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One of the most overlooked gaps in well-meaning organizations is recognizing the need to treat internal customers even BETTER than external customers—at least initially.  Within an organization, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of your fellow employee as your family that you can treat however you want because “they have to love me, they’re family,” when in reality, they are your most important customer.  Why?  Because how we treat each other within the organization is a reflection of how we are going to treat our external customers in the long term.

One of the first things to think about then, as we look at creating a culture of service, is how well do we ask for and listen to feedback from teammates on how we are serving them.  Let me give you a great example I heard just this past week to illustrate this point.

I have a very good friend who is a professional golfer on the PGA Tour. My husband and I had dinner with him last week and he shared with us how he meets with his team at the beginning of each year to set goals for the season.  I was surprised to hear that in addition to his caddy, he has a personal trainer, a swing coach to help him with his golf swing, a short game coach to help him with his short game, and his agent.  While in their meeting, my friend gave his swing coach some feedback about how he would like to see him out on the golf course more to be able to better analyze his swing and offer suggestions.  The swing coach did not like the feedback his team member (as well as his boss!) gave him, and became very defensive about the feedback and was clearly not open to hearing it.  The end result was that my friend hired a new swing coach who was committed to delivering on the service my friend was looking for.

Good service begins at home

Just because we work for the same company doesn’t mean we should treat our fellow employees as second class citizens. On the contrary, we need to listen to them and thank them for their feedback the same way we would to an external customer.  My friend’s swing coach didn’t understand the idea of “serving the golfer” to help him get better and it cost him his job.

Ideally, this internal customer focus will start at the top of the organization with senior leaders recognizing the importance of consistently providing both the positive and constructive feedback to employees about what is expected of them, praising them for what they do well, and giving them ideas where they can improve.  Next, individual department leaders should continue the process by encouraging team members to ask for feedback from each other, as well as from other departments on how well they are serving them.

Learn from the positive and the negative

One important note about negative feedback.  When someone complains about your service, or shares some unpleasant feedback with you, remember they must care enough about you to share it and want you to improve, so thank them for the feedback!  If my friend’s swing coach had done that, he probably would still have his job!!!

About the author:

Kathy Cuff is one of the principal authors—together  with Vicki Halsey–of The Ken Blanchard Companies’ Legendary Service training program.  Their customer service focused posts appear on the first and third Thursday of each month.

Leaders in today’s organizations need to continuously balance the expectations of three different groups of people—shareholders, customers, and employees. How these three groups are ranked within a company will largely determine the type of culture the organization has. A “shareholder first” organization is very different from a “customer first” or an “employee first” company.

In a recent article for Chief Learning Officer, best-selling author Ken Blanchard asks, “Who is customer number one in your organization? How is that impacting the return on investment, level of service, and levels of employee engagement in your company?”

 Using examples from several well known companies such as Southwest Airlines and WD-40 Company, Blanchard shows how companies that adopt an “employee first” mindset perform best.

But that’s only half the story, says Blanchard.  For best results, leaders need to combine a focus on people with a simultaneous focus on results.  It’s this one-two combination that delivers the greatest impact.

Investing in People

As Blanchard explains, “Leaders in ‘employee first’ organizations turn the traditional pyramid upside down so that the customer contact people are essentially at the top of the organization. In other words, the leaders work for the people who report to them.” This is the high investment in people part of the equation.

To illustrate this, Blanchard points to the philosophy of Garry Ridge, CEO of household-products manufacturer WD-40, who even goes so far as to remind managers of their mutual accountability to employees at performance review meetings. If a manager recommends that a person be let go—or “shared with the competition” as WD-40 calls it—the first question asked of the manager is: “What have you done to help your direct report succeed?” If the manager can’t show that he or she has coached and supported the direct report, the manager—not the direct report—might be “shared with the competition.”

Holding People Accountable

One of the benefits of this serious approach to mutual accountability is that it gives leaders permission to step in when tough love is called for—for example, when people engage in inappropriate behavior.

As an example, Blanchard points to Colleen Barrett, president emeritus of Southwest Airlines.  As Barrett explains, “We are very clear in telling our people what our expectations are. We hold them and ourselves accountable for meeting those expectations every day. Sometimes this means having a real heart-to-heart with people and reminding them what your values are. If you have been intentional and firm in explaining what your expectations are, that gives you the opportunity to point to specific examples where they haven’t exhibited the required behaviors.”

High Investment and High Expectations

As a leader, you need to be supportive and directive at the same time. It can seem like a lot of work, but it is necessary if you want to create the high-investment, high-expectations culture that makes all the difference. When people know that leadership not only expects the best from them, but is also backing them up, they feel safe, prepared and ready to step out to serve the customer in ways that unsupported employees just won’t risk.

What’s your organization’s approach to employee support and accountability? 

Do you use a high-investment, high-expectations approach to talent management? To read more of Ken Blanchard’s thoughts on this topic, check out The Upside-Down Pyramid here.

“Make sure that people understand your reasoning and process. If you decide that some information is just too sensitive to share openly, that’s okay. Just be sure that the process you use isn’t seen as secretive. In the absence of openness, people will imagine the worst,” says Scott Blanchard in a recent column for Fast Company.

One area where companies often run into trouble with this is sharing information about employee compensation. Most companies keep actual salaries confidential but that doesn’t mean that the process of determining salaries has to be confidential also, explains Blanchard.  “If you have a good reason for paying at the level you do, let people know. Keeping it a secret doesn’t help things. It just causes unnecessary discontent.”

A Case in Point

To illustrate his point, Blanchard shares a story about the experience of a CEO who serves on the company’s board of directors.  This CEO went through something just like this when an internal employee survey showed dissatisfaction about the fairness of pay in his company. This was really frustrating to the CEO, who believed that the company’s pay scales were well above industry averages.

“It was purely an openness issue,” explains Blanchard. “The company had been operating fairly for a long time but leadership had not taken the time to fully disclose the way they were making decisions. When they eventually did disclose the process, perceptions went up.”

For this company, the first step was to conduct a highly visible and transparent study with an outside firm to analyze the company’s whole compensation system.

“What it showed was that the company’s base pay levels were almost exactly at the 50th percentile for organizations of a similar size and with the same demographics. It also showed that the company had a generous bonus plan in place available to all employees. The bonus plan, together with the base pay, resulted in employees being compensated at the 75th percentile–well above average.

“Armed with this information, the leadership team went on an organization-wide campaign to talk about the procedure they used to determine pay scales and the rigor they used in applying it. As a result, they were able to change people’s perceptions of the level of compensation in the organization and its relative fairness. Because people had a greater understanding about the way pay scales were determined, they had a better capacity to understand and accept the results, even though they still wished—like all of us—that they were making a little more.”

How open is your company when it comes to sharing information about how decisions are reached? 

Are you more of an “open book” or a “closed book” culture?  Remember that your approach will have a definite impact on employee’s perceptions of fairness.

As Blanchard concludes, “When people aren’t able to point to a process that is known, published, and understandable, they start to make up their own stories. If there isn’t clarity about the way decisions are made, the stories people make up are typically a lot worse than reality.”

You can read Scott Blanchard’s entire column in Fast Company, The Just-Right Approach To Social Media And Transparency, And What It Says About Your Company and also check out Blanchard’s other thoughts on compensation at The Role Money Plays in Engaging Employees.  To read more about money’s role in creating an overall engaging work environment, download the new Blanchard white paper, Employee Work Passion: Connecting the Dots

“Do you want this job so you can serve—or so you can be served?”  Of course if you ask most people this question straight-up, the answer will always be “to serve” in the mind of the applicant, but a closer examination of what is behind the desire to serve is still really an opportunity to accomplish individual goals.  For example: 

• “I want to take this organization in a new direction.”
• “I want to be able to ask anyone on the street who is the number one service provider in our space and hear…”
• “I have a great idea on how to improve things.”

A serving leader, by contrast, will look to serve the goals that the organization wants to achieve. This is what Jim Collins referred to as “Level 5” leadership in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t.  It is a combination of fierce resolve and will, combined with humility and a desire to serve the needs of the organization that delivers long term results.

For anyone involved in the evaluation and selection of leaders for their company, the challenge is to find people with that combination. 

We are just leaving the era of charismatic leadership.  We have all seen the effects of self-centered leadership.  It’s an effective entrepreneurial start-up strategy, but it can also create a rapid rise and fall cycle centered on the personality and drive of one person. 

Today we need a new leadership model—one that is focused on accomplishing the goals of the organization, as opposed to meeting the needs and aspirations of just the individual leader. The best leaders find and identify the strengths latent within people and organizations and lead them to a place that they couldn’t get to on their own.  In this way they truly serve.  And if they do it well, the people will say, “We did it ourselves.”

What attributes are you looking for in your new leaders?  To learn more about identifying leadership attitudes and beliefs check out these previous posts:

Are You a Serving, or a Self-Serving Leader?

Rebuilding Trust, Commitment, and Morale

Ego and the Dark Side of High Achievement

Some organizations do a great job helping employees get started in a new role. In other companies, people don’t even have clear job descriptions, so the on-boarding process is a little bit like being thrown into a salad spinner.

In a recent article entitled Three Keys to Effective On-Boarding, Madeleine Homan-Blanchard, cofounder of Coaching Services at The Ken Blanchard Companies identifies three ways managers can help new employees (or existing ones in new roles) get off to a fast start.

• Explain the local culture. There are many subcultures at play in any organization, and it’s the manager’s responsibility to explain how this particular team operates. Whether managers share it formally or informally, the existing culture and values need to be made extremely clear to new people.
• Share expectations.  A second strategy that Homan-Blanchard recommends to speed up the individual on-boarding process is for managers to spell out very clearly what the expectations are for the new employee. This gives new people a sense of safety because they know exactly what they are dealing with and what they will be evaluated on.
• Map relationships. Finally, Homan-Blanchard recommends that managers help people understand who the people are inside and outside of the department that they can go to for help if they need it. As she explains, “Many times this won’t be obvious on the organizational chart so it is very beneficial for a manager to say, ‘It might look like these three people are the ones to go to for that type of question—but if you really want to get this done here’s the person you want to talk to.’”

With a little extra time at the beginning of the process, managers can help eliminate some of the “deer in the headlight” hesitancy and confusion that trips up a lot of people when they first start a new role.

To learn more about Homan-Blanchard’s advice for getting people off to a fast start in your organization read Three Keys to Effective On-Boarding.  Also check out a free webinar that Homan-Blanchard will be conducting on August 17, On-Boarding: How to Shorten Ramp-up Times for Employees

Ken Blanchard was a featured speaker during commencement ceremonies for the college of business at Grand Canyon University yesterday. In his remarks Dr. Blanchard encouraged the aspiring leaders to remember that leadership is not about you—it is about others, and that true success in life is not about what you get, but what you give.

To illustrate his point, Blanchard shared one of his favorite stories by John Ortberg, a Presbyterian minister and best-selling author from Menlo Park, California.

Blanchard told how Ortberg used to play Monopoly with his grandmother every time she would visit. His grandmother was a good player and always won the game in short order. Read more…

There is a classic fable about a man who approaches three laborers breaking and shaping rocks. The man asks the first laborer what he is doing. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m breaking rocks,” the laborer replies. The man asks the second laborer what he is doing and he responds that he is building a wall. The man then asks the third laborer what he is doing and the laborer responds, “I’m building a cathedral.” 

The three men are all doing the same work, but each with a different perception of its relative worth. Which man do you suppose is coming to work happier and more engaged?

The first man sees his work as a job, the second man sees his work as a task, but it’s the third man who sees his work as a worthy calling, because he is clear about the bigger picture and how his work connects and adds value.

And it is that man who, according to Blanchard employee work passion research, has more positive intentions about

• performing at an above-average level
• being a good organizational citizen
• using more discretionary effort on behalf of the organization
• remaining with the organization
• endorsing the organization and its leadership to others

In a new monthly column for Fast Company, Scott and Ken Blanchard look at the power of meaningful work and alignment. For leaders looking to rekindle a “cathedral” point of view in their people they suggest:

• First, remember why you got into business in the first place. Without an occasional reminder, sometimes it really can seem like the only reason the organization exists is to make money for shareholders.
• Second, connect the dots between an individual’s work and the organization’s overall goals. Make sure that individual tasks and roles are aligned to current initiatives by regularly reviewing what people are working on and how it is contributing to overall performance.

Helping people see and understand the meaningfulness of their work is one of the most powerful things you can do to create strong and powerfully motivated employees. To learn more about creating a sense of meaningful work in your organization, check out Scott and Ken’s new column at Fast Company here.  To learn more about Blanchard’s research into employee work passion, follow this link to Employee Passion: The New Rules of Engagement or From Engagement to Employee Work Passion: A Deeper Understanding of the Employee Work Passion Framework

Employee engagement is a popular topic these days and a whole industry has sprung up around helping managers identify people’s strengths, discover their motivations, and provide the tools and resources people need to succeed.  The goal is to create a high-energy work environment where people want to come to work and be their best.

But do high employee engagement levels translate into better bottom line performance?  Not necessarily.  There is one additional component that has to be in place in order to drive bottom line impact. Read more…

Join The Ken Blanchard Companies for a special complimentary webinar and online chat beginning today at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time (12:00 noon Eastern).  Founding Associate Pat Zigarmi and Trust Practice Leader Randy Conley will be speaking on the topic of Building Trust and Transparency in Your Organization. The webinar is free and seats are still available if you would like to join over 1,000 people expected to participate.  Read more…

“Love” as the key ingredient to business success?  Ken Blanchard and Colleen Barrett make a convincing case in their new book, Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success.  I received an early manuscript of this new book (due out in January) after attending Barrett’s keynote address at The Ken Blanchard Companies annual client summit in San Diego last month.  Their basic formula is simple: Southwest succeeds because it treats employees with respect, practices The Golden Rule, and loves people for who they are.  In return, the company asks employees to treat customers in a similar manner.

It’s an approach that allows Southwest’s leadership to expect more—and receive more—from their people than other airlines.  Because employees know that leadership is on their side, leaders can confidently challenge and hold people accountable for meeting expectations.  It’s a business version of tough love that only works when employees know you care.

Interested in trying a little leadership love at your organization?  Here are three tips for getting started:

1. Communicate your organizational mission and vision. Barrett explains that at Southwest, they are first and foremost in the customer service business—they just happen to express that service by providing airline transportation.
2. Define the values that will guide behavior. At Southwest values start with safety and practicing the golden rule–treating people as you would like to be treated–as a foundation.  Three additional values of Warrior Spirit, Servant’s Heart, and a Fun-LUVing Attitude guide employee behavior on a day-to-day basis.
3. Combine caring with high expectations. Leaders at Southwest treat their people with respect, strive to bring out their best, and love their people for who they are.  In return, employees are expected to buy into the company’s mission, and to practice the company’s values with each other and customers.

What’s the level of leadership love in your organization?  Do employees know that leaders truly care about them?  It’s an essential ingredient at Southwest that has helped to create long-term success and a fun-loving culture in a challenging industry.  What could it do for you?

Win an Advance Copy of Ken and Colleen’s New Book!

Would you like to get a sneak peek at the unbound manuscript version of Bringing LUV to Leadership?  Rarely made public, we have a small number of extra copies from the proofing and review process that we are giving away this Friday.  To be entered into the drawing, just sign on as a fan at Ken Blanchard’s new Facebook Fan Page by 12 noon Pacific Time, Friday, April 9.  Everyone who is signed up as a fan by that time will automatically be entered into the drawing.  Good luck!