Beware the Doom Loop

Jim Collins of the 'Good to Great' fame describes the Doom Loop as a downward spiral into oblivion. It is often characterized by a steady stream of 'new' leaders, strategies, five year plans AND constant poor results.

And then, the senior managers often say "It was all so sudden.... we never knew it was going to be so unexpected". Really?

I think anybody in any organization that is on the wrong side of the doom loop will know immediately that the oranization is on a downward spiral but what happens in reality is that fear paralizes them into thinking excactly the opposite or worst, they deliberatly refuse to face the facts. Executives give overly optimistic targets, promise unrealistic turn-around results or feign ingnorance of the difficulties faced by their departments. In one account shared by a senior manager from an organiztaion that was in the Doom Loop was that Fear and Anger made decision making difficult if not impossible. Individuals opposed ideas not based on facts but on emotions. Managers became angry and that clouded their judgement.

Well, thats a Doom Loop scenario alright! Is your organization in a Doom Loop? If yes, tell your people this : We have time to either fail or learn...make your
choices.

Is 'Service Atttidue' Trainable?

For the next 3 months, a few of us fellow corporate trainers/consultants will be busy developing, conducting, implementing and evaluating a program that we have christened as " The 5 Star Customer Service Champion" or 5 Star CSC for short for a company involved in several service oriented businesses.

Interestingly, a few days ago I heard of a coffee life-style company (I think I am the first one who coined this term)which believes that service attitude is something that is not trainable. In other words, you either have it or you don't. The recruitment process of this company involves the entire team of staff at each outlet where an interview is conducted and a team decision is made whether the interviewee has the service attitude or not. No training! You come in with the skill to serve. You don't learn on the job!

The obvious question is : Can we train someone to have a service attitude or is it something inborn and natural. Is it nature or is it nurture? I think its both and there are more people in the service industry out there who have been trained in the service attitude although there are a few (very few) who have had the service attitude in them all the while. Lets talk about the latter.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to observe a customer service representative at a DiGi outlet in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. She was one of the few people whom I can confidently say was born to serve. She had such an aura of the service attitude that her other colleagues paled in comparison. I am also confident that providing exceptional service is so natural for her that she will probably wonder about all the fuss about customer service training! Don' get me wrong, as I have come across many other front liner for example, who have provided good service but I would not bet on saying that they have an internal built-in service attitude like the DiGi lady.

The thing is, there are not many like the DiGi lady around. The good ones, so to speak, will sooner or later find their way to better paying employers or more exciting industries. That leaves most other SMEs in a position of making the best of whoever comes their way. The only way to do that is through training.

The vast majority of the people who are employed to represent an organization when dealing with customers on a daily basis needs some form of training and development. Such trainings should also be a continuous and filled with exciting programs, friendly competition and an overall sense of 'activity' all the time. Yes, all the time.

You see, as I have said earlier, most of our people need to be trained in customer service as they are not born with the service attitude and people who needs to be trained in something will sooner or later forget all their learning. The only effective way to keep their learning fresh and active is by constantly creating a buzz around it. Remember the Fish Philosophy? I believe that it was so successful not because of its novelty of learning from a bunch of fish-mongers but because it was a process filled with laughter, fun, games, competition and a general sense of on-going buzz to the extent that much of the concepts became part of their everyday lingo.

In fact, 2 years ago when we were conducting a sales program for managers of a Malaysian telco, we noticed a drastic and noticebale change in the service attitude of the front liners of this telco who were at that time going though their own customer service training.

So, is customer service attitude trainable. Yes. Do everybody need the training? No. Are there many more who needs the training than who don't? Yes. Thats my equation.

But wait, there is another component to this equation: Are there those who are just not fit for the service industry? Yes. What to do with them? Train them and get rid of them if they don't perform to expectations. But remember: train them first for benefit of the doubt as there are many unpolished diamonds out there.

I am hoping to discover some of these diamonds in the next 3 months.

Cheers to all of you.

The Digital Economy

Last week, I attended an international seminar that among others discussed the impact of the current digital economy on management and leadership styles. The topic intrigued me not so much for all the sophisticated developments around the world as a direct result of the digital economy but rather what, in my mind the real meaning of what the digital economy is all about.

Lets use Hollywood as an illustrative example of the new digital economy. 5 or 10 years ago, an animated feature film produced by a Hollywood studio would have been a 100% American product as the entire production of the film would have been done by Americans or those working in American movie studios. Today, a Disney cartoon is conceptualised in Boston, animated in Bangalore, edited in Busan and premiered in Baltimore. How is this possible? Simple! The Digital Economy.You see, what the digital economy has done is that it has enabled more and more of human commercial activities to be broken down into bits and pieces of digital bytes that can be moved from one continent to another, re-assembled, worked on, re-broken into bytes and sent to another continent to be re-assembled into a finished product. This cycle can involve a dozen employees in a dozen countries in multiple time-zones.

Today, a large amount of medical x-rays from American hospitals are read and interpreted by Indian and Australian doctors. Again, this is the direct result of our ability today to digitize our everyday activities.

While I find most discussions on the digital economy hovering around how outsourcing and offshoring are changing the international economic order, very few have actually paused to look at how the digital economy have enabled almost all our activities to be broken into byte sized information that can be manipulated and worked on without any spatial-time constraints.

I anticipate the real impact of the digital economy will dawn on the mass consciousness of the people in a couple of years when the International Space Station is completed. This space station and others like it that will surely follow will be maintained 24/7/365 by a group of space agency employees who will be spread around in every corner of the world who will be managing every minute detail of these space stations.

Do we dare to hope that maybe the digital economy will also unite the human race? Time will tell.