June 20, 2016 · 12:45 pm

Make Up Your Mind

At the risk of compelling you to sound like Ronald Reagan (“There you go again”), I’m going to weigh in on a lesson learned from yesterday’s US Open Golf Championship. I promise not to get into a discussion of the rules of golf!

There was a moment when Dustin Johnson, who was leading the tournament, had his golf ball move a tiny bit while he was preparing to putt. He notified the rules official about what had happened and the official told him that since ball moved without Johnson doing anything to cause it, there would be no penalty. At some point, other US Golf Association officials notified the on course officials that they were going to review video of the indecent and that Johnson might be facing a one stroke penalty. What ensued was chaos, and is instructive for any of us in business.

Put yourself in the position of the golfers. At the time, there were several competitors within several strokes of one another. The on-course scoreboards might no longer be accurate and every walking official had been notified that Johnson’s score might be one shot lower than the scoreboards were reporting. Do the golfers play more aggressively? More conservatively? The point is that there was uncertainty and that uncertainty might not be resolved until after the round was over when more officials could chat with Johnson.

That’s the business lesson. Putting aside the complexity of the rules, the USGA should have made a decision immediately. No golfer can compete without knowing how they stand and neither can the folks who work in your business. I’ve worked in organizations where there were rumors of layoffs and/or budget cuts. It was paralyzing. Employees were focused on their jobs and not on their work. Partners were worried about both with whom they’d be dealing and if the business could live up to commitments it had made. I’ve found people can deal with almost anything except not knowing.

There is a corollary lesson here. If the scoreboards aren’t accurate, the golfers don’t know how they stand nor how they should operate going forward. If your data is incomplete or possibly inaccurate, neither do you. We need to make decisions and we need to have accurate, complete information as we do so.  Lesson learned?

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June 17, 2016 · 11:58 am

Just Nice Isn’t

Foodie Friday, and this week I learned something from going to lunch. I’ve written any number of times about how critical customer service is, both in the food business and everywhere else. I found out from my dining experience this week that there is a lot more to the equation. Let me explain.

I was out for a business lunch. We were seated in a section that wasn’t particularly busy and greeted by our server. Let’s call him Jim. He was as pleasant as could be. He asked about our drink preferences and said he’d be right back with the drinks as well as some water. When he came back 10 minutes later with our two glasses of iced tea, I thought maybe he’d had to serve another table. No water either, but not a big deal. He also left without taking our food order.

Upon his return, he apologized when he saw that he hadn’t delivered the water. He ran to get it. He must have run a 3K because it took another 10 minutes. Jim was still incredibly nice as he took our food order – charming, actually – but I was beginning to realize that his demeanor was much better than his competence. Other tables that had been seated after us we receiving food as we were still ordering.

The rest of the meal went on like this. Smilin’ Jim would interact with us every so often and we would have to wait. The customer service was abysmal, frankly, although it was hard to get really angry about it. That’s the lesson I learned.

Nice isn’t enough. Jim was about as good as it gets with respect to customer interaction but he was a total failure when it came to customer service. It’s not enough to train the people who service our customers to be nice. We must train them to produce results and those results must be customer focused. If I go back to this place (the food was actually quite good once it arrived) I’ll be sure that Jim smiles on someone else.  Service with a smile is great, but remember that “service” comes first in that sentence!

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June 15, 2016 · 11:33 am

You’re Missing 93%

One of the things I find to be both a blessing and a curse in our modern business world is email. As someone who can remember the days of typing (On a typewriter! With carbon paper for copies!) business correspondence and sticking it in an envelope prior to a days-long wait for a response, email’s immediacy is a blessing. Things happen! Stuff gets done! That’s great, but there are a few downsides and they’re worth thinking about.

First, because email is so fast, we tend to send missives off rather quickly. One thing the slow pace of written correspondence used to force was a thorough consideration of each thing we sent. Letters took time to craft and revisions took even longer because until the widespread use of the word processor one had to retype the entire document. Think about what a business partner would think if you were sending snail mail as you do email. Would you send a letter that simply said “OK” or “thanks” or any of the silly little emails we send? Would you send four notes a day, all within an hour of one another? Probably not.

The reality is that you’d probably not send a note at all. You’d pick up the telephone or, if it’s a work colleague, walk down the hall to see them. That’s the real downside of email, and I think it’s a huge problem. Why? I’ll let Psychology Today answer:

If there were ever numbers associated with body language and nonverbal communication, 55, 38, and 7 would be it. People often refer to these numbers as the standard for understanding nonverbal communication and expressing its importance- specifically over the words being spoken…The numbers represent the percentages of importance of varying communication channels have with the belief that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.

In other words, by using email as our primary form of interaction – with coworkers, with partners, with customers, or with vendors – we’re missing 93% of what they’re saying because they’re saying it either with body language or with their tone of voice.  The telephone helps capture the latter but we’re still missing more than half.

I realize that it’s not always practical to go see someone and you also want many communications to be in writing.  But in addition to the blessing (??) of email, we also have the gift of many video chatting platforms.  Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, and others make interacting with someone a near in-person experience.  More importantly, they can help assure that you’re “hearing” them because you can see all the non-verbal nuances that are NEVER available in email. Make sense?

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