Guidelines and Guardrails

Planning for the new year Part 4 (Moving from a case-first to a knowledge-first culture)

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In the first, second and third articles in this series, we walked through Guidepost statements; how to talk to your employees and making sure your managers are player-coaches, not enforcers. In this article we talk about one of the most important foundational elements for your service organization.

Does your service and support team employ a case-first approach? Not sure? Hint: If you continuously feel like you’re chasing your tail, constantly drowning in escalation-after-escalation backlogs, and your cases seem to grow increasingly complex, you are probably running your business on a case-first model.

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Planning for the new year – Part 3 (Managers as player-coaches)

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In the first and second articles in this series, we walked through Guidepost statements, and how to talk to your employees. This post tackles managers as player-coaches — a key element to make sure you are ready for the new year.

Historically, service and operations managers were tasked with making sure the trains were on track and on time. If the global pandemic taught us anything, it is that the existing tracks are being shredded and we need to figure out where and how to lay new tracks.

Unfortunately, we have not yet given managers the freedom to operate in this new world—and it costs us a lot more than we realize. Customers hate the rigid rules that constrain our support teams in the name of efficiency. Employees hate the measures that demonstrate just their adherence to process, not their ability to work around the nuances. And managers have one hand tied behind their back by their inability to use judgment to resolve customer issues or help employees grow.


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Planning for the new year – Part 1 (Guidepost Statements)

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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.

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Want to be a true Leader? Let employees be your guide…

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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.

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Measures are for the team, not managers

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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?

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6 simple questions firefighting chiefs ask—and you should, too

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As leaders, we have grand plans: those that will help our organizations, our customers and dare we admit it—our own careers. Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to translate strategy into practical projects for our operational managers to implement. So, we end up with statements like: Here’s what we need to do by X date, …

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