Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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Culture is the foundation of your employee experience.

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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

There is more to a great employee experience than you think.

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When we design our customer experience, we typically focus on the touch points, moments of truth or my favourite moments of need. Whatever we choose to call them, these are the moments when the customer enters into contact with our service delivery system.

Typically (but not exclusively) the contact takes one of two forms: a human touch point or a mechanical/technical touch point, like a website, a check-in console or even an airplane seat. These are important moments that combined make up the full customer experience.

As I argued in my previous blog post, the human touch points have the highest potential to create the emotional connection that is crucial in our efforts to build loyalty, but they also carry the highest risk. If our human element does not deliver, it can be much worse than an automated experience. The mechanical touch point can generally be engineered to be emotionally neutral but rarely produces something that makes your heart sing. I recently checked in to one of these fully automated hotels. It was late, I was driving and just needed a bed for a few hours. All the automation worked, but I felt terribly lonely, with no human interaction whatsoever. There was nothing wrong with the product. But there was also nothing in that experience that would entice me to do it again or tell my friends (positively) about it.

The front line employee makes or breaks it

Our front line employee has the power to make or break the experience for our customer and if we want to make sure that our customer has the best possible experience, we need to make sure that our employee experience is the best possible. Sounds so evident, but that is not always what I observe out there.

So how do we design a great employee experience?

The starting point is behaviour.

When you think about your customer experience, your dream scenario is that your employee does ‘something’ that will make the customer feel appreciated, valued, looked after etc. This is why a lot of companies invest time and effort into training their staff to do certain things in a certain way and that is great. But it only takes us halfway to where we need to be. Because when our staff does things right, we only score 3-3,5 on a satisfaction scale of 1-5. The reason is that from a customer point of view, good is the expected level. You are not surprising them by being good, that is what they expect, and anyway most of your competitors are also ‘good’ otherwise they would not have even been in the game.

So in order to take the experience beyond the 3.5, we need to make an emotional connection. In practical terms, that means that the frontline staff need to invest a bit of themselves in the transaction. They will need to be flexible and adapt to each interaction and add to that interaction what they think would be meaningful to exactly this customer situation, be empathetic. It is not enough to say: ‘have a nice day’. That is not much better than the voice at the end of the escalator at the airport that says: Watch your step… watch your step… watch…

What drive positive service behaviours beyond just mechanically doing things right?

Motivation drives behaviour.

Motivation, engagement, mindset, call it what you like. But whatever you call it, let’s agree that it is some form of inner drive. The best service employee wants to do this. They enjoy being engaged and that is driven by how they feel. What influences how they feel?

The two primary drivers of how we feel on the job are: The culture that we are part of and the systems we are working with.

When we put all this together, we have the consultant’s favourite 2×2 matrix, but this one is a bit different because it is actually a very simple version of Ken Wilbers four quadrants in Integral Theory.

These four quadrants are interdependent. Change something in one and you affect the other three. If they become unbalanced in the sense that what is going on in one quadrant is not congruent with what we would like to see in another quadrant, then the ‘whole ‘ is not functioning optimally.

A simple example

A CEO called me to work with his group of middle managers. “They are not a team, they do not collaborate with each other and it is driving me nuts,” he said. “Can you please work with them and make that happen?”. So I asked him “What kind of remuneration system do they have?” Oh, he said, ” They get a handsome salary and they can earn a substantial individual bonus depending on how their department performs.”

Game over. As long as he maintains this ‘system’ of remuneration’, the ‘motivation’ for each of them is to do their best in they own department. There is no reason for them to collaborate. If he then further reinforces this by very strictly follow up on individual department performance, it just makes things even worse.

Understand the employee perspective through the 4 lenses

If you start analysing your service business using these four lenses, you very quickly start uncovering all sorts of things that are not congruent and therefore counter productive. The obvious ones are often in the ’System’ category. ‘Process’ or ways of working that are frustrating for front line employee but that nobody has done anything about. These we can often flesh out using Service Design tools like employee journey maps.

But the less obvious sources of disengagement come from the culture box and is typically related to what kind of psychological environment the supervisor and the supervisor’s boss is creating. As I have written about before here, culture beats strategy, always. We will take a closer look at that next week.

This spring we ran a series of blog posts around development, developing yourself and others. We have collected and edited those blog posts into a simple e-book that you can download below if you would like to explore this subject further.

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

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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.

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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?

 

How do you achieve the best value fit: Inside out or outside in?

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Everywhere you look, every ‘expert’  on service is telling you that the name of the game is to provide values. And that is true. No value, no business. Everytime you see a high profile brand or product tanks and disappears from the horizon, just think Nokia, Polaroid Kodak, it is basically because they lost it. From the customer perspective, they were no longer providing values.

In the drawing above, the square box represents the company’s offering. It is deliberately drawn as a square to illustrate that we often fall into the trap of having a set solution, a basic service package, our way of doing it. The polygon illustrates the uneven, ever-changing needs of our customers. So, when we overlay what we offer with what they need, we get three zones. The overlap represents the fit (A) where we meet customer needs. The better the fit, the more values we are providing. B is the part of our offering that we charge for, but what the customer does not actually need. And C is the money left lying on the table, in the sense that this is what the customer would really like, but they cannot find it with us and, therefore, either go without it (frustration) or source it from someone else.

Market leaders in a given segment easily get wrapped up in the beauties and benefits of their own products. When they do, the value fit shrinks.

Typically what happens is that they drift slowly from being the customer-centric companies that they were when they were created, and  as a result of over-focus on their own attributes and brilliance, they gradually become more and more product-centric.

This is the danger that lies in the asymmetry that is at the core of the service purchase. What the customer purchases is not what the supplier thinks he is selling. When we forget that, we get lost.

In order to avoid that, we need to understand the the crucial difference between an inside-out and outside-in  customer strategy

Basically you have three options:

  1. I stay behind my own walls, convinced that what I do is great. Great service, great product. It is so great that the world will always beat a path to my door, as they have done in the past. Those who are not here with me must be idiots.As a consequence, I become a hostage of my own past patterns. I look at and understand the world through a filter that is primarily composed of what has worked previously, not realising at all that none of the tomorrow’s problems will be solved with yesterday’s solutions.
  1. I venture to my window from time to time to look out and observe the world. Still, from the security of my own tower, I shake my head at what is going on out there and thank the Lord that I have the right solution. I may feel some concerns, or even frustrations, that out there “they” don’t get it. Maybe I should start thinking of ways to make them listen and understand, possibly turn up the advertising, or make more noise. Or maybe I should start by sending out a survey. I delude myself that I have understood the world by looking out the window.
  1. I leave the security of my tower. I stand next to my customers and together we look at what it is that I am offering. I even try to walk in their shoes for a while and gradually I start to understand what it really means to be in their place. It scares the living daylight out of me to suddenly be in such a vulnerable position.

Only option three will enable you to maximise the value fit.

That is is why the whole philosophy of Service Design Thinking is so important. This is the toolbox that will help you transition from inside out to outside in thinking in your organisation.

 

The real key to creating the eternally fantastic experience

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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!

The paradox of becoming a perennial service experience

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I spotted at least 10-15 new restaurants, cafes and other food related concepts on my walk downtown yesterday. I love the raw courage, energy and pure optimism many of these new service ventures exude.  They are brave because the reality is that by next summer, most of them will be struggling and many of them will already be gone.

And then once in a while, there is a survivor, a business idea that makes it through that first critical 2-year hurdle and becomes a viable stable business.  But that is just the first hurdle, the real test is to make it past the 5-year mark and beyond.

So what does it take?

You need to do two things equally well. On the one hand, you need to be extremely consistent in the way you deliver your product and at the same time, you need to be constantly renewing and innovating. That is the wicked paradox and that is why it is so hard to do.

One way to understand this is to use the Kano model.

Quickly explained, you could say that our goal is to reach total satisfaction, and avoid any dissatisfaction. In order to reach that goal. I will need to ‘implement something’. Certain things need to be in place.

If we stay with the simple example of the coffee shop, there are certain basics that need to be in place in order for you as a customer to even consider this a coffee shop. Tables, chairs, coffee, decent hygiene. If these basic are not there and well functioning, you would not even consider setting foot there. But that does not mean that more tables and chairs and scrubbing the floor even cleaner are going to attract even more customers.

It will take something more than just the basics.

You will need to implement attributes that we could call performance items. For a cafe to be considered a possible option for me. it would need to have high-quality coffee, friendly helpful staff, a selection of light bakery items etc..

This, of course, is individual and subjective. Now in my case, I can easily think of a dozen coffee shops that would fulfill these performance criteria. But there are a few coffee shops in town that I will actually go out of my way to visit. Not only do they get the basics right, they also fulfill my performance criteria AND they have something that delights me, a feature that I find unique and special for this place and that few others have in the same way.

But these needs are layers in order of priority. One layer builds on the next. It’s no use focusing on the delighters and neglecting the basics.

So the need for consistency is about the ‘basic’ and especially the ‘performance’ items. If they are not stable, you’ll very soon get tired of a place. If most days the coffee is great but sometimes it’s not, that is the end of that. You find somewhere that is consistent. Because the main reason we come back to a service experience is that we would like more of what we had on the previous visit. This is a fundamental customer need that we must never forget as service providers.

But at the same time, in the Kano model, there is also this notion of ‘drift’. Maybe, 6-7 years ago what really delighted you about a certain cafe was that it had free, no code high-speed internet connection (and it was one of the few that offered this in your area). Then 2-3 years ago, you started thinking of the free high-speed internet as a performance item, most of the good cafes had that. And today you probably consider that internet connection is as basic as the tables and chairs, and if it is slightly inconsistent in its performance, you will switch to a cafe that does have a stable internet connection.

So the service attributes that start out as delights, over time drift and become first performance items and then just basic. The reason for this is that customer expectation mature and competition is constantly copying the best delighters from each other.  That puts us under constant pressure to renew ourselves to continuously think up new delighters while skilfully maintaining our performance and basic attributes.

This over time becomes a delicate balancing act. What to add, what to maintain and what to let go. It can only be done successfully by being very ‘close’ to our customers. We need to fully understand why they chose us, and how their preferences are evolving!

If we are successful doing that, we achieve the nirvana of a great service concept and become perennial. My favourite example of this is the Danish Museum of Modern Art in Louisiana, it has existed for more than 50 years. There are certain things that are rock solid consistent and at the same time, they are always reinventing themselves. Brilliant!

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!

Would you like the people around you to take better decisions?

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Probably.

The better decisions they take, the easier your life becomes. That is the bottom line.

So how can you help them do that?

It’s all about awareness as we discovered in last week’s post. They need help to raise their awareness about their own decision-making process.

How often do you review decisions taken by your direct reports together with them? Other than maybe telling them that whatever they decided was in the good/bad category?

As you may remember, this is a point I have made several times in this blog. We don’t automatically learn much from our experiences. If we did, we would never make the same mistake twice, would we? We only learn from our experiences when we take the time reflect on them.

But in a busy service environment, reflection is not top of mind. Fire-fighting is more the mode we are in. The mantra seems to be: Do something if it works fine; if not, try something else. It puts out the fire most of the time but we don’t learn a lot from the process.

So instead of getting frustrated next time one of your people makes a less than perfect decision, try sitting them down for a chat. Make it clear that this is not a reprimand but a learning session. Use a reverse GROW process as the framework for the conversation.

  • What were you trying to achieve? (Goal)
  • What was the reality of the situation? (Reality)
  • What options did you have? (Options)
  • What did you decide? (Will)

In my personal experience, the two key points in this discussion are:

1) What was the reality of the situation?
Did they jump to conclusions, or confuse their assumptions with facts? Often it turns out their decision was based on everything but the reality of the situation.

2) What options did you have?
As humans, we have a tendency to stick with the first solution that pops into our head. “Ahha got it, I will do this”. Maybe the first solution is the right one, that flash of inspired insight. But more often than not, that first idea that pops up has overlooked other possibilities.

This is where it can be helpful to explore with them what other options were actually available. It will help them understand that next time, it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment and try and come up with a few more alternatives.

When we do this, we help our colleagues see how their decision-making process operates. Now they have a basis for getting better.

This works well in one-to-one sessions. But we can use exactly the same review process to consider decisions that we have taken together. The key here is to avoid blaming any individual but looking at the collective decision-making process in order to learn from it.

This the fourteenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.