262: Uncommon Service. Radical Imagination.

Dear Friends

Before we get started, thank you to everyone who commented on my new website copy and, in particular, on the curated leadership learning journeys I’ve been piloting. There’s work to be done! I appreciate the generosity with which you shared your time, perspectives and expertise.

I planned to move on from our conversation about creating conditions for uncommon service, then I visited my local barber (to deal with the 52-year-old expanding eyebrows and other unmentionables).

It was midday, the shop open for business, but he opened the door, face plastered with white paste, applied thick and even. Somehow, the luxurious black of his eyebrows, moustache, and beard remained magically untouched. Under his eyes were two cotton pads, secured by slivers of surgical tape, and across his nose, an adhesive strip was pulled tight.

I raised an eyebrow. He grinned, ‘Making pretty’, and then shrugged his shoulders, ‘If I no pretty, how you trust?’

A simple truth, often forgotten. What we want our customers to experience, our employees must. For our teams to experience it, we must know it. For strategy to move others, it must touch soul and self.

Knowledge not experienced, not lived, not embodied, has shallow roots.

And so, we’re back with Frances Frei and Anne Morriss.

/strategy  

You’ll remember from last week’s letter that their foundational formulation is:

Excellence = Design X Culture.

Their book is structured around five truths. Truth Number 3 is ‘It’s Not Your Employees’ Fault’ (Click here for all five).

It’s packed with examples of how companies have designed to meet the requirements of the five truths.  

Commerce Bank rested its strategy on warm friendliness. An eight-day working at Commerce required eight hours of smiling, so their interviewers looked for a simple cue – did the candidates smile in a resting state? Sadly, I wouldn’t get the job.

When you’ve decided the capabilities you’re amplifying, recruit for it.

But, even with good recruitment, you might not get excellent performance (after all we all think we’re the best recruiters).

Frei and Morris provoke:

“If your company delivers disappointing service on a consistent basis, or even excellent service but only in fits and starts, it’s not because you’ve somehow managed to hire an entire company of people who just don’t get it. The problem is much more likely to be that you’ve built a service model for phantom employees you wish you had — but actually don’t.”

And keep poking:

“… Here’s a safe assumption: unless you have the resources and capacity to systematically attract, reward, and unleash the very best in your industry, some of the people now reporting to you cannot be objectively characterized as outstanding. Second, you’re probably making your employees’ job harder. The hunt for new sources of revenue within organizations often leads to an increase in operational complexity”.

What they don’t say, but is quite possibly true, is that we, ourselves, may well not be ‘objectively characterized as outstanding’. Hard to believe, I know, but worth considering.

But breathe, excellent service is the result of intentional design, far more strategy and implementation than individual brilliance, so we can also be outstanding. It just requires those two things – intention and design.

To start, take as given that your organisation’s systems and processes make it hard to deliver excellent service.

Ensure that you and the rest of your executive team spend a few days a year in a customer-facing role. I don’t mean playing golf with clients, I mean get into the call centre, take an order and try to fulfil it, call your call centre, live what your teams and customers live.

Identify and eradicate blockages and frustrations. Every business has them. If you remove them, you reduce cost and increase customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

(Unsurprisingly asking your teams what blockages they face and removing them drives increased trust, higher engagement and better performance.)

//self

The world’s pace and the conviction with which its solutions and formulas are given mean we rarely pause to design our lives. It is as if we are glued onto a high-speed conveyor belt that moves us from school to university to career to retirement, and only occasionally, in the middle of the night, do we get to pause and think, “Does this fit my definition of excellence?” Quite possibly, we might not even know what excellence looks like for our number one customer, ourselves.

As with businesses, when we’re overwhelmed with complexity and our energy is depleted, knowing what excellence is can be hard to discern.

So, before vexing yourself with existential questions of excellence, start small. Find ways to add back energy – stop the unnecessary (your phone), sleep a bit more, do what gives you joy, be generous to strangers. Increase your energy and the rest becomes more possible.

//soul

Strategy gives us the how, but it is soul that gets us out of bed, that energises what we do; without it, we just go through the motions.

I love how Krista Tippet describes author adrienne maree brown, “She works with the complex fullness of reality to move towards a wholeness of living”. That’s a way to live and lead.

brown is the author of books Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, Pleasure Activism and Loving Corrections.

In this brief podcast (invest 17 minutes, it’s worth it), brown and Tippet speak about the power of imagination, and how the limits of our imagination constrain the kinds of futures we create.

I was reminded of their insights whilst I read The $140 Billion Failure We Don’t Talk About in which the authors comment “The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will”, and “The focus of the effort became replacing what was lost, not building something stronger and better”.

Without imagination strategy fails.

brown comments that we are born into imaginings that we’ve been told are true, that we are in an imagination battle, and that the work of radical imagination is to dream beyond constructs imposed or inherited.

She ends the conversation with words we all need, “… the most exciting thing right now: we are aware, if we wake up, we are in a place where we can create so much history and so much change. Everything is falling apart but also new things are possible… We have no idea what we could be, but everything that we have been is falling apart. So it’s time to change. And we can be mindful about that. That’s exciting”.

All the best

Karl

Please share this letter with your networks. If you’re reading for the first time, you can subscribe here. I have space for three new clients from November, if you’re interested in working with me drop me an email.