I recently completed a chapter in a book on social media to be published next year (no not mine – another one) and I called it “Your staff are your best advocates”. Hugh McLeod just re-blogged this post from 2005 on the same topic, and Steve Bridger just said in a Twitter conversation that he got a good response to saying “ loyalty to charity brands is now shifting towards affinity to individuals working within charities” in a keynote yesterday.

We are gradually groping our way towards the Cluetrain idea of markets being conversations but it is still a long way off and “brand” still mostly means orchestrated bollocks.

I am a mentor at The School of Communication Arts, run by Marc Lewis, which aims to develop new talent for the marketing business. I have done a few mentoring sessions and really enjoyed meeting and getting to know the students. However I have been feeling increasingly uncomfortable about being involved, even marginally, with an activity that I find increasingly annoying.

When I called Marc to share these feelings we had a pretty robust exchange of views on marketing and its place in the modern world. We then had round two of this argument in a session in front of the students at the school last week. I said that I had no problem with advertising as such. I am happy being helped to make decisions about buying stuff. I will always buy stuff and ways of making better decisions about what to buy are always welcome. But this is a million miles away from being shouted at about crap I don’t want when I am trying to do something else – no matter how entertainingly it is done. There were one or two students nodding as I made my case but most were pretty full on that we “need” marketing to fund content, entertain us in magazines, and smarten up Times Square!

Roll on the day when marketing retires into the background and I can have real conversations, with real people, in real businesses, who are doing stuff that makes my life better.

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Many moons ago I met Bob Khan, one of the fathers of the internet, and while I was with him a journalist asked if he was worried about governments or businesses damaging the openess that had made the internet grow and thrive as it has.

His response was “If the kinds of people who work for those kinds of organisations aren’t stupid before they start working there, they quickly become stupid after they have worked there for a while”

Recent events brought this insight to mind again …..

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Leaders face a near perfect storm today. Making sales and profit goals are tougher in the “new normal’, employee disengagement is near epic levels and Gallup research cites nearly one in three payroll dollars are lost because of disengagement.

The savvy leader begins to sort and understand what is going on in the larger economy and their own organization. One of the biggest challenges is an epic rush of resumes. Recent survey data from the Wall Street Journal, November 2009 cited nearly 87% of employees are distracted by thoughts, daydreams or plans to leave the organization. The 87% looks like this…60% actively seeking other employment, 21% networking, and 6% updating resumes. Bottomline, organizations may be about to experience a massive round of “free agency employees.”

The challenge for leaders is to reach out and engage employees… inspiring a new age of honesty and engagement. And reach out to actively disengaged employees. Often disengaged employees are fearful and they no longer trust…trust has evaporated. The loss of trust is serious and there is a cause and effect. The organization may not have met their needs.

Here are 3 tips to purge the wrong attitudes for excuses, whining and negativity.

1. “It’s the economy”, words of the employee blaming the economy. Every organization faces a tough economy. An employee who substitutes excuses for results is not a team player. The response: Discuss expectations of no tolerance for excuses. When mistakes happen, as they certainly will, the correct response is a simple “I’m sorry” and the employees adjustments if any to be sure mistakes are minimized.

2. “If only we had….” The whiner’s theme. It’s ok to find gaps and soft spots in the organization. But it serves no one to put energies into whining without smart solutions. The response: Ask that the whining to stop. Reach out and ask what could be better, what is missing? Ask employees for their personal commitment to help.

3. “Negative Nancy’ this is the naysayer, the one who loves to rain on everyone’s parade. The Response: When Negative Nancy says we “can’t”…respond… “I understand why we haven’t…tell us how we can”.

Try this as a leader. Write down all the things going on in your organization which bug you. Keep writing until you have at least a list of 20. Throw out the ones which are numbers…like sales numbers, profit…those results are simply symptoms of people issues. You want to focus on the human element. After the list of 20 personality irritants..the human things…group into patterns…keep working until you’ve sorted into a list of 3.

You’ve begun to sort and clarity…all will help you focus on the most important blockers to your organizations success. Your purpose is to clarify the 3 big blockers…the things that bug you…what does it call you to do? You may be ready for expert help to go to the next step. The next step is hard work…but the payoff is huge.

We’ve tackled big issues and big challenges and have been involved in just about every important phase of business. http://lighthouse-leadership.com By the way, do you want to learn more about creating a powerful workplace culture? If so, download our brand new free ebook Three Elegant Strategies for Your Organizations Survival Elegant Courage Jodi lead the cultural turnaround which was core to financial recovery. Mike is innovative and persistently explores new ideas.

Author: Mike Krutza
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Hybrid and Electric Cars

Maybe it is just me, but shortly after posting about how pygmies are taking over the world, I had 2 really bad experiences of customer service from the same company.

There is a well-known budget hotel chain here in the UK called Travelodge. I have used its various hotels frequently in the last year or so. Normally my stay is a fairly painless experience – it’s a budget chain so you get what you pay for, but the rooms are pretty comfortable so I’m happy. I tend to arrive at my destinations late so I nearly always get the night porters when I check in. Without exception these people have been courteous and kind. But the behaviour of the management in these 2 recent incidents defies believe.

On the first occasion, I was told, apologetically, by the night porter when I arrived that the advertised breakfast bags for the following day had not arrived. The next morning I politely asked the day manager why there had been no delivery and where I might get some breakfast locally. His response was astonishing. Had I not been told there were no bags when I checked in? Yes? In which case the reason why was none of my business. And this despite the advertised promise of a breakfast bag. And where could I get some breakfast now? “Dunno!” was the curt reply. Which was strange given that I’d seen him at the hotel over several months.

The second occasion was in a different city. My wife woke at 3am and walked into an eave in our room almost knocking herself out. The night porter could not have been more helpful, bringing a bucket of ice to the room along with an incident form for us to complete. On returning home I wrote and complained about the safety aspect of this eave. After 4 weeks I’m still waiting for a response. Not an apology mark you, just a response.

What is disturbing is that I hear similar stories from friends and colleagues about all sorts of companies. In my experience it is service companies that seem to provide the worst customer service; just think of all the complaints over the last few years about the banks and building societies and their high-handed attitude towards their customers.

One of the lessons all business leaders need to learn is that they must listen to their customers and try and act upon what they tell them. But do most businessmen listen for themselves (assuming that they listen at all) or do they rely upon some third party to tell them what their customers think (i.e. their customer services department)? At my last company, I made a point of spending time answering the telephones in the technical support department as often as I could because this connected me directly to our customers. Whenever we made a change to our service (we were a large Internet service provider), I got almost immediate feedback from the customer base telling me whether or not we’d made the right decision – and some of that feedback was very blunt I can tell you!

If business leaders don’t talk to their customers directly they are bound to alienate them at some point. And alienating customers is likely to mean a rapid drop in sales with all the problems and pressures that can bring.

We don’t do customer service anymore.

Perhaps we should.

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