• Search for:

• Recent Posts

  • Simon Sinek
  • Be the Pilot
  • C+C = Customer Service Experience
  • Perfect spaghetti sauce
  • Seth Godin – Tribes

• Pages

  • About Douglas Weaver

• Categories

  • blog
  • features
  • Uncategorized

• Tags

  Baseball book review Choice Connection Customer Service Development Feedback Happiness influence Leadership Malcolm Gladwell Management Marketing Seth Godin Southwest Airlines Ted The Servant Tipping Point Tribes

• Twitter

  
  Douglas Weaver
  Our reputations do not come from how we talk about ourselves. Our reputations come from how others talk about us.
  As a leader, you are the one to create and reinforce beliefs with every communication, every decision, and every interaction.
  Saying you're a leader doesn't make you a leader. Leading makes you a leader. So Lead...
  Great leaders don’t change people. They create environments where people can change themselves.

I sat down in my seat on the airplane and started to read a book- because I still had to sit through the safety overview and preparation communication before we taxied to the runway. If you fly often, you are accustomed to this period of time and my guess is that you typically tune out. If you fly Southwest this can sometimes be an entertaining (although less and less) period of time but typically its very robotic and routine. All of the sudden the pilot’s voice could be heard on the speaker. He thanked us for flying United that day and then he introduced by name, hometown, and hobbies the flight crew AND flight attendants. I was blown away…

How often do we get caught up in our roles or day to day work where everything seems to us (and others) to be robotic and routine? Imagine the effect you would have on the routine and ordinary if were to “be the pilot”.

Its simply not enough to focus and insist on customer service. How many times have you had an experience where you could tell that someone was trained in customer service but the interaction was missing something? The second the conversation went “off script” is when you knew you were in trouble. I think there are two components to the customer service experience. The first is the formal aspect- it may be training, creating a culture, creating an expectation (etc.) – this is the “script” part. While some may argue, I am willing to say that is the easy part. The hard part is the second component that I think has to go hand-in-hand with the ‘script’ and that is a “connection”. That feeling of something missing often has to do with a lack of genuine connection with someone. The person that is trained or expected to do something is at a loss when they have to go off ‘script’ because they have no connect, no empathy and understanding, with the person they are interacting with. That is a negative way to explain it, let me use a positive example. I was recently flying on a Southwest Airlines flight and had a great customer service experience. Our flight was stuck on the runway for an hour. As you can guess it was hot inside the plane, people were annoyed, and I would say morale was pretty low. I am sure protocol for customer service says something about communication to the passengers, maybe something about beverages, etc. Our flight attendant did these things, but he also connected with us. He was standing in front of an angry mob and making us laugh. Not just the typical ‘jokes’ that are often told on Southwest flights- but way off script. He was asking people questions and incorporating that into his jokes, responses, etc. Was his sense of humor the key- well it didn’t hurt, but the key was actually his connection with us and knowing what he needed to do (what we needed) to make us happy for an hour. I didn’t get off the plane angry or fed up…quite the opposite.

While I focused here on customer service, this could/should be applied to collaboration, networking, etc.

Customer Service + Connection = Customer Service Experience

Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce — and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so.

The book The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership written by James C. Hunter presents us with an executive John Daily, who is coming unglued as a husband, father and boss. Almost against his will (and certainly his better judgment) he goes on a week-long retreat to reclaim his sanity (ok, that might be dramatic, but certainly he goes to regain some balance and control) at a Benedictine monastery. With a certain sense of irony, and possible life predetermination, John Daily learns that a former Wall Street legend who “disappeared” years earlier is now a monk named Brother Simon at the monastery. The book is a quick read (a longer airplane ride) and the story is engaging.

The author presents several ideas in the book that I felt were important. The first is the idea of the qualities of a servant leader;
1. Patient – showing self-control.
2. Kind – giving attention, appreciation, and
encouragement.
3. Humble – being authentic without pretense or
arrogance.
4. Respectful – treating others as important people.
5. Selfless – meeting the needs of others.
6. Forgiving – giving up resentment when wronged.
7. Honest – being free from deception.
8. Committed – sticking to your choices.

These behaviors will allow one to serve and sacrifice for others. A servant leader will set aside their own wants and needs and focus on the legitimate needs of others.

Another lesson from the book is the idea of leading with authority. Leading with authority enables you to have a personal mission statement: to serve the people you lead, to listen to their needs, to give praise and recognition, to show kindness, and to be honest, among other things. People tend to gravitate towards servant leaders.

The author talks about the old paradigm of leadership where the employees (‘grunts’) are at the bottom of the pyramid, and as you move up you have supervisors, middle managers, vice presidents and the CEO. He turns that paradigm on its head and shows an upside-down pyramid with employees at the top, on down to the CEO. Through this point of view he shows how true leaders serve the people who work for them, and the front-line employees serve their customers. The role of a leader is not to rule over other people, but to serve them.

With the paradigm shift in place, the author uses another inverted pyramid to describe the Servant Leadership model. At the bottom is will, then love, service and sacrifice, authority and leadership is at the top. According to this model, the first step toward leadership is will, having intentions + actions, or aligning intentions with actions and choosing the appropriate behavior. With the proper will you chose love, the verb (in this case) that means identifying and meeting the legitimate needs (not wants) of those being lead. The next step in the progression is to serve and sacrifice for others. Through service one builds authority or influence with people, and once that is established, one earns the right to be a leader. The greatest leaders, therefore, are the ones who serve the most.

Having grown up with the love of playing baseball and having had the opportunity to spend some time with some great baseball minds, I thought I had a can’t miss analogy. Well, let me flash back before I tell you how wrong my analogy was. A few years ago I was playing baseball in Ft. Myers. I had the privilege of meeting Steve Liddle (current bench coach of the Minnesota Twins) and Stand and Stu Cliburn (both coaches in the Twins minor leagues). I was amazed by the stories about leadership and baseball that they told. Later, when I was back in Maryland, I went with some teammates to a game in Bowie. After the game I picked up steamed crabs and we hung out with Stan and Stu in the clubhouse. As we were picking our crabs and listening to baseball stories (there may have also been a beer or two involved) I heard a challenge for a minor league coach that lead to my “can’t miss analogy”. The coaching challenge that I heard was how do you keep a 30 year old player that will not make the major leagues around? The player is good, but not great, and does have a positive impact on the development of other players that will play in the majors.

I thought about that for years after I heard this and eventually thought of it as a question. How do you (or do you?) tell someone they are not good enough to go to the next level? I continued to think about this in a business environment and this is what eventually led to my analogy.

My analogy- Don’t minor league coaches and managers in a business setting both face the challenge of having people that will “make it” or “not make it”? Assuming that all of the training, coaching, and development has taken place…What should a manager do when they have someone on their team that they “know” won’t make it?