This is the third in our series that looks at leadership capacity and its impact on organizational growth. The full series will be available for download as a white paper once it is completed.

In our last article, we discussed the characteristics of transformational leadership that impact organizational growth. Now we want to investigate how to effectively assess a leader’s capacity to lead their company.

Rarely is a great leader born. Developing leadership capacity and the “must have” leadership characteristics does not happen by accident. Organizations cannot sit back and hope leaders develop.

Building leadership capacity is a process that starts with understanding the concept of leadership capacity, defining the expectations of leadership within your particular organization, and then building intentional, implementable steps that help leaders assess and develop their ability to be a leader.

Assessing your organizational leadership

Here are three techniques that will help you assess leadership capabilities as an initial step to developing future leaders within your organization:

1. Clarify organization leadership standards:

In order to develop the type of leaders you want in your organization, you first need to decide what a leader looks like in your organization — to define an organization wide standard for leadership. Take the time to develop and refine a leadership model that will lay out the skills, behavior and “must have” characteristics that are desired by the leaders within your organization.

Leadership standards will vary company by company and will need to address the specific needs and fit within your organizational culture. Since organizational culture is based on the leadership team, leaders need to take the following steps to define a standard for leadership:

• Assess your personal leadership style
• Ask other senior leaders to assess their personal leadership style
• Have the leaders in your company assess each other’s leadership style
• Define the most important leadership standards and characteristics you want to embed into your culture
• Work with other leaders to define the standard characteristics for leadership that best fits your company and its culture

2. Assess leaders against the standards:

Once you have a clear picture of what the ideal leader looks like, develop feedback channels to assess your leaders. Gathering feedback about the current performance of potential and current leaders will help companies assess the current state of individual leaders against the standard. Through the use of assessment tools, companies have the ability to monitor their leadership capacity — individually and collectively — to determine where gaps lie. Consider using some of these tools to garner feedback about your leaders:

• Self-assessment: Who knows better what is needed for a specific position then the person who is currently in the position. Provide individuals with the opportunity to perform a self-assessment to determine which skills and training they require to improve and develop as leaders.Consider developing feedback or self-assessment forms that leaders can fill out on a quarterly basis to ensure they are in tune with the company’s standards for leadership.
• Feedback channel: Provide employees with a feedback channel to solicit input and understand their perspective of your organizations leadership performance. Place the box in a high traffic area, or create a special email address for easy input. Make sure to encourage honest, constructive feedback and reward employees with effective and implementable ideas.
• Employee surveys: Polling employees is an effective way to get information about the leadership structure of your company. Gather input from all levels of the organization to get a holistic assessment of organizational leaders and their capacity to lead. Consider having a yearly company survey to assess the state of leadership within your company.
• Open channels of dialogue: Create an open line of dialogue for employees to talk with leaders about leadership capacity and its impact on organizational culture. Consider setting aside a block of time each week or month to allow brainstorming sessions or meetings related to leadership.
• 360 Degree Assessments: Solicit input from peers and subordinates in all formal assessment process. This ensures that each leader has a fully objective viewpoint of their strengths and areas for improvement as part of their personal growth and development. This is often the most honest and therefore the most useful of all assessments.

3. Develop a meaningful review process:

Many organizations have review processes in place — some similar to those mentioned above.

Unfortunately, for too many organizations, they are just another task that must be completed rather than seen as a valuable tool. In order for reviews to be a valuable activity, leaders need to take action based on the insights and implementable actions they discover during the review process.

Here are three review process ideas that leaders can implement:

• Leadership review process: Allow your employees to assess people that currently hold leadership positions. Turn the tables on leaders and allow employees to ask questions and provide open and honest opinions about where leaders are strong and need improvement. Leaders can set up this leadership assess in a number of ways:
  • Emailing a questionnaire to employees
  • The creation of an internal discussion board
  • Creating a leadership seminar
  • Having an internal leadership conference
  • Having a town hall meeting
• Project reviews: Once a project is complete, it should not be the last we hear of it. Review the performance and leadership capacity of the project lead and strategic initiatives through:
  • The development of a project review process or committee
  • Having the project lead/team assess their performance as a leader in addition to ways they could improve project inefficiencies
  • Don’t just focus on areas of improvement — make sure that you also highlight areas that went well — to ensure they are embedded into future initiatives
• Yearly performance reviews: Review the body of work of all the leaders within your organization. It is these insights that will help to set the strategic direction and lead to the continued growth of your organizations leadership capacity and development of a leadership culture. For the reviews:
  • Set up a review committee
  • Compare the defined company leadership to a leaders performance
  • Discuss leadership strengths and weaknesses with all leaders
  • Suggest areas to improve
  • Have leaders teach and discuss the leadership areas where they excel

Effective organizations have an internal structure in place to assess organizational leaders and determine their capacity to lead. It is this assessment process that identifies people who have the knowledge, skills, and potential to step up and take on a larger leadership role.

The next article in our leadership capacity series will build on these leadership assessment methods and examine how leaders can work to build a culture of leadership within their organization.

When discussing the “How to’s” of building an engaged culture, we hear lots of talk about “reinforcing the positive” and “catching people doing things right”, but what happens when people are doing things wrong and we need to provide corrective direction.   Specific steps need to take place to get the person moving in the proper direction while still keeping them positive and motivated.

Most importantly, you must focus on the situation or issue versus the person, while sharing a more appropriate course of action. We all need to avoid falling into the trap of confusing criticism with constructive feedback.

Constructive feedback is information-specific, issue-focused, and based on observations, while criticism is a personal judgment about a performance effort or outcome, usually given is general and vague manner, focused on the person, and based on opinions or feelings

These steps you will help you have more success.

1. Describe: Start by describing what the person did accurately and concisely. Be objective and neutral — remember, how we say something is just as important as what we say. Provide specifics of what happened and do not exaggerate or minimize the situation. Focus on the positive contribution.
2. Explain: Explain the impact of the behaviour on the customer, team or organization. These need to be observations of what you have seen or heard — not your interpretations or opinions. Observations are factual and non-judgmental. It is helpful to start focused on ‘I’. ‘I notice’, ‘I have seen’ or even I have been told’. This will help keep the discussion issue focused. Avoid using ‘but’, ‘although’ or ‘however’ to link this to the first section. These words create contradictions and send a mixed message that effectively negates any positive message you started with.
3. Suggest: Suggest specific changes that you would like to see made and explain what you want the person to do differently. The more specific, the more likely they person will be able to implement the suggestion next time.
4. Commit: Seek a commitment to change. Be clear on the consequences of continuing in this vein. Seek an agreement about the new, modified behaviour. In extreme cases, be clear of the consequences of not making these changes — but again be objective and neutral to minimize this sounding like a threat.

Example: One of your team is being described as harsh or bossy when providing direction to other team members.

Describe: Bill, I really appreciate that you have taken ownership of this project and are providing clear, well thought-out input on what next steps are needed. I wanted to let you know how valuable this is to the team and the overall success of the project.

Explain: I notice that sometimes when you provide direction to other team members, you are very quick and specific when giving input — which sometimes creates the impression that you don’t value their input and think that only your way is the correct way.

Suggest: I’d like to suggest that you take some time to understand why they did it the way they chose and what next steps they are considering. Then building on their ideas, share some additional thoughts on how they can accomplish their goal.

Commit: That way, they will feel that you are adding to their thoughts and helping them be more successful. Does that make sense? Would you give that a try next time and let me know how it works?

Feedback should be given, as close as possible to when the performance incident occurs so that the events are fresh in everyone’s minds. When feedback is given well after the fact, the value of the constructive feedback is lessened.

The exception may be when giving negative feedback. Sometimes when a negative incident happens you may need time to get your thoughts in order before you give negative feedback (coming on too strong or in an angry manner will negate any good you hope to achieve). Giving the feedback tomorrow rather than immediately will come across as far more constructive — and tomorrow is still timely.

Lastly — and hopefully these go without saying — your feedback should be person-to-person versus in writing. The very nature of feedback is a mentoring/coaching activity, which should be done verbally and informally. You should also provide positive feedback in the same manner at least as often as you provide corrective feedback.

By focusing on the positive and keeping the discussion fact based when providing correction, you are able to modify and build new behaviours, without challenging their current behaviours. What do you think? Is it worth a try?

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

I must admit, I am uncomfortable when someone compliments me about my work. Of course I want people to be happy about my behaviour (performance) and I want positive feedback versus the alternative, but for me, I am uncomfortable responding to praise, or compliments. I’d like to hear something specific about my work rather than some generic comment about me.

For example I prefer: “That was a great idea you proposed for ……” versus “Your idea was brilliant. You’re very creative.” (Okay, I like that too, but I prefer the former).

You’re probably thinking I am over analyzing and I should take all the positives I can get and shut up. Probably good advice, but I can’t change my emotional response to flattery, praise, or compliments — they make me a bit uncomfortable. I prefer a positive comment about the specific behaviour and its effect. Nobody has to add anything personal or gushy to make me feel good. The behaviour speaks for itself.

For instance: “That comparison you used in the first paragraph really helps the reader understand your point.”

Instead of: “You’re a great writer—so eloquent.” Describing the behaviour and the effect is a particularly good approach if you are just starting to provide positive recognition for behaviours.

It also works with someone you may not have a good relationship with. Anything you say to that individual is going to be hesitantly received — they are sensitized to every phrase, gesture, tone, and inflection. If you have a real good relationship with someone, then you have larger margin for error. Some other examples of positive feedback include:

• When you apologized for the inconvenience to the customer who had to wait in line and thanked them for their patience, which really demonstrated our principle of empathy.
• That recommendation you made about _______ really demonstrated your knowledge about that aspect of the business. It will really save us time.
• Your PowerPoint created a buzz after the meeting. The senior team said your presentation made it easy for them to understand the issue and take action.
• I noticed that your email was sent late last night. I appreciate your commitment and know I can count on the project to be delivered on schedule.

Stay away from describing the person and focus on describing the valued-added behaviour and its effect After you have laid the groundwork based on what they did and what effect it had, then you can add personal appreciation. You can then start you comments with “I appreciated you taking the time to….” You have now added a personal touch based on creating a positive relationship of recognition.

Employees want to be acknowledged, to know that the company is aware of their contribution or even more important — their efforts to overcome the limitations of their equipment, unforeseen problems, outdated systems and processes are noticed and appreciated.

People don’t leave companies — they leave Managers. Two of the biggest reasons are; Managers who doesn’t know how to recognize people effectively, and having to work around poor performing co-workers, bad systems and other problems and not being appreciated and acknowledged.

When your feedback describes what they did and what they had to overcome, you defuse any pent up frustration and create a positive, supportive, high performance culture where everyone is working to improve, and where adding value gets noticed.

Try this technique and I guarantee employee engagement will go up and surveys will have positive responses about management and supervision. In addition, turn-over and absenteeism will go down and performance and productivity will go up.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2009 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

Okay, we all know about the recession. I have decided not to focus on the problems but the opportunities (old P&G training kicking in!). So what are the opportunities that we can leverage? For starters, focus on motivating and inspiring your teams. Here are a few things that you can do tomorrow, for little or no money, which will have a positive impact on your business results.

Set a positive tone: It’s easy to blame the economy. Customers are buying less, expecting more. But using the economy as the catch-all excuse for poor performance sends a dangerous message. It implies that the situation is completely out of the company’s hands. This raises anxiety levels and enables complacency. While the competition is bemoaning the economy remember, high achievers never complain, they just get on with it. They look for ways to get a bigger piece of the pie by adding value.

Communicate: An e-mail from the CEO doesn’t accomplish much. Give people frequent opportunities to openly discuss and ask questions about the business situation the company is facing. Speak to employees in small groups and be as candid as possible. Give them what they deserve: honest explanations and plans to move forward. Schedule brown-bag lunches or other informal venues to talk to employees about their findings and where they might be hitting roadblocks. This is also a good time to address any rumours.

Leverage the expertise of your team: Motivate and engage your team by including them in the problem-solving process. Form groups of employees to identify what’s slowing down business. Often the best place to start is to look for processes and bureaucracies that annoy the team. No one knows the issues better than those who are dealing with them daily. It’s a great time for people to realize that they can play an important role in discovering opportunities for the company. (TIP: Cross-pollinate with people who have different areas of expertise. Often fresh eyes offer an innovative new solution.)

Feed your top performers: It’s easy to believe that employees are grateful to have jobs at all. But layoffs and budget cuts cause good people to look for better opportunities. Give them a reason to stay by advancing their careers. If promotions or raises aren’t possible, give top performers the opportunity to grow, even if it’s a lateral move that challenges them in a new way or to take on a special assignment. (TIP: Also, keep an eye out for great talent that other companies have shed for cost cutting measures. This is a great time to recruit future stars.)

Focus on the future: Don’t sugar-coat it! Surviving through the downturn might not be easy, but by emphasizing the opportunities and developing a plan together you will emerge even stronger than before.

Performance Excelerator™ | Leadership Expert| Professional Speaker

Bill is recognized as the Performance Excelerator™ because of his uncanny ability to create profound change and deliver extraordinary results with the most demanding organizations. He works with senior leaders to inspire and develop high-performance teams that deliver exceptional customer service, higher productivity and improve profits.

Bill is passionate about results and works only with clients who share that passion — ready to take steps to achieve immediate, significant and continuous improvement. Whether working with boards or operations teams and employees, his no-excuse approach breaks down the silos and gains consensus and clarity throughout the organization.

Bill Hogg provides dynamic keynote presentations, transformative workshops, and world class executive consulting.

© Copyright 2008 – Bill Hogg & Associates All Rights Reserved

In February I wrote a post about a recent service recovery experience with Swiss Chalet.

I thought I would share the subsequent follow up I had with the manager of the particular store I mentioned.

The franchise manager called a couple days later because I had made a comment through their website about my experience. I thought it would be interesting to see how they reacted.

The timing of the return call was pretty quick, but upon connecting, her first concern was to ensure that the issue was with her particular location — and not another  location. I confirmed it was her location.

She then asked what I wanted to make this right — yes those were her exact words. I indicated I wasn’t looking for anything — I had just responded to the feedback form that was made available to me for feedback. They had asked — so I assumed they were interested in what I had to say.

She then indicated that she was calling because “the Franchise owner wanted me to clarify that it was their store”.

She saw I had received a $6.00 credit and said “she would take up with the central organization”. Implying that somehow, someone else had dropped the ball in the total experience.

And that concluded the call. Not even an apology on behalf of her store.

My Perspective: This encounter is part of a much bigger problem I am seeing in the service industry — particularly the auto industry. The follow-up survey for customer satisfaction.

You know the one — where corporate has arranged for a survey company to call customers to gain feedback and then punishes the outlet if they have poor performance.

This results in employees basically asking people to give them a high ranking so the employees/outlet doesn’t get in trouble or even penalized. Talk about a skewed result. Employees start to “game” the system when feedback is used as a stick.

How is this type of information gathering supposed to help businesses improve? They have missed the real opportunity for honest feedback because they have forgotten the purpose of the feedback loop.

 So have a look at your customer feedback programs. Are they focused on improving the experience or punishing the laggards. Are they being implemented simply because you know that you should be measuring customer experience — or are you using this important tool to fine-tune and continuously improve.

There are much more effective ways to deal with the poor performers.

I recently read an article “Consistency Is Far Greater Than Rare Moments of Greatness” by Scott Ginsberg The Nametag Guy.

In it he makes the point “Because ultimately, consistency is greater than rare moments of greatness. And people only give you credit for that which they see you do consistently.”

It brought to mind that even before we become great — we must first become consistent. If you talk to any professional athlete, cook, public speaker, salesperson or customer service representative, they will all tell you that before they became great they first had to learn how to consistently deliver their product.

Only then were they able push to the next level — become faster, stronger or better.

In the book “The Myth of Excellence“, Crawford & Mathews state the key to successful organizations is first becoming consistent across the 5 key attributes (price, service, access, experience, and service) that consumers desire — and then achieving dominance in one and differentiation in a second, while remaining at par with the competition across the balance.

In my post Don’t Be A Jack of all Trades, I talked about focusing on your strengths — but only after you have brought your weaknesses up to par.

The consistent message here seems to be that before we ever become great we must first become consistent with customer expectations across all touch points.

Even if you are great in one area of your business — or one department — a single interaction with your customers that is below expectations can render the entire experience as negative. Think about after-sales service. Any issues come to mind personally.

My Perspective: Look at your customer experience map and look for areas where you are below par. Fix them

Then look for areas where you are or can be exceptional. Leverage them.

Don’t try to be great in all things, figure out what you want to be known for and make that the area that you will seek dominance.

In my last post I had been transferred to the Manager because I had been told by the person at the desk that all they could do was pass my complaint on to the department that I had the issue with. You will recall the transfer to the Manager was prompted by my request for the email of the President so I could send them a personal note.

The manager was really quite nice. She empathized with my situation all the while assuring me that my concerns were important to them. However, she did not contradict the assertion by the front desk that the process was simply to send comments to “another department” and pray.

In fact, she assured me that when I returned home, I would receive a survey that solicited my honest feedback and would be read by senior management as part of their ongoing desire to understand their customer expectations. Resultant, there was no need for me to have the email of the President. (Ohh, the red flags are waving now.) So I left without the email address.

The next day, we returned to our room to find a very nice basket of nuts and water with a note from the Manager (but still no email address).

Overall, I thought the Manager handled the issue very well, but clearly they were not empowered to actually do anything.

What seemed crystal clear to me was that someone had tried to implement a customer-focus in this organization, but fundamentally the senior team didn’t buy in. Resultant, the promise was not delivered. In fact, it would have been better not to make such lofty promises and raise expectations to a level that ensured disappointment.

So sometimes, customer focus language can do more harm than good. Be sure that your organization can and will support this initiative across the full organization before communicating these higher expectations to your customers.

Oh, in case you are wondering — I received an email survey for my feedback the day after we arrived home. I will let you know if I get a response.

I just returned from 1 week in Orlando Florida where I was spending time with my wife and youngest daughter on March Break vacation. What a pleasure to sit by the pool, catch up on some reading and not think about business except in broad terms.

Overall we had a great time, but staying at a resort forced me to contemplate what they are doing well, or could be improved on — particularly since they set the bar high with the following promise, “In just 25 years, we’ve exceeded the expectations of more than 110,000 owners worldwide by empowering our team of dedicated individuals who work hard to ensure a wonderful experience.”

So I thought I would use the next few posts to share what I thought went well, what could be improved and some lessons learned.

Let me start by saying that the check-in was very friendly and positive. Short efficient line-up, because they had lots of people on hand to manage the crowds (3:00 pm check-in). Our check-in person was very friendly, asked some questions about where we were from, had we been to Orlando before, etc. that made us feel welcome. They completed the registration by promising that we were going to have a great time and our expectations would be exceeded. (There’s that phrase again — someone has been doing some internal training about consistent messaging).

In very short order we arrived at our room (1 bedroom with pull-out queen size couch) and were pleased with the cleanliness, size, facilities, location relative to pool and parking, etc. Satisfied, but so far nothing exceeded my expectations. After all, this is supposed to a first class resort. Shouldn’t we have a right to expect this?

After dinner and a stop to pick up some groceries, we settled in for the night and discovered that the pull-out bed only came with 1 sheet – no second sheet and no blankets. The rooms are advertised as sleeping up to 4 people, but there was no bedding for the second bed (pull-out). A quick call to housekeeping resulted in a 90 minute wait and a second sheet with 2 thin blankets. Hmmm, things are not quite so exceptional.

The next morning, my wife went in search of a morning coffee (Starbucks is advertised in the brochures) only to disciver that the restaurant in our area of the resort is only open from 11 – 4 and is really a snack bar.

Resultant, to get a coffee, required getting dressed, driving to a separate section of the resort where “Starbucks” consisted of 2 canisters (regular and decaf) that you poured yourself and had the ability to add a couple “shots” in addition to cream or sugar. At this point we are not feeling very “first class”.

But I am encouraged because on the front page of their monthly newsletter provided to all guests at check-in, they have published the following;

Delighting Our Guests
Resort Services has transformed into a “Customer Care” department. All team members are provided with extensive empowerment training, which includes taking ownership of any opportunity to delight our guests. For information, questions, or concerns you may have while staying at the resort or between vacations, call Resort Services at ext. 6100.

So it looks like someone has the right idea, but will the idea come to life?

I’ll talk more about that in my next post, but in the interim, see if you can spot the problem with the communication in the above message, and what seems to be the issue that is beginning to present itself.

Many of you will have heard or read about the new report released by the CMO Council that describes the current role of the voice of the customer in marketing decision-making based on a survey of 480 executives. It is a dismal state of affairs given the sputtering we hear about the importance of customer service.

Reports have already been published in major industry publications such as AdAge and AdWeek, as well as blogs too numerous to mention.

Some key findings include;

• Nearly two-thirds of companies do not have a formal Voice of Customer program in place.
• Only 31 percent highly rate their organization’s commitment to customer listening.
• Only 13 percent of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback.
• While 74 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages
• Only 12 percent are using a word-of-mouth marketing platform to drive online customer advocacy.
• 58 percent of them believe the Internet and social media have changed the level of influence and expectations of their customers, but only 14.5 percent track word of mouth on the Internet and only 16 percent regularly monitor online message boards for complaints and feedback
• 37 percent said they gather insights from customer engagement situations
• 56 percent said they have no programs tracking or propagating positive word of mouth among customers
• Only 33 percent of the respondents think their companies are very good at resolving complaints
• 58 percent said their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics
• Only 29 percent said their companies rate highly in their ability handle and resolve customer problems or complaints

I think you would agree that this is a dismal state of affairs. From all this data, two things stand out for me.

1. What gets measured gets done: Unless people are being recognized and rewarded for an activity it will not get done.
2. Empowerment: If improving the customer experience is not central to your value system and everyone isn’t empowered to effect change, then change will not happen.

At the end of the day, even though everyone seems to espouse the value of customer service, it still isn’t being effectively leveraged to create a point of difference for organizations. I believe those of us who focus on these two truths will win the day.

Check out the articles (and some of the comments) – they make good reading. You can download the Executive Summary here.

A recent study of UK banks by Grassroots indicates that the level of trust a customer feels for banks is a direct result of the quality of service provided.

Banks achieving a higher overall service score achieved significantly higher ratings of trust when compared to banks with a lower overall service score.

Some key findings of the study include:

• 60% of staff failed to offer to open an account. Of these 40% would have done so there and then if they had only been asked.
• Establishing the customer’s requirements is critical. Only two thirds of staff asked how much the customer had to invest.
• Just one in five customers rated staff as having excellent product knowledge. This is a key differentiator when there are fewer customers around.
• Only 64% of staff made an excellent first impression with survey participants – still a 5% increase on the results from the 2005 survey.

When the impact of good customer service can be linked to improved bottom line performance, one has to ask “why aren’t more companies paying serious attention to the issue?” This is particularly puzzling when each of the above points would cost little or no money to implement.

Cheers!