Where Outstanding Customer Service Starts

We live in an age where it's not enough just to set up shop and open a business and expect people to come flocking through our doors. Maybe there was a time when you could just find a town that didn't have an appliance store, go there, and open up an appliance store, and you'd be guaranteed some business. But today, when people are willing to drive long distances to shop at outlet malls or order things online or get things from complete strangers through the classifieds or Craigslist, you've got to have something going for you if you want customers to buy from you.

If you ask 10 businesses what the key to their success is, chances are the majority of them will say, it's their great customer service. And chances are, in the majority of cases, that's complete hogwash. Oh, sure, they talk about customer service, and customer service comes up in the annual employee performance reviews, but if all the companies who said they were about customer service really provided the level of customer service they claimed to, wouldn't our day-to-day experiences be a little different? Maybe even dramatically different?

So how do you go about institutionalizing good customer service? Do you just do some customer service training with the employees? Maybe some role playing games to help the employees see things from the customer's point of view?

Maybe customer service training and role plays would help, but there's an even bigger factor that can make a bigger difference: You have to model good customer service for them.

Sometimes this can be done in front of your employees, with actual customers. However, as managers, sometimes we don't have as many opportunities for customer interaction as our employees do. How can we model customer service if the employees never see us with the customers?

The answer: By seeing our employees as our customers, and meeting their needs as well as we want them to meet the needs of our customers.

Think about it:

When an employee comes to you with a problem or concern, how quick are you to act on it? Do you make it seem like it's a big deal to you, or do you ask them to, "Email me about it when I'm not so busy?"

When an employee has an issue that you or the company have no way of dealing with, do you dismiss it flippantly, or do you make the employee feel like you wish you could help in spite of your limitations, and maybe suggest some other alternatives?

When they come to you, do you smile and act happy to see them, or do you seem frazzled and busy, like you don't have time for them?

Often, these actions on the part of management set the tone for the actions that employees take down the line. It is far harder for employees to spontaneously spring forth a helpful, courteous attitude towards our customers out of themselves each day, than it is for them to pass along a helpful, courteous attitude that's flowing to them from all corners of the organization.

For this reason, it's actually helpful to provide customer service training to all parts of the organization. Your IT department or payroll department might not talk to your customers, but they are talking to your employees. In some cases, they're the people at the home office your field teams are talking with the most. Their customer service skills should be some of the best in your organization, if you recognize their opportunity to set an example for the rest of the company.

It is a service minded organization that creates truly service minded front line people.

The Value of Training

Imagine a farmer with fruit orchards. He's got oranges and apples, maybe a few pear trees here and there.

He's hired you to come talk to him about why his business isn't doing so well. He's cut expenses back every way he can, but he just can't turn a profit.

Analyzing his balance sheet, you're shocked to see that two of the areas he's cut down on are water and fertilizer.

"How are you watering your trees?" you ask.


"I'm not, really," says the farmer. "Not fertilizing, either. The way I see it, I'm here to sell fruit, not soil. I got worry about the fruit first, then the tree second. Something had to go, and that was the ground!"

The flaws in his logic are obvious. In fact, there's very little you can do to improve the health and quality of either the fruit or the tree that doesn't start in the ground first.

Every self-respecting farmer knows that, which is why it's highly unlikely you'll encounter a scenario like the one I describe here.

However, I see businesses doing the equivalent of this all the time. When there are cuts to be made, one of the first departments to get funding slashed is the training department.

"We have to focus on quality of product," people will say. Or, "We already have good quality, highly trained employees."

And that's generally true enough. However, the roots of both high quality products and great employees are grounded firmly in the soil of good training.

The other problem with this attitude is not always as obvious: it suggests that employees are the only ones who need training.

Upper management knows that they are in a position where they can make a huge impact on their organization--they certainly want that reflected in their salaries. However, often ego, or a worry that such training will make them look like they're weak, will prevent them from so much as attending the same seminars or workshops they're putting their mid-level managers through.

Good, principle-based training gets to the root of employee issues, management issues, and interpersonal conflict. By helping employees and managers on those deep, fundamental levels, it creates change that can reach through all levels of the organization. It manifests itself in areas ranging from quality of product to employee morale to employee loyalty.

Spring Water Clear Messages

When I was doing volunteer work in Brazil, I met a wonderful indian family living in the city of Manaus.

Manaus is a huge city of four million people, but when you start coming to edges of it, the rain forest still creeps its way into the city. This family was living in a little ravine on the edge of a neighborhood near the north end of the city, where the foliage around their house was pretty thick.

The person who I was working with at the time was a huge nature fanatic. He dreamed of becoming a fly fishing guide and had owned snakes and other reptiles as a teenager.

He was trying to learn the names of all the different animals in Portuguese. We'd bought a couple of animal books and he'd been studying them. When we were talking with this indian family, he realized they were pretty familiar with the animals of the area. He started talking to them about different animal names, especially lizards.

When they got talking about one particular kind of giant lizard (I have no idea what kind--he was the nature fanatic, not me), they told him they'd seen one of those around their house lately.

He was ecstatic. He wanted it. Having raised so many reptiles as a teen, he was excited at the chance to have such an exotic pet.

"If you see it, you've got to get it for me," he told them.

They smiled and told him they could get it. No problem.

The next time we stopped in, he was hopeful that he was about to walk away with a new pet.

Sure enough, they smiled when they saw him. "Hey, we got it for you," they told him. "We already started in on it, but you can have the rest."

Yeah, you probably guessed it. They brought out the charred, half-eaten lizard they'd shot with a bow and arrow, and cooked up for him.

He didn't try it (But I did, just so I could say I had).

It was Dr. Benjamin Martinez of Panamerican Associates that first introduced me to the idea of "Spring Water Clear" messages. He defined that this way: Messages so clear that not only can they be understood, but they cannot possibly be misunderstood.

Making sure instructions are spring water clear is one of the biggest challenges of management. Communication is a tough thing--you're trying to get an idea out of your mind, and into the mind of another. Generally, any number of obstacles can keep that mind-to-mind transition from going smoothly.

Often, businesses have certain cultural "lingo" that aren't always clear to new employees. Even worse, sometimes it can vary from state to state. A term that the west coast divisions use to mean one thing may mean something entirely different to the east coast divisions.

Also, one phrase is often used to describe entire processes. Although the manager and the employee might be clear about the job to be done, the details of the process might vary.

There are two lessons to take away from this: It requires caution before, and understanding after.

When delivering a message, we must be cautious that we make all instructions as spring water clear as possible, and that as many of the relevant details are outlined as we can. Taking time at the start will lead to time saved later, both because there are fewer mistakes to fix, as well as because even though confused "lingo" costs time, confirmed "lingo" saves it.

After the message is delivered, when problems arise, understanding is necessary. We need to remember that it is often inadequate communication that leads to mistakes, not incompetent employees. If you're repeatedly finding employees performing tasks incorrectly or differently than you would like, it is more likely that you're inadequately communicating your expectations than they have begun to suffer from communal, contagious ineptitude.

Conflict Management: Reasons For Employee Conflict

An Observation of a Cycle

Pretty early on in my studies of the principles of management, I came to a realization.

Every conflict between a manager and an employee--in fact, every interpersonal conflict, whether it was in the workplace, the home, sports teams, volunteer groups, or anything else--could be traced to one source.

A lack of trust.

If two people were not getting along, somehow they had come to stop trusting each other. For whatever reason, they now thought the other person was no longer acting with their best interests in mind.

If you think about it, this is always true. Whether it's a husband and wife drifting apart, a parent and a child fighting, or a manager who is in conflict with an employee, at the core of the conflict is the fact that they've become afraid that the other person isn't acting in their best interests any more.

I also noticed the way that lack of trust could begin to perpetuate itself. Because the manager, for example, was now afraid that the employee wasn't acting in the manager or the company's best interests, the manager would be hesitant to accept the employee's requests, complaints, or suggestions.

This hesitancy would cause the employee to further mistrust the manager. If he's not taking my requests, complaints, or suggestions, he must not be taking me seriously, the employee would think. Consequently, the employee would be hesitant to accept assignments, critcisms, and direction from a manager he felt wasn't really concerned about him.

Which leads to increased mistrust from the manager. Which leads to increased mistrust from the employee.

You see the cycle. It was always obvious to me, as an outsider, when I'd see the cycle develop.

The solution, to me, was obvious. Since this cycle was continuous, either one of them could break it. If I could just persuade one of them about the truth of what was going on, we could break the cycle.

A Problem With The Solution

But here was the problem: neither my observation or terminology helped me persuade them at all.

You see, my observation didn't change the fact that they were both right. The other person was acting in a way that did not merit trust. No matter which person you were, the fact was the other person was focused entirely on themselves and their own self interests. Their mistrust of you was that you would not do what they wanted. The other person wasn't thinking about your concerns at all.

Nor did my observation that there was a lack of trust. You can't spontaneously generate trust for someone who has honestly been demonstrating over time that they aren't thinking about how avoid injuring you, but has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to disregard your interests.

Despite my observations, I still felt powerless.

Help From The Arbinger Institute

Then I began reading some of the works of the Arbinger Institute, and found a much more sophisticated, useful view of the cycle I observed. They'd even given a name to it: collusion.

Normally, collusion means two people conspiring for a common goal, but in a twisted sort of way, it perfectly describes the way two people in conflict manage to exactly act in a way that justifies the other person's feelings towards them.

The manger, in his attempt to manage the untrustworthy employee, manages to act in exactly the controlling, resistant way the employee needs in order to tell himself his manager is oppressive and doesn't care about his employees.

And the employee, in an effort to stand up for himself and fight for his rights, acts in exactly the rebellious, resistant way the manager needs in order to tell himself the employee is difficult and doesn't care about the company.

But Arbringer doesn't label the thing flowing so freely back and forth between the two as mistrust. They label the thing flowing back and forth between them as blame.

Now that was a word I could use.

The Problem With Blame

If you asked the manager what the problem was, he would blame the employee. But if you asked the employee who the problem was, he would blame the manager.

But what was the real problem?

The problem was the blame.

The manager was actually reacting negatively to the things the employee was trying to do to "deal" with his oppressive manager. but the employee was only reacting negatively to the things the manager was doing to "deal" with his rebellious employee.

When one of them blames the other, in word or in deed, it provokes defensiveness and blame back. And that returned blame invites more blame and defensiveness.

And, even worse, at that point, they both begin to focus on proving themselves right rather than on solving the problem. In their book, Leadership and Self-Deception, Arbringer writes:

However bitterly I complain about someones poor behavior toward me and about the trouble it causes me, I also find it strangely delicious. It's my proof that others are as blameworthy as I've claimed them to be--and that I'm as innocent as I claim myself to be. The behavior I complain about is the very behavior that justifies me.

The eye-opening revelation is that blame is a divisive force that creates more problems than it solves.

Blame is a recourse for those who are more interested in justifying themselves than in getting results.

Blame is a weapon, but a twisted sort of weapon that seeks to transform the one it hits into an attacker, and the one who fires it into a victim. It is designed to elicit certain feelings towards the one leveling the blame and the one the blame is directed towards.

This is not to say that there are not responsibilities, and that in any given situation, some people may be more responsible than others. It is not to say

Blame is not about solving problems, but is simply about creating perceptions. Imagine if your doctor was more concerned about creating a certain appearance than about finding out what was really wrong with you. He would be inclined to overlook certain obvious symptoms, as he was continually reaching for hard-to-diagnose cases that would make him look like an insightful, knowledgeable doctor. He would be slow to diagnose things that should be easy for him, like simple colds, as he continually reached for diagnoses that were more in line with his own ambitions. His worries about perceptions over problem solving would hinder his diagnosis.

Similarly, let's say there is a person in our department who we want to blame for all the problems in that department. It doesn't matter if the person actually is as big a jerk as we think he is or not. What matters is that our focus on them, and our desire to isolate them as the cause of all our problems. Such a focus will make us as slow to diagnose seemingly simple problems as the doctor was in the example above.

Most particularly, it will render us almost completely impotent to diagnosing any problems in ourselves.

In fact, the blame becomes our proof that we're good, and that the problem is somewhere else. Whatever we do magically becomes okay. Sure, we'll acknowledge our own imperfections, and even work on them some, but we know they're not responsible for any of the big problems. What do our little imperfections matter, when there is such a problem person as so-and-so in my department?

But Isn't It Somebody's Fault?

The biggest reason to internally rebel against this idea is obvious: But what if it really is his fault? Or, perhaps, But it really is his fault.

And the answer to that is, it can be his fault without any need for the kind of bitter, vindictive blame I'm talking about.

What do I mean by that?

Chances are, you've been corrected once or twice in your life. You've made mistakes, and other people have seen fit to tell you about them.

I want you to think of two times you've been corrected.

For the first time, I want you to think of a time you've been corrected that provoked you to feel some type of emotion. The correction made you angry, or rebellious. This is a time when someone was blaming you.

Now, think of a second time. Think of a time when someone let you know something that you could do better. This time, think about when the correction was a good experience. You felt, if anything, grateful, or at the very least, none of the hostility you felt the first time.

If you think about the differences between the two times, chances are the difference wasn't in the correction. Chances are the difference was in how you thought the person who was talking to you felt about you.

In the first example, the person making the correction may have been trying to make themselves look smart (and, you felt, trying to make you look stupid to help them look smarter). They might have been trying to make you look bad (because they were trying to blame you for something). They might have been someone you saw as constantly butting in, because they didn't feel you were capable of figuring things out on your own.

Whatever the reason, chances are it was the person's attitude towards you that caused you to see the correction as being something you needed to resist.

Same thing in reverse in the second example. Chances are, you saw the second person as either willing or able to help you. You either didn't know them, and therefore didn't have any reason to believe they'd need to hurt you, or you did know them, and you knew they did care about you, and did want you to do well.

See how it works?

The problem is not in offering correction where correction is necessary. The problem is where we feel the correction is coming from.

The solution to eliminating harmful blame is not to eliminate accountability. People need to be held accountable. However, it is possible to hold someone responsible for something and work towards a solution without wanting harm, shame, or blame to fall on the person responsible.

No Need For A Bad Guy

If I asked you to beat Tiger Woods at golf, chances are you couldn't do it.

If I spent a lot of time training you, working with you, and coaching you, chances are you still couldn't do it.

No matter how important beating Tiger Woods was to me, or how naturally good at golf you are, or how good a coach I am, chances are we'll never get you to a point that you could beat Tiger Woods.

So whose fault is it? Who's to blame? You? Me? Woods?

Hopefully, the answer is obvious: It's nobody's fault. It's just not something that's within your power to achieve or my power to teach. He's got more natural ability, and he's been in the game longer.

Blaming would be useless here. There is no bad guy.

Now, remove Tiger Woods from the equation. Isn't there still a limit to how far your abilities and my coaching can take us? Once that limit was hit, would it really be anybody's fault?

Not at all. No amount of me blaming you or you blaming me would help. We've both tried our best, and both reached our limits.

There is no bad guy.

However, I might harbor an unspoken fear that I was the bad guy. Or you might harbor an unspoken fear that you were the bad guy. And in an effort to prove that wrong, we'd start gathering all the evidence we could against each other. We'd starting looking for every proof we could that the other guy hadn't tried hard enough, or put in enough hours, or did his best. We would want the other guy to be the bad guy, so that we didn't have to be.

And here's the sad irony: At this point, the only thing that would help is if I start to improve my ability as a coach, or if you start to improve your ability as a trainer. By spending all our time focusing on the other person, and ignoring ourselves, we have turned away from the only thing that can actually help improve the situation--working on ourselves. Until I start learning better coaching techniques, or more about play, or you start getting better conditioned or develop a better work schedule, nothing will change.

But as long as you're focused on my problems, and I'm focused on your problems, that will never happen.

Either one of us can break the cycle. If either one of us begins to think about what we can contribute to the relationship instead of what the other person is costing the relationship, our contribution will automatically begin to improve things.

However, this only works if our efforts, if our our contributions are sincere. The second example you imagined above, the one that you didn't feel the desire to resist, wasn't someone who was "working" you, or "giving so that you would give," or "practicing good people skills."

It was someone who cared.

Period.

Management Starts With You

If you want somebody to change how they are towards you, you've got to change how you are towards them.

It's that simple.

Stinks, doesn't it?

I mean, time it was that if an employee was a problem, we could just chew them out or write them up or fire them and move on.

But as time's gone on, it's started to dawn on people--even bosses--that being bossy isn't the best way to get your way.

In fact, being bossy is a pretty good way not to get your way.

It seems counter intuitive. I mean, it makes sense that we should be able to get better and better results if we push harder and harder, right? Isn't that how we've been told goals work? The harder you push, the faster you get results.

Except it doesn't seem to work like that with people. For some reason, when we push hard with people, they tend to resist. In fact, the harder we push, the harder they seem to push back. Even when we're the boss, and what we say should go.

It's a natural inclination, if you think about it, and it's born out of this fear: If that guy wants that thing so bad, he's not going to think about me while he fights to get it.

The Fable of the Sun And The Wind

This idea is illustrated in Aesop's famous fable of The North Wind and the Sun:

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.

They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.

Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt.

Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak. And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

The Meaning of the Fable

Many would argue that the moral of this fable is that it's better to treat people kindly than cruelly. That's definitely part of it. But there's a bigger lesson here that can be learned here--after all, chances are that few of us are actually mean.

Aesop himself gave moral of the fable this way: Persuasion is better than force.

In other words, Aesop was saying that it's better to try to convince a person that something is a good idea than to simply require him to do something.

I'd even like to go a step further and say the moral is this: People will always do things faster when they have personal reasons to do them than when they're required to do them.

Changing Our Attitudes

So the fastest way to get results from an employee is by connecting the project with that employee's wants and desires.

This means that for us to get better results from our employees, their wants and needs have to start to matter to us as much as our own do.

If the employee were a customer, we would be quick to that. We would want to know exactly what needs the customer had, so we could fill them as quickly and accurately as possible. We might even develop specific products just to meet that customer's needs. We would see there were dollars there, so we would try to learn that customer's business as accurately as we could, so that we could tailor products that would keep him happy and loyal. We would want to know that customer's business as well as the customer did.

We can see our employees in exactly this way. They are people with wants and needs. And the quicker we are to tap into their wants and needs, the more intricately we understand their reasons for coming to work each day, the more we can not only help them see the importance of their currently projects, but the more we can custom design assignments for employees based on what will fit their wants and needs.

This means seeing employees as partners rather than as resources.

This would cause us to look at "problem" employees in a whole new light.

Orchard growers sometimes spend some of their longest, hardest nights in the middle of winter when not a tree is producing any fruit. They stay up late with torches, keeping fires going, trying to keep trees alive during unusual cold snaps so that they'll be productive again come spring.

Similarly, it is often when employees are feeling and acting the most disloyal that they need us to provide them with reassurance that we are loyal to them.

And The Rest

Will every single assignment be one that can be custom tailored to fit a certain employee? No.

However, because of the careful way you try to match assignments and motivations to specific employees, two things will happen.

1. Your employees will be more willing to accept assignments from you. Because they feel you're acting with their interests in mind most of the time, they won't feel as inclined to resist you as they were when they were given assignments with reasons as simplistic as, "That's just the job," or, "Because that's what we have to do."

2. Your employees will be more likely to see the benefits without you having to point them out. Once you've started tying the success of projects to the individual desires of the employees, they will start to see how all aspects of the business affect them more clearly. They'll be more disposed to work for the overall success of the organization, because they'll be more likely to see organizational success as personal success.

The Change

I'm not trying to teach a technique or a practice here. There are plenty of managers who try to use some form of what I've described as a means to manipulate production from employees.

What I'm talking about is a fundamental change in the way employees are perceived.

A manager who sees employees as a resource, might still talk to them about their interests, or drop references to things they've heard the employee say into discussions, but as long as the employee was simply viewed as a resource, he would still be more interested in taking from the employee than in giving back. The employee will still feel this, and still resist.

He could even "do them favors" or "give them their way," in the interest of making them like him better, but in the end, since this technique is still motivated mostly by a desire to make himself look good rather than get more accomplished, it will still come up short of producing real results.

It is not until a manager truly changes his viewpoint to see his employees as partners that he will open up enough to them to allow them to trust him. It is not until they sense his resistance to their wants and needs coming down that they will begin to feel free to accept his assignments as being in their best interests as much as his.

And that's when they'll work for you as hard as they would work for themselves.