Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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A great manager is a rare bird…

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According to a recent blog post on HBR Gallup has found that one of the most important decisions companies make is simply whom they name manager. But mostly they get it wrong. In fact, Gallup finds that companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time.

Gallup finds that great managers have the following talents:

They motivate every single employee to take action and engage them with a compelling mission and vision.
They have the assertiveness to drive outcomes and the ability to overcome adversity and resistance.
They create a culture of clear accountability.
They build relationships that create trust, open dialogue, and full transparency.
They make decisions that are based on productivity, not politics.

But…

Very few people are able to pull off all five of the requirements of good management. Most managers end up with team members who are at best indifferent toward their work — or are at worst hell-bent on spreading their negativity to colleagues and customers.

However, when companies can increase their number of talented managers and double the rate of engaged employees, they achieve, on average, 147% higher earnings per share than their competition.

Read the full article on HBR her

Three slides that capture what this is all about

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In the current isue of HBR theres is a very interesting and inpiring article on Netflix and their HR policy.

You can see the full deck here in slideshare

There is lot of inspire in stuftt in that deck but three slides realy strauck a cord with me:

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The future of work … continued

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I was going to write a blog post on this subject – and while researching it i found this, and thought well I can’t convey that message much better than this ;-)

And the reason i wanted to write about this was because i read this wonderfull book by Scott Berkun

YWP-COVER-FINAL

From the books website:

The new behind the scenes book where Berkun goes back to work on WordPress.com. Learn what it’s like to work at WordPress.com, the 15th most trafficked website in the world, where everyone works from home, no one uses email and dozens of improvements launch to customers every day. The Year Without Pants is the best book you will read about leadership, productivity, and creativity in the modern age.

Her are a few of my takeaways from the book :

– Most people doubt that online meetings can work, but they somehow overlook that most in-person meetings don’t work either

– There is nothing wrong with tradition until you want progress: progress demands change, and change demands a reevaluation of what the traditions are for and how they are practiced

– … and the culture’s confidence that the best way to learn is to do – to think (but not for too long ) make decisions, learn from what happens, and repeat.

– the culture in any organisation is shaped every day by the behaviour of the most powerfull person in the room

And if you dont have time to read the book – take a look a this great talk by Scott at Google

And then you will probably want to read the book any way ;-)

Building the emotional connection

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Here is a great example of a brand making the emotional connection

In my view a brand is a product that you have feelings for – it becomes a brand the moment you ‘care’ about it in some way.

That is also the reason why we spend so much time talking about the importance of generating customer loyalty when we work with implementation of the Service Profit Chain.
Emotions drive loyalty.

Your ‘product’ becomes a brand in your guests head as a result of the emotional connection that your staff makes with the guest.

The first step in brand building is therefore making that connection ( it is not advertising spend) – then you can always reinforce that with clever advertising as it is done here – but it starts with positive moments of truth

What does it mean to be a entrepreneurial learner?

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“This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. This really means, how do you constantly look around you all the time for new ways, new resources to learn new things? That’s the sense of entrepreneur I’m talking about that now in the networked age almost gives us unlimited possibility.”

John Seely Brown at Digital Media and Learning Conference in San Francisco 2012

Thank you to Jane Hart for drawing my attention to this.

Read Jane Harts follow up post on this here

Customer Loyalty – the magic formula

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Most of us experience a market situation that can best be described as hyper-competition. Supply out strips demand in virtually any category you can think of.

When that plays out advertising becomes less and less useful because there is already so much of it that few people, if any pay attention to it.

So the name of the game is customer loyalty – trying to draw customers closer to us in such a way that they are less tempted to switch to the competitions latest bargain offer.

Many companies use a variety of sophisticated marketing tools and tricks to do this from simple punchcards that give you your 10Th coffee for free to more elaborate loyalty clubs like what many Air Lines have developed.

But I don’t think that bribing customers to come back is what really counts. It may produce some form of customer renetion but there is no emotional loyalty.

What is loyalty then if not retention or what is the difference you may ask?

Well, there are two reasons we need customer loyalty. One is the obvious, that it is much cheaper to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new one.That is the Customer retention part.

But more importantly loyal customers tell their friends – in fact the more loyal they are the more they talk about it – and that is what makes the all important difference between mechanicaly loyal and emotionally loyal.

When you have positive emotional feelings about a product or a brand you become an ambassador or what Fred Reicheld calls a ‘promoter’.(Here is a quick overview of the Net Promotor Score system)

Obviously in order for customers to become loyal they must first of all be satisfied to some degree. Customer satisfaction is the prerequisite for customer loyalty. But how much customer satisfaction does it take to create lasting loyalty?

From deeply dissatisfied to relatively happy, nothing much happens. Then, as satisfaction becomes more than just satisfaction and turns into enthusiasm, loyalty increases sharply.

But notice that when we deliver the right service/product at the right price, at the right time, and to the agreed-upon specifications, we score a 3 or possibly a 3.5 if we are lucky.

“Hey! But that is not fair,” you might be thinking, “we are doing everything perfectly and just as agreed, and all we get is lukewarm feedback!”

Doing everything perfectly and as agreed upon is exactly the problem. When clients read your marketing material or listen to your sales pitch, they learn that you will do this, this, and this for them at this price and on such and such terms.

So, who will be impressed when you actually deliver on what you said you would deliver?

You are performing exactly as expected. If you do less, they will be annoyed. If you do more, they will be en route to enthusiasm. If what you do far exceeds their expectations, they will be ecstatic.

But what can we do more than delivering everything we said we would?

We can establish an emotional connection. And because so few companies get it, it is still unexpected. When we touch our customers emotionally we exceed their wildest expectations.

Just think of a wonderful service experience you have had at some point. What made it exceptional? The mechanical stuff or was it because some one touched you at an emotional level some how?

Nine times out of ten you will find that what creates enthusiasm and loyalty is an emotional connection.

So forget the punch cards and the bonus points – what you need to work on is your team.

It is the attitude and loyalty of your team to your business that drives true customer loyalty. ( see my previous post on Employee loyalty here)

Loyal employees create loyal customers – that is the magic formula and that is also at the heart of the Service Profit Chain