I wondered in an earlier blog about whether Instructions are important or not. They are.
I was recently in the UK and as usual when there I rented a car. This part of the process is very simple. I apply on line, get the confirmation, get an email when I arrive telling me which car I have and where its parked. Ignore that email and go find the actual car that they want me to have – a Mercedes Model B . Usually from arriving at the garage I am on the road in under 5 mins. This is great customer service.
However, in this instance, getting the car to move became a whole different problem. Nothing is the same anymore.
I have had one of those weeks where I can’t quite work out if it went well or not. And as is sometimes the case, this particular concern is based on a difference between my perception of myself and that from people around me who I trust.
And from my wife who I trust and who sees everything.
The issue that has caused me to stop and reflect is how I go about building teams.
From the feedback I have got there is little doubt that the people who work for me understand what I want them to do and actually spend a fair amount of time and effort getting on with it. The question is what happens when I am no longer there. Have I created a team that works well together even if individually people are pulling in the right direction.
Stopping, reflecting and deciding to look at what you do is probably something we all know instinctively we should do but I suspect we find it incredibly difficult to do. I know I do. And I know that my typical reaction to being told something that I don’t understand is to ignore it or take it personally. Or both.
But the word at the end of the first paragraph is key. I’ve got feedback from people I trust and if they are saying something I probably ought to listen. Its taken me a long time to get to this point but I do feel ready not only to listen to the advice but to do something about it.
I think we all know we need to do some things better or differently. No one (and maybe not even me) is that good. But actually recognizing it and then doing something about it is difficult.
Oh goodness this is sounding like a self help blog. Its not its meant to be about business.
Finding people you really trust, listening to them and then acting on their advice isn’t easy. But in business it take so much to just keep going and keeping your head above water that we don’t do enough of it.
And we should do more.
Its a lot easier than looking back and realizing what you should have done.
Let me know what you’ve stopped to reflect on? And what you did about afterwards.
I’m just back from NYC from a joint business and vacation trip. Its amazing, having lived in New York for more than three years before moving to Hong Kong, just how much it feels like home. You get off the plane and everything is familiar even while a lot has changed. Although of course nothing changes like Hong Kong where once a week at least three of our local shops have closed, been refurbished and reopened as something else.
Image courtesy of porbital / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Maybe its that pace of change that stops Hong Kong from feeling like home yet. Or maybe its the fact that in New York there are people who recognise me nearly two years after I left. Going into a bar for dinner and being recognized by a waiter who seems genuinely interested in what I’ve been doing just makes the place more comfortable.
Sure, in Hong Kong we have local restaurants where after regular use we are now well known but with the exception of one – Stone Nullah Tavern in Wan Chai – it still doesn’t quite feel like home. Of course Stone Nullah is an American style bar and maybe that’s part of the attraction. They go out of their way to make us feel welcome.
A view of Hong Kong Harbor from the Peak
My wife pointed out to me the other day, as we ruminated on where we might move to next, that it takes a long time to feel settled in a place. Often it takes between 18 months and two years just to feel like you know the place and how things work. Moving internationally is something that I’d recommend to everyone but I have perhaps, in the past three or four months, overlooked just how long it takes to feel settled. While getting a cheery wave and a ‘joe sun’ (or correctly spelled: jóusàhn) from locals is a testament to getting better known, its still a long way from being settled.
So I’ll keep hunting for good bars and restaurants and welcome your recommendations in the comments section below! For the expats living abroad, what made you feel settled in the country you now call home?
At the office I work sits one of the most fearsome devices known to human kind. Well, me anyway. The automatic coffee machine.
Image courtesy of Vichaya Kiatying-Angsulee / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
You would think getting a coffee is a fairly easy thing to achieve. Yet it has taken me more than two years to finally get the coffee I want. And it was, and I am sure you’re ahead of me at this point, all my own fault. I kept saying to myself, ‘how difficult can it be to get the right coffee?’
Well actually very difficult.
The coffee machine has a number of buttons. At first glance (and for the next 300) it looks simple; if you push the top button you get decaffeinated coffee and if you push the second one down you get regular coffee. It all seems simple so far except that when you push the top button nothing happens. Push the second button and you get a hot cup of something that smells and looks a little like coffee. But not something I want to drink.
The trouble is I want decaffeinated. And over the two years that I have pleaded with and begged this machine, it failed to deliver what I wanted.
Last week I went through my usual ritual and nothing happened. I pushed the decaf button and nothing, zip, nada, nowt (that’s a North of England term – see even my blog is globally educational). I stabbed the button again in the hope that somehow it was all in the timing of the button press but nothing happened.
At this point, spying the maintenance man, I did something that men typically find very difficult to do. I asked for help.
‘Read the instructions on the front’ was the reply. Well if it was that simple I would have sorted it out a long time ago so really what use was that? Except it was very useful indeed; standing back from the machine I took a look. And there in front of me were instructions on how to get the coffee I want – press the top button followed by the second button. Sure enough two presses later I had a cup of decaffeinated coffee. Almost two years to the day and after asking for help, reading the instructions, and pressing the buttons in the correct order, I finally had what I wanted.
And a thought struck me – how many times do we do things in a way that is more complicated than necessary (or just give up) simply because we have never asked for help, or read the instructions? I recall that during my time as a COO I was always struck by the fact that the same process, for example issuing an insurance policy, could vary between 20 minutes in one office and two days in another. People would blame the process when in fact it was more about the lack of training, a refusal to ask for help, or lack of clarity around the instructions.
So what?
If you’re responsible for a customer service, whether its a coffee machine or an insurance policy, spend as much time on making sure instructions are clear and on training your people correctly, as you do on developing the product you sell. And, whatever your role in an organization, take responsibility for training yourself. Shout loud and long when there is a lack of support or training. You might be surprised when people actually listen.
While my lack of decaffeinated coffee didn’t impact customers it probably impacted my colleagues – my having three cups of regular coffee is not going to make their lives any eaiser!
So I can now get the coffee I want. Shame I haven’t yet mastered my laptop with its 500 page instruction manual, all on-line and in most parts completely unintelligible.
And thats a story for another blog.
Anyone else out there ever gone against their natural tendencies and asked for help? What was the result?
Hotel California by the Eagles includes amongst its many lines ‘you can check out anytime you like but you may never leave’ which provides the perfect point from which to launch this weeks posting all about hotels and travel. I have been fortunate enough to stay in many hotels, in many countries and for many different reasons.
Some have been dire (you know who you are) and some have been great but what is it that makes the difference? Surely having high quality shower gel makes the difference? Well no. Maybe its the free newspaper that is hung on your door at night? Again no. So it must be the staff? Yes to a point. Good staff will make a poor hotel better and poor staff will ruin a good hotel but that’s only half the story.
And while on the subject of ‘poor staff’ let me digress for a moment. I doubt many hotel owners go out of their way to recruit ‘poor staff.’ I doubt you’ll see a job advert seeking ‘staff with no idea and no desire to help wanted as a hotel receptionist.’ Poor staff are inevitably the result of poor recruitment practices and even more importantly a lack of suitable training. Poor staff is an excuse and any business leader who’s staff are accused of being poor should hang their head in shame. No really, hang your head in shame if your staff have ever been called poor. Or change your HR people. Do both. Now.
So good staff help but at the end of the day I have summed up what makes a good hotel as ‘its one that just works’. Meaning what exactly? After giving it some thought there are three things a great hotel does well
they recognize that people want a simple check in process that moves you from street to room as soon as possible
there is an understanding that all the staff have a role to play in making the guest feel welcome even if only staying overnight. It is the cleaner who welcomes you to the hotel with a smile that makes as big an impact as the receptionist
a great hotel has all its facilities working and when there is a problem (as there inevitably will be) they try and sort the problem out. They let you know what they are going to do and then they do it; no fuss just competent problem solving.
Actually when you think about it these three could apply to any business. And yet so many places I stay can’t make these three simple things work.
I wonder why? What makes a good hotel experience for you? Or for that matter what makes any customer experience good?
I have long been interested in the upside and downside of risk and reward. This is nothing more than a long winded way of saying that you win some you lose some. Managing the chance of either of these outcomes is what being in business is all about. But we can often get carried away by only seeing the negative aspects of risk.
But risk can have upsides and worrying constantly about the downside means we lose sight of opportunities.
One of may favorite signs of an over zealous approach to managing risk – well making sure you can’t be sued and that is not the same thing as managing risk – can be found in the bathrooms in New York – ‘Warning – This Door May Open.’
When I first saw the notice I couldn’t help but smile, its a notice that states the obvious. It is after all a door and it is therefore likely that it might open at some point in time. In fact as I was standing in the bathroom hoping to get back to work I was relying on the door to open. The word ‘May’ was a bit of a challenge implying as it did that the Door ‘May Not’ open and of course I had no way of knowing what would persuade it to open. However taking courage from having been present for many door openings and remembering that it never seemed that difficult I reached out, grabbed the handle and pulled. Door open, I walked through and the rest as they say, is history.
After a bit of reflection I realized that this warning in some ways reflected the best and worst of how we think about risk today. By its very nature there is a chance that the risk may happen (or in this case the door may or may not open). Risk is all around so reminding ourselves that risks do actually occur should help us think about how we assess , understand, and consider risk. The fact that a risk can occur and that this can turn into a loss of some kind should be a sobering reminder that we have our own responsibilities to understand and assess what we do on a day to day basis. It should also prompt us all to think about the positive aspects of risk – the door may in fact open.
But the fact that a risk may occur should not in any way stop us from going about our business. So as a reminder that risks can actually turn into something bad and that we have some element of control over how we treat these risks the warning on the door is a good thing.
The downside of a warning like that is when it is used as a way of apportioning blame when something happens. “I told you the door might open”.
If businesses continually feel that the role of government or society in general is to tell them off for something they did then we continue to encourage a risk adverse attitude. And a risk adverse attitude eventually leads us to take as little risk as possible. Business comes to a halt and a slow (and sometimes rapid) decline sets in.
And for a society all of a sudden we reach a conclusion, collectively, that taking a risk might be a bad thing.
But risk is what we do. If we don’t take risk we cannot find any positive potential nor, and this is the most important point, can we learn from mistakes. Learning from what went wrong as well as what went well is what underpins a great business.
So the door may open and that might be a good thing.
There is nothing I like better than a slow Sunday morning at home. Relaxed after a good nights sleep, according to my Fitbit anyway, with the smells of fresh bread baking in the oven this really is a good time of the week.
A time to reflect on the week just gone and begin to look ahead to the week ahead. A time to catch up on emails, make some of those changes to the on line accounts that you’ve been meaning to do for a while (and will be thinking about again next week) and to have a look around the internet for something interesting.
And nothing shatters that peace more quickly than the howls of anguish from your wife as she tries to make some US websites work in Hong Kong. For reasons that have been long documented and lamented some US enterprises still don’t understand that there users, while speaking English, may actually live overseas. So when you finally get around to changing your address on the system to Hong Kong the helpfully designed system automatically redirects you to the local Chinese site. In Mandarin which is of course not the local language in Hong Kong as most native speakers use Cantonese.
And to be very helpful the site itself doesn’t have a translate facility into English. And once your browser thinks your in Hong Kong it doesn’t really matter what you do the helpful system will redirect you back to the Hong Kong site, in Mandarin.
There really is no excuse for this – working overseas should not stop your ability to work. And the US companies who insist on making this difficult need to get a globe. On it they will find Asia Pacific and right in the center they will find China. The future. Lets hope the Chinese are a little more flexible on languages otherwise the whole world is about to come to a rapid stop.
The business world has so many opportunities to reshape itself and drive better outcomes - we are only scratching at the surface of the change agenda and all the possibilities open to us. What ever happens next must embrace how we all work better together, how we are organised, the things we do and the many tools we use to make the change. Let’s make good things happen
The Burble 