Archive for the 'people' Category

• Each person has a motivation profile, find it and use it
• Recruit the right people for the right roles, rigorously
• Recruit the really good people, the stars you find, even if you don’t have a job for them now
• Recruit for attitude, recruit winners.  People can learn the content of a role
• Balance the teams – task, team players, leaders, followers
• Train, train and train again, together – the team that trains together stays together
• Stretch people – people stay as long as they are learning
• Money is a demotivator, as long as you have enough
• Pay people to do something extra and you will have to keep paying them to do it again
• Make people bring their out of work objectives to work and beat them up if they don’t work on them (“80/20″), driving fulfilment
• Look for people’s strengths eg a secretary can be great at interviews
• Ensure consistency of delivery through process – blame the process, not the people if something goes wrong
• Keep explaining the changing context around people – keep the external world coming in
• Walk the floor (daily) and say good morning to everyone
• Say thank you
• Respect for every person: I see you, I see you too
• Go back to the floor at start of any role and regularly thereafter
• Know the numbers inside out, what drives them and the root causes
• Adopt common thinking and analysing tools so you can form instant teams
• Social glue is vital in your organisation so foster personal relationships and events to cause them
• Celebrate successes

brilliant basics, people | No Comments

Regardless of the outcome today, it was fascinating what a little passion did for the European Ryder Cup team yesterday:  5 and a half points to a half against the USA in the golf after Captain Monty said there wasn’t enough passion in the play and he wanted more. Whether that’s the whole story we’ll see after the event, but it got me to thinking about the role of passion in a business.

Those of you who have seen me speak at conferences will know it’s one of my pet subjects. Starting with people’s passions out of work and getting them to share what they feel passionate about – it’s a great way of bridging people to life and learning a little about the person beyond the suit at work.

Finding people’s passions at work can sometimes be more difficult. They want to develop their people, they want to do the right things – but what are they passionate about?

Well that’s what leadership is for. Does your business change the world for a better place? If it doesn’t then you’d better start thinking. I love the saying “Change the world or go home!”

You don’t have to stop world poverty. It can be in little ways such as a Facebook or eBay. Or the way a Mac changes the way you work – darn, there I go again advocating. Yesterday I used my girlfriend’s laptop – it was like going back to the steam age. Waiting whilst it opened, didn’t open, rebooted. Restarting after explorer crashed. And that was all before I started to order anything online. I’m used to opening the lid and starting, closing the lid to finish and rebooting about once a quarter. Sod’s law says I just crashed Mail whilst writing this – but it was because I tried to attach all 27 gig of my photos by mistake! But heh even that took 10 seconds to recover.

Passion is when people talk about “their business” and about other people’s businesses. When they get cross and angry if you mess with “their brand”. Sometimes what causes it is almost a mystery – such as first direct. Sometimes it’s just simplicity such as Amazon. Mainly it’s clear leadership towards something worth fighting for - and tons of hard, consistent and detailed work towards that goal.

So here’s two things to do this morning – assuming you don’t bunk off to watch the golf!

1) Sit yourself down and work out why your business is worth being passionate about. If it isn’t then change it.

2) Get your team to talk about their passions out of work to warm them up. Then get them to talk about their passions in work. Find the “passion gap”.

3) Fill the gap – change the world or go home!

Remember, no one got out of bed in the morning thinking “Whoopee, I’m going to save 20% of my budgets today!” or “Great day – I’m going to make the shareholders richer!’.

Tell me about your passions in work ( careful tiger….) and how your colleague discussions go
Read more about “100 things you can learn from Amazon” and “100 things you can learn from first direct” in our library at http://www.budd.uk.com/articles-listing.php

people | No Comments

The UK General Election has accelerated the interest in what is called ‘social media’ – in this context meaning Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, etc. And in particular, how these new ways of communicating with people can be used to win the election.

A lot of this has to do with the perception that the use of these new tools was hugely influential to Barack Obama’s success in the US Presidential election. We can debate whether this is true or not, but my purpose here is only to recognise that social media has become widely acknowledge and discussed. I want to look at the potential impact social media may have on business.

The current news items are only the public face of a debate that began some time ago in the business and government worlds. But what the added attention has done is move the topic of social media up the corporate agenda – and no doubt many will rush to ‘”do something”, to be seen to be doing something and not to get left behind.

Like most bandwagons, and especially technology-led ones, it pays to be cautious and spend time thinking – hard – about what you want to achieve by engaging in these new forms of communication. In amongst the uncertainty about how organisations should react to this change in customer behaviour, one thing does seem to be certain. There is no going back once you have started. 

Many groups and forums are springing up to address this area, many of which are ill-informed and offering poor advice. But, there is lots of valuable thinking and sharing being done as this new area is explored. One that I like is called Social CRM Pioneers. It has somewhat of a technology slant (which suits my background) but there are some very informative and insightful conversations being had there.

The first question is how to start – what should be done first? There is no single right answer to that, as individual circumstances differ massively, but here are a few thoughts for you.

Your customers have always been having these conversations between themselves about your products and services (although with less reach and fewer people to listen). You now have the possibility to ‘overhear’ what they are saying in these public communities and networks and, if you are careful and respectful, the possibility to be invited into the conversations and maybe influence attitudes and opinions. 

How will this change in customer behaviour affect your corporate culture? Firstly, remember, your employees are customers too – and will be feeling this change first-hand in their everyday lives. So, you probably already have a lot of knowledge internally. Perhaps, you could start by asking employees about their experiences and how they would like brands to interact with them in this environment? Start an internal conversation as a precursor to external conversations.

The rise of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems over the last fifteen years should have been accompanied by corporate adaptation to a more customer-centric model, although in most cases only the technology was implemented. Maybe, in this new social revolution we should be building ‘people-centric’ organisations.

That is, not companies facing off to individual customers (remember the ‘market of one’ and 360 degree customer views?) but individual people in organisations building trust and relationships with individual prospects and customers over time and through multiple channels and media – whether that be for marketing, sales or service needs. That would mean organising internally to meet customers’ needs and not simply organising for efficiency.

Oh, and don’t forget that there are a large number of customers who do not not participate in online communities and social media. Their needs must not be overlooked in the seeming stampede for this new promised land.

brilliant basics, culture, customer experience, customer forums, frontline agents, listening, managing, people, social media | No Comments

I sit writing, bleary eyed, having just taken off from Milan very early this morning after an excellent night on the tiles at Stream’s annual user conference. The conference circuit has been taking its toll on my blogging of late….. In the last 30 days, its been ECMW, a telco CRM event in Lisbon, our own Chief Customer Officer forum, then Dusseldorf and Paris with LimeBridge external events, LimeBridge’s 10th global gathering. This week it’s been Milan and the British Bankers Association. Finally next week I chair Advanced Customer Management in London and the “season” finishes. I probably need to buy an acre of Brazilian rainforest to offset the flights and the midnight oil that has been burned.

There’s at least 10 blogs to back date from the interesting things I’ve heard people talking about, Prahalad, Eisner. Updates on how LimeBridge is jumping to its next iteration etc – I’ll catch up at the weekend….may be.

What just caught my eye was an article in the FT titled “In the pursuit of happiness”. The story goes that the long held premise that happy staff make happy customers is not backed up by the evidence. Crumbs, I just noticed I know the journalist – will have to shoot him – Alan I know where you live !

On the conference circuit I’ve been talking a lot about our passion of “how do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and people” and trying hard to get people to feel the feelings that customer facing staff feel when they deliver dumb things in what we call the “stupid factory” of poor processes. How it feels when they are not supported by management, and worse when they are controlled by management practices and measurements. And how they perform when they are supported rather than managed (see the blogs on red nose day, and on the 4 questions that Happy use). I’ve been working hard to recognise that change in attitudes starts with them, not someone else. How they respect people by saying hello in the morning, how they listen to their frontline staff who know what customers are saying. How they are as managers and designers of the operation around them.

There’s also a fundamental that people won’t get off their backsides for money, to make shareholders another million. But they will for a real purpose, for a passion that matters. When we did the CCO forum we calculated that about 30 million customers and 90,000 staff would be affected by how the influential people in the room drove their businesses – that matters. Not how much more money their businesses would make as a result. I realised I had to shout this from the roof tops when I heard a colleague of mine say he thought our passion didn’t make our sales proposition clear. Bollocks to propositions, its not about business – its about how frustrated and fed up we’re making those 90,000 people and 30 million customers. And how quickly can we stop it happening.

So as you see the FT article got me going! It refers to the seminal HBR article “The Service Profit Chain” (you can read it in our library at http://www.budd.uk.com/ ) and how the authors now admit its not that direct a linkage from satisfied staff to satisfied customers to higher profits. That’s its not that linear. Of course it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that happy staff don’t deliver better results.

The article falls into the trap of measuring results only in shareholder terms ie profit. 21st century business is also about measuring social returns on customer time wasted, staff lives wasted and natural resources wasted from paper wasted on junk mail to midnight oil burned trying to get your laptop to work with all its new software and PDAs and printers. This matters far more to people. It gives purpose to what businesses are for.

In fairness the article does touch on the need for both dimensions, the process and the motivation, to be right in order to deliver a good result for customers. And it emphasises a key thing – that workers should redesign work, not managers or consultants. They already know what’s broken – you just have to free them to change what happens. It’s managers “managing by getting in the way” LINK that’s the problem with the Service Profit Chain logic, not the service profit chain itself. And the article does emphasise the Gallup 12 questions ( see previous post) bringing out that its your direct manager who affects most how you feel and therefore how well you perform

Alan must have been reading our blogs when he put his FT article together, given all the things he mentioned!!

Well that’s another half hour lost to ranting, but I feel better for it! A bientot

chief customer officer, dumb things, managing, people | No Comments

I met Henry Stewart, CEO of Happy, an IT training firm that has won numerous awards for being what it says on the tin. What a nice bloke. With 50 employees, they have a waiting list of 2000 people to join and are top ten in the FT top companies to work for apparently.

His secret goes back to MBGITW – management by getting in the way. He did a great exercise to make you think about it. Try it:

What do you think is most important to do when you are managing?

Think about when specifically you did your best work

What did your manager do when you did your best work? (Most common answer – nothing, they got out of the way!)

So what should you do when you’re a manager and want to get the most out of your people?

Scary thought eh?

managing, people | No Comments

The earlier post on managing by getting in the way seemed to hit a rich stream. Not least in terms of re-thinking some of the things I do!

One of the rich veins to tap when looking for waste and MBIGTW is the purchasing department and paying one’s bills.

I won’t say which companies are concerned, but needless to say they are 3 major companies I could example, household names, coincidentally European companies. The systemic problem they have is that the business leaders are not so much supported by good purchasing practice, as ruled by them. They cannot run the business at the pace or in the way they would like. The cultural impact of purchasing is major.

Worse still, in these companies, there appears to be an accidental, but systematic inability to pay their bills. This results in major time wasting for executives, managment and their staff. The effect on culture and morale is palpable. The effect on retaining the best talent can’t be measured, but it’s there.

Ok, the CFO might make an argument for the financial benefits of not paying the bills owed. But the human impact in the business ( let alone the suppliers) is bigger.

Is this the biggest example of managing by getting in the way that you can suggest, or do you know of a bigger one?

managing, people | No Comments

Jonathan Wilson is moving from our advisory board (see www.budd.uk.com/people.html) to lead Budd’s executive coaching and change management. He reminded me the other day about the Gallup data on the 12 key questions to ask your staff ( and yourself !) if you want to know what happy bunnies they are.

I won’t fire them all at you, but the first four are an interesting self test. Try them:
1 Do I know what is expected of me at work?
2 Do I have the right materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
3 At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
4 In the last 7 days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?

Let us know what you find…. Email us – peter.massey@budd.uk.com

I started to find the 12 questions by Googling but, as is too often the case these days with Google, lots of intermediaries are top of the list. Luckily Amazon was one of them. I pressed one click to go to the book that contains them “First, break all the rules”. I pressed one click to add it to my basket, one click to check out and one click to confirm. Approximately 20 seconds. That was Thursday and the book arrived today Saturday. That’s what we call fast+simple.

Had any similar experiences? Email us with them – peter.massey@budd.uk.com

Amazon, fast+simple, people | No Comments