Gallup’s chief economist points to the incoming president’s most pressing economic concerns and how to solve them. He explains why policymakers keep dropping the ball and how Barack Obama can avoid doing the same. And he discusses what Obama and business leaders should expect in 2009, some of which is actually good news -- though most of it isn’t.
The first day on the job is always difficult. You must learn new names and new faces, find where they keep the office supplies, then figure out how to do what you were hired for. But imagine doing all that while your organization's financial system is in a nosedive -- its debt increasing by $3.87 billion a day -- and not long ago, many of your highest ranking coworkers actively campaigned to keep you from getting the job.
And that's just the beginning of the situation President-Elect Barack Obama is facing. The list of challenges seems endless: two wars, the ever-present threat of terrorism, and a global economic meltdown, along with myriad other troubles both at home and abroad. By all reports, he's keenly aware that he must hit the ground running on January 20 and has been rapidly assembling his executive team. But, says Gallup Chief Economist Dennis Jacobe, Ph.D., -- and many other economists too -- President Obama's first priority when taking office should be shoring up the U.S. economy.
In the following interview, Dr. Jacobe outlines what he thinks are the incoming president's most pressing economic concerns and how to solve them. He explains why policymakers keep shooting themselves -- and by extension, the taxpayers -- in the foot and how Obama can avoid doing the same. And he discusses what Obama and business leaders should expect in 2009, some of which is actually good news, though the vast majority of it isn't.
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viernes, 26 de diciembre de 2008
How Employee and Customer Engagement Interact
It’s not quite as simple as “engaged employees create engaged customers.” Here’s why. Customer Engagement Employee Engagement HumanSigma
by John H. Fleming, Ph.D., and Jim Asplund
Excerpted from Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter
(Gallup Press, November 2007)
Conventional views of the relationships among employee attitudes, customer requirements, and financial performance have emphasized their sequential nature. You can think of these variables as successive links in a chain, in which each variable affects the next to drive some ultimate outcome. This perspective suggests that engaged employees create engaged customers who foster organizational success by delivering positive financial outcomes. Though this perspective has some validity, we believe that it fails to convey the true multidimensional nature of the interdependencies among employee and customer engagement and overall organizational financial performance.
Employee engagement does have a direct and measurable relationship to and impact on customer engagement. But, like the ways in which heart rate and respiration interact to speed life-giving oxygen to all parts of the human body, the ways in which these organizational functions interact to enhance a company's financial vigor are more complex than a simple linear chain of factors. Integrating the vital signs of employee and customer engagement into a single performance construct supported by a single performance measure -- the HumanSigma metric -- provides a comprehensive means to capture and understand this dynamic system. This is because the combined impact of a company's human systems taken together is substantially greater than the effects of the individual systems separately.
Optimize
Our first experience with the power of this dynamic interaction of employee and customer engagement arose quite by accident. Several years ago, we were working with a large retailer to measure and improve its customer and employee relationships. As part of this process, we collected metrics on employee and customer engagement for each store in the chain. Not surprisingly, our analysis found strong linkages to financial performance for each separate measure.
Within the stores, these two performance indicators were reported and acted on independently of one another because, as with most such measurement programs, different functional groups within the company owned the individual parts. The corporate human resources department owned the employee engagement initiative, while store operations owned the customer measurement initiative. As you might expect, there was no formalized interaction between or integration of the two teams responsible for these programs. They rarely, if ever, communicated with one another.
One day, however, the corporate owner of the employee engagement program ran into his counterpart on the customer side at lunch in the company cafeteria. A lively discussion about the two programs ensued. It became clear that the top-performing stores were using some best practices that could be transferred to stores where employee and customer engagement were gaining considerably less traction.
With the best principles of the service-profit chain in mind, the two program owners decided that it might be interesting to compare notes on which stores were the best on each performance indicator. After all, if the sequential service-profit chain model was correct, we would expect there to be considerable overlap between the two groups of best-performing stores.
To perform the analysis, we first identified the 10 highest and 10 lowest performing stores based on their success in engaging employees. We then identified the 10 highest and 10 lowest performing stores based on their success in creating customer engagement. Our working assumption, given the demonstrated statistical linkages between employee and customer engagement, was that some of the top performers in creating employee engagement would also be among the group of top performers in developing engaged customers. Unfortunately, we were wrong: Just one store appeared on both lists. Somewhat nonplussed, we went back to the data in search of an explanation.
As we began to work through the implications of these findings, we made an intriguing discovery. Stores that performed well (those that scored in the top 50% of all stores on the measure) in employee and customer engagement -- even though they may not have had the highest scores on either metric -- tended to deliver considerably better financial results than those that scored poorly on the two measures. Furthermore, stores that performed well on both measures also outperformed those that scored high on one but not the other of these metrics.
Just as respiration and heart rate combine to efficiently and effectively deliver life-giving oxygen and nutrients to the entire human body, customer and employee engagement interact to promote an enhanced level of financial vigor throughout the organization. This relationship is depicted graphically by plotting individual stores' scores on these metrics along two axes representing local employee and customer engagement scores, with each dot representing an individual store in the chain. (See the graphic "Optimized.") By looking at the "scatter" of the points, it's easy to see the considerable variation in performance on employee and customer engagement at the local level.
Our subsequent research has confirmed that this pattern holds true not just for the large, multi-store retailer in this example, but also for companies of different sizes and in various industries. When viewed from the perspective of local business unit performance, customer and employee engagement . . . potentiate one another, creating the opportunity for accelerated improvement and growth of overall financial performance.
John H. Fleming, Ph.D., is Principal and Chief Scientist -- Customer Engagement and HumanSigma for Gallup. He is coauthor of Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (Gallup Press, November 2007).
Learn More >>
Jim Asplund is Chief Scientist, Strengths-Based Development and Principal, Performance Impact Consulting with Gallup. He is coathor of Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (Gallup Press, November 2007).
by John H. Fleming, Ph.D., and Jim Asplund
Excerpted from Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter
(Gallup Press, November 2007)
Conventional views of the relationships among employee attitudes, customer requirements, and financial performance have emphasized their sequential nature. You can think of these variables as successive links in a chain, in which each variable affects the next to drive some ultimate outcome. This perspective suggests that engaged employees create engaged customers who foster organizational success by delivering positive financial outcomes. Though this perspective has some validity, we believe that it fails to convey the true multidimensional nature of the interdependencies among employee and customer engagement and overall organizational financial performance.
Employee engagement does have a direct and measurable relationship to and impact on customer engagement. But, like the ways in which heart rate and respiration interact to speed life-giving oxygen to all parts of the human body, the ways in which these organizational functions interact to enhance a company's financial vigor are more complex than a simple linear chain of factors. Integrating the vital signs of employee and customer engagement into a single performance construct supported by a single performance measure -- the HumanSigma metric -- provides a comprehensive means to capture and understand this dynamic system. This is because the combined impact of a company's human systems taken together is substantially greater than the effects of the individual systems separately.
Optimize
Our first experience with the power of this dynamic interaction of employee and customer engagement arose quite by accident. Several years ago, we were working with a large retailer to measure and improve its customer and employee relationships. As part of this process, we collected metrics on employee and customer engagement for each store in the chain. Not surprisingly, our analysis found strong linkages to financial performance for each separate measure.
Within the stores, these two performance indicators were reported and acted on independently of one another because, as with most such measurement programs, different functional groups within the company owned the individual parts. The corporate human resources department owned the employee engagement initiative, while store operations owned the customer measurement initiative. As you might expect, there was no formalized interaction between or integration of the two teams responsible for these programs. They rarely, if ever, communicated with one another.
One day, however, the corporate owner of the employee engagement program ran into his counterpart on the customer side at lunch in the company cafeteria. A lively discussion about the two programs ensued. It became clear that the top-performing stores were using some best practices that could be transferred to stores where employee and customer engagement were gaining considerably less traction.
With the best principles of the service-profit chain in mind, the two program owners decided that it might be interesting to compare notes on which stores were the best on each performance indicator. After all, if the sequential service-profit chain model was correct, we would expect there to be considerable overlap between the two groups of best-performing stores.
To perform the analysis, we first identified the 10 highest and 10 lowest performing stores based on their success in engaging employees. We then identified the 10 highest and 10 lowest performing stores based on their success in creating customer engagement. Our working assumption, given the demonstrated statistical linkages between employee and customer engagement, was that some of the top performers in creating employee engagement would also be among the group of top performers in developing engaged customers. Unfortunately, we were wrong: Just one store appeared on both lists. Somewhat nonplussed, we went back to the data in search of an explanation.
As we began to work through the implications of these findings, we made an intriguing discovery. Stores that performed well (those that scored in the top 50% of all stores on the measure) in employee and customer engagement -- even though they may not have had the highest scores on either metric -- tended to deliver considerably better financial results than those that scored poorly on the two measures. Furthermore, stores that performed well on both measures also outperformed those that scored high on one but not the other of these metrics.
Just as respiration and heart rate combine to efficiently and effectively deliver life-giving oxygen and nutrients to the entire human body, customer and employee engagement interact to promote an enhanced level of financial vigor throughout the organization. This relationship is depicted graphically by plotting individual stores' scores on these metrics along two axes representing local employee and customer engagement scores, with each dot representing an individual store in the chain. (See the graphic "Optimized.") By looking at the "scatter" of the points, it's easy to see the considerable variation in performance on employee and customer engagement at the local level.
Our subsequent research has confirmed that this pattern holds true not just for the large, multi-store retailer in this example, but also for companies of different sizes and in various industries. When viewed from the perspective of local business unit performance, customer and employee engagement . . . potentiate one another, creating the opportunity for accelerated improvement and growth of overall financial performance.
John H. Fleming, Ph.D., is Principal and Chief Scientist -- Customer Engagement and HumanSigma for Gallup. He is coauthor of Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (Gallup Press, November 2007).
Learn More >>
Jim Asplund is Chief Scientist, Strengths-Based Development and Principal, Performance Impact Consulting with Gallup. He is coathor of Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter (Gallup Press, November 2007).
How The Ritz-Carlton Manages the Mystique
GALLUP Management Journal
(click here for original article)
11 December 2008
by Jennifer Robison. Senior Editor for the Gallup Management Journal.
The luxury brand uses hard data on employee and customer engagement to create its image and ambience -- and to drive measurable results
Joanne Hanna recently had the pleasure of being a Ritz-Carlton guest, but only after the pain of a bad experience she had flying -- crammed into coach -- in December. "I had to get to a conference in New York, but my flights were delayed over and over. I arrived seven hours later than I meant to, and if I never see O'Hare airport again, it'll be too soon," she says. That delay meant that she missed all her meetings and had time only to check into her room, change, and race to the conference's opening-night dinner.
"The gentleman who escorted me to my room at The Ritz-Carlton asked how my day was, and I told him, the poor guy," says Hanna. "He said he'd be happy to book me into the spa, or send up a masseuse, or even have a rose-petal bath drawn for me, and I'd have loved all of that. But there was no time." So he told Hanna to wait a moment, and then he returned with a scented candle. "I was so touched, I was speechless -- it was so thoughtful and helpful, like something a friend would do," says Hanna. "So I told the people at the desk. And now whenever I check into a Ritz-Carlton, there's a candle waiting for me."
Perhaps any hotel employee could figure out that a tired and frazzled guest could use a little help. And maybe any hotel company with a global database could keep track of a candle-loving customer. But making sure that every employee notices, cares, thinks, and acts as thoughtfully as the one who served Hanna -- well, that takes something special.
The Ritz-Carlton calls that something special "The Ritz-Carlton Mystique." It's a way of conceptualizing the brand's image and the ambience of each of the company's more than 70 worldwide locations. "Mystique" sounds enigmatic, but it's achieved through the most straightforward of methods: extremely close attention to performance data collection and a broad educational platform to deliver the findings.
Of course, all companies watch standard business measures and train employees. But The Ritz-Carlton watches things that most companies ignore, then uses what they learn in a unique way to create ongoing, top-to-bottom learning. "What we get from the data is essential," says John Timmerman, The Ritz-Carlton's vice president of operations. "Everything we learn we use to set strategies, and every strategy is communicated to our people. That learning environment is how we stay agile in an ever-changing world."
Beyond the data
Agility from education is a complex thing. A company has to determine what data to collect and how to collect it, but it also has to ascertain what to do with it. Get any of those things wrong, and the company trips over its own feet. So The Ritz-Carlton concentrates solely -- but obsessively -- on the factors that support the iconic brand.
"We really wanted to make sure that we not only had a great company but that we also had a sustainable company," says Timmerman. "So we started to benchmark different business models. We had to have the right outcome measures, so we developed certain business priority measurements. We call them our key success factors."
The factors are: mystique, employee engagement, customer engagement, product service excellence, community involvement, and financial performance. Most companies start with the financials, but The Ritz-Carlton finishes with them. "Financial performance is a result of the other metrics -- our key success factors," Timmerman says. "Everything else is a diagnostic metric."
The key success factors are the business priorities, and within those factors, The Ritz-Carlton reports on absolutely everything -- from the general morale of the restaurant staff in Bahrain to the number of scuffs on an elevator door in New York. Every day, the company's staff determines whether they're meeting the key success factors -- and if not, what needs to change.
Thus, each location and every one of The Ritz-Carlton's more than 38,000 employees turn in a river of quantitative and qualitative data points. Those bits of data, filtered by the requirements of the key success factors, are examined to give the company real-time information that it uses to set and evaluate the business priority measurements that make up the key success factors. It's a feedback loop of current information, starting and ending with the priorities.
"When executives focus on the mechanics, they miss the communication," says Timmerman. The key success factors feedback loop provides the communication that prevents The Ritz-Carlton's service from being mechanical -- and keeps it personal, for every person in every location every day.
How they strategize
The Ritz-Carlton starts with a flood of data, turns it into a powerful strategy, then targets specific actions to obtain its key success factors. But creating the right strategy to achieve the factors takes as much evaluation as analyzing the data in the first place.
First, The Ritz-Carlton defines the priorities that make up the success factors so that they're actionable and applicable to all employees. To draft the actions, a cross-functional team -- including senior corporate leaders, field representatives such as human resources managers, and rank and file employees -- reviews the plan and contributes insights. The company also uses the data to perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to adjust to new information.
"We look at where we want to be versus where we are today -- and where we see the trends on the horizon," says Timmerman. "Then we frame the key success factors. Then we ask for input with the SWOT process. It's a very defined process because it's our opinion that if you can't define it, you can't control it, you can't measure it, and you can't improve it."
The input of frontline staff -- the people who check guests in, serve food, and occasionally present scented candles -- into the SWOT process is crucial. Their insights are loaded into a global database so leaders can identify macro-level themes, market specifics, individual functions, and even corporate blind spots. As a result, the ladies and gentlemen, as all employees of The Ritz-Carlton are called, feel integrally involved in the business.
"For us, [integrating employee feedback into the process is the] true success because employees are personally engaged, they're fulfilled, they understand their contribution, and we're maximizing their talents," says Timmerman. "Involving [employees] in the SWOT process increases their engagement. And in my opinion, employee engagement measurements are a barometer of leadership effectiveness."
Once the company has determined the actions for achieving its success factors, the next step is actually putting them into action. That's the education factor.
How it works
A strategic plan will achieve its goals only if it's understood. And no plan will achieve its ends if it isn't measured and monitored. So, before long-range plans are put in place, The Ritz-Carlton goes to great -- some might say extreme -- lengths to teach and learn from employees. "To be agile in any marketplace, especially one that changes as rapidly as ours," says Timmerman, "means being a learning organization."
The Ritz-Carlton never misses an opportunity to teach. All new employees take part in a two-day cultural orientation before they start their jobs. Then, they are certified after the first 21 days and annually thereafter to ensure that they are delivering brand standards. Every employee in every location takes part in a daily pre-shift meeting in which actions, events, issues, and most importantly, The Ritz-Carlton philosophy, are discussed. In this way, no one is left in the dark about what a priority means -- and everyone understands his or her role in shaping it. "That helps us all adjust to changes," says Timmerman. "And change is constant."
A byproduct of daily learning is that the ladies and gentlemen who actually deal with guests are reminded to, coached on how to, and have a method for relaying customers' faint signals. Even the most subtle guest reactions are noticed and fed into the river of data that is distilled into the business priorities. As a result, the hotel can pick up on information that might have been easily missed and have a built-in plan for delivering that knowledge to others.
Furthermore, every hotel, function, and division has access to the key success factors as well as very specific revenue and profitability measures. Thus, every day, those ladies and gentlemen can see how well they're performing against their targets, each of which rolls up to the company metrics. "So what you have is complete alignment, [and employees can see how] all the key success factors that are at thirty thousand feet translate down to ground level," says Timmerman.
Yet none of these approaches are very long term. Through trial and error, The Ritz-Carlton realized that unless the issue involves a capital improvement, action items should be designed to be accomplished within 90 days. Furthermore, having learned in the strategy evaluation process that hotels do very well when they focus their attention on just a few things, The Ritz-Carlton makes sure every business unit has no more than three priorities.
"[Any objective] longer than ninety days turns into ongoing committees that drink coffee and produce meeting minutes but not a lot of results. And once you go beyond the top three priorities, you start to really diffuse your resources, your bandwidth," says Timmerman. So the company set a mandate that every employee must work on something to improve customer, employee, or financial outcomes, with visible results within 90 days.
Engaging employees
"At the end of the day, our bottom line is in the hands of our front line," Timmerman says, which is why the company is meticulous in hiring and developing its staff. The Ritz-Carlton aims to hire only the very best of the very best -- they select just 1 out of every 20 applicants, and that's after applicants are pre-screened for job requirements.
But fit to role is only part of the employee equation. The other is employee engagement, because engagement is the cornerstone of every Ritz-Carlton success factor. Employee engagement first came to the company's attention because of its correlation to performance measures that have profit consequences; Gallup research has shown that hotels with increased employee engagement scores have lower management turnover, fewer safety incidents, and higher profitability and productivity. (See "Feedback for Real" in the "See Also" area on this page.)
The Ritz-Carlton has conducted employee satisfaction measurements for years because it understood the crucial role that employees play in satisfying guests. But there's a big difference between engagement and satisfaction, so the company began using Gallup's Q12 employee engagement metric in 2006.
The Ritz-Carlton has an extraordinary number of engaged workers, with an overall engagement ranking in the upper quartile when compared to all the workgroups Gallup has studied. And its employee turnover is low enough to be legendary: a mere 18% compared to the luxury-hotel industry average of 158% for line-level workers, 136% for supervisors, and 129% for managers. "We like turnover to be between fifteen and eighteen percent," says Timmerman, "because fresh voices are valuable too."
Engaging guests
The other side of the employee engagement coin is customer engagement. Like employ
ee engagement, customer engagement has strong linkages to important profit outcomes: Gallup research has shown that fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium over average customers in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth. (See "Manage Your Human Sigma" in the "See Also" area on this page.)
When it first measured customer engagement in 2004, The Ritz-Carlton scored above the 80th percentile against business-to-consumer companies in Gallup's customer engagement database. For most companies, this would be an outstanding result, but outstanding wasn't good enough for The Ritz-Carlton -- or, frankly, for the extremely selective luxury hotel market. So the hotelier used what it learned from the success factor feedback loop to teach the ladies and gentlemen to provide the perfect, and perfectly subjective, engaging experiences. And it worked: The Ritz-Carlton's overall customer engagement score now ranks above the 90th percentile.
HumanSigma
But a few years ago, The Ritz-Carlton stopped managing customer and employee engagement separately. The company understood the dynamics and profit potential of employee engagement and customer engagement, which is why it made each a key success factor. But the performance potential of managing both factors holistically -- a process Gallup calls HumanSigma -- caused the company to reconsider its approach. "Our employee and customer engagement scores are as important as our financial data," says Timmerman.
Gallup research shows that companies that score above the 50th percentile on either employee or customer engagement tend to deliver 70% higher financial results than companies that score poorly on both measures. But companies that score above the 50th percentile on both employee and customer engagement measures outperform companies below the 50th percentile on both measures by 240%. (See "How Employee and Customer Engagement Interact" in the "See Also" area on this page.)
That's a significant performance differential, so The Ritz-Carlton leaves little to chance regarding HumanSigma. Senior leaders incorporate HumanSigma targets into their corporate strategy and action plan, and they review those targets like they review sales and financial results. "We wanted employee and customer engagement to have the same importance as sales, marketing, and financial goals, so we made it part of the senior leadership agenda," says Timmerman. "We integrate that data into our leadership performance profile, so we look at customer relationship management as part of the leadership metrics. That way, employee and customer engagement really get traction."
Candles
So leaders carefully track HumanSigma, which personally affects individual employees, so that they can perform according to the business priority measures, thus ensuring the key success factors, which maintain the world-famous brand. And all of this changes a little bit, every day, to fit the needs of customers.
It's mind-bogglingly complex, but the end result is quite simple. One cold day in December, an exhausted traveler's day was transformed by the gift of a candle from a thoughtful employee. That candle required the compassion of a single employee, but was predicted on millions of data points. That's the quintessence of business agility.
And though that candle cost very little, it's worth a fortune. Hanna was enchanted by The Ritz-Carlton Mystique, as are all people. But that candle caught her at a deeply emotional level, making her a passionately engaged customer. The hotel can count on getting all of her future business, which means several thousand dollars of extra revenue, assuming she remains as engaged as she is today (which, she says, is "a pretty safe bet").
If even a tenth of its guests experience the same sort of magic that Hanna felt, the company's careful data analysis will pay for itself. If a quarter of them do, The Ritz-Carlton's commitment to engagement will return a magical experience for its guests -- and an enormously healthy return on investment to the company.
(click here for original article)
11 December 2008
by Jennifer Robison. Senior Editor for the Gallup Management Journal.
The luxury brand uses hard data on employee and customer engagement to create its image and ambience -- and to drive measurable results
Joanne Hanna recently had the pleasure of being a Ritz-Carlton guest, but only after the pain of a bad experience she had flying -- crammed into coach -- in December. "I had to get to a conference in New York, but my flights were delayed over and over. I arrived seven hours later than I meant to, and if I never see O'Hare airport again, it'll be too soon," she says. That delay meant that she missed all her meetings and had time only to check into her room, change, and race to the conference's opening-night dinner.
"The gentleman who escorted me to my room at The Ritz-Carlton asked how my day was, and I told him, the poor guy," says Hanna. "He said he'd be happy to book me into the spa, or send up a masseuse, or even have a rose-petal bath drawn for me, and I'd have loved all of that. But there was no time." So he told Hanna to wait a moment, and then he returned with a scented candle. "I was so touched, I was speechless -- it was so thoughtful and helpful, like something a friend would do," says Hanna. "So I told the people at the desk. And now whenever I check into a Ritz-Carlton, there's a candle waiting for me."
Perhaps any hotel employee could figure out that a tired and frazzled guest could use a little help. And maybe any hotel company with a global database could keep track of a candle-loving customer. But making sure that every employee notices, cares, thinks, and acts as thoughtfully as the one who served Hanna -- well, that takes something special.
The Ritz-Carlton calls that something special "The Ritz-Carlton Mystique." It's a way of conceptualizing the brand's image and the ambience of each of the company's more than 70 worldwide locations. "Mystique" sounds enigmatic, but it's achieved through the most straightforward of methods: extremely close attention to performance data collection and a broad educational platform to deliver the findings.
Of course, all companies watch standard business measures and train employees. But The Ritz-Carlton watches things that most companies ignore, then uses what they learn in a unique way to create ongoing, top-to-bottom learning. "What we get from the data is essential," says John Timmerman, The Ritz-Carlton's vice president of operations. "Everything we learn we use to set strategies, and every strategy is communicated to our people. That learning environment is how we stay agile in an ever-changing world."
Beyond the data
Agility from education is a complex thing. A company has to determine what data to collect and how to collect it, but it also has to ascertain what to do with it. Get any of those things wrong, and the company trips over its own feet. So The Ritz-Carlton concentrates solely -- but obsessively -- on the factors that support the iconic brand.
"We really wanted to make sure that we not only had a great company but that we also had a sustainable company," says Timmerman. "So we started to benchmark different business models. We had to have the right outcome measures, so we developed certain business priority measurements. We call them our key success factors."
The factors are: mystique, employee engagement, customer engagement, product service excellence, community involvement, and financial performance. Most companies start with the financials, but The Ritz-Carlton finishes with them. "Financial performance is a result of the other metrics -- our key success factors," Timmerman says. "Everything else is a diagnostic metric."
The key success factors are the business priorities, and within those factors, The Ritz-Carlton reports on absolutely everything -- from the general morale of the restaurant staff in Bahrain to the number of scuffs on an elevator door in New York. Every day, the company's staff determines whether they're meeting the key success factors -- and if not, what needs to change.
Thus, each location and every one of The Ritz-Carlton's more than 38,000 employees turn in a river of quantitative and qualitative data points. Those bits of data, filtered by the requirements of the key success factors, are examined to give the company real-time information that it uses to set and evaluate the business priority measurements that make up the key success factors. It's a feedback loop of current information, starting and ending with the priorities.
"When executives focus on the mechanics, they miss the communication," says Timmerman. The key success factors feedback loop provides the communication that prevents The Ritz-Carlton's service from being mechanical -- and keeps it personal, for every person in every location every day.
How they strategize
The Ritz-Carlton starts with a flood of data, turns it into a powerful strategy, then targets specific actions to obtain its key success factors. But creating the right strategy to achieve the factors takes as much evaluation as analyzing the data in the first place.
First, The Ritz-Carlton defines the priorities that make up the success factors so that they're actionable and applicable to all employees. To draft the actions, a cross-functional team -- including senior corporate leaders, field representatives such as human resources managers, and rank and file employees -- reviews the plan and contributes insights. The company also uses the data to perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to adjust to new information.
"We look at where we want to be versus where we are today -- and where we see the trends on the horizon," says Timmerman. "Then we frame the key success factors. Then we ask for input with the SWOT process. It's a very defined process because it's our opinion that if you can't define it, you can't control it, you can't measure it, and you can't improve it."
The input of frontline staff -- the people who check guests in, serve food, and occasionally present scented candles -- into the SWOT process is crucial. Their insights are loaded into a global database so leaders can identify macro-level themes, market specifics, individual functions, and even corporate blind spots. As a result, the ladies and gentlemen, as all employees of The Ritz-Carlton are called, feel integrally involved in the business.
"For us, [integrating employee feedback into the process is the] true success because employees are personally engaged, they're fulfilled, they understand their contribution, and we're maximizing their talents," says Timmerman. "Involving [employees] in the SWOT process increases their engagement. And in my opinion, employee engagement measurements are a barometer of leadership effectiveness."
Once the company has determined the actions for achieving its success factors, the next step is actually putting them into action. That's the education factor.
How it works
A strategic plan will achieve its goals only if it's understood. And no plan will achieve its ends if it isn't measured and monitored. So, before long-range plans are put in place, The Ritz-Carlton goes to great -- some might say extreme -- lengths to teach and learn from employees. "To be agile in any marketplace, especially one that changes as rapidly as ours," says Timmerman, "means being a learning organization."
The Ritz-Carlton never misses an opportunity to teach. All new employees take part in a two-day cultural orientation before they start their jobs. Then, they are certified after the first 21 days and annually thereafter to ensure that they are delivering brand standards. Every employee in every location takes part in a daily pre-shift meeting in which actions, events, issues, and most importantly, The Ritz-Carlton philosophy, are discussed. In this way, no one is left in the dark about what a priority means -- and everyone understands his or her role in shaping it. "That helps us all adjust to changes," says Timmerman. "And change is constant."
A byproduct of daily learning is that the ladies and gentlemen who actually deal with guests are reminded to, coached on how to, and have a method for relaying customers' faint signals. Even the most subtle guest reactions are noticed and fed into the river of data that is distilled into the business priorities. As a result, the hotel can pick up on information that might have been easily missed and have a built-in plan for delivering that knowledge to others.
Furthermore, every hotel, function, and division has access to the key success factors as well as very specific revenue and profitability measures. Thus, every day, those ladies and gentlemen can see how well they're performing against their targets, each of which rolls up to the company metrics. "So what you have is complete alignment, [and employees can see how] all the key success factors that are at thirty thousand feet translate down to ground level," says Timmerman.
Yet none of these approaches are very long term. Through trial and error, The Ritz-Carlton realized that unless the issue involves a capital improvement, action items should be designed to be accomplished within 90 days. Furthermore, having learned in the strategy evaluation process that hotels do very well when they focus their attention on just a few things, The Ritz-Carlton makes sure every business unit has no more than three priorities.
"[Any objective] longer than ninety days turns into ongoing committees that drink coffee and produce meeting minutes but not a lot of results. And once you go beyond the top three priorities, you start to really diffuse your resources, your bandwidth," says Timmerman. So the company set a mandate that every employee must work on something to improve customer, employee, or financial outcomes, with visible results within 90 days.
Engaging employees
"At the end of the day, our bottom line is in the hands of our front line," Timmerman says, which is why the company is meticulous in hiring and developing its staff. The Ritz-Carlton aims to hire only the very best of the very best -- they select just 1 out of every 20 applicants, and that's after applicants are pre-screened for job requirements.
But fit to role is only part of the employee equation. The other is employee engagement, because engagement is the cornerstone of every Ritz-Carlton success factor. Employee engagement first came to the company's attention because of its correlation to performance measures that have profit consequences; Gallup research has shown that hotels with increased employee engagement scores have lower management turnover, fewer safety incidents, and higher profitability and productivity. (See "Feedback for Real" in the "See Also" area on this page.)
The Ritz-Carlton has conducted employee satisfaction measurements for years because it understood the crucial role that employees play in satisfying guests. But there's a big difference between engagement and satisfaction, so the company began using Gallup's Q12 employee engagement metric in 2006.
The Ritz-Carlton has an extraordinary number of engaged workers, with an overall engagement ranking in the upper quartile when compared to all the workgroups Gallup has studied. And its employee turnover is low enough to be legendary: a mere 18% compared to the luxury-hotel industry average of 158% for line-level workers, 136% for supervisors, and 129% for managers. "We like turnover to be between fifteen and eighteen percent," says Timmerman, "because fresh voices are valuable too."
Engaging guests
The other side of the employee engagement coin is customer engagement. Like employ
ee engagement, customer engagement has strong linkages to important profit outcomes: Gallup research has shown that fully engaged customers deliver a 23% premium over average customers in share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth. (See "Manage Your Human Sigma" in the "See Also" area on this page.)
When it first measured customer engagement in 2004, The Ritz-Carlton scored above the 80th percentile against business-to-consumer companies in Gallup's customer engagement database. For most companies, this would be an outstanding result, but outstanding wasn't good enough for The Ritz-Carlton -- or, frankly, for the extremely selective luxury hotel market. So the hotelier used what it learned from the success factor feedback loop to teach the ladies and gentlemen to provide the perfect, and perfectly subjective, engaging experiences. And it worked: The Ritz-Carlton's overall customer engagement score now ranks above the 90th percentile.
HumanSigma
But a few years ago, The Ritz-Carlton stopped managing customer and employee engagement separately. The company understood the dynamics and profit potential of employee engagement and customer engagement, which is why it made each a key success factor. But the performance potential of managing both factors holistically -- a process Gallup calls HumanSigma -- caused the company to reconsider its approach. "Our employee and customer engagement scores are as important as our financial data," says Timmerman.
Gallup research shows that companies that score above the 50th percentile on either employee or customer engagement tend to deliver 70% higher financial results than companies that score poorly on both measures. But companies that score above the 50th percentile on both employee and customer engagement measures outperform companies below the 50th percentile on both measures by 240%. (See "How Employee and Customer Engagement Interact" in the "See Also" area on this page.)
That's a significant performance differential, so The Ritz-Carlton leaves little to chance regarding HumanSigma. Senior leaders incorporate HumanSigma targets into their corporate strategy and action plan, and they review those targets like they review sales and financial results. "We wanted employee and customer engagement to have the same importance as sales, marketing, and financial goals, so we made it part of the senior leadership agenda," says Timmerman. "We integrate that data into our leadership performance profile, so we look at customer relationship management as part of the leadership metrics. That way, employee and customer engagement really get traction."
Candles
So leaders carefully track HumanSigma, which personally affects individual employees, so that they can perform according to the business priority measures, thus ensuring the key success factors, which maintain the world-famous brand. And all of this changes a little bit, every day, to fit the needs of customers.
It's mind-bogglingly complex, but the end result is quite simple. One cold day in December, an exhausted traveler's day was transformed by the gift of a candle from a thoughtful employee. That candle required the compassion of a single employee, but was predicted on millions of data points. That's the quintessence of business agility.
And though that candle cost very little, it's worth a fortune. Hanna was enchanted by The Ritz-Carlton Mystique, as are all people. But that candle caught her at a deeply emotional level, making her a passionately engaged customer. The hotel can count on getting all of her future business, which means several thousand dollars of extra revenue, assuming she remains as engaged as she is today (which, she says, is "a pretty safe bet").
If even a tenth of its guests experience the same sort of magic that Hanna felt, the company's careful data analysis will pay for itself. If a quarter of them do, The Ritz-Carlton's commitment to engagement will return a magical experience for its guests -- and an enormously healthy return on investment to the company.
miércoles, 24 de diciembre de 2008
UN CUENTO PARA LA NAVIDAD Y EL AÑO NUEVO
Charles Plumb era un piloto de un bombardero en la guerra de Vietnam.
Después de muchas misiones su avión fue derribado por un misil. Plumb se lanzó en paracaidas y pasó seis años en una prisión norvietnamita.
Un día estaba en un restaurant y un señor le saludó. Le dijo "Hola, usted es Charles Plumb, era piloto en Vietnam, y derribaron su avión, ¿verdad?
"¿Y usted cómo sabe esto?" le preguntó Plumb.
"Porque yo empaqué su paracaidas. Parece que funcionó bien ¿verdad?" Plumb casi se ahogó de sorpresa y con mucha gratitud le respondió:
"¡Claro que funcionó... si no hubiera funcionado no estaría aqui!"
Estando solo, Plumb no pudo dormir esa noche meditando. Se preguntaba "¿Cuantas veces ví en el portaviones a ese hombre y nunca le dije "Buenos días!"... yo era un arrogante piloto y el era un humilde marinero.
Pensó también en las horas que este marinero pasó en las entrañas del barco enrollando los hilos de seda de cada paracaídas teniendo en sus manos la vida de alguien que no conocía.
Ahora Plumb comienza sus conferencias preguntando a su audiencia: "¿Quién empacó hoy su paracaídas?"
Todos tenemos a alguien cuyo trabajo es importante para que nosotros salgamos adelante. Uno necesita muchos paracaidas en el día en el aspecto fisico, en lo emocional, en lo mental y hasta en lo espiritual. A veces, en los desafíos que la vida nos lanza a diario, perdemos de vista lo que es verdaderamente importante y a las personas que nos salvan en el momento oportuno sin que se los pidamos. Dejamos de saludar, de dar las gracias, de felicitar a alguien o simplemente de decir algo amable solo porque sí....
Hoy, esta semana, este año, cada día, tratemos de darnos cuenta quíen empacó nuestro paracaídas y agradezcámoslo. ¡¡Mañana puede ser tarde!!
Esta nota es para todas aquellas personas que han tenido confianza en mí este año, y en estos treinta y tantos años en Chile... especialmente a las personas que han participado en talleres y procesos de consultoría conmigo, las gerentes y jefes que han confiado en la promesa de Boyden institute, mis compañeros de trabajo y patrocinadores y a las personas que diariamente me brindan servicios, sin que las vea ni las reconozca. "¡Disculpen mi ceguera ... no quiero ser malagradecido!"
Un agradecimiento especial a las empresas que han confiado en nuestros servicios para representarlos en Chile: Vital Smarts y Crane Consulting, mis amigos, compañeros y clientes de Franklin Covey en toda la región con quienes aprendimos tanto juntos, mis colegas del English-Speaking Union y, sobre todo, a mi querida familia que me ha tenido que aguantar tantas décadas y quienes me han enseñado lo lejos que estoy de ser el modelo de efectividad que quisiera ser!!!
¡Saludos a todos y que se renueven durante estos días tan importantes con sus seres queridos!
sábado, 22 de noviembre de 2008
NAVIGATION NOTES
These notes may be useful as you explore these pages:
ARTICLES
These have been ordered into sections (etiquetas):
Books Recommended
The books included so far are by no means necessarily the greatest books on the subjects of my professional interest but they are those that have had the most profound affect on me at one particular time and probably influenced many of the decisions I have taken during my career. Friends and colleagues will notice that I have ended up representing or working with many of the authors.
Rather than giving my own biased view of these books, however, the corresponding link will take you the Amazon page for these books, where you will be able to see a summary of the customer reviews and the average ranking . I have found this a really useful tool for deciding which books to order through Amazon in addition to reading the professional reviews and browsing the random page feature.
I will be most interested in receiving your feedback on these books and others on similar subjects that you may have read and I would like to think that at some stage I can start a new category of "Books Recommended to Me".
RECOMMENDED LINKS
This is not an exhaustive list of my favourite sites, but it does contain links to many of the organizations and people mentioned in the articles and/or whom I feel I can responsibly recommend to friends, clients and colleagues.
ARTICLES
These have been ordered into sections (etiquetas):
- Coaching
- Comunication
- Cross Culture
- General Interest
- Language Learning
- Leadership
- Networking
- Politics
- Strategic Planning
and - IN SPANISH
Look for Section (etiquetas) in the right hand columns to choose your subject matter of interest.
Books Recommended
The books included so far are by no means necessarily the greatest books on the subjects of my professional interest but they are those that have had the most profound affect on me at one particular time and probably influenced many of the decisions I have taken during my career. Friends and colleagues will notice that I have ended up representing or working with many of the authors.
Rather than giving my own biased view of these books, however, the corresponding link will take you the Amazon page for these books, where you will be able to see a summary of the customer reviews and the average ranking . I have found this a really useful tool for deciding which books to order through Amazon in addition to reading the professional reviews and browsing the random page feature.
I will be most interested in receiving your feedback on these books and others on similar subjects that you may have read and I would like to think that at some stage I can start a new category of "Books Recommended to Me".
RECOMMENDED LINKS
This is not an exhaustive list of my favourite sites, but it does contain links to many of the organizations and people mentioned in the articles and/or whom I feel I can responsibly recommend to friends, clients and colleagues.
El Coaching Transformacional
Por Thomas Crane, Autor de “The Heart of Coaching”.
¿Cómo enfrentar al ejecutivo talentoso, pero que trata mal a su personal?; ¿O al especialista que teme a los equipos de trabajo?; ¿Qué hacer con un gerente que no se compromete ni quiere sostener ningún enfrentamiento?
Una solución es despedirlo, pero antes de hacerlo habría que pensar… soy yo parte del problema?
Es ahí que surge el concepto de coaching tansformacional, una herramienta que busca mejorar la conducta, no solamente de una persona o grupo, sino de la organización completa, partiendo con uno mismo.
Tal como planteo en mi libro “The Heart of Coaching”, cada día más líderes se encuentran frustrados frente a la necesidad de “hacer más con menos” e implementar culturas de alto rendimiento.
El Coaching Transformacional provee al líder los herramientas para desarrollar, enriquecer y reforzar los talentos naturales de su equipo ayudándoles a cuestionar sus creencias, conductas, la calidad de sus relaciones y sus resultados y le hace receptiva a recibir e invitar la retroalimentación sobre su propio desempeño
El nuevo líder debe remplazar su paradigma de ser “jefe de las personas ” para uno mas saludable y sostenible de ser “coach para la gente”. Así los los miembros de su equipo aprenderán a transformarse en coaches entre ellos mismos, impactando no solamente los resultados individuales y de su equipo sino el desempeño y efectividad de la organización entera.
Una Cultura de Coaching de alto rendimiento es aquella donde todos los miembros de una organización se involucren en conversaciones respetuosas de coaching, sin restricciones, sobre cómo pueden mejorar sus relaciones de trabajo y su rendimiento. Aprenden a valorar y usar feedback, como herramienta de aprendizaje para lograr altos niveles de responsabilidades a nivel personal, desarrollo profesional, mejores relaciones laborales, mejoramiento continuo y satisfacción del cliente.
¿Cómo enfrentar al ejecutivo talentoso, pero que trata mal a su personal?; ¿O al especialista que teme a los equipos de trabajo?; ¿Qué hacer con un gerente que no se compromete ni quiere sostener ningún enfrentamiento?
Una solución es despedirlo, pero antes de hacerlo habría que pensar… soy yo parte del problema?
Es ahí que surge el concepto de coaching tansformacional, una herramienta que busca mejorar la conducta, no solamente de una persona o grupo, sino de la organización completa, partiendo con uno mismo.
Tal como planteo en mi libro “The Heart of Coaching”, cada día más líderes se encuentran frustrados frente a la necesidad de “hacer más con menos” e implementar culturas de alto rendimiento.
El Coaching Transformacional provee al líder los herramientas para desarrollar, enriquecer y reforzar los talentos naturales de su equipo ayudándoles a cuestionar sus creencias, conductas, la calidad de sus relaciones y sus resultados y le hace receptiva a recibir e invitar la retroalimentación sobre su propio desempeño
El nuevo líder debe remplazar su paradigma de ser “jefe de las personas ” para uno mas saludable y sostenible de ser “coach para la gente”. Así los los miembros de su equipo aprenderán a transformarse en coaches entre ellos mismos, impactando no solamente los resultados individuales y de su equipo sino el desempeño y efectividad de la organización entera.
Una Cultura de Coaching de alto rendimiento es aquella donde todos los miembros de una organización se involucren en conversaciones respetuosas de coaching, sin restricciones, sobre cómo pueden mejorar sus relaciones de trabajo y su rendimiento. Aprenden a valorar y usar feedback, como herramienta de aprendizaje para lograr altos niveles de responsabilidades a nivel personal, desarrollo profesional, mejores relaciones laborales, mejoramiento continuo y satisfacción del cliente.
¡BIENVENIDOS! (en español)
Bienvenidos a mi nuevo blog cuyo objetivo principal es comuniciar ideas para construir confianza y mejorar resultados cuando personas, organizaciones y comunidades necesitan colaborar.
Tras 30 años en Chile el el campo de las comunicaciones, la capacitación y desarrollo organzacional, sentí que ya es hora de construir puentes con mis contactos en este continente y a través del mundo para compartir algunos de las experiencias y recursos que he acumulado y seguir aprendiendo para que estemos mejor preparados para enfrentar los desafìos de este "Brave New World" (¡¡Mundo Felíz!!).
Les invito a navegar, comentar, compartir y ojalá contribuir!
PARA VER LOS ARTÍCULOS EN ESPAÑOL VER INDICE O CLICK AQUI
Philip Ray
Tras 30 años en Chile el el campo de las comunicaciones, la capacitación y desarrollo organzacional, sentí que ya es hora de construir puentes con mis contactos en este continente y a través del mundo para compartir algunos de las experiencias y recursos que he acumulado y seguir aprendiendo para que estemos mejor preparados para enfrentar los desafìos de este "Brave New World" (¡¡Mundo Felíz!!).
Les invito a navegar, comentar, compartir y ojalá contribuir!
PARA VER LOS ARTÍCULOS EN ESPAÑOL VER INDICE O CLICK AQUI
Philip Ray
The Challenges of Globlisation
Cross-Culture
(Extracted from www.crossculture.com with permission)
As organisations become increasingly international, there are many more demands on the senior executive team. It is not easy to get your message across and convince people with the same background – but the challenge is greater when they have different values and beliefs, organise their world in different ways, and communicate and listen differently.
The Lewis Model of Culture (click on graphic or click here for a multimedia demonstration) is the most practical theoretical approach to classifying cultures, and the easiest to apply to your work.
Demands of Globalisation
Globalisation creates increasingly complex demands :
European cross-border mergers and acquisitions have increased dramatically in recent years.
Off-shoring is no longer done for purely cost-saving purposes. Next Generation Off-Shoring is also down to skills shortages, and for innovation. Duke Fuqua Business School have forecast that off-shoring of R&D will increase by around 65% and of engineering and product design by 80% in the next couple of years (click here for further details).
According to a survey by KPMG, 83% of mergers and acquisitions produce no value for the shareholders. The report concluded that ‘linguistic and cultural divides may explain why deals between the USA and continental Europe were least likely to boost shareholder value.’
In 2006 Wal-Mart pulled out of the German market, losing 1 Billion USD. Analysts said culture was behind the failure – German consumers simply did not like being greeted with a toothy grin as they entered the stores.
A recent Hay Group report found that only 28% of executives felt they had done a good job of cultural due diligence before the deal – though 72% considered such an assessment of critical importance.
Globalisation is a fact of life (click here for an article containing ideas on globalisation). Few of us – whether in business, government or non-governmental organisations – will be able to escape working with people from different cultures from our own. This places unprecedented demands on our ability to understand other ways of thinking, behaving and communicating. Without preparation this can lead to unnecessary stress and a feeling of frustration and helplessness.
No matter how strong the business logic is, nor how good your systems and processes are, you should remember that ‘culture eats processes for lunch!’
If you can pull it off by investing time in developing your personal and organisational skills to make culture work for you rather than against you, you can achieve rare competitive advantage.
Cultural interaction is a business process that needs to be managed – it cannot be left to chance.
For further information watch this section, visit the website http://www.crossculture.com/ or contact me directly.
(Extracted from www.crossculture.com with permission)
As organisations become increasingly international, there are many more demands on the senior executive team. It is not easy to get your message across and convince people with the same background – but the challenge is greater when they have different values and beliefs, organise their world in different ways, and communicate and listen differently.
The Lewis Model of Culture (click on graphic or click here for a multimedia demonstration) is the most practical theoretical approach to classifying cultures, and the easiest to apply to your work.
Demands of Globalisation
Globalisation creates increasingly complex demands :
European cross-border mergers and acquisitions have increased dramatically in recent years.
Off-shoring is no longer done for purely cost-saving purposes. Next Generation Off-Shoring is also down to skills shortages, and for innovation. Duke Fuqua Business School have forecast that off-shoring of R&D will increase by around 65% and of engineering and product design by 80% in the next couple of years (click here for further details).
According to a survey by KPMG, 83% of mergers and acquisitions produce no value for the shareholders. The report concluded that ‘linguistic and cultural divides may explain why deals between the USA and continental Europe were least likely to boost shareholder value.’
In 2006 Wal-Mart pulled out of the German market, losing 1 Billion USD. Analysts said culture was behind the failure – German consumers simply did not like being greeted with a toothy grin as they entered the stores.
A recent Hay Group report found that only 28% of executives felt they had done a good job of cultural due diligence before the deal – though 72% considered such an assessment of critical importance.
Globalisation is a fact of life (click here for an article containing ideas on globalisation). Few of us – whether in business, government or non-governmental organisations – will be able to escape working with people from different cultures from our own. This places unprecedented demands on our ability to understand other ways of thinking, behaving and communicating. Without preparation this can lead to unnecessary stress and a feeling of frustration and helplessness.
No matter how strong the business logic is, nor how good your systems and processes are, you should remember that ‘culture eats processes for lunch!’
If you can pull it off by investing time in developing your personal and organisational skills to make culture work for you rather than against you, you can achieve rare competitive advantage.
Cultural interaction is a business process that needs to be managed – it cannot be left to chance.
For further information watch this section, visit the website http://www.crossculture.com/ or contact me directly.
Copyright © 2008 Richard Lewis Communications. All Rights Reserved
Tom Crane's new Blog
Coaching Cultures During Times Like These
November 18, 2008
(Congratulations to Tom Crane author of Crane Consulting for the publication of his new Blog. We reproduce his opening article below.
November 18, 2008
(Congratulations to Tom Crane author of Crane Consulting for the publication of his new Blog. We reproduce his opening article below.
"The Heart of Coaching" was written to provide leaders and their teams a universal, systematic, and pragmatic way of creating coaching relationships, and then planning and conducting coaching conversations that ended up serving both the coach and the coachee. When it first appeared 10 years ago, the world never contemplated such times as we are experiencing today. The emotional stresses brought about by the economic meltdown are immense and far reaching.
It is precisely during times of emotional stress and deep human challenges that the core skills of coaching come into play. In "normal" times, it is difficult enough to build trusting relationships and hold helpful coaching conversations based in candid feedback that actually led to enhanced business results. Overlay the current context of what is going on in today's global for-profit businesses and not-for-profit communities, and you have a powder keg of emotional energy that can bring people down further.
What people need during times like these is resilience - the ability to bounce back from and effectively deal with the negative events of the times. That often begins with having people around you being willing to listen.
At the heart of a "coaching culture" are people acting as coaches for one another. They CHOOSE to respond with compassion. When leaders and teammates engaging in a coaching conversation have both the capacity and willingness to respond to their colleagues with heartfelt listening, empathy, and a sincere desire to be helpful, they can change everything for their coachee. We directly work with empathy in our coaching workshops as a natural expression of one's Emotional Intelligence, and propose that empathy does not mean one necessarily agreeing with their coachee - but being able to relate to their human experience - and to do that without blame, criticism, or judgment.
These times call forth the very best of us as human beings, and remind us to come from caring, compassionate concern. This is one significant way we can maintain the tone of hopefulness as we wade through these rough waters together.
It is precisely during times of emotional stress and deep human challenges that the core skills of coaching come into play. In "normal" times, it is difficult enough to build trusting relationships and hold helpful coaching conversations based in candid feedback that actually led to enhanced business results. Overlay the current context of what is going on in today's global for-profit businesses and not-for-profit communities, and you have a powder keg of emotional energy that can bring people down further.
What people need during times like these is resilience - the ability to bounce back from and effectively deal with the negative events of the times. That often begins with having people around you being willing to listen.
At the heart of a "coaching culture" are people acting as coaches for one another. They CHOOSE to respond with compassion. When leaders and teammates engaging in a coaching conversation have both the capacity and willingness to respond to their colleagues with heartfelt listening, empathy, and a sincere desire to be helpful, they can change everything for their coachee. We directly work with empathy in our coaching workshops as a natural expression of one's Emotional Intelligence, and propose that empathy does not mean one necessarily agreeing with their coachee - but being able to relate to their human experience - and to do that without blame, criticism, or judgment.
These times call forth the very best of us as human beings, and remind us to come from caring, compassionate concern. This is one significant way we can maintain the tone of hopefulness as we wade through these rough waters together.
http://theheartofcoaching.typepad.com/theheartofcoaching/
Tom Crane, author, "The Heart of Coaching", Crane Consulting, http://www.craneconsulting.com/
Tom Crane, author, "The Heart of Coaching", Crane Consulting, http://www.craneconsulting.com/
©2008 Crane Consulting. All Rights Reserved.
How to Have Influence
Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg
(Extracted from MITSloan Management Review Rehttp://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2008/fall/13/ )
In business and in personal life, people look for easy solutions to solve complex problems. Unfortunately, most quick fixes don’t work because the problem is rarely fed by a single cause. If you want to confront persistent problems, the authors argue, you need to apply several different kinds of influence strategies simultaneously. Their approach is based on three separate studies — two examining organizational issues within companies and a third exploring destructive individual behaviors such as smoking, overeating and excessive alcohol use. The authors document the success of this multipronged approach across different problem domains (from entrenched cultural issues in companies to leader-led change initiatives to stubborn personal challenges). They found that those who employed only one influence strategy (for example, managers offered training, redesigned the organization or held a high-visibility retreat) were far less likely to achieve significant results than those who used four or more sources of influence in combination. The same went for those tackling personal challenges. Many had attempted to alter their behavior by using a single approach (joining a gym, following prescriptions in a book or attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) — but nearly all had failed.
Using examples from such companies as AT&T, Lockheed Martin, OGE Energy and Spectrum Health Systems, the authors describe six influence strategies. The first two, personal motivation and ability, relate to sources of influence within individuals that determine their behavioral choices. The next two, social motivation and ability, relate to how other people affect an individual’s choices. And the final two, structural motivation and ability, encompass the role of nonhuman factors, such as compensation systems, the role of physical proximity on behavior, and technology. “Too often,” the authors argue, "[leaders] bet on a single source of influence rather than tapping a diverse arsenal of strategies. We have learned that the main variable in success or failure is not which sources of influence leaders choose. By far the more important factor is how many.”
Joseph Grenny is cochairman of VitalSmarts LC, a global training and consulting company headquartered in Provo, Utah. David Maxfield is vice president of research at VitalSmarts. Andrew Shimberg is president of nGenera Talent, a talent development and organizational change company in Austin, Texas. Comment on this article or contact the authors at smrfeedback@mit.edu.
Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg
(Extracted from MITSloan Management Review Rehttp://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2008/fall/13/ )
In business and in personal life, people look for easy solutions to solve complex problems. Unfortunately, most quick fixes don’t work because the problem is rarely fed by a single cause. If you want to confront persistent problems, the authors argue, you need to apply several different kinds of influence strategies simultaneously. Their approach is based on three separate studies — two examining organizational issues within companies and a third exploring destructive individual behaviors such as smoking, overeating and excessive alcohol use. The authors document the success of this multipronged approach across different problem domains (from entrenched cultural issues in companies to leader-led change initiatives to stubborn personal challenges). They found that those who employed only one influence strategy (for example, managers offered training, redesigned the organization or held a high-visibility retreat) were far less likely to achieve significant results than those who used four or more sources of influence in combination. The same went for those tackling personal challenges. Many had attempted to alter their behavior by using a single approach (joining a gym, following prescriptions in a book or attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) — but nearly all had failed.
Using examples from such companies as AT&T, Lockheed Martin, OGE Energy and Spectrum Health Systems, the authors describe six influence strategies. The first two, personal motivation and ability, relate to sources of influence within individuals that determine their behavioral choices. The next two, social motivation and ability, relate to how other people affect an individual’s choices. And the final two, structural motivation and ability, encompass the role of nonhuman factors, such as compensation systems, the role of physical proximity on behavior, and technology. “Too often,” the authors argue, "[leaders] bet on a single source of influence rather than tapping a diverse arsenal of strategies. We have learned that the main variable in success or failure is not which sources of influence leaders choose. By far the more important factor is how many.”
Joseph Grenny is cochairman of VitalSmarts LC, a global training and consulting company headquartered in Provo, Utah. David Maxfield is vice president of research at VitalSmarts. Andrew Shimberg is president of nGenera Talent, a talent development and organizational change company in Austin, Texas. Comment on this article or contact the authors at smrfeedback@mit.edu.
Politics meets innovation on way to White House
Politics meets innovation on way to White House
Harvey Schachter, November 17, 2008 at 8:57 AM EST
(At the risk of violating copyright laws and whilst I find the "right" way to do this, I am posting this excellent article on how Obama has generated a massive world-changing wave of trust which a great friend from San Diego forwarded to me. PR)
A knock against Barack Obama in his campaign for the U.S. presidency was that he lacked executive experience. But nothing could be further from the truth, asserts Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab strategic consultancy.
"Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: A new kind of political organization for the 21st century," he writes on Harvard Business Online.
Here's what we can learn from the president-elect.
A self-organization design
We're used to thinking about organizations as either tall or flat, but those are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think in two dimensions: Tall organizations lead unresponsively while flat organizations respond uncontrollably. Mr. Obama's organization combined the virtues of both organizations through the game-changing power of self-organization. It was spherical, with a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.
Seek elasticity of resilience
His organization was built to remain resilient to turbulence. When challenger John McCain attacked Mr. Obama with negative ads in September, instead of retaliating quickly and decisively with its own ads, Mr. Obama's team responded furiously in exactly the opposite way - with record-breaking fundraising. "That's resilience," Mr. Haque says, the team reacted "to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources."
Minimize strategy
His campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naive sense
- as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources on dominating the news cycle, strong-arming his party, or cleverly undercutting competitors' positions with nuanced statements. "They realized that strategy too often kills a deeply lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning," he says.
Maximize purpose
Mr. Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign, Mr. Haque contends. It was larger and more urgent: To change the world. "Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: Yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things. And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can," he observes.
Broaden unity
Marketers traditionally segment and target. They slice and dice, dividing markets into tinier and tinier bits. But they can be hapless at unifying segments. Mr. Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification. His words to his country were that they are "not a collection of Red States and Blue States - We are the United States of America."
Thicken power
The power many corporations wield is thin - the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power inspires, leads, and engenders belief.
The power of an ideal
Remember that there is nothing more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative than an ideal, Mr. Haque says. "Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing - absent, bankrupt, stolen - from your economy, industry, or market? What ideals will you fight and struggle for - and live? Because the ultimate problem with industrial-era business was, as Wall Street has so convincingly demonstrated, this: There weren't any."
Harvey Schachter, November 17, 2008 at 8:57 AM EST
(At the risk of violating copyright laws and whilst I find the "right" way to do this, I am posting this excellent article on how Obama has generated a massive world-changing wave of trust which a great friend from San Diego forwarded to me. PR)
A knock against Barack Obama in his campaign for the U.S. presidency was that he lacked executive experience. But nothing could be further from the truth, asserts Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab strategic consultancy.
"Barack Obama is one of the most radical management innovators in the world today. Obama's team built something truly world-changing: A new kind of political organization for the 21st century," he writes on Harvard Business Online.
Here's what we can learn from the president-elect.
A self-organization design
We're used to thinking about organizations as either tall or flat, but those are concepts built for an industrial era. They force us to think in two dimensions: Tall organizations lead unresponsively while flat organizations respond uncontrollably. Mr. Obama's organization combined the virtues of both organizations through the game-changing power of self-organization. It was spherical, with a tightly controlled core, surrounded by self-organizing cells of volunteers, donors, contributors, and other participants at the fuzzy edges.
Seek elasticity of resilience
His organization was built to remain resilient to turbulence. When challenger John McCain attacked Mr. Obama with negative ads in September, instead of retaliating quickly and decisively with its own ads, Mr. Obama's team responded furiously in exactly the opposite way - with record-breaking fundraising. "That's resilience," Mr. Haque says, the team reacted "to an existential threat by growing, augmenting, or strengthening resources."
Minimize strategy
His campaign dispensed almost entirely with strategy in its most naive sense
- as gamesmanship or positioning. They didn't waste resources on dominating the news cycle, strong-arming his party, or cleverly undercutting competitors' positions with nuanced statements. "They realized that strategy too often kills a deeply lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning," he says.
Maximize purpose
Mr. Obama's goal wasn't simply to win an election, garner votes, or run a great campaign, Mr. Haque contends. It was larger and more urgent: To change the world. "Bigness of purpose is what separates 20th century and 21st century organizations: Yesterday, we built huge corporations to do tiny, incremental things - tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things. And to do that, you must strive to change the world radically for the better - and always believe that yes, you can," he observes.
Broaden unity
Marketers traditionally segment and target. They slice and dice, dividing markets into tinier and tinier bits. But they can be hapless at unifying segments. Mr. Obama succeeded not through division, but through unification. His words to his country were that they are "not a collection of Red States and Blue States - We are the United States of America."
Thicken power
The power many corporations wield is thin - the power to instill fear and inculcate greed. True power inspires, leads, and engenders belief.
The power of an ideal
Remember that there is nothing more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative than an ideal, Mr. Haque says. "Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing - absent, bankrupt, stolen - from your economy, industry, or market? What ideals will you fight and struggle for - and live? Because the ultimate problem with industrial-era business was, as Wall Street has so convincingly demonstrated, this: There weren't any."
domingo, 12 de octubre de 2008
Riversdown House
ENGLISH IN ENGLAND WITH RICHARD LEWISIt has been great to get back in touch with Richard Lewis and his team at Riversdown House after so many years. Riversdown was one of the very first Residential Centres for Language Learning which Richard set up when he returned to the UK from Japan with the aim of providing his language students from all round the world the opportunity of improving their fluency and cultural awareness by immersing themselves in the language and the heritage in the heart of the English countryside.
Over the next few months in the section on Cross Culture I hope to be able to share with you more information on the fascinating and highly relevant studies the team has done in this field and the benefits that many of their international clients have derived.
In the meantime, for further information contact me personally or visit the website:
Richard Lewis Communications
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