Leadership Card 27 – What Looks Like Laziness…

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Leadership Card 27 – What Looks Like Laziness…

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…Often isn’t laziness at all.  It’s cognitive exhaustion.  In other words, our brain gets tired.

Can you remember a time when you had a tough day at work?  Maybe you were solving problems for your customers, which were long, difficult and varied, or maybe you were doing a report or analysis for your boss.  And when you came home all you wanted to do is veg out in front of the television and not have to think any more.  Your brain needed a rest.

Research has shown that when we’re working on things that require complex thought – problem solving, working around things, or deviating from our normal routine, it wears down our ability problem solve or think of complex things.  So when people – whether they are your team or your customers – seem like they’re being lazy there’s a good chance you’ve just made their process too complex, and their brains are running out of steam.

It pays to make things simple and easy to use.  Making things simple and easy to use means your team and your customers are more likely to do the thing you want, and do it more often.

Making things easy to use also helps people form habits around your product or service, as it’s easy to do and easy to come back to time and time again.  And this is where Lean CX and the ease of use framework comes in.  By reducing “waste” in a task – things like rework (having to redo something because of mistakes), waiting, not getting the right outcome, or having excessive hand-offs to many people or excessive steps, you are making things harder.

On the other hand, using Lean CX and making thing standard and repeatable, reducing the steps, making it impossible to make a mistake, making it visual so people know what to do first time, and checking in that people got what they wanted, all help make a process easier.

So I encourage you to think about the processes in your company, and how you can make them easier.  The results you will see will be worth it.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 26 – What Looks Like Resistance…

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Leadership Card 26 – What Looks Like Resistance…

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… Is often a lack of clarity.

If you’re not clear on something, how do you know what to do?  In the moment, without trying things out or making mistakes, you don’t.  And more often than not a company will blame the people, when in fact the real reason for mistakes is those people just aren’t clear on exactly what it is they have to do.

And here’s a fun fact: a recent study from Gallup Business Journal found more than 50% of U.S. employees aren’t clear on what is expected of them at work.  Maybe it’s not so much “fun” as it is just a “fact” – especially if you’ve ever experienced it yourself.  It’s like someone telling you to run faster but not telling you where you need to run to.  Not having a clear objective, not having something to aim for or work towards can have a serious impact on the engagement in your team.

A clear objective was also one of the keys to improving results in executives by 35% in Albert Humphrey’s paper on SWOT analysis (being Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to a business).  Just being clear on where you wanted people to head helped them improve.

If you’re navigating a ship or flying a plane, can you imagine not having a destination in mind?  Well that’s the way most teams operate before working with Ease of Use and Lean CX – they simply run on whatever problem is most pressing at the moment and do their best to put out that immediate fire.  They don’t look at where they’re actually heading.

So give your people clarity.  Make sure they have a clear objective, know what is required, and know the steps to get there.  It will have a huge impact on the engagement and profit of your teams.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

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Ease of Use, Lean CX Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

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…is often a situation problem.  Have you ever had a really bad day – maybe your car breaks down, your boss yells at you, you break your watch and then someone asks you to do something and instead of helping out you yell at them to leave you alone?  And they think “What a rotten guy!” when the reality is you would normally help, you were just having a bad day.  It was a bad situation.

People tend to blame the person, instead of realizing that it’s the situation that is the real issue.  If you were having a great day it would be easy to take on one more thing with a smile.  But the situation made you cranky, and lowered your likelihood of helping as a result.

What looks like a people problem, is often a situation problem.  This is one of the greatest lines from an excellent book – “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath.  And they make an excellent point.  If you change the situation, more often than not you change the people as well.

This is also where designing your work and your customer experience for Ease of Use comes in.  If the work is easy to do for your teams – with no rework, no waiting, no searching, as few steps as possible, and the right result at the end, then there is a very good chance they’ll do it right and do it more often.  The thing is, most people don’t really design their work at all, let alone get intentional about designing their work for ease of use.

Most leaders just let the work happen, and give some vague outcomes to their team to try and make it work.  In reality they are trying to find the treasure without making a map.

And in most cases, it’s not your fault.  The majority of people don’t know how to define difficult work in a way that reveals solutions to their problems.  Having the right framework, in the form of Lean CX, makes it easy.  By ensuring you have a clear outcome and a clear set of steps to get there, you are closer to getting the right result every time.  But by reducing the steps to getting that outcome, ensuring your staff or people know what to do first time without having to ask, make it impossible to make a mistake, and check in to see if they are on the right track, you will be creating a process that is extremely easy to do and you will see the profit, productivity and engagement flow as a result.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 24 – The Curse of Knowledge

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Have you ever been speaking with someone, and when you’ve finished you realize you didn’t understand a word they just said?

It probably wasn’t your fault.  There’s a very common personal bias that affects us all, and it’s called the curse of knowledge.  It happens when a person has learned something or been doing something for a long period of time, and it becomes very hard for them to imagine other people not knowing it as well.

You may have experienced jargon or acronyms where people speak in a seemingly secret language without realizing that other people may not know those same acronyms or jargon.

One recent example I had was a large financial company adding a push button menu to their telephone system, so when a customer called through they would have to push a button depending on which department they wanted to go to.  The only trouble was, they used the internal names of their departments, like “operational support” instead of things that a customer could relate to, like “changing their bank account”.  This resulted in customers pressing any button just to speak with someone, and almost every call going through to the default department!  Needless to say, they were then overwhelmed with calls and very disengaged in their work, before we problem solved and found out what was going on.

The curse of knowledge means you have to have empathy for the person you are speaking with, not just speaking with yourself in mind.  That means giving your message in lay-person’s terms for your customers, or for your team, so everyone is clear and fewer mistakes are made.

And what are the benefits of this?

If everyone is clear on what is required, it’s been shown that engagement within your teams is higher, and productivity and profit are higher as a result.  There are studies on engagement, studies on happiness, and business studies from Stanford and they all point to the same thing.

There are fewer mistakes, so less rework in performing the same task over and over, and all of this has an effect on your profit and bottom line.

I encourage you to have that empathy, think of the other person’s point of view, and explain things without the jargon or industry specific terminology if you can.  You’ll be amazed at the results.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Lean CX Vlog 001 – Logging the Journey

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It’s About Disruptors and Engagement

Welcome to the first vlog on Lean CX.  This will follow my journey as a Customer Experience practitioner and author.  I’m making these videos to hone the Lean CX message, and log the process of improving companies, people and myself as I go along.

And where do I get to by the end of this video?  That it’s all about Disruptors and Engagement.  Hope you enjoy!

There is more – much more – coming soon.

Chat to you then – Dave

Transcript:

Dave:   It’s still a bit dark in the morning as you can see, but that sunrise even though it’s not as good now was beautiful this morning!  The reason I took you out this morning is that I want to talk to you about something really really important.

(About the Quad Bike Rider) What an awesome job.  Now that guy wouldn’t
have any problem with engagement – he gets to hoon around on a quad bike all day!  That’s pretty cool.

So I want to show you this – I just got – I just got this back from the printers and what it is is a card deck.  It’s the customer experience card deck.  There’s a leadership card deck as well and it goes through all of those ease-of-use principles to make your job easy to do and to make your product easy to take up as well.  But it all comes down to this – I don’t know if you can see it – but a simple action.  And the thing about simple actions is most people when they’re, you know designing their work or trying to get you to do some work or trying to get you to buy a product it’s harder to make something simple to do.  It’s actually harder for us – it takes more effort and more work for us to design it in a way that is very very simple.  And that’s the point – the framework that I’ve designed makes it easier for you to make it easier for
your workmates and for your customers and doing so has a massive impact on your profit.

So I’m sure these first videos are going to be pretty bad, as I just get up to speed and try and hone the message.  Because the message is really clear to
me – we need to make things easy and the easier we make things then the more people are going to do them.  Whether it’s our workmates or whether it’s the customers we want to buy a product or our application or our service.  So ease of use is absolutely everything and these videos are going to help me hone that message and also show you a little bit of Brisbane City which is an
absolutely beautiful city especially in the morning.

If you can imagine when things are easy to do they’re much easier to buy and
much easier for your workmates to perform so you know the profit, the cost
reduction, all those things flow from ease of use in a massive, massive way and
I just want to log the process of me going along this journey and I hope you
enjoy the series because it’s really going to show you how to create
disruptors and also create engagement in your team.

Thank you for watching!

Chat soon – David McLachlan

Leadership Card 23 – Not Invented Here

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It’s easy to shoot down someone else’s idea.  It’s not so easy to let go of your own.  Don’t believe me?  That’s what the research says.  From studies like the “Wobegon Effect” where almost every student believed they were above average (a feat that is actually statistically impossible, because to have an average you need a large amount of under-performers too) to customer-centric research where CEOs believed they were 70% more likely to give customers a good customer experience than their customers actually rated them, almost everyone overestimates themselves from things like looks, talent (just look at American Idol), skill, and (you guessed it) ideas.

I Didn’t Invent It, So It’s Not That Great?

That’s what most people believe.  But if they did come up with the idea, all of a sudden it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Have you ever had someone talk your ear off at a party, telling you how they came up with the idea for “x”, but so-and-so “stole” their idea?  Here’s the other part of that equation: Ideas actually are worthless by themselves.  Execution of that idea is everything, which is why hard work matters just as much as smart work.

Help People Come Up With “Their” Idea, And Win

Which is why, as a leader, you can use brainstorming tools or frameworks to steer the conversation or guide the problem that needs to be solved, while allowing the people you are working with to come up with ideas or solutions to their problem.

We’ve all been in a situation where someone outside our team has come in making suggestions, and deep down inside we think “How dare they think they can tell us what to do!”  Even if their ideas are good, it’s hard to take them on because they come from outside.

But help those ideas come from inside, from your team, or the people you want to change, and success will flow much more easily.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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Leadership Card 22 – Growth and Contribution

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Engineering Happiness by Using Growth and Contribution

Researchers and business owners alike have found something incredible over the years, and that is that money is not always the answer when it comes to getting the best results from your team.

Sure, you could throw money at something to try and improve it – maybe approve a project, get the latest third party provider to work with you, give bonuses for performance or commissions for certain activities.  But making happiness and engagement come from within has been shown to get far greater results.

People Want To Grow

There’s a great 30 second video by vlogger Casey Neistat that shows him on a treadmill, and says that life is like being on that treadmill.  To stay in one place, you have to keep moving.  If you stop moving, you actually fall behind, you don’t just stay in the same place.  And to get ahead, you have to hustle – you have to run and you have to grow.

When you help the people in your team grow, by focusing on their strengths and enabling them to improve, stretch, and get better, then their happiness actually improves.  And improving their happiness has an affect on your company’s bottom line, with up to 20% more productivity, and improved profit as a result.

People Want To Contribute

Growth isn’t the only thing that motivates your people from the inside out.  Focusing on something bigger than they are – a larger goal that helps others – also gives people the motivation to do better and become more than they are.

It’s not always easy to focus on growing yourself, while also focusing on contributing to others, but if you can find a way to engineer both of these into your work, you will see some stunning results.

How To Do It, Practically?

So how can we do it practically, as a leader?  Checking in with each person in your team at least once a week, and focusing on their strengths, has been proven to improve engagement by up to 27%.  That means getting to know them, making the time to meet with them, and finding a way to use the strengths and passions they have to enable them to grow.

Doing that, you can also set stretch targets or look at ways to grow within those strength areas.

Contributing to others can be aligning your work and processes to how they meet the company’s targets, or how they meet the needs of your customers and the outcomes of helping them.

Most people aren’t aware of these things they can do as a leader to improve their team’s results.   But doing these small things can make the difference between success and failure, and being a mediocre leader or a great one.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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The CX Card Deck

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Below is a 52 card deck of Customer Experience tricks, tips, models, frameworks, psychology and research, specially designed as a cheat sheet for you to use in meetings, as ice breakers, or to help make moves in your company.  You can buy the Customer Experience Card Deck now, printed on beautiful, strong, linen paper and delivered anywhere in the world.  A great way to brainstorm UX and CX solutions, they are the absolute best cards I have ever seen, so I know you will enjoy them.

         w-CX_Card_006_Reduce Customer Effort                                        CX_Card_027_Contagious 3 Emotion                   CX_Card_037_Slightly Worse Version               CX_Card_045_LCX Wastes 4 ExcessiveSteps              

Buy the Customer Experience Card Deck now!

What Is Lean CX?

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You can recognise disruptors before they become a reality.

Lean CX is a step by step framework for Operational Excellence and how it relates to disruptive companies and technologies – especially as they grow and are ready to scale.

Disruptive companies are those that can deliver something a customer wants faster, cheaper, with better quality and sufficient brand recognition.  Think McDonald’s in the 1950s, the model T Ford in the early 1900s, the Apple iPod in the early 2000s or the iPhone in 2007, Uber disrupting the cab industry, Netflix disrupting DVD hire and Amazon disrupting retail.

All of them have at least three of these four in common:

Continue reading What Is Lean CX? →

Leadership Card 21 – Core Human Needs, Significance and Connection

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Engineering Happiness In your Team With Significance and Connection

There’s a funny thing about happiness.  We all seem to want it, and yet so many times we do things that we know don’t bring us happiness in the long run, don’t we?

That extra piece of chocolate cake, or spending too much time working instead of bonding with friends or partners (which was, incidentally, one of the top five regrets of the dying).  Not exercising or being outdoors enough.  it all adds up.

But there could be a very good reason for us missing the mark when it comes to performing happiness improving activities – and that is because the real core needs that drive us are actually conflicting.

In the last card, Leadership Card 19, we saw that we deeply crave certainty in our lives, but also variety.  And the more variety we have, the less certainty we have.  Well it’s the same with Leadership Card 20, where we crave significance and connection, but the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

Significance and Connection – At Odds With Each Other

You see, to be significant you have to stand out.  You have to lead the pack, often be different to others.  And people get significance in different ways.  They can feel significant by performing really well, earning lots of money, moving up in their career, or they can feel significant by being difficult, causing trouble to get attention, and other ways like that.

But when we stand out and are different, it’s much harder to fit in, to feel that connection and bonding with people in a team, a family, a friendship group or anywhere else.

So while we crave both, significance and connection are hard to engineer together.

Engineering Both In Your Team’s Work

So how do we create both in our team’s work?  Part of Lean CX and the Ease of Use framework is a thing called “Checking In”, where we check in with our team members at least once a week, see where we need to adjust, and then focus on their strengths.

Doing this ensures two things – first, we build that connection by checking in, making sure they know they are on our radar as a leader and that we care about their path and their progress.

But then we focus on their strengths, building that significance of individuality, because we are all slightly different at the end of the day and have individual strengths and things we want to achieve.

So check in with your team, and focus on their strengths.  Even research from Gallup on employee engagement has shown that it can improve engagement by up to 27%.  And employees who are more engaged have higher productivity, sales, profit, and lower absenteeism and turnover.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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