I have, for the last few weeks, been on a bit of a whirlwind with work. I will probably write something more on attention management at some point as that is something I am working on to help with keeping myself on track. For now though, let's get an update going from last time and continue down this magical leadership journey.
Last time in Part 2, I talked about Parts 3 and 4 of the Great Leader Strategies (Part 2 here). I have, for the most part, been able to pass along challenges to the team. I am in the midst of getting a skills matrix complete for the team so we can better ensure that we have the knowledge to do a good job. That is still in work so I will make a separate update post with that some other time. I have a lot more to do on those two fronts. It looks as though I might be switching over to another role soon. One of the other managers I work with is going to be managing another function for the next year (a pretty cool opportunity for him!) so at some point I will be shifting over to his role. Our two teams work closely together, in the same office at that, so I don't expect a whole lot of disruption. I've been keeping a leader standard work of sorts for my role so that if someone were to take this position, I will be able to ensure they have the knowledge to do a good job and will be able to be included in the team very quickly. This all said, many of the things I wrote about in the previous two posts will be used again for the start of this new adventure. It will be interesting to see how this works with another team of people!
Moving on, let's take a look at the next two strategies. At this point, Lee says that you should have the following things complete.
Organizational structure set up
Selected the right people for the right roles
Focused on selecting and developing people
Now he says "it is time for them to go to work and to Make Dramatic Leaps in Guest Service."
Make Dramatic Leaps in Guest Service
In this part, Lee says "Great Leaders don't maintain anything. They want to make it better for our Guests, our Cast, and for our Business Results." This resonates with me. I have adopted the continuous improvement mindset and so am constantly thinking of ways to improve upon everything I do. Reading through this section, there are many different things noted to do in order to make dramatic leaps. Here I am consolidating as I understand them for myself and will include what I have done so far and what I can do better.
First and foremost, what better way to understand the experience of the customer than to put yourself into their shoes. Experiencing things as the customer would gives you a lot more insight into what works, what doesn't, and what you could be doing better. In my case, I've been teaching coaching classes with other members of my team. This past week when my teammate was teaching, I sat in the back and listened as a participant. From that perspective I took note of things that could help us present better, or make the material itself better. One of those things was "what's the key point here?" I kept asking myself this. I could easily get lost in the stories and not realize what the point was. I noted that the stories do provide a lot more interesting things and makes things relevant, but it is quite important that the story links well with the point we are trying to make. I've gone through my own notes and will ensure that I capture the key point and link the story well with that key point as to make it interesting and on point.
This concept goes farther than just this example. I've done the same thing in our other Continuous Improvement training, and now am looking at things in the eyes of all of our employees since they are the internal customers we serve. This has a lot to do with the "go to gemba" mentality, which I do as often as I possibly can.
The next few items from this sections have to do with safety and behaviors. These things are rather straight forward but immensely important for the safety of our employees and our customers. Some of these things, for me especially, are a bit difficult to do with my direct team (since we are more in the role of support and training). We must be proactive with safety - that is, we must review our safety scores and look for trends. When safety incidents and close calls trend in a bad direction, we must find the root case and take corrective action. To do this we have to be able to have people report on close calls, and hold ourselves accountable to looking for and correcting causes to these safety incidents. I ask myself now, what are my safety objectives? For me, it has been born from the Lean Safety Gemba Walk training I had been on as well as the training I received when I had worked for Walt Disney World a long time ago. When I coach with other managers or executives and go on gemba walks, I make it apparent that I am constantly looking for things in the process that may cause safety issues. I also pick up plastic straps and other trash that might be on the floor. These two behaviors, and the fact that I make it known what is happening, is one way I keep myself accountable to safety. One last item on the safety front is to be consistent with disciplinary action. Lee writes that while we all must do what it takes to ensure a safe environment, there are still going to be situations where we failed to follow the guidelines in which we were trained. It is important that for these safety critical items we enforce the right behaviors and ensure that we are doing that consistently with everyone.
This next part has a lot to do with being able to provide extraordinary guest service. It starts with the notion that we must all be striving for 100% satisfaction. This is very similar to the principle of "seek perfection." In the leader role, we have to be the role model for the right experience. That is, we must be promoting and exhibiting the right behaviors. When dealing with a customer, if they are upset or angry, they aren't personally upset with you necessarily, they are more upset that things are not meeting expectations and you just happen to represent that. Our goal then is to bring the customer back to a state where they are happy with us. In order to do that it takes more than just demonstrating the right behaviors, we have to be able to lead others in the following things.
Explain and teach everyone in your team what it takes to provide exemplary service and teach and support how to recover when there is a drop in service. A way to do this is to note the top things that may occur (we should have a many from all our experiences) that drop service, and give ways to deal with those things. Another thing to do is demonstrate zero tolerance for anything but great service. Lee says "make being rude a federal offense." We must empathize with our customers and learn how to handle many different situations while also maintaining a high degree of service. This is difficult and it takes courage to do - "being afraid and doing it anyway." Now, it may sound like at this point it's a very "punish" and "manage" type thing, but there's more that a leader does. Great Leaders will be visible in the operation and provide people support in everything they do. Great Leaders will do the work their people are doing and experience things from their perspective. Leadership is being involved, not just managing from afar. I think this is a key point in this part, while we do a lot to strive for excellence in service, we also remain quite involved in the work itself and provide exemplary service for our people.
Finally is the part of staying ahead. For this part we must read what our customers are saying frequently. We need to have a pulse of their experience and what better way than to hear it in their own words! In this recent coaching training, one of the participants wrote to me and said "I don't ever write an instructor of any course. I wanted to share with you how much value I got from today's training and how well you both did at making things extremely interesting! It was the best training I've ever had!" In that same training, another participant talked to me afterwards to provide some great feedback. He gave many positives and then many constructive notes. These things are hugely powerful to understand how people are experiencing things in their own words. Second to this is to hear what is happening in other parts of your organization and in industry. Luckily for me, I was brought into another great experience with the Customer Experience team. They are working on creating a world class employee experience and use Design Thinking (Human Centered Design) to organize and run their training sessions. I was in awe at how well the initial discovery portion and building empathy went. I felt the purpose and importance right away, and then as we went through the day I was having fun!
How do we know we are successful? Well we have to look at some of our measures. First is our customer satisfaction. How satisfied have they been recently? Then we must look at our own team's morale? How satisfied has their experience been recently? We must know there is a nearly one to one relationship between team morale and customer satisfaction, so this helps us lead in the right manner for both groups. Next goes hand in hand with what I am most familiar with - process!
Implement Effective, Structured Processes for Getting Work Done
As Lee says, "there is a process for everything." It really doesn't matter what you are doing there is a process behind it. This part for me seems quite natural. Ask why a lot, scan reports to see which processes need help or may need changing, and make improvements to processes. One part of this section that I found interesting was the idea of the "stop/start/continue" discussions Lee discusses. To do this, gather the team together and ask if there is something we ought to stop doing and in exchange start doing something else. Then is there something we ought to continue doing? He gives the example of counting dish breakage. Stop counting daily, start counting weekly, and continue to train all employees to stack dishes properly so we don't break so many. This particular part helps to define a good way to have a process discussion with others and is one I would like to introduce in what I do.
We usually will do kaizen events where you get a team together and run through the Define Measure Analyze Improve Control process together. With the stop/start/continue discussion, we can better discuss what type of things we will do to make things better. Based on what we know so far, what do we want to stop doing, what do we then want to start doing, and what should we continue doing? This can help gain traction with the team as it allows everyone to come to a plan of action together while also challenging the current state of the process.
The last part of the section discusses constantly learning from others on what they are doing in order to use that information to make your own processes better. This is a lot like the concept of "yokoten" or the horizontal sharing of knowledge. Having the drive to constantly look for better ways and thinking about how one could utilize the better ways helps leaders do great things for their customers and their employees. In a group chat I am in, the people constantly are sharing their current best practices in all sorts of business. While it may seem that something might not apply, if I think about it as a concept then I can start thinking about how I could apply that concept in what I am doing. This leads to even greater improvements than I would have thought of on my own. This is the same locally - showing others how we have improved things helps everyone think about how we could make things better ourselves!
I think the major learning for me from these two strategies comes from the first one about making dramatic leaps in service. It takes a constant and consistent effort as a leader to demonstrate the right behaviors and strive for excellence. I take a lot of my customer focus from Disney, as they are one of the world class examples of guest experience. A lot of what is done there, on and off stage (as is said if you worked there), has such a keen focus on what will create happiness for others. As I go on to another team, I will take all that I have learned so far and start from Part 1. Being able to write out my thoughts and share what I have tried has helped me to realize that there is quite a lot of effort involved with the actions of a leader, it takes a lot of involvement to be great and I look forward to sharing many more of my experiences!