retention is easier

Quick question is it easier and cheaper to: 1) get new customers; or 2) keep existing customers? Obviously, it’s easier to keep existing customers. They know where to find you, what you offer, your level of service, etc. They already know that pros and cons of doing business with you and choose to do business with you anyway. Getting new customers requires making them aware of your business and what you offer and them convincing them to come visit and then convincing them to buy something and then demonstrating enough value through price or service that they choose to come back.

So why, why, why do businesses put so much emphasis on getting new customers, often at the expense of existing customers? Some industries in particular seem to have a business model that is solely focused on getting new customers from their competitors while ignoring their former customers who have been seduced away by a competitor. Huh? I see this most in subscription based businesses: cable/satellite TV, mobile phones, etc. The thought seems to be once you sign up you are captive and therefore require no attention. They are too busy trying to woo dissatisfied customers from the competition to worry about their own dissatisfied customers. They confuse contract induced commitment with satisfaction and loyalty.

Likewise, is it easier and cheaper to retain existing employees or to find and hire new ones? If retention is easier and cheaper, do we treat employees like we want them to stick around, like they don’t have a choice and have to stick around, or do we treat them like we don’t care at all?

It’s been said that the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience. What are your employees experiencing? Are they treated as well as we would want to be treated as customers? If we gave our customers the level of support, attention, and communication that we give our employees, would we still be in business?

Let’s spin this around: how do you want your best customers treated? What needs to be done to provide employees with the same level of internal support and service?

tale of two burritos

Customer service makes or breaks a business and good enough just isn’t. This weekend, I ended up having burritos from two competing franchises. Let’s call them Good Burrito and Better Burrito. Both offer super fresh ingredients, make them with specifically the ingredients and toppings you ask for, are pretty quick, and are very tasty. I never really thought about the differences until sampling them back to back.

Good Burrito asked what toppings I wanted and shuffled me from person to person as the burrito moved down the line. By the end of the line, three different people had contributed to my dinner. Henry Ford would be proud of the assembly line efficiency. Better Burrito had one person who put my food together and what a difference that one person made.

Supergregarious, he seemed to truly be interested in my day. How was my Saturday going, was I working or off, where did I work, did I like it there? When adding ingredients he’d brag on them a little: These vegetables are great, we cook them with… You can’t go wrong with that salsa, it’s great on everything…

A couple of important points. This took NO MORE time, in fact it was probably quicker because I didn’t have to repeat what I wanted like I did when getting passed from person to person at Good Burrito. He never got bogged down in the conversation. I never felt like I was being interrogated. It never felt fake or forced. Instead he gave the impression that he was really interested in my day and in making me the perfect burrito.

Then when I got to the register to pay I asked to get a brownie. The woman at the register (also superfriendly) said, “Let me find you a good one. They put the old ones on top.” And she dug through the basket until she found one. It looked like all the others, but she proclaimed it worthy. When I decided to get a brownie to take home for my wife, she dug through the basket again.

Here’s the most important point: Whether they cared about me, my day, and my lunch doesn’t matter. What matters is that they made me feel like they did. It took no more time, cost no more money, and made all the difference.

The HR and business lessons I take from this:

Hire right! Here’s the secret to hiring people: hire people who give a damn. Nothing else matters unless they care. If they care, the rest is largely irrelevant.  I’ll take under qualified people who care over qualified but apathetic people any day. Qualified and they give a damn? Score! I suspect that the guy making my burrito was following a semi-scripted patter. But he was so fluid and did it so well that it came across as very authentic. And, he was clearly a very outgoing person and a good fit for a customer facing role. The woman at the register went out of her way to find a good brownie. It’s hard to train people to care or go above and beyond. Much easier to hire for it.

Train right. Again, I suspect that much of it was patter, but done so well it felt natural, not forced. That requires a lot of practice, role playing, feedback, more practice, etc.

Think twice about your dress code. Employees at both places were clean and well groomed. Except that the three workers I saw at Better Burrito had long hair (male), blond dreadlocks (female), purple hair (female), and a heavy emphasis on tattoos and face piercings. And they were supernice, not too cool for you, not angsty, not indifferent. Let’s see, person who gives a damn and has nose rings or one who is unpierced and indifferent? Hmmm, easy choice.

Sustained business performance requires great customer service. Great customer services requires great people. Great people requires an intense focus on hiring right and training well. That requires leadership that truly gets the DIRECT connection between people and performance.

The final lesson? Great customer service trounces good customer service every time. Good enough customer service never is.

feedback, the overlooked advantage

Organizations only improve when individuals improve. People simply cannot improve without feedback. Most people and most organizations struggle because the only thing harder than giving good feedback is receiving it.

Jason Lauritsen recently wrote a great post titled “Flipping the Script on Feedback”. Lots of interesting points about feedback, but what really struck me was his comment: …teach people how to receive [feedback] rather than spending so much time worrying about the way in which your managers deliver it.

I was struck by what a friend used to call a blinding flash of the obvious. Duh! We spend all this time trying to teach managers to deliver feedback well – which is important – and miss the most crucial link. If the employee is not good at receiving feedback, it doesn’t matter how well it’s delivered. If they are good at receiving it, then they will still try to benefit from it even if the delivery is poor. Obviously, training on giving and receiving feedback isn’t mutually exclusive, but his post serves as an important reminder that both sides of the equation are important.

As I think about it, I wonder why organizations don’t place much, much greater emphasis on developing every employee and manager to be truly great at giving and receiving feedback. After all, we will never (read as: NEVER) create a high performing organization, department, team, family, etc. without the ability to honestly give and learn from feedback. It’s a pretty straightforward equation: the more receptive to feedback (data) we are, the more people share ideas and information with us, the better the information we have, the better the decisions we make and actions we take, the better results we get. AND the better we are able to assess, evaluate, revise and improve.

I suspect that downplaying or dismissing the importance of feedback is simply another symptom of the misguided belief that business results are somehow separate from the people in the business.

Better people = better results. Period.

human resources’ top goal? (repost)

From time to time I see HR folks insisting that the primary purpose of Human Resources is to keep the company from being sued. This philosophy is at the very core of everything I find wrong with HR.

Yes, HR can play a huge role in preventing or mitigating employment lawsuits. This is an important result of HR, but the top goal? Prevent lawsuits vs. select and train really great people? Prevent lawsuits vs. creating an environment where people actually want to be there? Prevent lawsuits vs. helping managers be the best leaders they can be? It really seems to be putting the cart before the horse. After all, a company can get sued if it mismanages its money but no one ever says that the number one goal of the finance department is to prevent lawsuits. You can get sued for being abusive to customers or false advertising, but I’ve never heard anyone suggest that the primary purpose of customer service and marketing are to prevent lawsuits.

Want to know the #1 way to ensure that HR is never involved in any strategic level conversations? Want to guarantee that your company culture is rife with fear and managers don’t manage? Want to be stuck in the glorious tar pit of HR as bureaucracy? Spend all your time focused on not getting sued.

In the perfect little world in my head, HR’s #1 goal is to help the company perform at its best. Minimizing lawsuits is a by product of doing things right; it’s a means to an end but not the end itself. The best processes and practices will help the company perform in a way that comply with all the laws and regulations. However, “not getting sued” as an end goal will never, ever create high performance. It’s like a runner training for a marathon with the #1 goal of not getting injured. Sure, they don’t want to get injured, but the best way to not get injured is to not train. After all, you can’t pull a muscle sitting on the couch. But that doesn’t work because their #1 goal is to perform at their best on race day. Not getting hurt is a part of that, but it’s obviously not the focus. Instead, the runner knows that with good planning, preparation, and execution of a training program they will minimize their chances of getting injured while maximizing the chances of high performance.

It’s an idea worth repeating: HR’s #1 goal is to help the company perform at its best.  And if you do it well, you automatically reduce the chance of getting sued. But that’s an outcome of doing things right not the other way around. For example, adhering to all the anti-discrimination laws does not ensure that you hire great people. But when you are focused on hiring the best people you will naturally seek diverse talent pools because you don’t want to exclude the best talent because of arbitrary bias.

Can we move HR out of the dark ages now? Instead of operating out of continual fear of lawsuit, let’s create high performing companies by helping people be at their best.

no problem too big? (repost)

We all have more personal and professional resources at our fingertips than we can imagine. I am not naturally good at networking, but I suspect the advantage that great networkers have is that they are simply better able to see and tap into these resources.

I recently attended a training program that really underscored this idea for me. There were six table groups with about five people at each table. For one of the activities, each table was given a large, hypothetical, community issue to solve. As an example, one group was told that they were trying to offer low cost health screenings at a community health fair; another group was trying to create transportation solutions for a low income area. There were six different groups all trying to solve overwhelmingly huge problems.

Everyone then mingled throughout the room asking people from other groups what they could do to help. Amazingly, EVERY SINGLE PERSON had a skill, access to resources, or knew someone who could help. Although the situations were hypothetical, the resources and solutions weren’t.

The point of the exercise was to demonstrate the sheer volume of resources available in a community and I was blown away by it. Normally, if you went around and asked a bunch of relative strangers what they could do to help, you’d get little response and few ideas. So what made this activity different?

First, the focus was on gathering all ideas, big and small, and no ideas were dismissed. Also, we weren’t looking for a solution, only asking what the others could contribute (and a lot of times their contribution was to offer to connect them with someone else). Finally, no one said, “I can’t help.” The expectation was to think of some way, no matter how small or unorthodox, to help. This generated a ton of good ideas that would not have been otherwise considered.

If that magic can happen with a group of strangers, how powerful would it be with people you know? We’ve all done this to some extent, but I wonder what would happen if we really leveraged it? What if you took a problem you were working on and directly asked everyone you know what they could offer to help? (Posting it on Facebook or Twitter is not directly asking. Emailing is not directly asking. I mean to have a one-on-one in-person or over the phone conversation where they have to give you an answer right then.)

This is really leveraging the six degrees of separation. We don’t have to go too far out in our network to find someone who would be a great resource whether we are trying to find a job, buy a car, hire a personal trainer, find great day care, locate investment property, etc.

I’m becoming convinced that there are few problems bigger than the people we already know. The only thing we need to do is ask.

all you need to know about training design (repost)

When training fails, it is generally because the learners haven’t understood the material on both an intellectual AND an emotional level. Intellectual level training focuses on the “what” and the “how”. What needs to be done and how do I need to do it?

We see this all the time. Where people say they don’t need training because they already know it, but they aren’t doing any of it. They haven’t truly connected with the “why”. Why is it important that I do it? What are the benefits of doing it or the consequences if I don’t?

There are only two reasons that humans do anything: 1) to seek pleasure; and 2) to avoid pain.  These are the same two reasons that humans learn anything. Why do we learn the newest version of Microsoft Office? To do our jobs better (pleasure) and to avoid failing at our jobs (pain). Why do we learn new exercises or diets? To get sexy and delay death.

So, no matter how much we read, research, discuss, and ponder, we never truly learn until we connect with the material at an emotional level. Everyone knows that smoking, drinking, or eating too much will shorten their lives. We know at the intellectual level, but often don’t get it at the emotional level (if we did, we’d stop). Until a person really, really connects with the consequences at an emotional level, intellectual warnings do zero good.

All great training – regardless of topic – teaches the what, how, and the why. And it does it in a way that each participant can individually understand and key into. Experience is the best teacher because it provides the emotional learning.

Will Rogers really understood this principle. He summed up everything important about training design in three sentences: “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

Design and evaluate your training programs accordingly…

 

Note: this is a repost of my very first blog post from almost a year ago. Hope you enjoyed.

the toughest part about leadership development

Becoming a better leader is difficult, no doubt there. Many, many books and classes exist to help you, but there is one particular challenge that rarely gets mentioned, yet is at the heart of all real leadership development. Here it is, you might want to commit it to memory:

All leadership development is personal development.

You can get promoted into a leadership role with very little leadership ability. It’s sometimes just a matter of tenure, being in the right place at the right time, or being very technically skilled and having no other career path available. And there are a lot (emphasis on a lot) of bad managers out there whose people get results despite their poor leadership skills. But we’re not talking about continuing on as a bad manager, we’re talking about growing and developing as a leader.

You can never become a better leader without first becoming a better you. Your team won’t get better until you get better. You cannot sustainably get more out of others without getting more out of yourself. That’s not quick. It’s not easy. It’s not sexy. And it’s a hard sell. But it is truth.

Say it again with me: All leadership development is personal development.

 

i commit

I commit to playing bigger, taking relentless action, having epic fun, and making a freakin’ difference!

  • What do you commit to?
  • What gets you out of bed, ready to conquer the day?
  • What excites you about being on Planet Earth for one more day?
  • What are you passionate and enthusiastic about accomplishing?
  • What’s the bigger game you want to play?

Bring it on!

no more surprises

Nobody likes to be surprised by bad news. Surprises can be a career limiting event. From this day forward, do all in your humanly power to make sure that two types of people are never, ever surprised:

1. Your boss. Your job is to make your manager’s life easier. The #1 way to make their life (and your life) more difficult is for them to be surprised or blindsided by what you have done or not done. We will all make mistakes and drop the ball from time to time and the first step to retribution is making sure your boss isn’t surprised.

2. Your customers. Your job is to make your customer’s life easier. Nobody buys from someone who makes their life more difficult. Surprises make things difficult. Changes happen, there are things outside our control. Customers are far, far more forgiving if they know about potential issues in advance. Delivering bad news in advance is difficult, but letting them call to complain after being surprised by bad news is a far more challenging situation.