Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Blog Page

Why Culture Beats Process

By

Culture2
I am researching for a workshop that I will be conducting next week on culture and performance. One of my favorite subjects.

The evidence is very clear: Everywhere we find exceptional customer service, we invariably also find an amazing culture. Culture and performance are inseparable.

It’s not surprising though, if you think about it, your complete customer experience is a direct reflection of your culture. Makes perfect sense.

During my research, I came across this beautiful quote from Brian Chesky, Co-founder, CEO of Airbnb. This is part of a longer letter that he had written to his team, which was later published in Medium:

So how do we build culture?
By upholding our core values in everything we do. Culture is a thousand things, a thousand times. It’s living the core values when you hire; when you write an email; when you are working on a project; when you are walking in the hall. We have the power, by living the values, to build the culture. We also have the power, by breaking the values, to fuck up the culture. Each one of us has this opportunity, this burden.

Why is culture so important to a business?

Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap.

Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process. In organizations (or even in a society) where culture is weak, you need an abundance of heavy, precise rules and processes.

Read the full article here

Great service is all about engagement in the front line.

But engagement is inseparable from empowerment.

Empowerment is culture.

Customer Centric : they get it – Virgin Hotels

By

In my previous post, I tried to illustrate how some hotels (and other service businesses) truly understand what it means to be customer centric and then all the others who really just don’t get it.

Two days after posting that I came across the following video from Virgin – who is now entering the hotel industry.

This is interesting because Virgin has always had a strategy of moving into industries where most of the players just don’t get it… Airlines, trains, banks, phone providers, and now hotels. What it means is that Virgin sees an opportunity to do it much better…there is room for improvement… Check out their website

Virgin Hotels – ‘Brilliant’ Not To Scale New York. from Not To Scale on Vimeo.

We make love and steal hearts. We’re passionate about creating brilliant experiences that make peoples’ lives better. And there’s nothing more honorable than that.

Customer centric – do you get it?

By

Walt on legs

In my view there are basically 3 kinds of hotels.

Hotels that just don’t get it. The law of supply and demand eventually takes care of them.

Then there are hotels, who get it, or should I say they think they get it. They are the hotels who continually ask themselves: how could we get more money out of each guest by providing more options, loops and hops they must jump through?

– so they have complex internet packages, like lousy internet for free, decent internet at a price – cheaper if you take the full 5 day pass etc.
– or when you walk into the room the television screen is blaring at you suggesting all the films that are on offer – at a price – and it takes you 10 minutes to workout how to turn the dam thing off or find the news.

Then there is the third category .

These are the hotels that ask themselves: What is it like to be on the road, away from home? What does one need, what is annoying, troublesome, irritating? How can we create a service that would make life better, easier, smoother or more fun for our guests and what would we need to charge to make that possible.

From a guest point of view this kind of hotel has a very different feel from the former. The final guest experience is totally different because that basic intent ‘to serve’ comes out in everything they do.

And when you experience that it is such a pleasure because you feel like a welcome guest and not like a ‘wallet on legs’.

What makes a leader better?

By

Silo organisation

In a recent article in Straegy+Business I came across the following paragraph:

The fact is that giving people bigger jobs with fancier titles and larger salaries won’t make them better. More complex assignments will. Just look at the leaders of ANZ, the global banking group headquartered in Melbourne. Each time an employee identified as having high potential is promoted, the company makes sure it’s not to the same job on a larger scale (in terms of budget and resources) but to an entirely new set of challenges—maybe it’s relocating to a new country, shifting from a staff to a line role, or moving from a turnaround situation to launching a new business unit.

 

It made me think: so how good are we at  doing exactly that in the hospitality industry?

In my experience we don’t do it very much. A really good waiter gets promoted to head waiter and then on to restaurant manager. A good chef becomes sous-chef  and eventually maybe head-chef.  

And then we wonder why we have silo-thinking.

10 leadership traits that people adore

By

Great Boss?

Many books have been written about what leadership is – but what is it from a followers perspective?
This is what respondents reply when asked to list the characteristics of leaders they admire:

  1. Has a clear vision of how people’s work meets the leader’s expectations.
  2. Provides timely, clear, constructive feedback.
  3. Expresses appreciation and gives credit where credit is due.
  4. Actively listens and answers questions.
  5. Treats others with respect and kindness.
  6. Consistently fair in their treatment of others.
  7. Trains, develops, and grows their people.
  8. Willing to jump in and help out when things become difficult.
  9. Has an open door policy and is available.
  10. Supportive and protective of their people when things go wrong.

 
Source: SmartBlog on Leadership

So, all you need to do now, is rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 according to how well you doing on each of those points – and if you are honest with yourself you will have a very practical and workable t-do list on what needs working on.

If you are courageous you could even ask one or two close collaborators that are not afraid to give you honest replies to review the evaluation you made of yourself and give you some honest feedback.

Welcome back from summer…

By

It time to roll up our sleves and get cracking again…

As Joyce Hostyn writes on her blog :

“Beauty is an outcome of a focus on the human side of business. Of a deep understanding of people’s dreams, desires and search for meaning. Of a pursuit of a higher purpose.”

Watch her inspiring presentation here:

Ready? Let go to work…

A culture of doing stuff

By

Dialog drives culture-2

“Only the leader can set the tone of the dialogue in the organization. Dialogue is the core of culture and the basic unit of work. How people talk to each other absolutely determines how well the organization will function. Is the dialogue stilted,politicized, fragmented and but covering ? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions. If it’s the former as it is in all too many companies, reality will never come to the surface.

You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue, one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor and informality.”

Execution, the Discipline of Getting Things Done, Larry Bossidy (CEO Honeywell Int’l) and Ram Charan with Charles Buck.

Without trust no engagement…

By

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