Category Archives: Leadership Cards

Leadership Card 14 – CEOs versus Customers

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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 14

Leadership Card 014 CEOs Customers - Lean CX Ease of Use

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The Customer Experience Disconnect

In a study by Bain & Co it was revealed that around 80% of firms believed they delivered a “superior customer experience”.  The only trouble was, their customers didn’t agree, with just 8% of customers confirming they were provided a superior customer experience.

The study also found that companies were trying to do a good job – they truly believed they were customer focused and recognized the importance of their customers.  They obviously genuinely wanted to provide a superior customer experience, they just didn’t know how to truly pull it off.

Instead of focusing on improvements that truly value the customer, they do things like relentlessly pursuing new customers at the cost of old ones.  For example, heavy discounts for new customers while more expensive pricing for existing customers.  Or they gathered immense loads of data on their customer’s habits without actually talking to them, understanding what makes them want to stay.

How Easy Was It To Get What You Wanted, Really?

Research and consulting firm Forrester has found that making it easy for your customer to get what they want goes a long, long way to providing them that “Superior” customer experience.  In fact, customers are more likely see your company as competent and to forgive any mistakes that happen along the way.

Part of making it easy for a customer to get what they want is reducing the steps to getting what they want.  The more “steps” a customer has to take, whether it’s talking to different people or departments, filling out multiple forms or needing to gather multiple pieces of information, all affects the ease of use and the likelihood of a good customer experience.

Checking in with your most profitable customers to understand what went well, and what didn’t go well, also helped the best companies design their experiences to attract more profitable clients.

Getting Intentional About Designing Your Work

The research by Bain & Co also found that companies who outperformed others when it came to customer experience had intentionally designed their work (i.e. the operations of their business) and customer experience.  They called it Design, Delivery and Developing Capabilities, and this is where it is handy to have a simple yet powerful framework to work through decisions with.  The Ease of Use framework first outlined in the book The Lean CX Score can immediately improve the ease of use for your customers and your team in a few simple ways.

First, it brings clarity to a process by making it repeatable.  Then it reduces the steps to a customer getting what they want, by making hidden things visible and making it impossible to make a mistake.  Finally, by checking in to see if the customer got what they wanted they can reduce the steps further and make things easier again.

Don’t fall into the trap of a complicated programme of work to improve the retention of your customers – make it easy with an easy framework and focus on the ease of use for your customers.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 11 – Clarity and Empathy and Employee Engagement

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Clarity and Empathy – Two Major Keys To Employee Engagement

Straight out of Harvard comes a story and research showing a simple way to improve employee engagement and your productivity, profit and happiness.  It’s called caring.  Actually caring what your customers are trying to solve, actually caring what your team is trying to solve, and providing clarity on the path to solve that problem.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Yet almost no one does this.  Most people are too busy either putting out fires in their own business, or creating fuzzy, vague outcomes and mission statements that when it comes down to it mean absolutely nothing.

To Be Clear Is To Be Unkind

Something financial guru and  entrepreneur Dave Ramsey says is “To be unclear is to be unkind”.  And that kinda makes sense, doesn’t it?  It happens so often not just in business but also in relationships – when you have an expectation that something will happen but you haven’t actually made that clear.  You haven’t told the person what you would like!  And since they can’t read minds, there is a good chance they won’t actually do the thing you secretly wanted them to do.

So make it clear.

Make it clear by understanding what your customer wants.  Make it clear in a standard, repeatable process that shapes the path for your team.  Make it clear when you check in regularly to see if everything is on track.

When you’ve made it clear, another thing can happen.  It might be clear that the process is actually pretty hard.  Maybe it’s an emotional time or area for a customer, maybe it’s a long and boring process.  Nothing is perfect.  So this is where the second part of our equation comes in:

Care.

Care about your team, sympathize with their troubles.  Yes, problem solve with them using Lean CX when you can, but also just listen.  Sometimes people need to vent, and need to be heard that they are going through something tough.  Acknowledge that it is, and don’t minimize it.

Empathy and Clarity.  They both make a difference to your team’s engagement, and if you use both I absolutely guarantee you will see some astounding results.

Chat soon – David Mclachlan

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Leadership Card 10 – Tie Outcomes To Meaning

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Giving Your Team a Purpose

There’s nothing worse than getting up at your alarm in the morning, getting the kids ready for school, downing a morning coffee and rushing in to work… only to have that work mean absolutely nothing in your broader life.

You’ve been there before, haven’t you?  The work is either boring and too easy (or too hard), or too little or too much.  It’s rarely ever Goldilocks – just right – and it’s almost never a part of your real dreams, passions, or purpose.

There’s A Lot Of Disengagement Out There

And the stats on this are pretty brutal.  Nearly 67% of workers are disengaged at work – dragging their feet, making additional mistakes, and  having significant time off before leaving altogether.  But the research also shows that people want to do a good job, it’s usually leaders lacking in real team motivation, psychology and operational management skills that cause people to lose their engagement and their drive.  Which makes sense, because no one really ever teaches you this stuff, do they?  Especially not in an easy to use framework like the one from “The Lean CX Score” book.

Tying the outcomes of your team to a higher meaning has been proven to improve the engagement and purpose of your team, and the results they get.  The good news it doesn’t have to be a fancy meaning like curing world hunger, it just has to be a meaning higher than the work they’re doing now.

Things like:

  • Your work will have a direct impact on meeting our profit target in this way, or;
  • The customers you help are impacted in that way, or;
  • You are helping your broader team achieve something by doing your work, or;
  • Even almost any “because”.

Just Saying “Because” Increased People Saying Yes By 93%

During a study by psychology Ellen Langer, she wondered what sort of words she could use to get people to let her cut in line before them at the copy machine.

She used many different variations and ways of asking, but it turned out that almost any reason was enough – the highest performing sentence included “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?” with a 94% compliance rate.  But just giving any reason also gave a 93% compliance rate, such as “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?”

Just including a “because” in your request brings a different meaning to things – a meaning that’s not just all about you, or the other person in the moment.

So when you tie the outcomes of your team’s work to a meaning, give it some thought, but don’t overdo it.  Don’t spend six months coming up with the perfect “meaning”, when a simple higher meaning will do.  And then watch your team blossom just that little bit more, as the engagement within your team grows.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 9 – Setting Clear Outcomes

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A Simple Way To Improve Engagement

In the research Leadership Cards previously we’ve seen that a big part of getting where you’re going is having a destination in the first place.  It’s that old cliche, worn out but it’s true, of setting goals to have success in your business and your life.

But setting goals can sound boring, can’t it?  Instead, we could look at it this way – it’s not so much about setting goals as it is about getting stuff done.  And further to that, getting the right things done.  Setting a clear outcome, a clear destination for your team, puts them on the right path, gives them clarity in their work and life direction.

If you were a pilot taking off from an airport, you would want to have somewhere to go.  If you just flew round in circles for a few hours, you would run out of fuel and crash.  That’s what’s happening with your teams.

The research also showed that setting outcomes collaboratively, where you sit down with your team, choose tasks that suit their strengths, improved results by up to 35%, and in some cases more.

So make it clear!  As part of the Ease of Use framework, outlined in the book “The Lean CX Score”, you find your customers (the people you serve), find what they want, and outline the steps to get there.  That’s clarity.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 8 – 50% of Employees Don’t Know What is Expected

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If You Don’t Know What’s Expected, What Are You To Do?

Imagine this: in a high performing company there are two teams.  One team is given a clear objective and is clear on their path to get there.  The other team is given no direction at all – in fact some of them are not even sure why they turn up each day.

Which one do you think will do a better job?  And if you’re a business owner, which team do you think will be worth the wage you’re paying them?

When we put it like this, it seems obvious, doesn’t it?  The team with the clear direction, objective and path will certainly outperform.  Yet recent research shows that around 50% of employees in work today are not clear on what is expected of them at work.

And when they’re not clear, as we found above, they’re probably not going to be doing a great job for you or your customers.  Here’s the thing about people who aren’t clear on what their objective is – they perform 35% worse and are 34% more likely to be disengaged in their work.

So set clear outcomes.  Better yet, do it collaboratively with your team.  You will be pleasantly surprised by the results and the improvement to your revenue and profit.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 7 – The Benefits Of Clear Outcomes

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Lean CX Ease of Use Leadership Card - 35pc gap in what was achieved

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Having Something To Aim For Makes A Difference

Have you ever tried crumpling up a piece of paper, taking aim at the nearest waste basket, doing your favorite basketballer impression and shooting a three pointer while an imaginary crown goes wild?

Well, maybe your version wasn’t that elaborate (or maybe it was), but being able to see the waste paper basket – knowing it is there and having something to aim for makes a big difference in whether you get it in or have to take another try.

Can you imagine walking, blindfolded, into a room while holding the same crumpled up piece of paper, and throwing it in any random direction with the hope that it somehow makes it into a waste paper basket?

Well that’s exactly what the majority of businesses, startups, and teams within those businesses are doing today.  They’re going into business without a clear idea of what to aim for.  They’re delving into their work without clear outcomes.

Clear outcomes mean you have a clear objective – a goal, an aim, a target – and have taken the time to outline clear steps to get there.  Are the steps going to be right every time?  Of course not.  Despite what some people will tell you, no one can see the future.  But having something to start with and get you on your way certainly helps.

Now a few business disciplines have been misinterpreted and been taken completely the other way.  Agile, iterative planning, continuous development, the Lean Startup and Minimum Viable Products can (and have) been used as an excuse by lazy managers not to do any planning or set any clear outcomes at all.  Those managers say they will test and learn, and they don’t know what they don’t know.  And those managers are missing the point.  “Iterating” towards something still means you have to have a clear objective to iterate towards in the first place.  And having clear steps to start with is like having a flight plan that you can take off with, and adjust it as you go.

Apart from all that, the research actually backs up the approach of setting clear outcomes in a big way.  Teams and companies who set clear outcomes outperformed those who didn’t by 35% in their results, according to this Stanford University study, and found no less by the man who invented SWOT analysis (an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, well known by your typical MBA graduate).

So set clear outcomes with your team, do it collaboratively, and you will see a big improvement in your results.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 6 – Employee Engagement and Defects, Theft and Safety

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Design Your Work For Ease of Use Using Lean CX – Leadership Card 6

Lean CX Ease of Use Leadership Card - Theft and Defects

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Have You Ever Been Happy?

Silly question, I know.  But… have you?  Really, truly happy?  Do you remember what it’s like?  Maybe it was this morning, maybe it was yesterday, maybe it was last week or maybe it was last year.  But the thing about happy people – people who are fulfilled, at peace with their place in life, and satisfied with what they have, is that they are nicer people to have around for a variety of reasons.

Sure, they are happier, they don’t grumble as much, and are generally more fun to be around.  But the statistics also take it a step further, because people who are happy, find meaning from and are completely engaged in their work actually make fewer mistakes, have fewer safety incidents, and steal less.

Employee engagement is so important when it comes to safety incidents, in fact, that one CEO I recently worked with used to have a rule: “Don’t tell me the engagement score, just tell me how many safety incidents and absentees your team has had.”  That was all the information he needed to know to get a gauge on whether or not the team would be working well or far off track.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 5 – Absenteeism and Turnover

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Design Your Work For Ease Of Use – Card 5

Leadership Card 5 - absenteeism and turnover

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People Leave Leaders, Not companies

Your experience of a company, now matter how large or small, is only as good as the leader you are working for.  Have a good leader who engages her staff, checks in regularly, focuses on strengths, ties outcomes to meaning and more, and you will likely have a good experience and want to do great work.

Have a bad leader, however, who micromanages, is never around when you need them, doesn’t seem to care about the work or your development and only looks out for themselves, and there’s a good chance you’ll be left with a bitter taste in your mouth when thinking about that company.

It’s no surprise, then, that teams in the lowest quartile for engagement experience 41% more absenteeism – people with sick days or any other reason to get away and have a day off.  They also experience 59% higher turnover.  When you combine these two things as a business, not only is less getting done, but the cost of replacing staff – from advertising, to hiring, and training someone new, is absolutely huge.

Design Your Work For Ease Of Use, and Employee Engagement

Getting intentional about designing your work means designing it in a way that engages your staff.

At its very core, the framework described in the book The Lean CX Score advocates things like checking in regularly, removing frustrating rework, gaining clarity through a standard process and much more.  It’s the little things, the mundane things, but these things make a huge difference.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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