Leadership Card 32 – Checking In to Increase Engagement (and Customers)
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The Best, Most Loved Leaders Check in Regularly With Their Team
The Gallup business journal recently found that there is a very clear way to increase your team’s engagement in their work. They found that leaders who check in at least once a week with each individual in their team, while focusing on their strengths, saw up to a 27% increase in engagement.
To put that into perspective, companies in the top quartile of engagement have enjoyed twice the revenue of companies in the bottom quartile of engagement, according to a study by Kenexa. Other studies by Gallup have shown lower absenteeism (by 41%), improved sales rates, and significantly improved productivity in companies with highly engaged staff. Improving your engagement by 27% could easily move you into that top quartile where all the magic happens.
Do you want to be a leader that everybody loves? Check in with people regularly, and focus on their strengths. Part of this comes down to another key to increasing engagement – in fact some people have called it the main key. And that is progress.
By checking in regularly with your team, and focusing on their strengths, you are facilitating both a sense of progress, and the likelihood of real progress itself. Teresa Amabile found in her research and writings called “The Progress Principle” that people’s happiness increased when they had a sense of progress. In fact, there’s a good chance you can relate to this. How many times have you thought about (or actually gone ahead with) quitting your job or business plan because you weren’t making any progress?
So check in with your team, focus on their strengths, and make sure they are on the right track making progress.
Check In With Your Customers To Significantly Increase Sales
Retaining customers can be one of the hardest things in business, but when you get it right, studies have found very real increases in revenue and profit. One study by the author of The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Frederick Reichheld) found that retaining an extra 5% of your customers led to an increase in profit of between 25% and 95%. And if you think about it, it makes sense. Most of the cost to acquire a customer is spent up front, with advertising, brand awareness, many meetings or phone calls and even steep sales discounts. But once a customer has formed a habit of doing business with your company, there is a much lower chance they will go searching for something else.
And this is where feedback comes in.
It’s such a simple concept, yet almost no company does it well (outside of many of the best, most profitable companies). You want to search out customer feedback. Are you getting complaints? Great! At least your customers are telling you. Don’t hide away from the complaints – they are free feedback that is worth its weight in gold if you know how to fix their problem and improve.
Customer feedback might take the form of a survey, a Facebook or Google review, a complaint (as we noted) or even praise (statistically less likely, but still nice). And when we get any type of feedback, we want to solve the operational problems that lead to anything negative.
Work taking too long? Solve the operational problem behind it. Staff on-site leaving a mess after their work? Solve the operational problem behind it. Quality of the product not lasting long enough? Solve the operational problem behind it.
And – here’s where things come full circle – the best way to solve operational problems is to ensure you have a standard, repeatable process in place and then check in regularly to ensure it is being done. And if it’s being done, but the results are still bad, then you improve the repeatable process and roll it out again.
Rinse and repeat on your way to exponential growth – just buy me a beer when you pass your first million.
There’s the other side to this tale as well – as your business grows and you rely on repeatable processes more, if you don’t check in to see if those processes are giving you the outcome you want, there is a good chance you’ll run into trouble. If you don’t check, you can’t adjust, and if you don’t adjust, you may not get the results you want. Pilots check their course regularly on their way to their destination, and so should you, by checking in with your team, your customers, and making sure they are getting the outcomes they want.
Chat soon – David McLachlan
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