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Leaders, do you appoint someone the workplace pit bull believing it will make everyone more responsible and accountable? Let’s consider what workplace pit bulls do to accountability.

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The Story.
In a meeting with a brand new customer, one of my clients introduced herself to me as the one who pit bulls everyone. The boss had given her that responsibility believing it would make everyone more accountable.

I finished the engagement and for the first time turned down follow on business when they asserted the pit bull approach would remain. Her actions had few positive outcomes and many negative.


The Claim. Driving and pressuring people to the maximum creates accountability.


The Truth. Driving and pressuring people to the maximum creates a flurry of activity and fear of blame. It might create short term productivity but not accountability.


What Do Workplace Pit Bulls Do to Accountability?

1. Make team members very risk averse. They take the safe approach to avoid the pit bull’s bite. This has little to do with producing the quality outcome and is hardly accountable to the organization’s goals.




2. Breed a not my fault culture to avoid blame and punishment. This is the exact opposite of responsibility and accountability.




3. Stress people right out … of their knowledge. Have you ever been so stressed that you can’t even think? How can you be accountable to the organization’s goals if you can’t apply your knowledge, creativity, and critical thinking on a daily basis?




4. Reduce trust and respect. When a blame culture takes root, people begin to mistrust not only the pit bull but everyone around. Everyone covers their tracks instead of investing in true collaboration and teamwork to reach the organization’s goals. This is not accountability.




5. Demoralize team members. Workplace pit bulls may produce obedience yet it’s at the cost of morale, spirit, and the desire to be accountable.

Workplace pit bulls (or those who appoint them) are filled with fear of organizational failure and instill fear to prevent it. Ironic, isn’t it, that they can end up producing the very thing they wish to avoid — organizational failure!

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Accountability does not foster this culture of fear and blame. It thrives in learning organizations that empower people within appropriate boundaries.

It rises out of honoring individual accomplishments as well as team successes. It both requires and engenders high levels of achievement by inspiring new possibilities and tapping the team’s current knowledge and ideas.

If you are a leader and aren’t seeing the performance and results you need from the teams, don’t seal your fate by confusing accountability and blame.

Blame won’t change their behavior; a change in your behavior will. Honestly assess your leadership style and make changes to produce change.

Inspire accountability in your teams. Don’t pit bull them into obedience.

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What is the greatest approach you have ever used or witnessed that produced accountability? What resources will you recommend in the comments section below?


From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Resource for Entrepreneurial Leaders: Something Needs to Change Around Here by Liz Weber, CMC.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service, teamwork, and leading change to corporate teams. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Authenticity is touted as critical to success in leadership and business in the 21st century. Authenticity is the spirit of the day with young entrepreneurs and new generations in the workplace. It is the ever present success formula from brand strategists and marketing experts.

Meanwhile adaptation is also critical to success. Leaders, teams, and businesses that cannot adapt to change, fail in the long run. Adapting to market conditions, generational differences, cultural diversity, customer expectations, and the mindset of venture capitalists brings success.

There are many who see authenticity and adaptation as mutually exclusive and at war with each other. This view drives their extreme behavior.

Some think adaptation defines a chameleon so they cling to authenticity. Those who crave acceptance constantly adapt and lose authenticity as they meld into the crowd.

Extremes like this lead businesses, leaders, and individuals to unnecessary mistakes. Authenticity & adaptation are partners, not enemies, in success.

Authenticity:
Builds clarity & customer trust in your brand
Prevents groupthink on teams
Inspires and engages employee talent
Develops trust between leaders & team collaborators

Adaptation:
Keeps your brand current and competitive
Builds bonds for teamwork
Develops your versatility to capture possibilities

The extreme view can grip anyone or any company during tough times. Consider Coca Cola’s historic move to crush Pepsi Co. so they adapted Coke to taste like Pepsi — with disastrous results. Or IBM’s refusal in the early 90′s to adapt and embrace outside influences until the stock price plummeted. Witness online rudeness, labeled as authentic and necessary for honest discourse. Yet honesty and civility can coexist.

Thwart the power of the extreme view:

1. Evolve and test your purpose regularly. An up-to-date mission gives you clarity when the cloud of stress and tough times move in.
2. Gather and consider quantitative and qualitative information. Seek other views.
3. When you are comfortable, stretch. When you are uncomfortable, question your motives before you act.

When adaptation is driven purely by fear, greed, or insecurity, stick with authenticity.

When comfort, arrogance, ignorance, selfishness or fear of change masquerades as authenticity, it’s time to adapt.


How have you found the balance between authenticity and adaptation in your leadership, or business, or teamwork?

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, is known for taking corporate teams from inspiration to action during times of great change. Her workshops on teamwork, transitions, and customer relations continue to deliver stellar results.

Customer service teams, technical support teams, help desks, customer care centers, and call centers have one critical customer service challenge in this decade — adapting to customers’ needs and preferences.  It takes more than just multiple customer service venues (channels) or the latest technology and knowledge management to satisfy diverse expectations of customers around the globe.

It takes empowered CSRs, technical support reps, help desk analysts, and call center agents that are allowed to innovate without fear of failure or punishment.

Companies in every sector are touting innovation as the top focus for continued success yet not implementing this empowerment at the front line.  Necessity is the mother of invention (innovation) IF fear of failure or punishment is low. Otherwise the front line sticks to a pre-determined routine and set of rules that fall short of  superior service to diverse customers.

Innovate Customer Service at the Front Line

1. Communicate the purpose, values, and mission of customer service. On that basis, trust staff to make appropriate judgments and in-the-moment decisions on adapting to customers. Nordstroms and Zappos successfully empower their front line.
2. Use staff meetings to develop a culture of continuous improvements. The front line knows what each customer is thinking. Encourage them to innovate by tapping their knowledge and ideas for improvements.
3. Foster and recognize the front line for their innovations that deliver great customer service.

BONUS: In addition to higher customer satisfaction ratings, the front line achieves greater job satisfaction. Doubtful?

Studies at MIT and University of Chicago, as summarized by Daniel Pink, DRIVE: Motivation Beyond Carrots & Sticks, show that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the motivators of great performance and seeds of job satisfaction (except for purely mechanical tasks).

Customer service professionals are very purpose driven. The best seek jobs in enlightened companies that tap their commitment and give them autonomy to innovate and deliver the best possible service. Attract the best talent and they will deliver the best service!

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Questions:

What else will encourage the front line to innovate for better service?

What else can customer service leaders do to increase performance and retain the best staff?

Individual strengths and teamwork are not at odds with each other. In fact, they are innately connected.  Why then do so many leaders think that appreciating individual strengths will hurt teamwork?

This is an important issue in this time of asking people at work to do more with less. Study after study shows that appreciation/recognition is the one key thing management can do to inspire and motivate effort and performance – http://fb.me/HgG7O52r.

Leaders, you could argue that the appreciation could be given to the whole team and not the individuals. Yes that is true.  Yet, you run the risk of the appreciation sounding shallow and repetitious if it lacks specifics.

You could argue that the individual appreciation could be given in private and team kudos in public. Yes that is true.  Yet it cheats the entire team out of the chance to:

1. Participate in building a culture of identifying and appreciating the strengths that individuals contribute to the team’s results
2. Learn what individual strengths exist on the team for future success and
   
3. Witness the joy that their individual teammates experience when honored for their strengths.
   

As a leader, what can you do to ensure that individual appreciation won’t hurt teamwork?

1. Honor diversity. Don’t fall into the trap of honoring only those individuals who are very much like you.
   
2. Highlight how the individual strengths contributed to the team’s results.
3. Recognize both the individual strengths on tasks and also on the interpersonal skills which contribute to the team’s results.
4. Applaud the effort of all who blended the individual strengths into team results.

What else helps the team value each individual’s strengths as well as the total results? Or do you think that this is all very risky? I welcome your comments below.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, delivers transformational team building workshops and advice that empower you to remove teamwork obstacles — big and small. See this site for more information http://katenasser.com.

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Customer care, the true sense of wanting to help customers, is a subject that has intrigued me for many years.   Why do I feel so much inspiration to care for customers?

You might immediately think personality type. Maybe some types are more innately inspired to care for customers. Yet, I am not an amiable on the personality scale.  In fact, I have seen many different personality types working quite well in customer care.

Maturity? I have always felt the inspiration to care even as a teenager with summer jobs.  Money?  Well, summer jobs didn’t pay much. In fact, read the myriad of blog articles that claim CSRs are demotivated because they don’t get paid enough to care.  (I don’t agree with that one.)

Well I have spent much of my professional life inspiring customer service and tech support reps to care for customers. Leader after leader has asked me the same question, “How can we motivate our reps to deliver better customer care?”.   One day, I heard the same question again. This time it hit me that the obstacle the leader faced was not the reps — it was the concept of motivation.

Motivation

The concept of motivation conjures up images of offering comp days if they consistently reach their metrics or scheduling a pizza party if they clear the backlog in the email queue. There is nothing inherently wrong with offering these carrots to accomplish a short term goal. It will not, however, create consistently high quality customer care. The effect of the motivator wears off the same way an advertisement loses its marketing/sales effectiveness over time. It no longer motivates.

Inspiration

On the other hand, inspiration is something deep inside your reps and consistently there. The actual feeling varies in each person. Here is a short list of inspiration points I have tapped in thousands of reps over the years. You will notice a common thread. Inspiration is integral to what makes the individual rep naturally feel good.  What would you add to this list?

1. Making a difference in the customer’s life that day. To do that, the reps need to be empowered to actually help.   Reading from scripts and having to pass all exceptions to a supervisor is not inspirational.
2. Seeing how their work contributes to the company and the customer’s success. A director of customer services recently told me that their initial attempt at training reps included a product manager delivering a Powerpoint presentation on the products.  She was in the back of the room and saw the reps disengaging, looking around, swiveling their chairs.   She decided to redo the customer service reps training program and had them actually touching the products, installing them, and so forth.  The results were amazing.  In fact, the results were inspired!
3. Living what it feels like to be a customer.
4. Enjoyment and fun. There are people who begin to care about others when they feel good themselves. It doesn’t have to be constant fun — life rarely is. Yet if there is no fun, these reps will not be inspired to give more.
5. Respect for their individual talents. Perhaps one of the most common inspiration points is people being known and respected for their individual talents — at least in our American culture. In eastern philosophies/cultures, this is not necessarily the case.

©2010 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, is an inspirational and activational speaker and trainer in customer service and teamwork. Her years of experience, her natural intuition about people, and passion for people-skills always take your organization to a higher level of performance.  See her video footage on this site.

This is a new ongoing blog post to collect and share great practical tips on starting the week off with a positive pop!! Here are just a few starting tips.  Please add your comments below so we can get this rolling.  

If you are on Twitter, chat (tweet) on Motivate Mondays with # so others can find it.  If you are not on Twitter, join up and follow me (@katenasser) and @Help_NewTweeps to get going more quickly.

Motivate Mondays: Tips to inspire a great start of the week:

• Sunday, have fun during the day, get organized in the evening, and sleep happy at night.
• Plant a big smile on your face as you go to work.  Let your actions control your feelings not the reverse.
• Do something different at work on Monday morning.  It will change the entire week.
• Ask your teams and colleagues: What will we learn this week?  Because you change how you start the week, your week will take a new and different path.

Inspiring yourself and others has great rewards.  It changes your thinking.  It changes your outlook.  It changes what happens around you because of your actions to try something different and change.

Please contribute a Motivate Mondays tip below.  We grow and change by listening and learning from others.

Kate Nasser

http://katenasser.com