I want my customers to have a kick-ass experience. When I look at my company's customer scores on Google or Yelp, I see 1, maybe 2 star reviews. I’ve heard the argument that “well that’s just because people who had a bad experience will tend to write a bad review more than someone who had a good experience.” People want great customer experiences, and that is provided by people. So the real question is, why do people provide kick-ass customer experiences? And what do those companies do so differently?
VIDEO: Let's Teach for Mastery - Khan Ted Talk
VIDEO: Khan Lab School
Just above you will find an enlightening Ted Talk from Salman Khan and then another about the Khan Lab School that is based on the Khan Academy learning platform. Starting with the Khan’s Ted Talk on teaching for mastery, what I found fascinating was the idea of mastery learning. Think about a classroom in which the teacher lectures based on some curriculum (not hard to imagine as this was basically my entire learning career growing up), and in the middle of that classroom is a student who is just not getting it. The teacher continues through the lecture, the student doesn’t know what’s happening, and days go on like this, weeks go on like this. Where is the student’s learning now? The gap is enormous.
Like in business, when we just keep on moving without our employees gaining mastery, we create enormous gaps in performance. So much so that it won’t be uncommon to see a “Tiger Team” get sent out to “fix that problem.” In the classroom this is detention or suspension at the worst, remedial class at the best. Both ways, the learner continues not learning, and the gap widens. This leads to a revolutionary re-think or mindset shift in the learning system. From the video about the Khan Lab school we hear about a new mindset of relinquishing control back to the learner. To do this we must re-evaluate our approach, we must rethink about how much time to spend on a subject or topic, we must understand and focus on what outcomes we are truly trying to get, and we must rethink how we teach.
There are classrooms all across the country that are trying these new ways. What’s interesting about those schools that are changing is how they utilize technology to redefine how learning can be accomplished. Teachers use Khan Academy and other software to understand the learning of their students and allow students to fill those gaps of mastery. In those progressive schools, ownership of learning transfers to the learner and the teacher willingly provides that, the teaching system more than just encourages it, it changes to fit that common goal of mastery learning. This allows for the teacher to focus more on the one-on-one student/teacher relationship. There are schools that try to emulate those high performers. School districts buy iPads and Chromebooks, and teach the teachers how to set things up and make their students use those tools. But it fails. Much like in business, replication is not application. Just using technology without changing the mindset away from command and control, you lose nearly all benefits of that technology.
To replicate an idea on the surface does not provide the same outcomes, the same learning, the same contextual understanding of the idea as would true application. In Lean this concept is called Yokoten - the horizontal deployment of ideas through understanding and application of the contextual concepts. In order to fulfill the goal to create a kick-ass company and a kick-ass customer experience, like Khan, we must rethink the entire system. Companies that do extremely well are those that learn extremely well. As a company then, how do you learn? Is the typical Learning Management System, classroom/online training modules, and week-long one and done training exercises really the best way? I think the traditional ways parallel that which the education industry is discovering. The command and control system that governs learning is broken.
People don’t want to work somewhere that isn’t fun. Just like children hating school, we must understand that it's because we have taken away all ownership of learning, and lost focus on the overall goal - to create that kick-ass customer experience. Instead we are beaten down for not knowing, we go into training classrooms and taught a single way, and when we leave we are marked as certified in something, something which we will not practice again until we are audited. When we fail those audits and someone tries to determine the root cause, it's either boiled down to failure to comply, or that the person isn't up on training.
Taking the concepts from Khan, we must learn how to learn. We can focus on the mastery of skill by allowing employees to develop individually, and providing more of the contextual and experiential learning will be more effective at helping to master those skills. As an organization, like in education, it requires a relinquish of power to the learner, in this case the employee. Gallup provides an engagement poll that thousands of companies participate. In their results, they discuss how nearly 2/3rds of our employees are disengaged at work. Companies have taken away all ownership and pride of work and then wonder why people are so disengaged.
So how are we doing this? Well, that’s what is driving me each day and, in fact, why I am driven to write down my journey and share it. We are re-envisioning our leadership and management structure as coach-based, and our employees as learners. Each employee, in order to drive a kick-ass customer experience, must master a set of skills. First and foremost we teach how to see burden, unevenness, and waste. This is real learning, at Gemba, where the work is occuring, to actually see the struggles of the employee, and all the waiting and potential defects our product must deal with as well. We master this skill, seeing waste everywhere, working one on one, at the place of work, teaching and coaching individually and as a team. What’s brilliant with the team learning, is that the management structure starts to change. Huddles become the common communication platform, short 5-30 minute huddles where information is exchanged, learning occurs, and open questions are asked. We treat each other with respect, and learn how to master the skills of coaching, problem solving, seeing waste, going to Gemba, and practicing our improvement kata, or routine, of improvement.
Those managers we have started with have started to see how beautifully this works. They are seeing the struggle and trying to remove those struggles working directly with their employees. This is a complete flip of how the typical manager sees his/her responsibilities. Ownership of development is given back to the employee closest to the work, and the management structure becomes more of a coach and teacher, allowing employees to master their own skills. A quote from this week that was shared among our teams really gets to the point: “it’s amazing how quickly things improve when we just engage with everyone!"
As this structure of learning gets stronger, we relinquish power and ownership to the employee, and we focus on the relationships between management/teacher and employee/learner. By allowing for our people to develop themselves and continuously support that development, we can finally say we have learned how to be kick-ass for our customers!