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Risk lies not in the journey, but the reluctance to take it

When my father passed away in March of 1985, a family friend made a comment to my mother, which I will never forget.  While trying to console her, this very good and honorable friend told her how fortunate she was to be employed.  He went on to reassure her that a secure job was every bit as important as having a life insurance policy.  You see, at that time, the U.S. was beginning to show recovery from a double dip recession (consumer and business) where unemployment had climbed above 10%.

As you may recall, the U.S. went on to realize one of the strongest economies and global recoveries ever – yes, just a few years following a shattering financial crisis which crippled this country.  The world of work changed dramatically not coincidentally during that period.  The knowledge worker was born.  It became less about what a person could do and more about what they knew, felt, and thought.  Selecting the right people became a differentiating imperative, one, which could build value overnight.

The, fear based approach to employment of the early ’70s and ’80s was gone.  People now had choices.  They left the organizations, not always physically, that had destroyed their trust and security of the job that “was as important as a life insurance policy.”  Once thriving organizations toppled because they couldn’t retain the talent necessary to compete in the new global economy.

Is history repeating itself?  You can bet on it.  So the question now becomes, “how can our organization emerge from this double dip set back in the most healthy and prosperous way?”

Like the advice given my mother, this is not a time to rely on what has worked in the past.  Conventional wisdom suggests we do employee engagement surveys to understand the health of our human potential, address our management development and leadership talents, and set our plan in motion to improve.  While these steps are critical and absolutely necessary, our research suggests that these alone won’t give us the control we need to create the change we want.

As leaders we must ground “all things culture” in the business of our business!   If you aren’t doing this, as a leader your impact is relegated to simply “reviewing” your changing culture – not determining it.

So get committed.

Direct the evolution of your culture from the macro through the local.   Culture will eat strategy, tactics and even the best laid plans for lunch, unless it is continuously connected to mission, vision, and purpose.  What elements of your culture must change and what must prevail?   What aspects of your service culture resonate with your customers and which irritate or alienate them?

This is not a time for seeking consensus, but a time for taking your organization to the next level, the true and proper role for leadership.  The risk lies not in the journey, but in the reluctance to take it.

By Curt Coffman, MBA

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Latest research suggests you should get him a chair
and invite him to your next survey

In 1941, Percy LeBaron Spencer of the Raytheon Company, was developing radio signals which were the central mechanisms of radar.  One day, while walking past a radar tube, he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted.  Surprised, but curious, he experimented with this existing technology by placing a bowl of popcorn kernels in front of this tube; it quickly popped all over the lab.  The microwave (radar) oven was born.  The rest is history, all because of a surprise discovery.  The cooking/heating capacity of the radar was there all along, yet no one was looking for it because they were focused on the radar.

New research by The Coffman Organization has revealed a similar discovery, this time in the area of employee engagement and building true sustainable value in an organization.  Simple – yes, missed- absolutely!  Face it, for the past 15 years, we’ve been shown complex “meta-analytic” research that linked engagement levels of employees to results like turnover, productivity and even profitability!  So, we measured, tried to improve and hoped for the best.  Results though, were mixed when tested – engagement rose, but not always the promised results.  What has been missing?

As Percy LeBaron Spencer discovered, we also have a very powerful tool which has not been fully utilized to build organizational value.

We need to use employee engagement to build the value of an organization by:

1. Acquiring new customers, and
2. Retaining current customers.

While there are many opinions about how to build value, it is unquestionably these two variables that really matter.  For decades now, organizations have found themselves in an era of efficiency with highly effective initiatives such as LEAN¹, and Six Sigma²; this did indeed help maintain their margins by focusing on cost reduction.

As efficiency increased, however, an undeniable crisis mounted and was often ignored – flat and frequently declining sales!  Without growth, even the most effective process will not contribute to the bottom line over time.

What will?  This is where the new focus of employee engagement finds its previously overlooked application:  engaging every employee by establishing a line of sight to how they contribute to two things – acquiring new customers and retaining current ones.

Many may say, “in my job, I have no influence over these.”  We think this is at the core of the problem.  We either influence customer acquisition and retention directly, or through those we collaborate with and support.  If one cannot make the connection between what they do and this outcome – it may be a non-job.

While Spencer and Raytheon did not disassemble or change the radar tube, they certainly re-focused it.  Just like the radar tube, employee engagement is critical, but if it is not focused on how it translates to customer acquisition and retention – don’t waste your money.

Trends in engagement will not be forsaken, but traditional “action planning” needs a complete overhaul.  The goal of action planning or survey follow-up is not to improve a particular item or any of the individual survey responses.  Rather, it is to create clarity around how each one either enables or inhibits the employee’s ability to acquire and retain customers.

Through this discovery we have developed a proven approach, our Leading to Engage™ process and survey practices, to achieve this most critical outcome.  Like Spencer and Raytheon, our approach has forever changed the status quo into an entirely new means of getting exponentially better results.

Please call us at 888-999-8940, or email us at Info@CoffmanOrganization.com to see how this
powerful approach can help your organization grow today.

Too Busy to Build Value?

If so, you’ll have plenty of time soon…

How have you been? Is a “throw away” line.
It prompts a superficial response so we can continue on uninterrupted by reality.

Well, at least it used to be.  Now, it might well unleash an emotional litany:

…swamped, buried with projects…barely keeping my head above water, up to my ears in alligators…

Probe a bit and you’ll hear the underlying message:  busy, busy, busy, but lacking in results.

What are we busy doing?  Reorganizing, planning, recording, assessing and messaging.  These things are important, preventing weaknesses from creating crises is a good thing, but most of the time our activities entirely miss the number one charge of any organization – building value.  You see, value is not derived by piecing together activities like fabric to a quilt; value is a derivative of aligning the strategies, vision and direction to do ONE THING – acquire and retain customers.

This means more than buying customers through acquisitions and mergers, but really identifying customer needs, developing a marketing plan, selling and most importantly, building new relationships (organic growth).  In the past five years, research by The Coffman Organization suggests that employees, managers and leaders are increasingly becoming detached from the customer.  Why?  The uncomplicated answer is because customers are challenging and sometimes mess up our well thought out plans and strategies.

It is so much easier to restructure, change reporting channels and create communication plans than to figure out how best to acquire new customers and to sustain these relationships.  While not bad prima facia, these actions may change behavior but they usually have little to no impact on customer acquisition and sustainability.  This should be the litmus test for EVERY initiative, project and hour worked for every single person in the organization.

Let’s be honest, quality standards are far more beneficial to us than to our customers.  We use scalability and standards to protect the organization or our own position in the pecking order by ensuring a cookie-cutter approach (“do it like this”), or delivering a message that you adamantly disagree with.

Contemporary organizations keep it simple and NEVER lose sight of what really determines their success.  Everyone from HR, IT, Accounting, Operations, Marketing and Sales knows how to separate the hay from the horse manure.  There is a widely held expectation that someone knows each and every customer and has a meaningful relationship with them!

When customers voice reasonable needs, great organizations don’t crouch behind the shields of “scope creep” or “out of standard”.  They recognize how a $15 part can ultimately result in a $750,000 purchase of heavy machinery.  For example, an $18 pizza may not seem like much of a value driver, but when one considers that every man, woman and child consumes 23 pounds (43 slices) of pizza per year, the overall contribution (value) is enormous.  Value-building leaders know that creating lifelong customers always trumps the traditional view of satisfying a customer within one transaction.

At The Coffman Organization, we have completed research with hundreds of thousands of employees, managers, leaders and, most importantly, customers.  The results are alarming.  While no one denies the importance of the customer, they have been reduced to a nameless, faceless entity.  Value-driven companies structure themselves around the fact that every touch point results in a stronger or weaker relationship – depending on the human connection.  Our data show that customers are not loyal by nature – they actually prefer to switch.  Despite this disappointing fact, they do crave meaningful relationships with the people they do business with and trust.

Sales, or more succinctly, a sales driven model will yield unprecedented success when organizations do the following:

• Strive to engage employees around their role in creating great customer outcomes – no matter what role they are in.
• Study your best sales people, NOT “how” they do it, but what THEY NEED to sustain their high performance.  Remember that big performance comes with big other stuff too – be ready to manage it.
• Provide meaningful measurements to both sales representatives and their customers – by region, district and territory.
• Use a customer engagement structure as the foundation for excellence.  See employee engagement when alongside customer engagement as a leading indicator of the organization’s success.
• Develop your managers around the right things – knowing their employees and developing the kind of meaningful relationships that will accelerate performance and quickly smooth out the inevitable bumps in the road.
• Don’t assume your managers know how to manage people!  More often than not, they know how to manage things, which doesn’t promote customer acquisition and retention.

Busy?  We want to help you know if what you’re doing is truly building value.  Let us show you how our model can help create a culture that does just that.

How do we burn thee?  Let us count the ways…

• In the hospital, when you are at your wife’s side during a pregnancy crisis…
• When you go out to lunch, and your boss calls your cell to say it’s NOT necessary to come back…
• When you pick up your messages and it’s the phone company calling to disconnect your business line…
• When everyone on the team already knows what you will find out after the meeting…

These are just a few of the ways some organizations demonstrate to people (and their colleagues still standing) that our human resources are our most important resources.  That we care.  Really, we do.

Is it really that inconvenient for your manager to talk to you first,  privately,  in person?

What is it about organizational life that provides permission to re-write the basic rules of human decency?  This is really not a “Miss Manners column,” but we are pretty shocked when being a leader means you can do anything from putting oranges in your pants (don’t let anyone ever tell you we don’t have balls here) to interrupting your child’s birth to announce that you have been terminated.

~Believe It Or Not~

One of the 3rd largest insurance companies in America,
an icon for “family values,” fired an employee via email at 11:50pm Sunday evening.

Indecent seems to be the right word to use when you are told to fire a 20+ year, valued employee because the $400 million dollar bonus the senior staff have divvied up leaves the company a bit too short to afford her $40,000 dollar salary.  Just email her. She’ll find some other job; after all, she knows every one of your clients by voice, and remembers all their spouse and children names and hobbies. That kind of memory will certainly serve her well in the new job market.

We are not big believers in developing classes in ethics, or coursework of that ilk.  After kindergarten, you know that hitting other people hurts them as much as when they hit you.  And you also know that what belongs to other people belongs to other people, the fine print not-with-standing.  Whether or not you choose to live your life by these values is another matter.  A class will only annoy the ethical and give the others an excuse that there is something to discuss.

Doing what is right has never been easy.  Ask a soldier or anyone over 60.  Or ask your children about the choices they are making at school every day.  It is not a generational thing.  It’s a human thing.  Encumbered with the burdens of our own lives we face a fork in the road and one of the paths appears to be downhill.

To that point, a leader we admire a great deal told us this story:
Just entering the shipping department late one afternoon, I interrupted a celebration, with high five hand slapping and people laughing.  The team members were so enthused, it looked like the group was about to hoist “Joe” onto their shoulders.

This is exactly the kind of scene you want to run into all over your organization – and I was eager to get in the moment with them.  I pressed them for the news:  what had happened – what was this success?

With urging from the group, Joe told his story.  It appeared that he had gone to Home Depot to pick up $1800 dollars worth of paint and the clerk forgot to charge him.  That was the cause of the celebration.

“Joe, get your ass back in the truck and go pay for the paint!”

How naturally and spontaneously we communicate our own values!  Without a moment’s hesitation, our leader sent an unequivocal message:  the misfortune of others does not count as our success.  In the chaos and confusion of mistakes and misinterpretations and an uncertain future, we find our way by always doing what is the right thing to do.

We know of an organization which employed a “travel expense review committee” to insure expenses were accurately reported.  Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?  Occasionally, reimbursement was requested for something that was not allowable, and that resulted in “savings” for the organization.

Unfortunately, this group found most of its satisfaction when employees could have claimed an expense (like parking) and forgot to note it on their expense report, even though they had enclosed the receipt.  This oversight was never brought to the employee’s attention and resulted in a win something akin to the paint celebration.

Doing what is right doesn’t imply doing what’s right for the organization over the individual, does it?  The more you find yourself qualifying what is right, the less right it is.

Shouldn’t people appointed to the “travel review committee” actually have traveled extensively themselves?  Those who are never asked to sacrifice for the organization by leaving their homes and families, and never miss a dinner meal or a child’s play at school should probably not be the ones in charge of evaluating the travel patterns of associates whose evenings are entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers.

Layoffs happen.  Economies and fortunes decline over night, sometimes through no fault of our own.  But the way in which we face these challenges speaks volumes about our character or lack thereof.

One organization called several hundred people into a meeting hall to discuss an impending layoff.  Upon leaving, each person would receive an envelope, only some of which contained a pink slip.

When it happens to you, how far down the hall will you walk to open your envelope?  What kind of regard will you have for those who engineered this low courage assault on your self-confidence and security?

When you get burned, the person who guided you, supported you and cared about you, should be there with you, helping you take the next steps just as he/she has been there coaching you for success.  It isn’t necessary for that person to have all the answers, but being there – showing up – is the right thing to do.

Personally, we know some admirable people, great managers, who took the uphill path in the face of these situations and left with the staff who had been wronged or discarded for a cheaper model.  Since their resignation never “saved” that person, we suspect that most took this route as much for themselves, as for their associates, to insure their own solid footing on the path…far away from the slippery slope of convenience.

New ideas are energizing and revitalizing – right?

Hmmm…not always. Actually, unique, original perspectives elicit, on the whole, more negative than positive reactions. How? Why? Seriously, doesn’t everyone love innovation?

Innovation looks much less like a sparkling diamond and more like a lump of coal in the beginning, just waiting to be shaped and transformed into something of value. Tragically, too few can visualize the potential in a lump of coal. Furthermore, our organizational cultures often unintentionally thwart innovation.  So rather than innovation, we settle for a new container, logo or even price. We trademark to protect our “intellectual property,” which even further prevents innovation.

When will we recognize that the most effective defense of our competitive advantage won’t happen in a courtroom? Sustainability will only happen in a culture that props up the lumps of coal and encourages uniqueness in its most raw form.

Makes sense – right? How do we get there? Before innovations can become a vital component of our cultures, we have to embrace some new views:

It takes serious courage to bet on something unseen.

You don’t get to excellence by eliminating risk.

Innovation requires giving up control.

Let’s look at these new cultural challenges more closely.

1. Innovation requires giving up control:

Do we hire people to perform tasks vs. not to think about new ways of doing things? Frankly, it scares us to think that employees could be out there coming up with their own ideas about how things could be done. “Do, don’t think” is often the unspoken mantra.

2. It takes serious courage to bet on something unseen:

Ideas are easy – innovation (what people will actually pay for) is hard. Ideas are shaped and even completely transformed when put through the blender of both Socratic and unfiltered Input from others. It’s naïve to think the best ideas come only from those already sophisticated in the respective area of focus. Fresh, valuable products and services also come from those without bias – those often excluded individuals, who aren’t already subject-matter experts.

3. You don’t get to excellence by eliminating risk.

Obviously, preventing errors and costly mistakes is necessary. If not balanced with promoting excellence, however, our efforts are wasted. The two are complementary, but definitely not the same thing. Our brains function in one of two states at any given time:  fear or vision. Fear always seems more motivational, at least short-term, but without vision and its accompanying risk, cultures grow stale.

Imagine if the BlackBerry, iPod, post-it-note, electric screwdriver, sandpaper and computer mouse had remained someone’s lump of coal.

Do you really want innovation? If so, it’s time for a new pair of glasses.

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