Leadership is a Gift

Leadership at it’s best, when it feels good, when it is powerful is often a gift.  It is that moment when you selflessly want to help someone else.  When you are helping a peer to succeed.  When you are making someone feel good by catching them doing something amazing and pointing it out.  All these moments and more are a gift, freely given with no strings attached.  These moments show true leadership and are a gift that often multiplies itself by creating more leaders.

The Danger of the Wrong People

Having the wrong people on your team is very dangerous.  I have discussed some of the reasons before:

• Bad attitudes are contagious.
• Good people  get frustrated having to do extra to make up for the bad ones

I recently figured out the most important reason to remove the wrong people from your team.  They cause you to change how you deal with those you lead.  We have all done it.  We have a problem with 1/3 of our team not doing what they are supposed to do.  The simple response:  Make a rule.  The new rule makes the bottom 1/3 better, not much but it is a start.  Later another rule, and the bottom 1/3 is just a little bit better.

The problem?  These rules pile up and every one of them, in addition to making the bottom 1/3 a little better, makes your best, your brightest, your superstars worse.  Make enough of these rules and your best will find work elsewhere.  They don’t want to be hampered by rules designed to make the worst better.

Eventually you may have enough rules that anyone can work for you and be slightly successful, but the only people who will want to work for you will be people similar to your original bottom 1/3.  The results will be consistent, but mediocre.

Did you set out to be mediocre?  I didn’t!  So, that underperforming bottom 1/3 can get better through training, passion and pride or they can join someone else’s team.  I refuse to handcuff my best to make my worst a little better.

What are we doing wrong?

I just read the July 29^th edition of the Miss Manners column and was appalled at one letter and the answer given.  The letter writer asks how he can avoid lying to avoid “… an overblown show of concern that I find disingenuous and unproductive” when replying truthfully that he didn’t enjoy a meal when asked by a server or manager at a restaurant.  The answer included the phrase: “brazen fishing for compliments”

you can read the whole thing yourself at:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/28/AR2009072802784.html it is the second letter near the bottom of the page.

At first I was angry.  How dare they misconstrue such a well meaning and important attempt to make sure the customer is happy!  I went so far as to write a letter in response explaining my views and how important it is to know the things only the customer can tell you.

But wait, they are the customer.  Being angry at them, Treating them as the enemy, these are actions which lead down the wrong road.  You can’t let your employees fall into these traps let alone fall into them yourself.  They don’t understand your motives.  They have never walked in your shoes.  If what the customer is seeing in our actions is this far from what we are trying to do we are doing something wrong.

So, what are we doing wrong?

Is the right person asking if the meal or beverage or whatever is good?

Do they truly care?  If the server, barista or bartender doesn’t truly care they shouldn’t be asking the customer the question.  The manager, the owner or even the cook should.  While I think that none of these people should have their job unless they truly care about the entire experience of the customer.  Some may not agree or may not act.  I am assuming that if the manager or owner doesn’t care these questions just won’t be asked.  If I am wrong, that could be part of the problem.

Does the person asking have the power to fix things?

If the customer has to explain their dissatisfaction a second time to a manager they may feel like they aren’t believed, they may feel they are being given the runaround.  I prefer the trust your employees and have employees you can trust method of dealing with this problem, but if that isn’t your style have someone with the power to act do the asking.

Do the actions we show after we hear that something is wrong show our true concern?

We can go wrong here in so many ways.  The biggest mistake is to give the customer something they don’t want, especially if it costs you.  If you give someone their money back and they don’t want it you wasted money.  Keeping this in mind, here are my actions in the order I would want to take them.

1. Sincere apology.  Everyone gets this one even if they don’t want it.  For some this is enough, but you need to always try to give more.
2. Replace the meal with something else the customer will enjoy.  This isn’t something to do only when the food or beverage has been improperly made.  If the customer ordered something that they wound up not liking I still want them to leave happy.  Think about it from the customer’s point of view, if they did order something they didn’t like, they may not be unhappy with you, but they likely won’t be back.  Give them something new and you go from that place I didn’t like to a great story I tell friends.
3. Give them a coupon for a free meal.  Make it cover the entire meal, at very least entrée and beverage, but ideally appetizer and/or desert too.  This can be for the dissatisfied person or for them and one guest.  I don’t believe in giving out discounts which require the customer to pay anything.  You are trying to recover a customer not make an immediate profit.
4. Money back.  I don’t like this one, you probably lose the customer, but it is better than the customer leaving dissatisfied and angry.  You don’t need to have people paying for things they aren’t satisfied with.

The final examples of what we shouldn’t do:

Don’t treat the customer like an enemy.

Don’t assume they are trying to steal from you.

Don’t assume every customer wants the same thing.

Don’t let your pride get in the way of realizing that your perfectly made product didn’t make your customer happy and that that is OK.

Don’t stop wondering what we are doing wrong.  If the customer is thinking we are the enemy, that we don’t have their best interest at heart then we are doing something wrong and we need to know what.  I am still wondering what we are doing wrong, if you know, please share.

How do you know when to remove an employee?

Hiring the right people and training them well are two cornerstones of leadership and creating a great team.  The third piece which is often ignored or at very least put off too long, is knowing when to remove someone from the team.  Hiring is hard and very inexact, you will make mistakes, everyone does.  The key is to realize the mistakes, fix them and learn from them.

Realizing your Mistake

This is harder than you might think.  It is easy to become somewhat invested in someone you have hired or promoted.  If they fail, it can feel like you failed.  They are part of your team so you will obviously be rooting for them.  How do you know when to remove someone from your team?   What is needed is a list of questions you can ask yourself which allow you to be objective and remove the emotion and pride from the decision.

For me this should be a list of 5 to 10 questions for which a negative answer on any means this person shouldn’t be in your long term plans.

Exactly what the questions are has to be a little bit specific to the industry, the company, and the leader.  If you are leading workers in a manufacturing plant you will definitely need different things from your employees than someone who leads service workers.

I will share my own list which is skewed toward my personality and customer service oriented foodservice and retail. These are where my experience and passion lie.  Hopefully they will help you create your own list.

1. Do they exhibit Passion or Pride?  Ideally they have both, but either one shows they care.
2. Do you trust them?  This one needs no explanation.
3. Do this person’s results fit in the values of your company or store?  I favor companies which have values beyond just making money.  If your values are great customer service you can’t keep an employee whose customer service is poor.
4. Does this person consistently produce the level of experience or product that you expect?  Every customer who doesn’t get the top experience or product you have to offer can easily become a former customer.
5. Is this person self motivated?  Whether you have 3 employees or 30, if you constantly have to push them it will exhaust you.  We all need an occasional push, it keeps us pushing ourselves and combats complacency.  But if someone only responds when they are being pushed they are a drain on energy.  I don’t know anyone who has enough energy to constantly sustain others and still do their own job properly.
6. Do they desire to learn and grow?  If you aren’t getting better, you are getting worse.  Anyone who thinks they are already good enough never will be.  I experienced this for myself.  I got complacent in a job I enjoyed and was good at and my performance suffered.  I let down my team and settled for good when I should have been striving for great.  The result as this dragged on was below average.  If you are willing to accept below average from yourself or your employees, that is your decision but I will never accept average.
7. Do they apply what you teach them?  This one is your defense against people who talk a good game.  They seem great.  Conversations with them drip of potential.  You leave feeling good about them.  Results never come.
   • “Learning is defined as a change in behavior.  You haven’t learned a thing until you can take action and use it.” –Don Shula and Ken Blanchard
8. Is this person doing just enough not to get fired?  Turn this one around, This person is doing just enough to get fired.  If you think this about an employe I will almost guarantee you will end up removing them from your team eventually.  Why put it off?
9. Do trusted employees think this person should go?  Your best employees probably know before you do that someone has to go.  They are likely the ones picking up the slack.  They may come out and tell you.  You may have to read between the lines.  If your best employees don’t like working with someone there is a reason.  If good employees who don’t normally complain start complaining especially if it is about someone, it is a hint.  This is a less sure question especially in the early part of a persons employment with you.  Your employees may not be patient and may not see the potential you do in a new employee.  But overall you should trust the instincts of your team.  You lead them, you trust them.  If they think someone needs to go you at very least need to look into it further.
10. Would you be nervous to have this person working when your boss or the president of the company were visiting?  I have always hated the feeling of a job where all of a sudden everyone would be nervous and acting differently when a boss or executive or health inspector was in the store.  Life is much easier if you have the same standards no matter who is present.  If someone isn’t good enough for your boss, or their boss why would they be good enough for you?

Fixing Your Mistake

Once you know an employee is bad for business or for your team fixing things is easy.  Remove the employee and do it as soon as feasibly possible.  You could be losing customers or good employees to someone who has no future with you.  Take action.

Learning From Your Mistake

Ask yourself were there things in the interview process that could have told you this person wouldn’t be a good fit?  Is there a question you wish you had asked?  You want to learn, but you don’t want to generalize.  You don’t want to decide you don’t want to hire a certain age or ethnic group, you will end up missing out on potentially great employees and breaking the law.  You just need to look for cues that someone isn’t for instance honest.

Leadership is Parenting

A wise parent humors the desire for independent action, so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease.
                       –Elizabeth Gaskell

I want to first preface this with the fact all of my knowledge is second hand, I am not a parent yet, but I find the parallels between the kind of leadership I do and parenting to be too strong to ignore.

This idea first came to me when one of my employees told me that sometimes I seem like a second father.  I obviously took this as a compliment and started to think about how much a team can be like a family.  I realized that I treated those who followed me a lot like I do my little brothers. 

The ways in which leadership is like parenting for me:

• I want those who follow me to succeed.  This isn’t just about succeeding at work which as their boss obviously has a lot of value for me, but also in life.  I want them to succeed in life.  I want them to grow beyond what I can give them.  I want tools which I help them learn to make a difference in their lives.
• I care about them.  I want them to be happy in the parts of life I affect and the parts I don’t.
• I have a plan for where they can grow.  Like children, employees don’t always grow within the plan but that is where the plan has to be adjusted.  The promising employee whose high performance had me thinking they were soon going to be a leader can make me just as proud with excellence in their job when we realize that they don’t have a desire to lead.
• It hurts when they don’t buy into your leadership or believe that you care about them. 
• I will protect my followers.  If my boss calls out my team on failing in some way it is my problem.  I won’t try to transfer the blame to a subordinate.  As long as they are on my team we win or lose as a team.
• Open communication is important.  Teams and families are a horrible place for the kind of miscommunication and vague expectations which plague many relationships.  If there is a problem it isn’t going to get better unless all parties know about it and why it is a problem.

I know that many of you have spent the entire time you have read this blog thinking about the ways that parenting and leadership aren’t alike.  I will admit that the metaphor isn’t perfect.  Most of the time, you don’t get to pick who your children are.  Most parents never fire their children no matter how just the cause would be.  I am sure that those of you who are parents can give me hundreds more.  My point is that treating employees or followers like you would your children is a valid and useful way to lead. 

You nurture them. You create a situation where they can succeed.  You help them continue to grow.  You continue doing all of these things as long as they are a part of your team.  One of the things you have to do to make this succeed is to protect those who are succeeding by removing those who aren’t helping the team.  It is important to remember that they are part of your team and deserve your support until the moment you remove them from the team.

Correcting Actions

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

                 –John Quincy Adams

As a leader it is often your responsibility to correct the actions of those you lead.  This is a powerful growth opportunity, but I have seen this situation become very uncomfortable for both the leader and follower.  This should never be the case.  This should be an expected part of the leadership relationship.  The more comfortable this situation is the more likely it is that the entire team will be held to the same standards.  This will increase moral on the team and buy in for values and standards.

There are a few key thoughts which can turn these situations to positives instead of negatives:

• The leader must believe in and value the actions they are trying to get.  If you don’t believe what you are selling, no one will buy.
• The leader needs to remember that they aren’t attacking the person just correcting the action.  An employee who is doing something wrong must be told how to do it right.  If it really is who they are and not what they are doing that is the problem, then the employee needs to be removed from the team.  You can’t correct who they are and shouldn’t try.
• The leader must sincerely care about the success of their follower, not only for the success of their own goals, but also for the long term success of the follower.  Everyone is far more likely to take criticism constructively if they believe that the person giving it truly cares about them.
• The leader needs to be able to show that being corrected themselves is a growth opportunity which they embrace.  I was recently in a coffee shop and witnessed a great example of this.  The manager was telling a customer about a new coffee blend, she said “It was created by a famous Seattle restauranteur.”  Another customer in line corrected her letting her know that the word is actually restaurateur.  She quickly read the word again on the bag of coffee and seeing that the customer in line was correct, she enthusiastically thanked the customer for letting her know her mistake.  I believed her enthusiasm and desire to learn, and I am sure that her employees who were standing nearby did too.  These employees will remember this and when they are corrected by this manager in the future.  It is easy to learn from someone who is willing to learn themselves.  No one wants to learn from someone who thinks they know it all and have nothing to learn.
• The follower must realize that having their actions corrected isn’t a personal attack.  All of the things the leader does which I outlined above help the follower understand this, but none of it matters if the follower can’t understand this one point.  If they can’t, you let them have bad feelings about being corrected, a few times.  After that, it is up to you, but I personally don’t want to lead someone who reacts negatively every time I try to help them do their job better.
• The closer to the original action you correct it the better.  Waiting will make it uncomfortable, will make it less genuine and powerful, and in some cases will make you worry about what to say and possibly avoid saying anything at all.

Constructive criticism and correction of actions which don’t fit within the goals and values of your team can be an incredible tool, but not if the process creates more negatives than positives.  Any action you can take to make this work better will strengthen your team and help you achieve your goals.

The Cliche that can Make all the Difference

 

You’re only as strong as your weakest link.

Do you believe this?

Your customer does. 

Consider these examples:

• You go to your favorite burger joint and order your normally juicy bacon cheeseburger.  It comes out dry, flat & flavorless.  You may have gotten the only cook who is lazy and cooks the burger with a press on it, but that doesn’t matter to you.  You got a dry flavorless burger.  With a long history of great burgers you may keep going back, but if you get that same cook again next time, you are probably gone for good.  This is the best case scenario, what if you are a first or second time customer?  What is this one weak link doing to the customer base of the burger joint?  This one weak link is systematically reducing the customer base of the burger joint one bad burger at a time.
• You go to your favorite retail establishment, the one that always helps you find exactly what you want and makes you feel good in the process.  You walk in to see the staff lazing around, no one helps you find what you are looking for.  If you do decide to purchase and not take your business elsewhere, you are met with a request for your money and a thank you which you don’t believe.  Does this one bad experience scare you away?  Maybe, but if this happens again the bad experiences will overpower the good ones. 

I don’t know how much more weight the negative experiences have than the positive ones.  I do know they have more weight.  My guess is that it is different for every person, and that the number is between 3 and 10 good experiences to make up for each bad one.  Do you like the odds that your good employees can make up for the one or two bad ones?  I don’t, and that is even with the assumption that you only have one or two weak links.  In my experience it is likely that the number is higher.  That some people you think are strong don’t quite live up to your expectation when you aren’t looking.  The bottom line is that your weak link(s) can and will lose you customers every day, every minute they are working.  Can you afford to be losing customers?  If not, listen to the cliché and make sure that your weakest link is strong enough to deliver you to success.

New Hire Training

 

The initial training with a new hire sets the tone for their employment with you.

I have found a few simple steps to insure that this time is useful and which will leave you with a better employee at the end.

1. Hire before you need to.  If you don’t, you won’t have time for the other steps.
2. Teach Values, Culture & what makes your business special first.
   1. This shows how much you value your company values.
   2. It makes sure that your customer doesn’t have an experience which doesn’t show your values because your new employee hasn’t learned them yet.
   3. It helps create the underlying passion for your concept.
3. Be organized.  Have a plan.  Know what you are going to teach and when.  This is for the nuts and bolts of the job, the skills, and the product, anything concrete.
   1. You won’t miss anything.
   2. Done in proper order knowledge builds, done in the wrong order the information can be confusing.
4. Stick to the plan.  You organized the information for a reason, letting your new hire get the information in a haphazard way risking omitting something important wastes the hard work put into making a plan in the first place.
5. Schedule short shifts for training.
   1. Training can be overwhelming.
   2. Taken in small doses all this overwhelming information can be easy.
6. Have a person or group of people who know how to train training.
   1. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because someone is a great performer that they will be a great trainer.
   2. The trainer needs to be:  Patient, Supportive, Knowledgeable, Values Driven & a Talented Communicator.  
   3. Trainers need to convey a lot of important information in a way that makes someone who is becoming part of a new culture confident and comfortable.
7. Teach Values and Culture again.
   1. You can’t teach this enough.
   2. A reminder at the end of training makes sure they are fresh in the mind when the work starts for real.
8. After you think training is over, ask your trainee if they think it is over & teach them what they want to learn.
9. When your trainee becomes comfortable and confident in their job, a month or two into their employment, ask if there is anything they now know that should have been part of the initial training.  No matter how many times you train, you can always learn and do better next time.

This will give your new employee many of the tools they will need to succeed and make you look good.  It will also make it easy on them.  The first few days, weeks, months at a job can be the hardest.  Whatever you can do to make this time less stressful will ease the transition to the new job and ultimately leave you with better employees who will be fully trained faster.

Passion: Gatekeeper of my Team

Apathy is a vice.

            –Oscar Wilde

Is there anything worse than going to a restaurant or store and being helped by someone who you can tell just doesn’t care, someone who can’t be bothered to pay attention, someone who obviously does the minimum required to get by.  I hate seeing this, to tell you the truth it makes me mad.  You may not have my extreme reaction, but I know it doesn’t make you feel good. 

I feel that it is my job to make sure that you don’t have this experience, that no one has this experience anywhere I work.  This seems like a reasonable goal for anyone in a leadership position in a customer service industry.  So, why do we all continue to have these bad experiences?  Sometimes it’s because the leaders themselves don’t care, in this case we are stuck with the apathy.  That is if we don’t do the smart thing and stop being their customer. 

I believe most times the leader does care, but somehow this doesn’t translate to great caring service for you, the customer.  There are many reasons for this and many things a leader needs to do to make sure the whole team cares about the customer.  I’m sure an entire book could be written on all the steps to creating and maintaining a team that truly cares, but I want to start with a single step. 

I was once told, unfortunately I don’t remember by who, that no matter what you do with the wrong people you will fail.  Interviewing, references, and background checks are far too inexact for me or anyone to be able to tell you how not to hire the wrong people.  The only way to do that is to never to hire at all.

What I can give you is this, a way to eliminate many of those wrong people from consideration.

One word: Passion

One question: What are you passionate about?

The funny part is it really doesn’t matter what the answer is:  It can be learning, it can be sports, it can be their children, it can even be television or video games.  The information you seek is not in what their answer is, but in how they answer.  Encourage them to elaborate and talk at some length about their passion.  Watch their eyes, their face, listen to their voice.  If their voice doesn’t show excitement, if they don’t have an excited smile on their face, if you can’t see some fire in their eyes, if you can’t feel passion in them while they are talking about a subject they are passionate about, they will never show any passion in what for them will only be a job.

The ability to show passion for something, for anything isn’t the only thing which will end an interview with me immediately.  But it is one of the most important.  Anyone who can’t show passion to me won’t show it to my customer and will leave our customer at best unsatisfied and at worst unhappy.

The Power of Failure

 

Whatever does not destroy me makes me stronger.

                                    –Friedrich Nietzsche

Failing and failing big in a way that shakes your confidence and self image can be the best thing that can happen to someone.  Flunking out of college made me the man I am today.  It made me a stronger person.  It changed my confidence.  It gave me a basis on which my leadership ability grew.

How does this work?  It isn’t the failure itself that really does all of the work, it is the recovery from the failure that changes who you are. 

When I was young, I was confident in my intelligence.  I did well in school and everyone told me how smart I was.  Most of my confidence and self esteem were based on intelligence.  When I flunked out of college during my first year this confidence was shaken.  I spent months feeling down, most of my time was spent watching TV.

My confidence came back slowly.  I moved out of my parents’ house.  I got a job (line cook at a restaurant) which in time I excelled at.  I went back to college, proving that I could succeed in higher education.  It is a little misleading to say that my confidence came back, this was a totally new confidence.  I first noticed the difference while working as a cook with only myself and one waitress working.  I would make decisions, I would act, I didn’t fear making the wrong decision.  I now knew that failure wasn’t the end of the world.  Failure is now an opportunity for growth. 

This ability to make decisions some would call hard was my first leadership skill.  I soon started being given supervisory positions in my jobs.  I started studying leadership.  My confidence continued to grow with experience, maturity and knowledge. 

Having failed isn’t the only thing that made me who I am, but it was an important turning point in my journey. 

What can you learn from this, you can’t fail on purpose right?

You need to do all you can to overcome the fear of failure, don’t let it effect your decisions.  Don’t worry that you might make the wrong decision, we all do that sometimes.  Someday, you may have a failure that rocks your confidence.  Whether you do or not, you will be secure in the knowledge that you are where you are because of what you did, not what you didn’t do.