Service Profit Chain

Progress drives engagement – So how do you focus on progress?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Progress

Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high quality product or service, everyday progress, even a small win, can make all difference in how they feel and perform.

The Progress Principle

This quote which makes so much sense to me brings us to another aspect of not just why we need to focus on developing the people around us, but also how we can do it.

Focus on progress

In order to progress, we need a baseline to progress from. Once we have a baseline, we can start thinking about what we need to learn or practice in order to get better.

For learning actually to happen, there must be a gap between your current capability and the results that you desire.

So in order for our people actually to learn they need to:

Have an awareness of the gap
Be willing to declare their incompetence (I don’t know how to do that.)
Commit to learning

(I have written about this in a previous post some time ago.)

So if I sneak into your business and tap any one of your team members on the shoulder and ask them: “What are you working on at the moment in order to get better?”, or I ask them: “In what ways does your boss feel you have made progress last month?”, do they know?

Or is progress something that is randomly observed and then celebrated: “Oh look isn’t this nice!”?

Focusing on progress is an important part of your leadership role. And your most important tool for this is not a dashboard in excel but conversations, one-on-one conversations (According to Gallup research, team members who have no or very few one-to-one sessions with their direct supervisor are 67% more likely to be disengaged at work. I mention this just in case you have the notion that one-on-one is a waste of time and it is easier to tell them all at once.)

If you happen to be a manager of managers, this is even more import – you are the role model. If you are not having one-to-one conversations (about progress) with your direct reports, there is little chance that they are having them with their team members. In fact, if you are not talking to them about how they are progressing with their approach to manage progress with their team, I am pretty sure it is not happening at all.

How to structure an engaging conversation

What would be a good way to structure these conversations?

Establish the gap. Once we have a gap, we can establish a goal. Moving toward our goal is what progress would look like. Then we can have a chat about so what is going on now compared to that goal. Once we agree on how what is going on is different from the goal, then we can talk about what options there could be in order to make progress towards the goal. Finally, we pick an action and commit to doing that.

The following conversation will be a follow up / feedback on how this is going. If you are familiar with coaching, you will have recognised that what I have described here as a framework is in fact the GROW coaching model – you can check it out in more details HERE.

In any case, in my upcoming course The Team Leaders’ Toolbox, we will be exploring this model more in details. If you would like to be notified when we launch that, sign up with the link below!

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

Who gets the last chef?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Who gets the last chef?

That was the title of my presentation for a group of managers last week. The title was inspired by a number of conversations that I have been having with clients during 2016. (You can substitute ‘Chef’ for the type of critical position that is part of your current reality.)

Reflecting on those conversations, I realised that there has been a common thread through most of them.

They have all been concerned with:

The lack of bench strength on their management teams
The scarcity of new talent

On a day to day basis, this is not so obvious, and therefore it’s not a high priority; but it hits them every time a key team member needs to be replaced. First, they realise that there is no obvious no.2 who has been groomed for the job. Secondly, when they start the search, they quickly understand that there is not a lot of talents available out there.

Problem is that once they realise this, it’s a bit late to do much about it other than pray…

And honestly, are they going to get the cream of the crop in that situation? Probably not. Most likely, they will get what is left over. It’s like purchasing a second hand car. You are essential taking over someone else’s problem.

Why?

Because the smartest of your colleagues out there have understood the problem a long time ago and have been working strategically with their HR development.

They don’t start thinking about who is going to replace the head chef on the day that he resigns.

They have a strategy to be the preferred employer in their area and an important part of that is a proactive strategy for succession planning. That means that when they recruit or promote someone to the position of, say sous-chef, they ask themselves does this person have the potential to become a chef one day, or is this just a good cook who just might make it as a half decent sous-chef? If that is the case, we have created a problem with a time release.

Part of being a preferred employer is being recognised as an organisation where employees can learn, develop and grow. And in order for that to happen, someone needs to take charge of developing, coaching and mentoring.

If you are a manager, that someone is you.

But this is an actually quite challenge for most managers. In fact, it is one of six key challenges that managers have in common across borders, hierarchies and professions, according to research conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership.

Developing, coaching and mentoring team members also happens to be one more of the leadership attributes that our current series on defining management and leaderships is about.

So let’s start off by understanding how do people actually learn and develop in the job situation?

According to a much quoted piece of research also by the Center for Creative Leadership*, lessons learned by successful and effective managers are roughly:

70% from challenging assignments
20% from developmental relationships
10% from coursework and training

The authors of the research explain it like this:

Development generally begins with a realisation of current or future need and the motivation to do something about it. This might come from feedback, a mistake, watching other people’s reactions, failing or not being up to a task – in other words, from experience. The odds are that development will be about 70% from on-the-job experiences – working on tasks and problems; about 20% from feedback and working around good and bad examples of the need; and 10% from courses and reading.

We can support learning and development through courses and training sessions, absolutely, but at the end of the day, it can only be support for what is actually going on in the day to day job situation. That is where the real learning takes place; which is why the immediate manager plays such a key role in the development of team members.

In the coming blog posts, we are going to explore this crucial leadership competence and what you need to do in practical terms.

*Lombardo, Michael M; Eichinger, Robert W (1996). The Career Architect Development Planner (1st ed.). Minneapolis: Lominger. p. iv. ISBN 0-9655712-1-1.

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What the h… went wrong?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Driving home, Peter kept on asking himself this question.

What a disaster! This was an important day. He had put together a cross functional team of ‘experts’; supposedly some of the most competent people in the company. He had taken great pain (and expense) in organising the best possible location offsite. There, he had given them a very clear brief, explaining exactly what needed to be done and what he expected from them. The deadline was 4pm – tight but doable.

And the result?

…. was a monumental f… up to put it mildly.

What was wrong with these people?

There was nothing wrong with these people. What was wrong was that Peter was not managing the states and states of the team in a skilful way. He was ignoring or maybe totally unaware of the basic mechanics of human interaction.

In my previous blog posts, I have explain this concept of states and stages in more details, you may want to read this first.

The four fundamental questions

Once we understand that this ‘instability of organic systems’ is what is going on, we need a basic tool or more accurately, to understand and master the basic process that is needed in order for groups of human beings to collaborate effectively with each other. From behavioural psychology, we learn that whenever humans are put in a new situation, a new project or a new workgroup or maybe just a new workday, they ask themselves 4 fundamental questions:

Why are we doing this?
Who am I going to do it with?
What are we going to do?
How are we going to do it?

And they ask them in exactly that sequence because they need the answers in that sequence. The questions help us make meaning of what we are doing. If it is not meaningful to us, we don’t get much done. It is as simple as that.

The first question is quite subconscious, a sensing. The second question is more of a feeling and the last two questions are more thinking questions. But it is hard for us to move meaningfully forward to the next question if the previous question has not been answered clearly for us.

From process theory, we know that processes follow an oscillating pattern. They move in regular ‘Waves’ from one extreme point to its opposite and then back again. Human group processes the two extremes, which are often insecurity/uncertainty to security/certain.

The High-performance team model

When we combine these two, we get the Drexler/Sibet high performance model and it looks like this:

Why are we doing this?

The first step is all about orientation. Establish a clear purpose and meaning with whatever it is we are about to do.

Who is on this team and do they know each other or not?

If not, we need to find a way to break the ice and let people get to know each other. We are wired in our brains to be slightly distrustful of people we do not know. It is a basic survival precaution that dates back to our cave origins. If we are going to collaborate on a job/project, we need a minimum of trust. We start to build trust as we get to know each other. It is very simple.

If we know each other on the team, we need to check in. Just a quick round. How are we all feeling in general and what are maybe our expectations for this job or venture or day? This is all about, what Blanchard (Situational Leadership) would call, our psychological readiness level.

What are the goals and roles?

Then we need to agree on the goals and roles. What are we trying to achieve and what roles do we each have that will contribute to us achieving this?

How are we going to approach this?

And finally, we need to have a discussion and establish agreement, so how are we going to approach this?

Once we have been through these first four fundamental steps, we arrive at the bottom of the V model a point where we all have clarity and certainty about what we are about to embark on.

As the leader, you have now done 90% of your work. You have set direction, alignment and commitment. Lean back and let them decide the details of (tasks and timeframes, etc.) how they are going to do it. That will be quite easy if we have done the ground work well.

Observe and offer guidance only if needed as they execute, and only when they are done do you step back in and facilitate a reflection, so how did it go? What did we learn and what would we do different next time? You can see my previous post on goal grids and learning for more on this.

In my next online training, the Team leaders’ Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

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Teams are organic systems, and therefore, by definition unstable.

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team member

As we continue to explore team leadership as different from team management, we now need to look at another aspect of the team.

A team is also a system. And when we look at it from that angle, we need to recognise that systems come in many forms. One way to look at them is as either mechanical or organic. Mechanical systems are things like computers, cars and factories. Mechanical systems are by definition stable. You may feel that your car is moody – but that is probably more about you than the car. The car works or it does not work. If you stress it, it continues to work up to a point and then it snaps and is kaput.

Human beings – the core elements of your team are organic systems, as are cats, cauliflower or caterpillars. And organic systems are by definition unstable. They are always in transition from one state to another. Humans, go from happy to excited to sad. From wide awake to drowsy. From enthusiastic to reluctant and back again, on and on it goes. The only constant is change.

If we try and handle this instability with just management tools, we quickly get into trouble. The whole principle of management is that we can set up rules, and ways of doing things that can be replicated every day no matter what. Great idea if you are working with a stable system – quite tricky if you are working with an unstable system. Add to that, the complexity that these team members are not transitioning from one stage to another in an orderly and synchronised manner. While A is happy, B is frustrated, and C is indifferent. And tomorrow that may well be the other way round. It just depends…

The instability is not completely random. We typically shift to a new state as a result of some stimulus. This can be a change in weather, a remark from a colleague, a difficult task etc. the list is endless. Here you see the big difference with mechanical systems. Your car does not get sad when it rains, happy when we are going downhill – or frustrated by all the bigger cars on the road today. It just does its car thing in the same state no matter what.

Now all this may seem obvious to you. But in my day to day work as a coach, I keep running in to leaders who are assuming that everyone on their team is operating like a car and therefore have two states ‘off’ and ‘on’.

First step is to acknowledge and accept that this is what is going on. Learn to live with the fact that everyone around you is basically unstable – including you.

Second, if you are the kind of leader who is highly volatile or moody or otherwise prone to dramatic shifts in your states, you need to learn to manage your own states (I will be giving an online course on that in beginning of the New Year).

Thirdly, now that you are aware that this is what is going on, you need to help your team members better manage their states.

We will look at that in next week’s post.

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How is team management different from team leadership and why should I worry?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

12984010 - leader versus manager

When it comes to leadership, there seems to be three major and very common challenges.

How to best:

Provide inspiration
Lead a team
Develop employee capacity

During the month of October, we explored what it means to be inspirational. This month, we will explore what leadership means in a team context. December will then be dedicated to the challenge of developing employees.

Just to recap. The basic premise for this series of articles is that management and leadership are distinctly different. Both are required, but somehow we tend to focus much more on the management part of the job and tend to neglect the leadership aspect (read more about this here ). If you are in the service industry, it will ultimately affect your guest experience.

In my view, team management is all about the operational practical and very tangible aspects of what the team does. Tasks, timelines, delivery, budget and all that stuff. It all needs to be looked after or else we really get into trouble.

But good management will only get us halfway or at best two-thirds of the way to what high performance would look like.

What is a team?

Have you ever thought about what it takes for a group of people working together to transition into becoming a team?

It takes two things.

There needs to be a common goal and there needs to be a mutual responsibility for reaching that goal.

It is not enough that I do my part on the team. I must also be concerned how you are doing and if you are struggling I must do whatever I can to ensure that you are also successful with your part of the job. That is teamwork.

It’s this last part that is tricky. It is relatively easy to establish a common goal – but establishing mutual responsibility is much much harder.

In order for that to happen we need DAC – direction alignment and commitment – this is a neat concept or way of thinking about leadership developed by the Center for Creative Leadership. I have written about this before here.

Here is a simple way to evaluate if all three of these elements are happening on your team:

	Happening	Not Happening
Direction	– There is a clear vision of a desired future that everyone buys into. – Team members are individually clear on what the team is trying to achieve as a whole.	– No agreement on priorities – Team members feel they are bingo pulled in multiple directions. – There is lots of activity but not much progress.
Alignment	– Roles and goals are clear individually. – There is a clear understanding of how each and everyone contributes to the larger picture. – There is a sense that this is a well coordinated and synchronised effort.	– Deadlines are missed. Rework required and lots of errors resulting in double work. – People feel disconnected from each other. – Internal competition and blame games are the norm.
Commitment	– Team members go the extra mile. – There is a sense of mutual understating and trust. – There are visibly high levels of engagement.	– Only the easy things get done. – Team members are questioning what is in it for them. – Individuals avoid taking ownership and responsibility.

If it is not happening, the obvious question is what do you need to do to make it happen? Because it’s not a management ‘thing’ – you can’t create an excel sheet or 10 point checklist – nor can you ‘tell’ them that this is what needs to happen.

What you can do, however is provide a space where they can co-create this with you. And that requires leadership.

I will come back to what you can do later in this series. Early 2017, we will launch an online training module that will show you a basic hands on approach of how to do it.

Next week, we will look at another aspect of why your team needs leadership. This has to with the instability of organic systems.

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The something for something system is at the heart of the uninspiring workplace.

October 29, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Unspiring

The Something-For-Something System is what happens in most organizations today.

Here is how it works. You come into work and give some of your time in return for a salary. If you work a bit harder, or a little bit more, or a little bit better, you have an expectation that you will also be rewarded for it — a bonus, overtime pay, a promotion, or whatever.

If you don’t work so hard or don’t do your job very well, it is built into the model that you can expect some kind of ‘punishment’.

The assumption is that you come to work because it is in your own interest. You need the money so you can pay your rent, feed the kids, or play golf during the weekend. It’s a something-for-something kind of thinking which has thousands of years behind it. Technically, it is known as transactional leadership.

The Game We Play

If the employer and the employee, or in practical terms, the manager and the employee, have a relationship which basically is about something-for-something, then it very easily becomes a game where you, as an employee, try to get away with doing as little as possible while at the same time getting the maximum amount out.

In that perspective, you could say that from the employee’s perspective, you have actually won something if you managed to do a little bit less and still get paid the same for it. That would be a win for you.

The manager’s role in an organization that practices transactional leadership is not very exiting either, because what this means is that the manager’s most important role is to control whether or not the organization is actually getting the output that the organization is paying for. That means time-stamping, control sheets, registration, serious conversations, the possibility of written warnings, and eventually, the ultimate punishment – layoffs.

In a transactional world, an effective manager is a person who distributes reward and punishment in such a way that he maximizes the output of the employee.

It’s all about management and there is no time for real leadership.

Management by Exception

In a transactional world, the manager manages by exception. By that, I mean that the manager is actually only exercising their management role when something is not working according to the plan, not living up to the expectations. Only when somebody’s not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, they put on their managers cap and do something… maybe.

Maybe, because as most of us don’t actually enjoy being bossy. As a result, the management role easily turns into non-management – something I only do if I absolutely must.

If things are going sort of reasonably OK, then there’s no real reason to do much, is there? It becomes a sort of ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ atmosphere. And in the organizations that are really bad, the supervisor, who is supposed to manage his front-line, gets this same treatment from his department head, who gets exactly the same laissez-faire management from the division VP or whatever. The something-for-something culture runs all the way through the system.

Unfortunately, a lot of research shows that this leadership style is neither inspiring nor the most productive. It’s not something that creates an extraordinary organization or fantastically enthusiastic and loyal customers.

It produces something that is often okay, but rarely fantastic.

It’s built into the model that it has to be like that; it is all that can happen as long as we have that mindset.

Now, I hope you are beginning to see what the problem is.

As long as we understand the world from a transactional paradigm, the something-for-something mindset, we aren’t going to get any further. We are stuck.

So, what is it going to take?

Well, as Frederic Laloux says, we need to move into a completely different mindset. We need to change our paradigm. We need to switch from transactional leadership to transformational leadership.

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What does it require to be an inspirational leader?

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

The concept of being inspirational may feel overwhelming to some. We tend to associate inspirational with icons of business like Richard Branson or monumental politicians such as Churchill or Kennedy.

But if you did the little exercise I invited you to try out last week, trying to identify leaders who in your career have been inspirational. I am sure you came up with a few even if you have not been fortunate enough to work for someone in the Branson category. Leaders with a lot less punch than Branson can still come across as very inspirational.

So, is the ability to be inspirational something we are born with or is it a learned skill? Maybe a bit of both. It is probably true that for some people, this comes more naturally than to others. But there is also lots of evidence that becoming more inspirational can be learned.

It begins with awareness. Awareness precedes change.

If we can identify the gap between our current skill level and the results we would like to see, then we have the best possible starting point for learning.

So, looking at what it takes to become inspirational, we can start with the very basics. Two things need to be in place for you to come across as inspirational and followership to occur as a consequence.

1) You need to be there.
2) You need to know where you want to go.

Yes, the first step is presence.

Only if you are fully present can you hope to be an inspiration to anybody. If you are distant, unfocused, distracted, frustrated or otherwise multitasking. You not only don’t have the necessary connection with the people, you are also undermining whatever trust there was between you.

No trust, no followership. David Maister has written extensively on how we compute trust in others. You can find more here.

What now?

Try and observe yourself over the next few days as you interact with your team. At the end of the day, rewind the day and think about the encounters you had. Were you fully present? Yes or no? Presence is a bit like pregnancy in that you cannot be somewhat present. Either you are there or you are not.

If you can identify situations when you were not fully there, ask yourself why. Was it your mood, external interference or what? Did you forget to reset you mind and body as you drifted from one meeting to the next? Was half of you still arguing a point in the previous meeting as you started the new one? If you are unsure how to reset your body/mind to a more present state, check out my friend Anouk Brack. She and her colleagues do a great job teaching this stuff.

Once you have mastered being present – it’s time to get clear about where are you going. Sometimes we call that vision/ mission work, but again that can become awfully theoretical and highbrow. I like to ask myself the question: So what are we trying to create?

Think of yourself having a coaching conversation with me. What would you answer be if I asked you: So if we were having this conversation one year from now and you were to look back on the past 12 months, what would have happened in your (department, company, team) for you to feel that you had made some real progress?

If you can answer that, gather your team and have a conversation about how they feel about this and what they think it is going to take from all of you to get here.

Now you have taken a first important step to becoming much more of an inspiration to your followers. At the same time, this is also a first step to creating the Dream Team that is the foundation of implementing the Service Profit Chain.

Let me know how it works or if you have any questions.

And if you have not yet downloaded my e-book on engagement, you might find some ideas in that to swell. You will find it HERE.

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Are you an inspiring leader to work for?

Are you an inspiring leader to work for?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

As I promised last week, this is the first in a very practical series of blog posts focusing on practical aspects of leadership: Why is it important? What does it mean and how can you do it?

If you did not read last week’s post, you might want to read that first – you will find it here.

I have over time become aware that many of you find that the management part of your job is pretty clear and relatively straight forward but as for the leadership aspect, it sometimes feels fluffy.

So let’s take the fluffiness out of leadership and make it very practical and hands on.

Over the next month, we are going to cover three main leadership themes: Inspiring others, Leading my team and Developing my people.

So starting with inspiration, we need to understand why being an inspiration to your followers is an all important part of your leadership skills.

Below is a graph that illustrates how the hierarchy of employee’s needs looks.

At the bottom, we have the foundational stuff. Without that being in place, we don’t even get basic satisfaction. This is more or less all basic management stuff that you are probably (hopefully) already doing. The next level, on the other hand, is where your leadership skills start to make a difference and what drives engagement. Finally, we have the top layer – Inspiration which is driven by the style of leadership you are providing.

There are, as you can see on the graphic, two aspects to Inspiration. There is the Vision/Mission for your company, department or whatever. That should answer the question: Are we trying to achieve something that is meaningful? And secondly it is about you. Are you the sort of person that inspires followership?

So why is this important?

Well if you are the sort of persona that likes the fluffy soft to be backed up by hard facts then take a look at the graph below.

At the end of the day, this is about productivity. People who are inspired produce twice as much as people who are just satisfied with their job. If you check out the Gallup engagement scores, you will see that around 63% of employees are not particularly engaged in the job. So from a leadership point of view, there is plenty of room for improvement in most places.

This is a pet subject of mine as you may have noticed. When we are talking Service Profit Chain implementation, employee satisfaction as such is not particularly interesting. What counts at the end of the day is enthusiasm and engagement.

But productivity is just one aspect of why being inspirational. The other aspect is linked to rapidly changing demographics – all the indicators are clear, within a few years we are going to be scrambling to find the employees we need.

In Northern Europe especially, the stats are clear. Soon we will see that for every four people that leave the industry (pension, age etc), only one new young person signs up. That is a disaster waiting to happen.

So you basically have two choices. Try and automate like crazy – but that does not provide especially breathtaking service experiences, nor are they easy to differentiate from the other offerings out there. Or you can choose to create a place to work that stands head and shoulders above everyone else in your region and therefore become the employer of first choice. Too bad for the rest but you will do fine.

So hopefully you now see my point – focusing on what it will take to provide an inspirational environment for your people is a strategic issue and you need to get better at it than your closet competitor. Or if you look at it from a career point of view, managers who understand how to do this are going to be in high demand.

So what does it take to become inspirational? That is the theme for next week’s blog post.

In the mean time, I would like you to reflect a bit on what bosses you have had in your career that you found inspirational and what was it they did? And of course, the opposite. Who were the absolute joy killers and what was it they did that would instantly makes us feel disengaged and lethargic?

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