In the first article in this series, we walked through Guidepost statements, and why they are so important to the success of your initiatives.
However, if you think of goals as your ultimate destination, it’s not enough to know that you are headed to Bangalore, Boston or Brisbane. First, you should know if you’re starting out in Copenhagen, Cambridge (US) or Cambridge (UK).
There are two ways to check your starting point.
Avoid detours: Smash your 2022 goals by following your guidepost statement
Halloween may be over, but for many organizations, the scariest time of year has just begun. As we march toward December 31st, we scramble to deliver on our goals for the current year. For many of us, it’s busy, it’s rushed, and often hard to keep straight what needs to be done next. It hardly seems like the right time to deliberately plan strategic initiatives that will support and elevate long-term business goals, but if not now, when?
Planning ahead is crucial in business, whether it’s laying out kicking off a new initiative or being part of a multi-year transformation journey. While leaders often specify the destination, they can forget to provide the details of the journey.
The key to successful workplace initiatives that create long-term change and impact is providing workers with the knowledge they need to do their best work. This is only possible when you “guide” employees rather than “grade” them.
While leaders—understandably—want high productivity from their teams, constantly checking in and monitoring their performance is not the way to get there. Rather, such a workplace is perceived as one where employees are graded – constantly watched and then judged. That environment offers no chance for building a high-trust culture, where innovation flourishes and everyone feels like they own the process and have a stake in the business.
Instead, the better way is to guide. Gallup research shows that only two in 10 employees strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.
In the last post, we walked through the importance of a guidepost statement that the team looks to for guidance, in the absence of clarity.
The next step in our journey to creating a modern set of measures is to make sure you have a set of “guiding principles.”
Guiding principles are the foundations you set as you build the measurement framework for your team. These guiding principles help you select the measures by which your team judges the success of their collaboration, processes, and initiatives.
Notice I said how “your team judges its success,” not how you judge them. That leads me to the first guiding principle I find especially effective in motivating teams to do great work: Measures are for teams, not managers.
What do I mean by that?
Over the last few months, we’ve been working with a number of organizations that are fundamentally re-thinking what they should measure, and why. I’m amazed that, time and time again, organizations try to measure success with metrics that don’t align with what they’re trying to accomplish.
This often happens because the underlying issues you want to solve depends on what you see. Some people call this perspective; I like to think of it as your lens.
Phil Verghis
When our team works with clients on data-driven continual process improvement, we examine their teams and processes through a variety of lenses to gain a multi-dimensional view of how well they work together and how they function within the enterprise. That’s how we uncover unexpected truths.
We believe it’s always better to improve a process than simply follow it. But, many times, we see one of two things: First, organizations try to automate a process before optimizing it. Unfortunately, automating a mess simply makes it messier, faster. The second scenario, which is harder to spot, is when the process itself may be optimally designed, but it is unnatural for the organization to follow the process. There are too many obstacles that set them up for failure.
Over the years, as we worked with leaders to get a sense of their organizational capabilities, we really struggled to find this blind spot. We focused on the usual suspects—people, process, and technology—as we assessed the state of their business and their overall capabilities. But we found that these three elements weren’t enough to give us a sense of who they were and what they were capable of achieving as an organization.
Customer success and support execs often are the bearers of bad news for an organization. When things go wrong, they are the proverbial “one throat to choke.” In an enterprise, this is particularly galling because many of the issues are not within the control of the customer service/support person. Buggy products, incorrectly calibrated expectations during the sales cycle and disruptions anywhere in the delivery process can cause frustration for customers. It’s no wonder that “customer satisfaction” is not a measure they like, particularly if too much of one’s bonus is tied to this measure.
To help the organizational silos better understand that everyone exists to care for the customer, there is a new metric that requires your attention. We call it “Time-to-Smile.”
Service leaders often are the pillar that others lean on when things descend into chaos.
But what happens when everything collapses around us, and we too feel the crushing weight of a pandemic that upends all our plans and stresses our systems, our people, and ourselves to the limit?
We can muddle through, or we can build on the foundation that marks our profession—the willingness to help each other—to know that all of us are better than any one of us.
That’s why we invited 28 service leaders — colleagues, customers, industry leaders, and thought gurus to orchestrate a series of roundtable conversations to explore ways to help each other and share tips, “gotchas,” and new best practices as we navigate our way to surer footing.
When we walked prospects through the results they’d see in just 30 days using Klever Insight software—a digital coach for tech support managers—the most common reaction was: “Sounds too good to be true. Can you prove it works?” And we were stumped.
Klever Insight is the world’s first digital coach that uses augmented intelligence—a human-centric application of artificial intelligence—to provide tech support managers the confidence and time they need to implement strategy, in just minutes a day. So how do we prove that a digital coach helps managers achieve a better outcome than managers that receive no coaching?
In a world where leaders have seen the payoffs of modernizing how they onboard customers, why does onboarding employees seem like it is still stuck in the past century? I’m not talking about the cool new ways to show appreciation — but in terms of perhaps the most important measure in a team-based environment.