Q & A ForumAsk a QuestionDisarming the grapevine Stop losing customers Getting people to trust management Understanding poor customer feedback We can't implement our innovation Some recent Questions & AnswersWe’re happy to share our experience and knowledge of change programmes. If you’ve got a question or concern about changing things in your workplace, we will be happy to try and answer it. To enter your question click here.Disarming the grapevine Q. Our grapevine is currently rampant with ungrounded fears about the future. We’ve been very open with our people and put out some clear messages but the disinformation is still causing us problems. How do we deal with this? Managing director of a financial services company. A. One way to combat untrue and destructive grapevine messages is not to challenge them head-on but to add something to them so they look stupid or unreasonable and consequently lose their power to influence people. Let’s say for example that there is an untrue story going about that you plan to drop a whole range of products and that this will cost many jobs. You could embellish and re-frame this story by adding that you feel so bad about this that you are going to visit all your customers to personally apologise for dropping their insurance coverage and to offer them ideas about which competitor’s products they can use instead. Top Stop losing customers Q. We are losing customers faster than we can replace them. We’ve carried out customer research but this has not told why this is happening? Sales director of an engineering services company. A. Undoubtedly your customers have the answers but sometimes, traditional market research approaches do not reveal reality, particularly when there are significant changes occurring in the market place. Get your customers into direct discussion with your people and don’t just talk about your products and services but talk about their world, their plans and their needs, problems and priorities. You’ll soon get the picture and you will also uncover a rich vein of new opportunities. Top Getting people to trust management Q. One of the key issues highlighted in our staff satisfaction survey is that a majority of our people don’t trust the board and do not think that the board always acts in the best interests of the business. We’ve been as open as we can be about our strategy and plans and our reasoning but the trust issue is still in evidence. Is there another approach we can use? MD of an international technology company. A. There seem to be two possible issues and solutions here. Firstly, we are reminded of a great quote from Emerson that goes something like; “What you are shouts so loudly in my ears, I cannot hear what you say”. The first issue for you to address is the credibility of your board in the eyes of your people. We’re going to assume you have a shared business agenda, you listen to your people, you all tell the truth all the time and everyday practice what you preach. If that’s the case then you need to help your people to recognise you as human beings. You need to carefully write and communicate stories that humanise your team, that bring them to life as individuals, with their strengths and weaknesses, hopes and dreams, joy and pain. You will now have a more credible platform form which to communicating your strategic messages. Secondly, we work with many boards that tell us that they do not seem to be able to get their strategy over in a way that their people understand. The solution here is to tell what we call the Future Story. A Future Story describes the outcomes of your strategy as a narrative. It’s a story about what people are doing, thinking and feeling when your strategy has had the desired effect. People make sense of reality through their interpretation of the stories they hear, think and tell. Describing your strategy as a Future Story taps into this human process and allows your people to think and say “Oh now I see what they mean”. It also helps them to self organise as people do when they have clear, believable direction, to achieve your vision in their area. Top Understanding poor customer feedback Q. We have recently got some pretty harsh feedback from some of our key customers but although our customer facing people have read it they just don’t seem to get it from the customers perspective. What can we do? Operations director of a pharmaceuticals company. A. A quick and very effective way to get people to ”get it” from the perspective of customer (or anyone else), is to ask them to act out or play the role of the customer in a short play that covers the areas at issue. The insights and feelings they will get from immersing themselves in the practical and emotional experience of the customer will change them forever! This is easy to set up; just ask a small group (4-6) of customer facing people to chose a relevant scenario, then to each adopt characters roles and then act out the scenario as it develops (ask them not to write any scripts as such). A typical scenario of this type should last no more than 15 to 20 minutes and should be observed by some of their colleagues. When the play is finished, the whole group should share their observations, experiences, feelings and ideas. An added touch is to then act the whole scenario out again but this time play it as when the problem is fixed. Lots of learning her and It’s all great fun by the way. Top We can’t implement our innovation Q. We are really good at coming up with innovative ideas for new services and new ways of working but hopeless at implementing them. What can we do to change this? R&D director of a major telecomms company A. Sometimes this is about taking projects away from innovators and handing them over to implementers. There is a lot of research and writing available about the effects of different team role preferences on project effectiveness that covers this point. Another issue is that many organisation get bored with their existing projects and load new ones on top because that’s more exciting, with the consequence that there is not enough resource to go around to cover them all and the less exciting ones suffer. We remember one occasion when we counted 167 different concurrent “improvement projects” running in the same service delivery area. We found that people were overstretched (quite a common complaint these days) and not a lot was actually getting improved. Often our work is focused on prioritising activity so that scarce resources are applied to the most important projects; those that will have the greatest impact on business performance, customer satisfaction and the bottom line. Our start point is to engage with customers and the people in our client’s organisation to uncover priorities and focus plans and energy on what’s really important. Top Ask a Question |
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