Transform Your Company Culture From “I” to “We”

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This post was originally published on the Desk.com blog.

Most leaders today believe in a “we” culture. They have read the books on building teams and work to implement the advice. Then they are stymied when the teamwork doesn’t happen or falls apart.

Take these additional steps to turn your company culture from “I” to “We.”

#1 Address the high performing loners.
Do you have individual team members that work well with the customers yet not with teammates? They see the work only as one-to-one between them and the customer.

Do you protect and retain these team members because they are good with customers? This reinforces an “I” culture. Lone rangers don’t share knowledge nor help other teammates. Admit to yourself that they are not the shining stars of company culture.

Tip: Speak with them. Ask them what if anything is getting in the way yet let them know that teamwork is essential.

• Do you have metrics in place that actually discourage collaboration and teamwork? Are you grading team members on their own metrics instead of the overall success of the organization?

A heavy focus on individual metrics undoes a “we” culture. Instead, inspire the team to own the customers requests. Above all, remember that metrics don’t create great service. They measure great service that the team creates!

• Are there squabbles between team members that you’ve overlooked? The “loner” may be isolating because team interactions have gone bad. When you tell team members to work things out for themselves, you are feeding an “I” culture.

Tip: Know what’s going on. Before resentments builds, engage team members in discussions to resolve issues. If you overlook team problems, success overlooks your team.

#2: Assert that great attitude is essential and non-negotiable.
Employees with bad customer service attitudes are toxic to a “we” culture. The one question I am repeatedly asked is: “How long do we coach an employee with a bad attitude?” The answer is: Never.

A positive service attitude is the foundation of outstanding customer service. A great customer service attitude is essential — not negotiable.

Can you imagine saying to a customer: “I’m having trouble in my life right now and that’s why I’m giving you bad service.” Well if you retain an employee with a bad attitude, then that’s what you’re saying. It also sends an “I” culture message to the teams as you shower extra attention on this team member.
“We” culture message: We buoy each other with great attitudes and skills to deliver outstanding service.

Tip: If someone is having difficulty in their personal life, ask them what resources do they have or need to work through it. Meanwhile make it clear that they must bring a great work attitude to work every day.

#3: Inspire individual talents to team success.
Forget the old adage there is no “I” in team. It was an attempt to handle arrogant non-team players with one broad brush. Replace it with: There are many I’s that create a team – individual talents, initiative, integrity, interdependence, and inspiration.

Give recognition of individual talents in team meetings WITH a call to use those talents for team success. This inspires individuals to contribute their talents to each other.
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There is very little to stop you from creating a “we” culture if your actions and the organization’s policies support true teamwork. Inspire and model how to be a buoy in a “we” culture of service excellence. Ask the team for suggestions on how to strengthen the company culture. Involve them and they will build a “we” culture of teamwork!

How Great Customer Service Helps Retain Great Employees

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John Tschohl, called the “guru of customer service,” by USA Today, Time and Entrepreneur magazines, is a best-selling author, service strategist and president of Service Quality Institute. John is a regular contributor to the Desk.com Blog Expert Corner series.  

As you know, attracting, hiring and training employees are time- and labor-intensive endeavors. So the last thing you want to do is squander that effort and your resources by failing to develop and maintain your employees’ loyalty.

One path to happy, loyal employees is a strong customer service training program. What is the correlation, you ask? Happy employees mean great customer service, and happy customers make employees’ jobs more pleasant and rewarding. If you fail to ensure your employees’ happiness, you’re not going to have a stable and reliable customer service team.

Great customer service equals happy employees
According to a Forum Corporation report, the highest employee turnover rates are associated with companies with the lowest employee ratings of service quality. Interestingly, factors such as length of service with the company, job function, and frequency of contact with customers show little influence on turnover rate.

This finding was confirmed when Sears surveyed customers in 771 stores. Employee turnover directly correlated with customer satisfaction. In stores that received relatively high customer-service ratings, 54 percent of the sales force turned over in a year compared with 83 percent at stores with low customer service scores.

Treat your customer service employees with respect
I am repeatedly amazed at the minimal respect managers show their junior staff (except in the glowing words of the annual report). Do they not realize that it can cost as much as $1,000 to replace an employee who leaves because he or she is unhappy?

Let low-wage employees know how much you appreciate them and how important they are to the organization. Appreciation and recognition are important, considering the fact that service employees often quit because they feel unappreciated and unwanted, not to mention underpaid. High turnover sabotages your efforts to deliver great customer service.

When finding people willing to work for $7 to $10 an hour ($200 a month in many developing countries), we should remind ourselves that we are lucky to find these individuals and we will do everything we can to let them know how much we appreciate them and how important they are to this organization.

Build a strong team with a customer service training program
One way toward a happier, more productive workforce and great customer service is a strong customer service training program.

If your customer service training is effective, you can expect an immediate impact on employee retention. Once you reach a point where the customer satisfaction index is high, then employees are far more likely to stay than if customers viewed them as adversaries and sought revenge by being “difficult.” Employees become enthusiastic about their jobs, thereby earning even more praise from customers. They begin working even harder. And better. Self-image improves. Morale runs high. Pride and team spirit take over and raise retention rate.

Great customer service also improves the reputation of an organization in its community. Employees enjoy working for compa­nies with good reputations, as it enhances their own personal reputations.

One person who recognizes the influence of great customer service on turnover is Peter Gregerson Sr., retired chairman and president of Warehouse Groceries Management. One purpose of the company’s service program, he says, is “to increase the employee’s value and worth to the company and to himself.
“We wanted to develop skills our competitors didn’t have in customer relations,” said Gregerson. “We hoped, with those things in mind, to increase our sales and our profit with repeat business and fewer customer complaints. We felt that it would reduce our employee turnover as well.”

People-oriented employees who derive personal satisfaction from dealing with customers are more likely to enjoy their work. So, your turnover will be low, and that’s no small benefit at a time when good employees are hard to find and hard to keep, and very expensive to replace.

The Power of Key Performance Indicators for Sales Teams

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Selling is a numbers game, and all sales organizations keep track of certain sets of numbers. It is easy to obsess over the obvious numbers like monthly or quarterly revenue or close rates. Unfortunately, those numbers simply give you the “final score,” without telling you anything about how your team played the game.
If you want to improve the way your team plays the game and boost the score in the future, you need to be paying much closer attention to another set of numbers, namely, the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that give you insights into how well each member of your team is actually playing.
What are KPIs?
While the term KPI is commonly used, it doesn’t mean it is always well understood. Something can be defined as a Key Performance Indicator when:

• It is KEY to the success of your organization. For example, is the number of sales contacts per week important to the success of your organization?

• It is related to PERFORMANCE when it can be clearly measured, quantified and easily influenced by the members of your team. For example, do you have a benchmark that tells you that when a sales maker makes at least 5 contacts with Executive level decision makers during a sales cycle the value of the final deal will go up by 40%?

• It is used as an INDICATOR; in other words, it is something that provides leading information about future results. For example, one version of the 80/20 rule says that 80% of a sales maker’s production is generated by activity in 20% of their accounts. Given that information, it might be a good idea to track the number of calls and the amount of time each sales maker spends with high value contacts in those accounts, and set some specific expectations there that can be measured. 

Essentially, KPI’s should provide visibility into current activity that will impact future sales team productivity. Tracking these indicators in the present will allow you to identify gaps and coach your team members, which will help you influence the outcome of those monthly, quarterly and annual productivity numbers that are so important.
The Difference Between Lagging Indicators and Leading Indicators
It is important to keep in mind when discussing KPIs that there is a difference between Lagging Indicators and Leading Indicators.  Lagging Indicators are outputs and results that are measured “after the fact,” and in most sales organizations these indicators get most of the attention, because they tend to be the metrics that go into reports to executives and even shareholders. Lagging Indicators include metrics like:

• Sales
• Gross margin dollars growth
• Gross margin % growth
• Product mix
• Share of wallet
• New customers

On the other hand, Leading Indicators are activities and actions that can be tracked or measured during the sales process as opportunities are being developed and the pipeline is being built. Leading Indicators include activities like:

• How many calls is a sales maker making per week?
• Who is the sales maker calling on?
• How many of these calls turn into opportunities?
• How many of these opportunities turn into wins?
• How is the sales maker performing in these categories compared to your peer group?

For the purpose of impacting sales transformation, the most important KPIs are going to be found among the Leading Indicators. If you are looking for a way to boost your Lagging Indicators, focus intensely on whatever you consider to be your most important Leading Indicators. As your sales team becomes more effective at executing these Leading Indicator Activities, the Lagging Indicators will improve.
KPIs are powerful because:

• They will help you make better decisions. You must have timely and accurate information about all aspects of the performance of your team members in order to plan and coach effectively. As a sales manager, you can’t rely on hope and assumptions; you must be assessing real data in real time that will reveal what is going on so you can take action now, before it is too late. 

• This leads to better execution. Identifying, measuring and – most of all - coaching to the right KPIs leads directly to behavior change and skill improvement across the entire team.

• KPIs set expectations and improve communication. Defining KPIs clarifies for sales makers the activities upon which they should be spending their time, and provides a context for sales managers to interact with sales makers regarding their performance. 

• A clear focus on KPIs will change sales maker behavior. Once sales makers understand the activities they are supposed to be concentrating on, they will devote more time and energy to these areas, especially if they know their compensation will be tied to their performance in these areas. 

• Focusing on a core set of KPIs will keep sales maker activities consistent. There is an old saying; “People don’t do what is expected, the only do what is inspected.” When sales makers understand what you are going to inspect every week, they are much more likely to do them every week.

• Tracking KPIs is the best way to identify and qualify sales maker performance. Sales makers might be staying busy and giving a 100% effort every day, which can be confused with real productivity. However, if they aren’t giving that effort to the right activities, all that effort is wasted. Tracking KPIs helps sales managers make sure sales makers are spending the right amount of time on the right activities. 

• Tracking KPIs takes the guess work out of evaluation and coaching. This is related to the previous point. Sales managers who don’t regularly track sales maker performance against a set of standard KPI metrics don’t really have any objective basis for evaluating performance. The sales maker may be a great person and hard worker, or they may be a disagreeable know-it-all, but those aren’t the most important behaviors for a sales manager to evaluate. The only thing that really matters is how they are performing in relation to the KPIs.

• Effective coaching begins with KPIs. Most sales managers understand that coaching is important, but coaching is useless if it is not based on quantifiable, actionable skills and behaviors.  The greatest value of tracking KPIs is the information they reveal about where each sales maker is doing well, and where they might need help to do better. Sales managers can quickly access KPI’s from their CRM for every sales maker and use this data to customize coaching conversations that will address gaps and boost performance.

Once your team knows and understands the role of KPIs in helping them measure and achieve success, their ability to meet and even exceed your expectations will rise dramatically.

Five Steps to Better Sales Performance

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A giant gap exists in most organizations between the highest performing sales reps and everyone else. How is it possible that in the same environment and under the same conditions, some reps achieve outstanding results while others struggle to just make their quota? 

The answer depends on the most critical role in any sales organization: the sales manager. On average, one sales manager impacts the success of 10 or more reps.

But instead of devoting time to coaching their teams to higher performance, managers spend their days distracted by the 14 meetings, 500 emails and 200 phone calls they handle in an average week.
As a result, a disconnect exists between what sales managers think their reps want and the reality of what reps need to be successful.

In the 5 Steps to Better Sales Performance eBook, we reveal the proven methods the best sales managers rely on to close the sales performance gap between average performers and all-stars.
The is a brief outline of the 5 steps:

1. Be a Coach, Not a Manager: Coaching will help you boost the performance of your all-stars, motivate average performers to reach the next tier, and elevate lower performers.
2. Set Daily Goals and Track Progress Against Them: Holding others accountable is on of the core skills consistent among top sales leaders.
3. Motivate the Middle: Sales Managers who focus exclusively on top performers – or the poor performers – are far less likely to be successful.
4. Focus on People, Not Process: 75% of sales leaders believe their managers spend too much time on administration and logistics that don’t add value to the business.
5. The Best Feedback is Served Fresh: Performance feedback gets stale quickly. Left unaddressed, minor issues quickly spiral into major ones. 

To learn more about these steps and get actionable tip for coaching your sales team, download the eBook

 http://www.frontrow-solutions.com/

Mobile World Congress 2013 may have overlooked something important

By Shane Schick

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It’s easy and understandable to look from afar at the coverage of this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and focus solely on the new devices – Firefox phones! Phablets! – that were announced by various hardware makers. None of those toys will mean much, however, if IT professionals don’t spend just as much time thinking about how IP networks should evolve to support them.

I was intrigued to see that the newswire service Reuters actually paid some attention to this, highlighting demonstrations from Qualcomm, Verizon, AT&T and others that illustrated the kind of space-age connectivity and context-based computing that has been envisioned for at least the last decade. As usual, the demonstrations were all about digital life at home, from coffeemakers that activated via a smartphone and speakers that turned themselves on when their owner enters a room. This quote summed up the underlying vision of Mobile World Congress 2013:

Glenn Lurie, AT&T president of emerging enterprises, said the next step would be . . . creating a smart ecosystem dedicated to an individual. “When my wife drives into the house and flips the garage door open, the house will know she’s home and unlock the door and turns the thermostat up; that’s the future,” Lurie said.

Well sure, it’s part of the future. But only part. If communication vendors put this much work into enabling a more seamlessly connected digital lifestyle for consumers, there will be an increased expectation of similar functionality and network-awareness at work. If your house can turn on the thermostat before you open the door, why should the average office worker need to sit through 10-minute boot times (or worse), tap through sluggish enterprise applications and search for the relevant files that they’ll need over the course of the day?

IT departments are stressed out right now in part because the IT industry allowed the consumer technology experience to overwhelmingly surpass what the average business can offer its personnel. As the next generation of networks manifest themselves, vendors and technology professionals have an opportunity to turn that situation around. It may begin with a migration to all-IP networks, but it will also mean the applications and even the physical infrastructure of business environments will need to be reconsidered. Call it unified communications 2.0 if you want, but it comes down to this: What do people need to do when they’re in “work” mode, and where will they be doing it?

Things that turn on or run automatically in a home will quickly be taken for granted. The real opportunity for next-generation network technologies will be about easing the processes carried out by business people of every description, making them more productive and collaborative than ever before. Hopefully some smart people at this week’s event in Barcelona will keep that in mind. A true “mobile world” should recognize that if we dedicate smart ecosystems to an individual, that individual isn’t just playing around. They have work to do, too.

10 Coaching Questions That Every Manager Should Ask

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When it comes to coaching, guiding a conversation with the artful and strategic use of well crafted questions is a challenge for coaches of all levels. Here are 10 questions you can use in any conversation.

After coaching thousands of managers across the globe, I’m overly sensitive to the fact that great coaches coach from their heart, not from their head. However, just like learning anything new, such as how to swing a golf club, you’re initially focused on the mechanics of your swing, each movement, step by step. It is only after consistent repetition of the same movement, does it become your own. You stop thinking about the mechanics, and habitually just do it.

This also holds true when it comes to the questions managers ask when coaching. I certainly know there’s a multitude of different questions you can use in any coaching conversation. However, when the best ones are used and used consistently, the conversation becomes magical and both the coach and coachee walk away from that experience feeling great because value was delivered, a new solution was co-created, a new possibility emerged.

That’s when this shift happens; the manager starts recognizing positive results from coaching and as such, their confidence increases and they begin to trust their intuition, their gut, their coaching abilities and their instincts more and more. The byproduct? The right questions just show up naturally and organically within each conversation. But you still need to start with a baseline of best practices to provide a solid foundation to build from before you can make it your own and leverage your own style, strengths and personality into your coaching.

Baseline of Best Practices

That’s why I’ve listed ten coaching questions here which I’ve used over the years that I have found can work in practically every conversation you have. (Actually, I’ve provided you with more than ten questions but condensed a few questions together, as there are several ways to ask the same question, depending upon your own style of coaching and communicating.) These questions will expand your direct report’s thinking, while challenging them to bring out their best. This leads to greater accountability and ownership of the problem, as well as empowering your people with the responsibility to develop their own solution so that they are the ones who have created a new possibility, approach, outlook or way of thinking.

Of course, depending upon the conversation, you may not need to leverage every single question. However, as you use them throughout your coaching efforts, you’ll start recognizing how many of these questions you need and which ones are the most appropriate. Keep in mind, this is just one of many ways to facilitate an effective coaching conversation. And if you don’t have a great manager or a coach in your corner, you can also leverage some of these questions for self-coaching! (Just don’t argue with yourself over the responses you hear! ;- )

10 Coaching Questions That Work In Any Conversation
 

• What is the outcome you’re looking to achieve here?
• Can you share the specifics of what’s going on?
• What have you tried so far?
• How have you handled something like this before? (What was the outcome?)
• Why do you think this is happening? (What’s another way to look at this/respond? What else can also be possible/true?  What assumptions could you be making here?)
• What’s your opinion on how to handle this? (If I wasn’t here, what would you do to achieve/resolve this? What options/ideas do you have? What’s another solution/approach that may work (which you haven’t tried yet?)
• What’s the first thing you need to do to (resolve/achieve this)? (What would that conversation sound like when you talk with……?)
• What resources do you need? (Who else do you think needs to be involved in this? How else can I support you around your efforts to complete this?)
• What are you willing to commit to doing/trying/changing (by when)?
• When should we reconnect to ensure you have achieved the result you want?

2 Bonus Questions

If you sense any resistance to change or a lack of ownership around the issue, goal or problem, you can weave in one of these questions here:

• What would it mean to you if you could (achieve this, resolve this, etc….)? (This question helps the person visualize what’s in it for them – and it’s the thing that they want rather than the manager trying to tell or ‘sell’ them on what the benefit is.)
• How would this impact/affect you (your team, career, etc.) if this (continues, doesn’t change, doesn’t get resolved)? (This question enables the person to see/articulate the measurable cost of not changing rather than being told the negative consequence. Remember, if they say it, then they own it. And if they own it, they act on it rather than being told the consequence, which often leads to resistance.)

Scary numbers expose the bandwidth-hogging devices that will cripple your network

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A new research report culls mobile subscriber data to show usage patterns and what impact phones, tablets and video have on IT resources. Take a deep breath.

I still remember a time when I used Internet cafés and occasionally even fax machines to work on the road. Mobile workforces aren’t new; the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and bring-your-own-device policies is just making mobile workplaces the new normal.

But mobility puts an added strain on the network — or, in the case of legacy networks, an overwhelming burden. At the same time, your users expect the same quality of experience that they’ve always had.
The Citrix ByteMobile Mobile Analytics Report (for the first quarter of 2013) looks at subscriber behavior that determines the quality of their experience with today’s mobile data services.

If you’re looking to improve the mobile experience for your users or better manage increasing volumes of traffic, the findings provide some insight into how people use their mobile devices and the impact this has on the network. It can also help you shape mobile policies to take into account how users typically access data on the go and what they’re consuming.

The report found that, on average, a network-connected tablet generates three times more data than a smartphone. It also found that an iOS-based tablet generates more than three times the data of an Android-based tablet. Android smartphones generate five megabytes of data per day, while iOS-based smartphones generate 13 megabytes per day.

Despite low usage, the report found that video generates more than 50 per cent of total mobile data traffic on wireless networks. So if only 20 per cent of users are generating more than 50 per cent of mobile data traffic, what does that mean when more of your users start viewing video? It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure this out: It will make your network slow as molasses.
And the problem is only going to get worse. Already, employees are streaming video and collaborating with their colleagues over the corporate network — often using mobile devices. And they’re probably accessing the network with their own devices, too.

Don’t have a BYOD policy? Doesn’t matter — employees are using their personal devices at work anyway, whether or not you have a formal policy around it. And if you do have a policy, are you supporting iOS or Android? Smartphones or tablets? Or a combination of operating systems and form factors?
Existing legacy networks weren’t designed to handle this new mobile reality. And we all know the consequences: disrupted streaming and dropped voice and video calls. Not only is this an annoyance to users, but it also makes the business look unprofessional.
So as you develop a mobile strategy and look at BYOD, don’t forget to consider the implications that will have on your network. It’s like bungee jumping without checking to see if the cords can support your weight — it’s just not a smart idea.