the same day last year? Ehhh?? Most probably you can’t remember because if it was just the way it always is, there was no emotion. You have not stored it in your memory as ‘an experience’ (Technically everything is an experience but we only retain in our memory the positive and the negative ones, the rest is auto-deleted).

“The only purpose of customer service is to change feelings.”
– Seth Godin

So as you look at your customer journey and map out the touch points, it’s a good idea to also map the emotional highs and lows. You can start out by estimating them but eventually, you will need to research and confirm your assumptions.

Let’s map a simplified example of a customer journey most of us can relate to, the airport check in: Arrive at airport, check in on the touch screen, walk through security, walk to the gate, board using automated boarding card verification, greeted by stewardesses, Settle into a seat.

What are the potential emotional highs and lows that we could work on to ensure that we maximise the experience? The touch screen provides no emotion unless it is not working, so it is just a negative risk. Walking the hallways can at best be neutralised by making the walk pleasant on the eye and informative. Boarding card verification is again automated. The automated or physical parts of the journey we can work on to eliminate negative emotions but they are hard to turn into over the top emotionally positive experiences.

The the two touch points that have the potential to provide emotional highs are the security check and the welcome onboard greeting by the hostess. The critical variable in achieving this is obviously the human being involved in these two touch points. The customer experiences are in their hands and totally dependent on how they feel (Technically we call that engagement, but that is actually just a fancy word for their feelings toward the job.) If they feel anything less than enthusiastic, they will deliver the minimum required to keep the job.

But, you may say,  we give them a service manual and they get the onboarding service course, they know what they are supposed to do. Yes, they know, but knowing and doing is not the same thing.  They will do or not do depending on how they feel.

In order to understand what drives their emotions, we need to map their employee experience. What is it like to be an airport security agent or a flight attendant? How does their employee journey unfold on a daily basis? What are the emotional highs and lows? Do we know and what can we do to maximise the highs and eliminate or neutralise the lows? (In a Service Profit Chain context, we would call this improving internal quality.)

If you are really serious about delivering best in class customer experiences, you need to start at the other end and look at what kind of employee experience you are providing that is your foundation.  Great service design pasted on top of mediocre employee experiences is like trying to paint over the rust spot on a used car.

You can download the Dream Team Checklist below and benchmark yourself!

 

 

Developing a customer centric experience strategy is not rocket science.

By


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?

 

The real key to creating the eternally fantastic experience

By

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

If you are not familiar with the intricacies of the Service Profit Chain, we have a special treat for you:

You can download Mike’s book Best! No need to be cheap if … for FREE using this coupon 8WG55DP7C3. This is only available for a limited number of 30 people so first come first serve!

Download the book now!