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10 Things for Managers To Do With a Spare Hour

There are those times when you’ve got your management act together when you reach those ‘One Minute Manager’ (Ken Blanchard) moments.

In the first book of the series (there are lots of great follow-ups), our star manager ensures that he’s able to spend a fair bit of time gazing out of the window because all the plates are spinning perfectly, with the minimal of intervention.

So, when you’re in that place with your management performance, what to do?

Here are ten ideas that you might want to consider when you are able to devote a spare hour to any activity you choose. The list is, of course, not exhaustive and you will have some favorites of your own.

That said, if you never have time to spare, taking a look at some of these will help you make that time, because the outcomes they will tend to produce will be constructive in magnifying the available time you have.

So, what’s not to like about these?

1. Pick an item to delegate – finding something that you permanently do NOT need to do yourself is a good first step. Second is to find someone who genuinely will benefit from doing that task. Thirdly, take the time to explain why you are delegating to them and the outcome you are looking for (don’t necessarily tell them how!).

2. Say ‘thank yous’ – just get out there and catch your people doing something right and thank them for it. This one is really simple and extremely productive.

3. Take an alternative view – ask yourself what would happen to a situation if you took exactly the opposite course of action than you have a current tendency towards. Just wonder about it a little.

4. Go and listen – get into easy conversations with your people and spend much more (90%) of the time in the conversation listening and work at just 10% of hearing your own voice.

5. Ask for help – go seek someone else’s help with a problem you are challenged with.

6. Ask for feedback – simple as it says – go off and ask someone on your team how you did with something recently. Listen to what they say, discipline yourself to NOT make excuses, if it isn’t positive. Just listen, absorb and thank then for their honesty. Feedback is a gift.

7. Be nosy – go poke around where your people work – not with personal stuff, but find out what they’re working on and ask questions that will help them tell you more about it (and then listen a lot – of course!).

8. Take a walk – yep, it’s time to ‘leave the building’. Spend a little time (you have an hour I’m giving you, right?) and go for a walk. No, there’s no catch!

9. Ask a customer – work out a way to interact with a customer or client informally. It might be a chat on the shopfloor. It might need a phone call to a random client. Whatever, just go for it and – you got it – listen!

10. Ring yourself – as a final challenge to your customer/client service, take a chance and ring into your own business, ask for yourself and test the experience. You will find it a revealing and, hopefully, a rewarding experience, even when you find out that your line is engaged!

How much fun is that? Instead of filling that hour with other ‘stuff’, you qualify all of these activities for that very productive ‘Quadrant 2′ as defined by Stephen Covey in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. Important and not Urgent.

All the more valuable and value-creating because of that.

Customer Service Excellence – Cultivating Your Raving Fans

Customers are an asset. Yet how many managers have the insights to make much more of these people that simply completing today’s transaction.

They are much more valuable than that.

It’s easy to appreciate the challenges that providing great customer service can pose. You see it’s not simply a case of giving them what they want, when they want it, at a price that they are happy to pay.

No, there’s a lot more value that we can squeeze from them in the customer relationships we build.

And the good thing is that they will be the beneficiaries as well. Because the way we generate ‘Raving Fans’ is purely by being great with the customers we already have and being clear about what we want from them too. It’s as simple as that.

You see, what we want from our customers, are people who like us so much they want to:-

•    Support us as a gesture
•    Help us along the way
•    Become a resource to their family, friends and acquaintances too
•    Come along and trade with us more often

We want to create people who love us so much that they will tell our story for free to anyone who will listen.

For many small businesses, this is all they do.

They are great to their customers; they go an extra mile even/especially when things go wrong and they are loved for it.

So much so that their customers become their marketing tool.

When you have complaints, you have the opportunity to interact fully with your customers – which, ironically, you miss when things actually go right!

A complaint is a little door to create a relationship that is open, honest and mutual. Over a little time, you will be able to move that relationship into a partnership too.

These people are a vast asset whether you are in a small local business or a huge mega-corporation, by creating one-to-one relationships like they’ve never had before with a service or goods providers.

And they tell others about how great you are.

If you are smart, you even start to ask them to collaborate in the development of your business or service, by asking them for their input beforehand.

Whether you are a store; a call-center or an online business you can move into the sport of open-sourcing.

And that will enable you to draw on the insights of your most important asset (along with your people, of course) – your customers and clients!

The ‘Raving Fan’ is the most cost-effective customer or client you can create. They are worth more than their weight in gold and are out there, right now, waiting for you.

(c) 2010 Martin Haworth. This is a short excerpt from one of 52 lessons in management development at Super Successful Manager!, an easy to use, step-by-step weekly development program for managers of EVERY skill level. Find out more at http://www.SuperSuccessfulManager.com.

Perception is the Difference

The iris reader in passport control was out of order at Heathrow Terminal One this weekend.

When I remarked on it to an official there (with care, as I had been delayed long enough), he smiled and said, ‘Well, it’s usually working 99% of the time’.

Since I’d only recently joined this scheme, designed to more quickly get you through the queues at passport control, I was disappointed.

I then reflected that 1% out of order for them was 100% out of order for me.

It’s about perception. What seemed a small outage for the people at Heathrow was my total experience, so, noticeable and a big thing for me!

In the work we do as managers, there are many issues we engage in with our people.

By its very nature, our perspective is very different from theirs – and here’s where we have to be careful and learn to be good managers.

Our insights into what is very important to them must be given extra focus, because otherwise we will miss things that make the biggest differences to them, small though they might appear to us in our role.

And this is as inherent a part of our job if we want to make a decent fist of management.

Because, frankly, most managers don’t understand that being interested in what’s important to their people, is most likely to be of high value to the team and organizational performance.

Can you see where the 1% view needs to be from the 100% angle?

Employee Relationships – What is Responsibility?

Responsibility is fast becoming a lost art in the business worlds in which we exist today.

When managers take responsibility for creating valuable relationships with their people, there are many opportunities to be had. But what is responsibility?

Whilst relationships between individuals requires attention on both sides, with managers and employees there is a drive more from the side most likely to benefit – and that is the management side in terms of the business value, whilst it is also in the interests of employees where there are benefits for them too (such as career progression and skills development, as examples).

It is really worth taking some time to understand what ‘accountability’ and responsibility’ are in this manager/employee context, so that a clear picture can be drawn to show what needs to be done.

There are two defining descriptions that need to be addressed here, ‘accountability’ and ‘responsibility’. Whilst these two words might seem to be very similar, there is a difference when managing employees is concerned.

Accountability is for someone – usually a manager in a business or organization – where ‘the buck stops’. As a manager you are the person ultimately ‘accountable’ for all sorts of required outcomes in your part of the organization.

Responsibility is one level lower, where as managers we delegate the ‘responsibility’ for an action to someone else, enabling them to be the person who delivers that part of an overall ‘accountability’.

We are ‘accountable’ for the delivery of something and we delegate parts of this to others who are ‘responsible’ for the activities they need to take to complete their part of the overall ‘something’.

We, as managers, take on accountabilities that the organization requires us to deliver to provide the returns that they, their stockholders and any other stakeholders want and need to be successful. We, in turn, break down these ‘accountabilities’ and let others in our teams take on ‘responsibilities’ that they can deliver to contribute into the whole.

Being responsible for actions is a big learning curve for your people to experience and sometimes they will need help with that. It can be a daunting prospect. It can also be misunderstood, where they don’t recognize that your expectation of them is real and finite. So they may need a nudge to comprehend what that means, especially to start with.

When we are building relationships, whilst we might be accountable for this overall (not least because it’s in our interest to do so), there are responsibilities that can be attributed to both sides to make the relationships start, continue and where appropriate, end effectively.

Understanding the difference between ‘accountable and ‘responsible’ is the first step for many managers in this position and one that they will need to be clear about at the earliest moment.

Dealing With Difficult People – General Principles

Difficult people can be found anywhere. As managers or supervisors, you are likely to have at least one you can name.

It’s as common as that.

There is a general principle to use as a first step.

Most managers come across difficult people at some stage in their careers or other. They are common and challenging sometimes by their behaviors, which can be very demanding, as well as time-consuming for us all.

What is fascinating, is how many managers come across a lot, yet others seem ‘lucky’ and come across far fewer.

It’s not luck.

You see, some managers are better at dealing with difficult people than others, even though they might not always be too sure about exactly how they do it.

There is often something that triggers their character and just as often, that will provide you with detailed clues about what you can do about it.

When considering why this is, there is one simple tactic that rises above others. The managers who are best at handling difficult people, are almost always good at building relationships, which they do without much effort.

They spend time using their listening skills to pay full attention to everyone – difficult or otherwise – they come across, thereby showing them that they are interested in them. This is the first part of the simple solution to dealing with difficult people and, as such, is the key to all workplace relationships too.

After listening to the issues raised by a difficult person, these managers are also very good at asking relevant questions to show they are listening and also to help the individual find new perspectives on the situation they are being difficult about.

Once they have created this level of rapport, managers who handle difficult people well are also very good at drawing a line under proceedings and moving the difficult person right along.

It’s only by using all of these tactics, that a manager will have the best results with difficult people, and minimize the frustrations.

Indeed, some managers have been so damaged by just one difficult person in a team that they give up themselves.

All they needed was a full awareness of what is happening and the steps to take to make the problem resolved

And it’s worth bearing in mind in the organizations we work in, that there are usually two different circumstances that we come across that need slightly different twists on the simple approach above.

They are people you are with regularly – people in your life outside work even – and those you aren’t. These are people who are strangers in your business and life who you might only come across once, for example.

Both can be resolved using the tactics above quite easily, so it’s always worth taking the time to ensure that they are fully utilized.

Customer Complaints – Who Will Gather The Intelligence?

Complaints are a valuable asset to any organization, once you can ensure that your people are willing to play. And to get them with you, they need to know that it’s not personal.

There is no greater value than that to be gleaned from your customers and clients who are prepared to take the time to give you feedback – which is a much more constructive way to describe a complaint.

These gold nuggets are literally worth their weight, when you are able to capture, dissect and respond positively to what you find out. Yet many organizations revel in low complaint rates!

The key to this is your people – all of them. It’s about turning them from being fearful of when a complaint comes in, to positively gleeful, because of the enormous opportunity it presents.

By ensuring that every one of them is geared up to sense when things aren’t going well, you will create an army of willing volunteers who are ready for action. Their job is to seek out and get to the bottom of any dissatisfaction they perceive.

This has to happen in the moment, all the time, or it will have passed and the opportunity will have disappeared into the anonymity of an ended phone call; a person now back out on the street; or the lost data storage of an online interaction that never sees the light of day.

It needs to be pro-actively sought, not passively responded to – or worse, swept under the carpet with the hope it will go away.

By encouraging your people to engage and interact with their clients, in any way at all, they will be able to get under the tough skin of a dissatisfied customer ‘not wanting to make a fuss’. They have to smell it out or it will slink away, unspoken, which is of no use at all to you.

They will probably capture more customer dissatisfaction, than you expect, especially to start with.

And when they do, it’s to be applauded. It’s to be celebrated.

Working as a team to find out critical information from those who have it, is a tactic any manager can adopt to ensure that customer service progresses, whilst also building the team togetherness ethic in a constructive, value-creating way.

By encouraging each and every one of them to engage their clients in any way they can, will make the conversation much more open and relaxed – and valuable.

Because, with this in place, many of your customers can easily be asked what they would love changed if they had the choice in the experience they have most recently had.

And that gives you – and your team – the vital intelligence to make your offer even better than it already is.