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Great leaders know this insight about improving team performance – and it’s not about inspiring or motivating them!
As a leader, your role is multi-faceted. You act as a cheerleader, mentor, delegator, motivator, disciplinarian, evaluator, resource-allocator , decision-maker, visionary, and strategist. And chances are, you fill all those roles every single day!
So you can be forgiven if you’ve overlooked (or underplayed) this key leadership duty: removing roadblocks.
Even with all the training, motivation, and skill in the world, your team will sometimes hit an obstacle that makes it hard — or even impossible — to provide stellar service experiences. Whenever possible, your job is to change or remove the rules, processes, SOPs, and expectations that prevent your team from stepping up to deliver better service to all your customers. That means that every time your faced with a team member who misses the mark with service, your first question should be: “What obstacle prevented this person from taking action to do better?”
The outcome? Every time you remove a roadblock, your team’s performance leaps ahead. Your team feels heard, seen, and supported. And you make it easier for every member of the team to step up with stellar service. Watch the video to learn more…
#VideoPosts #ServiceImprovement #BestPractices #ServiceLeadership
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Below is an Autogenerated Transcript
Well, I’d like to be clear. When I talk about the sixth rule of service leadership, out of seven, and it says remove the roadblocks to service, I’m not saying remove yourselves. I’m saying that over time, especially in an organization like yours, that’s growing so fast and promoting so many products that produce so many sales and so much profitability in such a short period of time, that there are going to be certain [vroom] structures that end up in place that actually don’t make it easy to go outside the structure. You end up putting processes in place that looks like tomorrow should be like yesterday, which is like today. Da, da, da, da, da. And now you ask them to be flexible, and now you ask them to be more personalized in the way you respond to someone and now we’re asking them to come up with some new action that will produce a compliment. But they could look at all the structures and the processes and the procedures and say, “Wait a minute, I can’t do that.” Unless you as the leader say, “Yes, you can.” “But boss, what about…?” And you say “No, no, let me explain. That can actually be removed in a certain situation.” Now, not randomly, but we’re saying it’s your job to listen for the frustrations of your staff. It’s your job to anticipate what could get in their way. It’s your job to listen for, for example, a customer complaint about the way something was handled. And instead of looking at “Who was the staff member and what did they do?” You look at “What was the situation in which the staff member chose that and what did they see that was getting in the way of doing something else?” That’s the roadblock to service. What would be some examples of that in this organization? When you think about who you are and what your department does and how quickly you‘ve grown, there’s a lot of practice there. There is a lot of procedures there. There’s a lot of processes that’s already in place. Could any of that look like a roadblock to doing something differently than your staff could have normally done? Could you, as a service leader, take the lead in helping to remove the roadblock to service? So that while we’re educating and encouraging people to take new action, they won’t say “Well, I can’t.” “Why not?” “Because of…” Well, that would be the roadblock to service. And it’s your job as a leader to help make that go away.
