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.

Today, customers are no longer looking for great customer service — they want more. Today customers demand a great customer experience and will not settle for anything less.

It is no longer good enough for companies to provide good customers service — rather, companies need to create memorable interactions with customers that help establish a loyal relationship and promote brand advocacy.

Creating a memorable customer experience is based on the creation of an ideal experience that your customers would want to have throughout their relationship with your company. These interactions take place on a number of channels such as in person, over the phone, through email, and on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Successful customer experiences are scalable and can be managed consistently across multiple channels. Your customers experience must be unique. And, for it to be successful it needs to be clearly defined so that each one of your employees understands how to deliver the experience you want to create for your customers.

10 tips to improve your customer experience

Here are 10 ways that you can improve and refine your customer experience and improve your relationship with customers:

1. Make your customer experience clear: A great customer experience must be scalable across your company, consistent, and be easily understood and implemented by your employees. Have you defined the key elements that must be delivered to every customer? Review your customer experience documents and ask your employees if they understand what is expected of them.
2. Make your customer experience simple: If your customer experience is too complex, your employees will have difficulty delivering a consistent experience. Keep it simple. Do your employees understand what is expected of them? Are there too many rules? Consider relaxing the constraints on your employees so they can focus on creating an experience that creates a positive customer outcome rather than simply following a list of rules.
3. Define customer experience by channel: Customer experiences will vary by the channel that customers use to interact with your company. In person and online experiences are different and this needs to be reflected in how companies approach their customers on each channel.  Does your ideal customer experience vary by channel? If not, clearly outline the experience you want to create for each platform and point of interaction with your customers.
4. Address the emotional need: The focus of customer experience management needs to be on addressing your customer’s emotional need. Do you understand your customer’s emotional needs? What are you doing to ensure their emotional need is addressed?
5. Make sure all levels of your organization are involved: Creating a truly great customer experience is a company wide effort. There needs to be a consistent experience across the board. Does your company have an internal feedback process in place? How do you know your customers experience is consistent? Implement a regular review process and collect feedback about the customer experience.
6. Get your employees to buy in: If your employees do not buy in, your customers experience will suffer. If employees are not buying in, it is often a sign that your customer experience is too complex, or worse, isn’t relevant to the customer. What are you doing to ensure that your employees are buying in and creating the experience your customers want?
7. Talk to your customers: Ask your customers what they want. Be direct — ask them what your company can do to improve their experience. These conversations will help to build relationships. What can you do to better understand your customer’s emotional need? Create feedback channels that will help you capture and respond to your customer’s emotional needs.
8. Test your customer experience: Before launching any new customer experience initiatives, ask some of your customers to test drive your approach and provide feedback. You will be surprised what you will learn and uncover some of the oversights that you have missed. Plus you’ll avoid the expense of a false start that doesn’t really resonate with customers.
9. Narrow your focus: If you do not understand your ideal customer, then the experience you have created for them will be off target. Who are your customers? Do you have an ideal customer profile? What do your customers want to get out of their interaction and relationship with your company? Offer incentives to customers to get their opinion through surveys and focus groups.
10. Measure the experience: Measure, measure, measure. If you do not have the tools in place to measure your customer’s experience, then you will not have the ability to refine the experience and gain new insights. What tools are you using to measure your customers experience? Develop a system to measure your customer’s experience.

Creating a highly engaging customer experience will lead to better relationships with customers that will not only generate consistent income, but also develop brand advocates out of current customers that will help generate a new stream of business.

This is the second in our series of articles 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 how leadership impacts your organizations ability to grow. Now let’s discuss some of the characteristics that leaders need to impact the growth of their organization.

There are certain core characteristics the majority of leaders possess. However, there are also an additional set of characteristics that define transformational leaders — leaders that have the ability to make an impact on organizational growth.

It is an organizations ability to develop this next level of leadership capabilities through training programs, mentoring, and skill development programs that put organizations in the enviable position to grow year over year without experiencing dips in performance.

Core leadership characteristics

There are certain leadership characteristics that, while important, do not inspire organizational change and growth that help companies develop into innovative, consistent industry leaders.

Examples of these core leadership characteristics include:

• Good judgment
• Communication skills
• Competence or knowledge
• Interpersonal skills
• Confidence

We hear about these leadership characteristics all the time and in many different contexts. While they are very important for leaders to have, there is another level of leadership characteristics that are “must haves” for transformational leaders. These are the leadership characteristics that make an impact and spur growth.

Transformational Leadership characteristics that impact organizational growth

In order to put your organization in a position to grow effectively and on a consistent basis, leaders with the following characteristics not only make them an effective leader — but also a transformational leader:

1. Internal motivation and self-management: Transformational leaders find motivation from within and use that as the driving force to effectively manage the direction of the company. The best natural form of motivation is to love what you do and ensure that your values are aligned with the organization you work with.
2. The ability to make difficult decisions: Difficult decisions are a part of being a leader. Transformational leaders do not back away or put off tough decisions. Difficult decisions are made easier when decisions align with clearly defined vision, values, goals, and objectives.
3. Check their ego: When placed in a position of power, it is easy to let your ego get the best of you. However, transformational leaders keep their ego in check and do not let it get in the way of doing what is best for business. The benefit of checking your ego ensures you put the company first over personal gain and encourages the best input from others within the organization — because when the company succeeds, you as a leader also succeed.
4. Willing to take the right risks: Anyone can take a risk. Transformational leaders take calculated risks that more often than not result in positive outcomes. Trusting your instinct, as well as your team to gather the necessary intelligence is important. Trusting your gut is easier when you have taken the time to research, evaluate and inform your decisions with input from those around you. Failure to take the appropriate risks and make these difficult decisions will inhibit change and your ability to grow.
5. Organizational consciousness: Transformational leaders share the collective conscious of their organization. They understand what actions to take to evoke change, spur innovation, and make decisions that will create growth. Since their own values are aligned with the organization they share a joint purpose with the organization and do not just view their position in the company as just a job.
6. Adaptability: Transformational leaders are willing to adapt and are always seeking new ways to respond to a constantly changing business environment. They know that the second they stand still is when they will be passed by their competitors; which means they are open-minded to change and lifelong learners.
7. Willing to listen and entertain new ideas: It is a rare individual who can build an empire. Transformational leaders understand that success is a team effort and growth is derived from the willingness to be open and listen to ideas from all levels of their organization. Transformational leaders create intentional ways to listen to their team and incorporate their insights.
8. Inspirational: People want to be inspired. Transformational leaders have the ability to make those around rise to the occasion. Inspiration comes not just from a formal motivational speech or simple recognition for a job well done, but by treating people as individuals and taking the time to understand what motivates and inspires their team.
9. Proactive: Transformational leaders are proactive decision makers. They do not wait around for others to make decisions and then react. They are willing to take risks, try new things and take an innovative approach to growing the organization. However, they also understand how to manage risk and make decisions that are backed by research, multiple insights and are well thought out.
10. Visionary: Being a visionary is about setting a realistic and concise company mission, vision, and values that fit the culture of your organization. Transformational leaders have the ability not only to effectively communicate the vision, but also get every person to buy in and work toward that vision by communicating with passion and clearly emphasizing the direction they want the company to pursue.

Transformational leaders constantly strive to have these characteristics. Developing these characteristics is what separates companies that are led by managers versus leaders.

The next article will build on these must have characteristics and examine how leaders can assess organizational leadership to improve their companies’ ability to grow.

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 spotted a couple interesting articles about the power of online reviews (word of mouth). Articles in BizReport.com and Internet Retailer report on Forrester Research’s recently released report called ‘Myths and Truths About Online Customer Reviews’.

Forrester Research indicates that while 81% of people look for information online, and are influenced by what they read — they also do not base their purchase decisions on that information. In fact only 14% always trust an online review. There are slight variations by target audience and category, but the good news is that bad online reviews can be survived. In spite of bad reviews, people sought additional information either from a professional reviewer (37%) or followed up directly with the company (7%).

My view is the lack of personal connection with the reviewer made their motives and credibility suspect. We don’t have a context for why they provided a poor review. Was it a disgruntled employee or a customer with unreasonable expectations? People want to make their own decision and online reviews are a research tool as part of the decision-making process.

However, compare that with an offline review — word of mouth from someone we know. What makes off-line reviews so powerful is that we know the person, we trust them and therefore their views are already in the context of a credible reviewer. We may already have discovered similarities in expectations that align with our own values, so their opinion holds special value.

A bad review online may not be a death knell, but bad offline reviews from someone we know will surely have an enormous impact on any business.

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.

The authors wrote in Industrial and Organizational Psychology that employees will feel — and act — engaged when their employer creates conditions that permit them to do so. The key condition for feeling engaged is fair treatment, which creates a feeling of trust and, in turn, feeling safe to be engaged.

They feel that some people confuse engagement with satisfaction and/or commitment and consider retention and turnover to be indicators of engagement. However, Macey and Schneider said employee engagement concerns both feelings of engagement, focus and enthusiasm, as well as engagement behavior, proactivity and persistence.

Engagement is not equal to satisfaction. Engagement connotes energy and not satiation, while satisfaction connotes satiation and contentment but not energy.

The authors contend that employees come to work ready to be engaged, and the challenge for organizations is to create conditions that will release that energy. I agree. Do you?

Cheers!

Most organizations have put considerable time and money into developing a benefits package that is a positive for their employees. Rightly, they expect that these benefits will contribute to a positive work environment and overall engagement.

However, Andy Philpott of Accor Services (one of the UK’s leading providers of employee benefits, rewards and loyalty services), reports that in a recent study they conducted of rewards, benefits and employee engagement that only one-third of employers (33%) believed staff understand what benefits are available.

More concerning is that just one in five employees (21%) claim to have a good understanding of the value of the benefits available and one in 10 admit they have no clue about the value of these benefits.

Employees also seemed unsure whether their pay, benefits and incentives packages were competitive when compared with people doing similar jobs in similar organisations. Only 33% felt their company was competitive on pay, 25% on benefits and just 17% felt their organisation offered competitive incentives.

It is critical that we communicate the value of our benefits package effectively to staff. Successful communication is an foundational element in building employee engagement and the resulting performance, motivation and productivity benefits are not maximized if people are unaware of what the benefits are.

Cheers!

Not that we need to say it again, but more recent research confirms that increasing employee engagement increases performance. Most boardrooms see employee engagement as a key priority for the future and investment in engagement is set to grow — even in the current economic environment.
This is a key finding of the comprehensive study of engagement practice undertaken in the UK, commissioned by employee engagement consultancy, Engage Group.

The survey of nearly 23,600 directors, managers and employees, conducted during October 2008 , reveals that effective engagement can demonstrably improve an organisation’s performance.

A high level of employee engagement is one of the top three drivers of an organisation’s performance, and nearly a third of the UK’s senior leaders see a fully-engaged workforce as one of the most critical factors in their organisation’s success.

Key findings from the report are as follows;

• Effective engagement can demonstrably improve an organisation’s performance
• Most boardrooms see engagement as a key priority for the future and net investment in engagement is set to grow, even in the current economic environment
• Despite growing board support for engagement, most employees still feel disengaged from their organisation – board buy-in has not yet, according to employees, been translated into action
• ‘New world’ aspects of engagement, particularly the appetite and ability of leaders at every level to share power and engage people in decision-making, emerge as powerful new elements of engagement
• Delivering on the ‘new engagement agenda’ will result in more engaged employees, more committed customers and faster growth
• Forceful ‘command & control’ styles of leadership have little, no or even a negative impact on engagement and performance levels – less than 40% of employees view their leader(s) as effective
• Employee satisfaction, the oldest assumed element of employee engagement, sinks near the bottom of the list of influential factors
• Internal measurement lags behind external measures of performance – only 28% of board members claim to use robust internal measures of employee engagement

This study confirms an earlier thesis, the outcome of an extensive research programme carried out in partnership with McKinsey & Company, that the drivers of employee engagement are steadily shifting towards a new inclusiveness

However, despite growing board support for engagement, most employees feel disengaged from their organisation. Only just over a third of employees believe their organisation engages them to perform well.

For those of us who live in the world of employee engagement this comes as no surprise, but for those clients who are still struggling to find the time, money or motivation, maybe this will help.

You can download a complete copy of the full report at Engage Group.

Recently MarketingProfs sent out a note about going the extra mile. In it they referenced an article (Giving Firms an ‘E’ for Effort: Consumer Responses to High-Effort Firms) by Andrea C. Morales, assistant professor of marketing at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

Their research indicated that customers reward companies that are seen to go the extra mile — even if they don’t personally benefit from that effort. In fact, customers are willing to pay more for a product, frequent one store rather than another, and, in general, have a more positive impression of a company or brand that is perceived to put in more effort.

Andrea’s explanation is that customers recognize that effort is a controllable behaviour, and as a result, feels gratitude toward firms that work hard.

It reminds me of a review an advertising agency got from a client (our customer) where I worked many years ago. In that review the client was very critical of the creative product and lukewarm on the media and production. However, they were very positive about the account service team because, in their words, “we worked so damn hard”.

They acknowledged that they were not always getting the level of service they expected, but were willing to be somewhat forgiving because of the obvious effort their daily account team was expending on their account. They gave us time to address the issues while putting senior management on notice that something had to be done.

According to the researchers, customers can view a company’s outstanding efforts as either general or personal.

• A company’s actions are considered to be general when they benefit the universe of customers, such as creating new products
• However, a company’s actions are considered personal when the action is deemed to benefit a specific customer (such as outstanding customer service), even if they are not the customer receiving the benefit.

We all know that personal wins because of the emotional connection. However, the interesting notion is the halo effect created by doing a good deed for someone else. My sense is that it is driven by the belief that the company (or person) would do the same for us in a similar circumstance.

I think this concept applies to personal behaviour as well as company behaviour. So demonstrate you are making the effort even if you can’t satisfy your customers need. They will recognize your efforts and appreciate and reward you for your attempt.

Cheers!