Victor Prince's Blog, page 10

Avoid the Transparency Trap: Do Transparency Right in your Organization

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“Transparency” has become a hot buzzword over the last several years among business leaders and consultants. I have found, however, that the definition can vary between the organizations producing goods and services and their customers. For the producers, they may think this means being completely open and showing everything they do. Proud front line managers may internalize this to be “let me show you how complex and hard it is to do our job so you are impressed.” Customers, however, are not necessarily interested in how you do your business – they just care if you are going to meet their needs with the timeliness, quality and cost they expect. If they are one of the few that are genuinely interested in learning how your widgets are made, they can probably find a video on television or the internet.

We are all customers and see useful examples of transparency every day, especially in transportation related businesses. When we are getting a package delivered by FedEx, UPS or other, you can probably track where it is online using a tracking code. When we are catching a plane or train, we typically can see the estimated time of arrival or departure on screens in the airport or station. In some sites, we can also see the track record of timeliness for that flight or train in the past to help us when we are deciding whether to book it. Transparency is emerging in other everyday areas too. For example, many new restaurants feature an open kitchen design where diners can see exactly how their food is prepared. Some of that may be for aesthetics, but customers may also get value by added trust by seeing the kitchen has nothing to hide.

Done well, transparency can be a game changer for your business. One of my favorite recent examples is Uber. Uber is a car reservation service that enables you to arrange a car to pick you up. Fundamentally, they do the same thing that taxi dispatchers have done for decades over the phone. However, once you make a reservation on Uber, Uber uses mobile location-based web technology to show you exactly who your driver will be, where they are, and how long it will be until they arrive. Among other conveniences, this feature has been a key one to Uber’s rapid growth.

So for you as a manager of an operation seeking to add transparency, think hard about what the customer really wants to hear about, not what you and your team want to talk about. Avoid the “transparency trap” of over-sharing how you do your job and focus more on showing the customer how you are doing in fulfilling their specic needs.

The 50/50 Format: Improve your Check-ins with your Team Members

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Do you have regular one-on-one “check in” meetings with your staff? Done effectively, those are invaluable ways for you to manage your direct reports performance and provide them with developmental coaching. Done poorly, they can be a inefficient use of time and even counter-productive and demotivating. Applying a little structure and process to these regular one-on-one meetings with your staff can help ensure you are all getting what you need out of them.

I synthesized the meeting format I used with team members into a structure I labeled the “50/50 Check-In.” The first 50 represents what I as the manager want to get out of the meeting. The second 50 represents what my team member needs to get out of the meeting. Each “50” represents 50 percent so we divide up the meeting evenly between those two agendas. Here are topics you probably want to cover in each of those 50s.

The Manager’s 50 – Identify the information you want to get out of these meetings. These should include:

Morale – Basically, how are they feeling about things? How is their morale? How is general morale? It’s a good icebreaker to kick off the meeting in a personal way. You may want to come up with a more fun name like “Pulse-Check” to make is sound less stiff.Objectives Progress – How is your team member progressing against their individual objectives? What is new since the last time you met? How close are they to their year-end goal? By asking those questions on a regular basis, you are letting your team members know you expect constant progress. I particularly like the “what’s new lately” question so I get a sense for how fast things are moving. It’s also a chance to celebrate small wins.Needs from You – What do they need from you to help them get their objectives completed? Do they need you to make a decision for them? Do they need additional resources? Do they need you to provide some “air cover” to get them through some organizational or bureaucratic barrier?Upward Feedback – You should ask them for any feedback on how you are doing to help you continue your own personal and professional development. A simple way to elicit this is through the following five questions: What should I do more? What should I do less? What should I stop doing? What should I start doing? What should I do differently? Obviously this upward feedback requires a great degree of trust to be honest and useful. If you haven’t been part of a “feedback culture” it could be a good idea to get some training for your team and write down some shared principles and ground-rules.

The Team Member’s 50 – Identify what information your team members should get out of the meeting. These include:

Objectives Feedback – Is their progress against their objectives meeting your expectations in terms of quality, timing, and efficiency? Think about the next performance review you will have to write on them and give them your honest sense of where they are trending to. Performance reviews should never be a surprise at the end of the year.Competencies Feedback – How are they doing in demonstrating and building the skills they need to be successful in your organization and their role? This is a separate topic from their Objectives feedback. For example, they could be progressing fine on their objectives but if they are making work harder for everyone else on the team, they need to know that. If your organization has a structured performance management framework with required competencies by job type and level, use that as a framework.Coaching – Where they are doing well, give them positive reinforcement. Where they are not quite where they need to be yet, help them learn. What skills or behaviors do they need to build to continue their progression on their desired career path? Talk with them to figure out what they are short on. Suggest training they should get or people they should talk to fill those gaps. Ask them to research training options to propose to you. Give them the benefits of your own lessons learned if applicable.Open Door – Is their anything else on their mind that they want to know or they want you to know about? I highly recommend an “Open Door” (or better yet, a “No Door” ) policy for managers to make themselves accessible to team members. Make this part of the meeting a natural chance for this to happen.

In addition to making the most of the 50/50 meeting time itself, there are things you should do right before and after each meeting to make them the most productive. These are great tasks an executive assistant can help you make happen consistently.

Email any specific topic items you want to cover to your team member at least 48 hours before your meeting. Your executive assistant can kick this off by asking you at the right time and capturing those in an email sent to both of you.

Ask your team member to send you any agenda items or materials they want to cover in advance too. If they are looking for you to make a decision, ask them to let you know. Once again your executive assistant can manage this for you via emails.

After the meeting, summarize and share any Action Items (i.e., the “to do’s” ) that came out of the meeting. These should be a relatively short list of short sentences, each with a clear “who,” “what” and “when” included. Your executive assistant can help you with this. It’s also a great idea to have the action items from the last meeting printed out and included as an attachment to the agenda for the meeting. You can discuss that in the Objectives Progress part of the meeting.

Finally, how long and how often should these meetings be? It depends on your situation – e.g., how many direct reports you have – but an hour every one or two weeks is a good goal. A half an hour weekly can perhaps too. Start with one of those and figure out what works best for you. You want to find the “sweet spot” in frequency since there is a bunch of pre-work that goes into each one that you will want to make sure will consistently get done. One thing to consider in setting the frequency is the nice little secret benefit of the 50/50 – they make easy natural deadlines and check-ins for the new things you ask your team members to do.

If you would like to see a sample example of an agenda and a list of action items from a 50/50, please email me.

The Thomas Jefferson Tombstone Test - How will you describe your legacy?

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Because Thomas Jefferson had such an immense impact on US history, he has been immortalized in many ways ranging from the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC to being on the $2 bill to having a state capital city named after him. Interestingly enough, however, he was much more modest about his own achievements when he chose what to have inscribed on his tombstone. His self-written epitaph reads “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence – of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom and – FATHER of the University of Virginia.”

While all great accomplishments, what stands out is what he chose to leave out. He makes no mention of the other major government positions he held: third President of the United States, first Secretary of State of the United States, second Vice President of the United States, Governor of Virginia. Maybe he viewed big jobs and fancy titles and just a means to an end, not an end themselves. He makes no mention of major accomplishments of his presidency, most notably the Louisiana Purchase. Maybe he viewed that as unfinished work.

If you had to think about just three things you wanted to be remembered for in your career, what would you like those three things to be, when your career is all done? What would be the results and lasting impact you would leave, not just the fancy titles that you would hope to have next to your name?

By visualizing what you would like to achieve, you can more clearly plan how to do things every day to get you on your way to achieve those goals.

Use the Age of Oldest Case (AOC) Metric to Prevent Customers from Falling through the Cracks

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If you manage an operation that processes individual requests, cases or such that typically take a day or more to complete, you probably track a lot of metrics. Things like average completion time, percent completed within a goal time, etc. are typical parts of an operational dashboard. Those are useful in assessing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your process. One thing that those can mask however is any outliers, like a case that has fallen through the cracks and is not being worked at all. Your overall process can be humming along quite well but an outlier can really create a bad customer experience for somebody. Customers like this are the ones most likely to post complaints about you on the internet, to the press, to regulators and others. While 99.9 percent of your customers have a great experience, this 0.1 percent can create a big headache and embarrassment for you.

So how do you minimize the risk of having a customer fall through the cracks?

A great metric to include in your dashboard is “Age of Oldest Case” (AOC). This basically identifies the oldest case in your system and calculates how long it has been in there. Once that case is resolved, you find the next oldest case. By tracking this AOC metric, you will keep focus on resolving those individual problem cases and not just ignore them.