service

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.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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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:

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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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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ETC is at the heart of your employee experience.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

ETC

What kind of employee experience are we delivering? That has been the theme of my blog posts over the past 3-4 weeks.

A few years ago, MIT Sloan Management Review ran an article entitled “Designing the soft side of customer service”. In it the authors argue that regardless of whether we are talking a pizza delivery or a complex consulting agreement, emotions are lurking under the surface and that our job is to make those feelings positive.

If we are aiming to create the optimal customer experience, we will need to start off by examining the kind of employee experience that is going to be the foundation of the customer experience.

A miserable employee is not going to provide your customer with a breathtakingly positive emotional experience – no matter how much you train them.

But this is not just about the full employee journey: recruitment to exit-interview. As managers, we need to focus on the day to day experience as well.

We have looked at endings, consequences and psychological safety in previous posts, so this week let’s take a look at what else we can learn from the field of behavioural science that can help us understand what drives a great employee or customer experience.

You need to focus on the “ETCs”.

Emotions influence what we remember. Emotionally charged episodes are easy to recall. “Experiences” that triggered no emotional reaction, positive or negative, are quickly forgotten.
Basically our emotions are triggered when something turns out better or worse than we expected. And the corresponding emotional response is then either positive or negative. A good manager does her best to manage the emotions of her team – and sprinkles the day with a few unexpected positive surprises as well. Positive surprises are anything from throwing a pizza and beer party to celebrate a win, to the simplest little gests of encouragement during the day.

Trust is the basic psychological variable that is essential to any form of relationship. No trust, no relationship. If we want engagement, there needs to be trust. And trust is the mirror of how we show up on a day to day basis as human beings. Are we reliable? Do we do what we said we would do? Do we care for and stand up for our team?

Control over one’s environment and knowledge of how events are going to unfold are fundamental psychological needs. But control is also linked to trust. In a high trust environment, the need for control is less. There is one more aspect of control when we are talking employees and that is the sense that I have some degree of control over how I do my job. This is one of the foundational cornerstones of employee engagement.

Every situation in the day that involves uncertainty either in outcome or in process will cause our team members to experience a loss of control – and that closes the loop back to emotions because a sense of loss of control creates some very negative emotions.

So there it is, as a manager, I need to manage the emotions, trust and sense of control of my team if I want to make sure that they are in the best possible shape to create a fabulous customer experiences.

It sounds complicated, but it does not need to be – In our next manager’s toolbox workinar*, we will talk about some simple tools and tips that can help you do a much better job at this.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 14th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

No fear, it is the foundation of a great team.

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

No fear

The past weeks, we have been looking at the employee experience. If we buy into the whole concept of the Service Profit Chain, it makes perfect sense that creating a great employee experience will help us create the best possible guest experience.

So let’s explore another element of the employee experience.

At a very basic level, we all have a need to feel safe. Only when we feel safe can we do our best work – if we feel anxiety in some form or the other, our system directs our resource toward coping with whatever we feel as a threat and, at a very deep level, tries to answer the question: Fight, Flight or Freeze? Obviously none of these modes are conducive to producing great customer experience or anything else for that matter.

When we dissect great customer experiences, most of them are the result of one of our team members deciding to do something ‘different’ in a given situation. The guest’s situation does not fit ‘the script’ and there is a need for an improvised solution. The last thing that guest wants to hear is “Sorry, we can’t do that”. But in order for our frontline staff to produce those creative alternatives that win us customers for life, they need to feel safe.

A good team is a great place to be, exciting, stimulating, supportive, and successful. A bad team is horrible, a sort of human prison. – Charles Handy

That is also confirmed by research from Google where they have identified psychological safety as the number one driver of great team performance. Teams that experience a high degree of psychological safety outperform teams that don’t.

But what does psychological safety actual entail?

The research breaks it down into four components:

Tribe – A sense of belonging
Expectations
Hierarchy – what are the roles
Autonomy

So in simple terms, that means it is important that everyone feels included, that we set clear expectations and that we try and limit the surprises; that there is not an excessive focus on authority and positions – and finally the ultimate motivator: do I get to have a say in how I do my work? (Not what I do, that is a management decision, but how I do it.)

This is all fairly easy to understand and makes perfect sense to most of us. But how do you as a busy team leader actually do that?

Well it so happens that there is a very nifty way to approach this. It is called the high performance team model and I plan to explain how it works in details on my next managers workinar*.

If you have this approach in the back of our head as you tackle your day, you will notice a marked difference in team performance.

* I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out

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This is the 13th article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

Are you the chief employee experience officer?

March 31, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Focusing on the customer experience is the key to high customer loyalty – it’s well established.

That is also why around 70% of medium to large UK companies have a customer experience manager at the level of VP or equivalent. The current buzz-tool for developing these customer experiences is ‘service design thinking’.

So far so good.

But if you’re familiar with the service profit chain, you also know that the key to an exceptional customer experience starts somewhere else. We need to create what we call ‘internal quality’ – more popularly referred to as ‘a dream team cycle’.

So what would happen if we were to turn all this service design thinking on its head and focus more on the employee experience? When did we last sit down to analyse the employee journey as it unfolds throughout the day?

Do we know what the critical touch points are? Have we done some emotional mapping that could help us understand what the possible frustrations are during a day?

What are the learning opportunities? Does this job have varying challenges, or is it just the same thing day in, day out?

This idea came to me as I read Global Human Capital Trends 2016, published by Deloitte University Press. According to this latest survey, 92% of executives listed organisational design as very important and something they will be focusing on this year.

So designing our service organisations from the employee perspective should receive the same kind of attention and resources as we use when looking at the customer experience. Yes?

This leaves the question of who the chief employee experience officer is going to be in your organisation. Will they be part of HR, or will your organisation create a totally separate role?

I would love to hear your views on this, so please feel free to reply to this mail.

What has Value – From a Customer Perspective?

March 20, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Why Value Is Not about Money

In the old economy – the one dominated by goods – value was created through the transfer of ownership. I create or produce something; and when I transfer the ownership to you, you give me money in return. The way you check the value of what you bought has to do with the specifications. Whether you are looking for strawberries or a new car, it is about product attributes. This ‘widget’ is _______ (stronger, faster, slimmer, tastier…) than the other ones you have looked at.

In the new economy – the service economy – value is created in use.
When I rent a car, use a consultant, or search for a great place to stay for my vacation, there is no transfer of ownership. It is all about utility – I need something, and my preferred service is the one that best takes care of that need. When my need is met, it translates into a result for me. And most of us are more than happy to pay for getting the result we need.
So, if our aim is to create a great customer service experience, the starting point is to make sure that what we are offering matches the value expectation of the customer.

In order to do that, we use the Value Equation – a tool that originates from the research conducted to produce the Service Profit Chain framework. The Value Equation has four elements:

R Is for Result

What is the result that the client is expecting or looking for? Do we understand the need? If I buy an airline ticket from Paris to Rome, and we end up in Berlin, the airline did not deliver the result that I was expecting. So, no matter how cheap the ticket is or how many drinks they serve, it is a lousy service experience. Do you book a table in a restaurant because you are hungry? Maybe. More often, you have a different need. Maybe you are looking for a special moment, an occasion to celebrate or an ideal setting for a special conversation. Whatever it is, the food is just an instrument in providing the real result that you are looking for.
This means that for every service product we create, we need to ask ourselves, “What is the result they are looking for?”

P Is for Process.
You can fly from A to B with many different airlines. In general, they will all get you to where you planned to go; but each one does it their way. The difference comes out in their process.
From a customer point-of-view, a process has five elements. Each plays a part when evaluating to what extent the value proposition actually covered their needs.

Time. How does time play into the need or result that they have? Is it important that we are on time? Is it important that we are fast or slow? If my wife and I are having dinner before the cinema, we are looking for one kind of time experience. If we are celebrating her birthday the following week, we are looking for a different kind of time experience. Same people, same restaurant, but different situations.

Reliability. Do we do what we say we will do? Are we consistent?
Competence. How does the customer experience the competence level of our employee at a given touchpoint? How well do our frontline teams respond when asked a question or a request for help?

Empathy. To what extent are our employees able to see the situation from the client’s point-of-view? When a customer feels understood, we are more than halfway to solving their needs.

Proof of service. Do we provide a service that the client does not notice – are there ways that we could remind the client that we are servicing them?
Under the fraction line we have –

$ for price and E for effort
The client pays a price for our service; but depending on the service package, they also put in more or less effort themselves. If you buy a sofa from IKEA, the price is low; but you put in quite a bit of effort yourself. If you fly Virgin Upper Class, they will pick you up at your office and take you and your stuff right to the plane. A different experience than flying Ryanair – and, to be fair, also at a different price point.
So, there you have it.

If you want to understand how customers perceive value, the value equation is your key. And, your starting point for developing a great customer experience is to understand how you tailor your customer value proposition to each segment using the Value Equation.

Simply enter your email below to download the Value Equation

The Asymmetric Nature of Services

April 21, 2016By Mike Hohnen

In my previous blogposts, we started looking at this whole concept that we have labeled “The Experience Economy” and why the shift towards a service-dominant logic is raising the bar for everyone involved in service.

So, if we can agree that there is a shift from focusing on goods to focusing on needs, we need to spend some time understanding the concept of needs as seen from the consumer’s perspective.

Many hotels, restaurants, or other traditional service providers forget that they are in the needs business and fall in love with their own products. They mistakenly think that it is the product the consumer is actually interested in and do not understand that the product is just a translation of their needs into something more tangible.

Loving the product and missing the need is also what happens every time a company or industry is disrupted. The needs shift or someone sees a totally different way to fulfil those needs – and titans of industry get washed away. Kodak never believed for one moment that we would ever drop Kodachrome and replace it with pixels.

Services are Asymmetric

So, when we look at the nature of services, it is important to remember that there is this phenomenon of asymmetry – what you sell and what the consumer buys are often two very different things. If you are an airline, you will have a tendency to think of your product as Seat 7A on Flight AB1234. That is what you have sold to that passenger. But the passenger doesn’t think of it that way. What they have purchased is transportation from A to B. That is the need they have.

If you take the restaurant industry, you don’t go to a fine dining restaurant because you are hungry. The restaurant may see itself as providing food and drink…that is its product. But, you are presumably there for something completely different. Something that has to do with atmosphere, occasion, or whatever.

In the hotel industry, they see themselves as providing you a room with certain specifications. But in many cases, you are not in that market for that product specification. You are in the market for a good night’s sleep…that is your need. If the ventilator on the ice machine rattles all night and prevents you from sleeping, then all the beautiful treats and frills in your room are not going to help one iota – you will hate the experience.

So, in that way, traditional service providers also need to make sure that they don’t fall into the trap of seeing themselves as product providers fixated by their own product specifications, to the extent that they forget about what the need is that they are supposed to fulfill.

Now, the problem this surfaces is that needs are deeply personal, subjective, and situational. So, when the travel industry talks about pax – we have 50 pax next week and then 200 pax on that flight – or the restaurant industry talks about covers – we will be doing 145 covers for dinner and then 85 covers for lunch – it is an insult to the individuality of their customers.

What pax and covers implies is that they are all the same – a flock of sheep that all need a standard shearing.

In the next blog post, we will take a closer look at how we can get better at understanding what needs are all about and maybe, more importantly, how to better get a grip on the fact that different people have different needs

– welcome to the age of mass-customization.