I love Frank Caliendo. He’s an impressionist that does the absolute best impression of John Madden you’ve ever heard. At the beginning of this You Tube clip he pokes fun at Madden for explaining things that you already know.
“uuhh… if ya can’t see, theeennn ya don’t know what your lookin’ at”
I think sometimes in the world of Service, and probably business in general, we forget to consistently communicate what success is because we think it’s as obvious as “seeing”. It’s not. At least it’s not to everyone.
Truly Great leaders in service roles get to where they are because they understand the big picture and the critical role they and their team play in helping the organization get there. An often repeated mistake is one that is rarely repeated – defining success for the team.
In Service & Support, where bright, creative, often expressive and downright amiable people pleasers dominate the landscape we tend to just assume everyone knows what it is that we’re trying to accomplish. And on the surface things like promptly answering the phone, responding to an email, or reproducing a problem in the lab are all the right things.
But those are tasks that support a larger organizational objective. You can try and wrap it all up in to “Increase shareholder value” but that doesn’t exactly resonate. You can attempt to come down one level and suggest “increase the intent to repurchase rates!” but that isn’t very sexy either. It’s not easy stuff. But it’s necessary.
Here’s how I defined it to one of my teams a couple of years ago. My company sold mobile computing devices and over 60% of the business, if not more, was sold in to hospitals, clinics, practices, etc. We’d get break/fix calls from large IT shops for a hospital network down to a nurse that doubled as an office manager.
So what was success? Success was coming in every single day and doing absolutely everything in your power to make sure that the care-givers in those hospitals and clinics had nothing standing between them and the father, brother, sister, or mother that needed their attention. It wasn’t hold times, or case closures. It was “Guys, there are people out there who are depending on our stuff working so the level of care they can give to people is the best it can possibly be. Do not lose sight of what matters here. It is about helping people and when some nurse is on the phone for 20 minutes with a broken product that’s 20 minutes she’s not helping a patient that could just as well be your friend or family member. Success is helping care givers do a better job by making sure their tools work for them ALL the time. ”
Don’t lose sight of the obvious. Define and communicate success often and with passion, and then LIVE it.
