The AntiSyphus Effect

How to alienate your customers in three easy steps

My company has been running something of a makeshift second shift for a couple of months now; until we hire full-timers to staff it, we have our regular employees handling the extra hours. Because we're working pretty long days, we purchase dinner for the second shift employees each evening as a token of our appreciation.

Having found myself stuck late at the office tonight, I was privy to the mass confusion 'round about 8:00 when dinner had not yet arrived. And since I wasn't officially working second shift, I volunteered to hunt it down. I called the pizza restaurant, and spoke to a lovely young woman who took nearly five full minutes to verify that we'd even placed an order. But I couldn't be angry with her, because she handled the situation perfectly: she assured me that the pizza was, in fact, on the way, but that the driver had gotten lost. After apologizing several times, she promised that we could expect the driver "any minute," and that we wouldn't be charged for the pizza. She was polite, never left me holding for more than a minute without checking back to let me know she was still working on it, and she took accountability for getting the situation fixed. So far, so good, right?

Fast-forward twenty minutes, when said driver was still nowhere in sight, and the villagers were ready to take up their pitchforks and torches. I called back, and got a different young woman on the phone; this one was decidedly not lovely. I explained that I'd called at 8:00, looking for our dinner (which was supposed to have been delivered at 7:30), and that I'd been told we could expect it any minute, but it still hadn't arrived, and could she possibly find out where the driver might be? (Yes, that was a horrible run-on sentence, and I'll hate myself in the morning; right now, I'm too tired to care.)

She was clearly exasperated with me (strike one), and told me that she "can't find out where the order is; I can just tell you that it's in progress." I repeated what I'd been told earlier, and said that it seemed to me as though the other employee had been able to reach the driver, and asked her to see if she could get hold of him. Three minutes later (strike two), the manager took over the call, and informed me that they had no way to reach the driver. At this point, I was getting more than slightly aggravated, and I reminded him that earlier, I'd been told that the driver was lost; clearly, someone was able to reach him. The manager stated that the driver didn't have a cell phone, and I'd just have to wait. This might've been strike three, but it gets better.

As I was being told that they had no way to communicate with the driver, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a car with a Daddy Joe's Pizza (name changed to protect the guilty) sign pulling into our parking lot. And as the delivery fella got out of his car, I noticed - with no small amount of irritation - a cell phone clipped to his belt. Strike three! For the record, I tipped the driver anyway, because he was not really party to this mess. But I'm pretty certain we won't be ordering from this particular company again.

The morals of this story are as follows:

• Your customers are not an inconvenience. They are the reason you get to collect a paycheck. So don't treat them as though they are bothering you, especially when you goofed and they aren't being ugly to you.
• Don't leave your customers on hold for an extended period of time when they have a complaint. Doing so communicates that you don't really care, and further fans the flames of their annoyance.
• Don't lie to your customers, ever. Period. Even if the truth is that you completely messed up, we'll forgive you as long as you're upfront about it. But once you get caught in a lie, it's all over.

What are your dealbreakers when it comes to companies that want you to part with your hard-earned money?

Resignation

It's been said that the opposite of love isn't hate; it's apathy. I think that, with a slight modification, we can make this adage apply to our careers: the opposite of career passion isn't hate; it's resignation.

When you've done your best to make a difference, and you've been stopped in your tracks time and time again, it can be incredibly demoralizing. When you strive always to do the right thing for your organization (only to watch better politicians -- but weaker performers -- get the plum assignments and the corner offices), you might become somewhat hostile. When you've tried to inject a little creativity into your workplace (only to have your suggestions rejected because they were a little too creative), you might feel frustrated. And when you survive those types of situations many times over and for an extended period of time, one of four things will happen:

1. Your frustration will reach critical mass and you'll leave the company
2. Your frustration will reach critical mass, your attitude will tank, and your performance will deteriorate
3. You will become resigned to the situation, and will become a mindless drone whose primary goal is to maintain the status quo
4. You'll find a way to rise above it all; you'll learn to work the system to get what you need to do what you want to do, and you'll be a smashing success

Outcome #1 sounds good; and it can work out for you, if you're lucky and go about the process the right way. You see, politics and bureaucracy are nearly everywhere in the business world, and trying to escape them by going from one corporation to another is likely to lead you in a metaphorical circle right back into the kind of mess you're trying to avoid. Nevertheless, this is the direction that many people take. Just remember that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence; and when you're interviewing, the company is selling itself to you just as much as you're selling yourself to the company. Caveat emptor, my friends. That's not to suggest that you should stay at your current company even though the stress is killing you. What I'm saying is, if you're miserable enough to leave where you are, then you need to become a skilled interviewer of potential employers so that you can weed out the toxic environments before you're ensnared.

Outcome #2 is not good, no matter how you try to spin it.

Outcome #3 is what I believe happens to the majority of folks. The devil you know is better than the devil you don't, right? And since there's no way to know what the next company will be like, you might as well stay where you are; at least you know what to expect. It's true that your work won't excite you, and you probably won't fulfill your career aspirations. But it's rather like that pair of sweats you'd never wear outside the house: it doesn't do anything for you, but it sure is comfy.

Outcome # 4 is the ideal, if you can manage it. But it won't be easy. You'll probably alienate some people (colleagues, and perhaps even senior management, who are all about toeing the Company line), and there will be those who tell you that you're crazy. But if you have the personal strength to say, "I'm going to achieve this goal, or I'm going to get fired trying" and mean it, you might just have something going. Now, I won't lie to you: there is the possibility that you might be asked to get off the bus if you're continually challenging the system. However, if you're really approaching your work from the perspective of what's good for you and the company, that's not likely. And if you can drum up that kind of passion for your work, and network like crazy, you'll develop a name for yourself outside of your corporate home (I don't need to tell you why that's a good idea, do I?).

If you've ever read Fish! (and if you haven't, you really should), you know that one of the main themes in the book is that you choose your attitude. And I know it sounds like new agey, warm and fuzzy silliness, but it's true: we can't control much in this life, but we can control how we respond to the events around us. And you know what? Sometimes faking it can be helpful. If you can behave as though things are moving along according to plan, and if you can behave as though you're getting all the support you need to move your initiatives forward, you might be surprised to find that you start getting more support and moving forward on your pet projects.

When you feel as though you can't do anything right, and you're afraid that the corporate quicksand is going to pull you under, please keep the faith. You don't have to be miserable, and you don't have to be ineffective, and you don't have to spend your career just making do. Dare to do what makes you great (and everyone has some greatness), and refuse to accept the status quo from yourself. You have more power than you think to change your world. One of my favorite songs ever is from a horrible little movie called, "Bedazzled." The song played during the closing credits was by a band called Sister Hazel, and the lyrics of the chorus read:

If you want to be somebody else... if you're tired of fighting battles with yourself,
If you want to be somebody else, change your mind.

American society seems to perpetuate victimization, and it's very tempting (and convenient) to allow youself to believe that you're a victim of bureaucracy, poor management, or incompetent colleagues. But the truth is that, if you are unhappy at work, you can choose to overcome it or you can choose to wallow in it.

The future really is up to you. Choose wisely.

Welcome to the Ivory Tower, Part I

Congratulations! You've just been promoted or hired into your first management job. Much like Melanie Griffith in "Working Girl," you may think you've finally arrived: after years of working hard to prove yourself, you have that coveted office - with a door! And as you close your door, prop your feet up on the desk (by the way, does anybody actually do that?), you may be thinking that you can finally breathe a sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that it gets easier from here.

Did you enjoy that moment of bliss? Good, because that's about as long as it'll last. What you think you've learned about life in management (from your view at the bottom of the org chart) is not at all what it is. You have less power than you think; this is especially true if you're a middle manager in a large company. You have more responsibility than you think. Finally, if you're like many managers, you've been tossed into this new fishbowl without a drop of training on the practical skills you'll need to do the job.

On the bright side, you probably don't realize that you don't know as much as you think you do, which means that you aren't scared. The dark cloud around that silver lining is that you might make some catastrophic mistakes because you don't know any better.

Early in my career, I managed a temporary employment agency outside of Newark, New Jersey. Most business people have a negative opinion about people who work as temps; that opinion is often based on the fact that temps seem to be somewhat unreliable. During my almost four years running that agency, we brought our turnover down to minimal levels. When I left there (to move to Tennessee), I had at least a dozen temps on staff who'd been with me exclusively for more than three years. But I made some big mistakes before I figured out what I was doing.

In the years since I left New Jersey, I've managed temporary employees and full-time employees; hourly personnel and salaried personnel; fantastic performers and horrible performers. And every group was equally challenging, each in its own unique way.

In today's entry, I want to introduce you to some of the manager archetypes (according to me). They're exaggerated, to be sure; but that doesn't make them any less real. You'll probably recognize at least one former (or possibly current) boss in this list; with any luck, you won't recognize yourself.

Bridesmaideum ad infinitum

Remember the saying, "Always a bridesmaid, never a bride"? Conventional wisdom has it that, when the perpetual bridesmaid finally takes the plunge, she uses that opportunity to get even with every friend who ever tortured her with a green taffeta nightmare of a bridesmaid's gown. She does this, of course, by outfitting all of them in the most hideous, ruffled, and unflattering bridesmaid's gown she can find.

Sadly, there are some managers who seem to take this same position: they are going to take every horrible act performed on them by every horrible manager, and they're going to pay it forward to the next generation of aspiring managers. Mind you, I'm not suggesting that this is always a conscious act; but I've known plenty of managers who have openly taken the position of, "Bwa-haha! Now I'm the one calling the shots! $#!+ rolls down hill, and for once, there's someone lower on the hill than me!" As corporate traditions go, we could do better.

Fidelis Horribilis

This manager wants to be your very best friend in the whole, wide world. S/he doesn't want to be the devil; s/he doesn't want to tell you what to do. In fact, s/he's perfectly content to keep doing exactly what s/he always did - just with more money and a nicer workspace. S/he goes out for drinks with the gang; s/he goes to ball games with you; s/he's just one of the gang. S/he has no earthly idea what it is that you do, but s/he's okay with that as long as nobody makes any waves.

On the surface, this manager seems like a real catch: you're treated well, you're appreciated, and you're pretty much left to your own devices. But one day, you realize that, while your boss isn't giving you any grief, neither is s/he giving you any real coaching or development opportunities. See, s/he doesn't want to give you any negative feedback, because then you might not want to be best buddies any more.

Fiddleris Moronicus

Remember Nero, fiddling away as Rome burned? He was the earliest known example of the Fiddleris Moronicus in action. This manager knows that things are going to the Seventh Circle in a handbasket, but pretends that everything is just hunky-dory. Problems? There are no problems here! Sure, production has been shut down for seven hours because of a system issue, but it's no big deal. We'll just work through until Midnight tonight, and everything will get done. You'll see!

The worst part of dealing with this type of manager is that it's impossible to have a real conversation about any problems, because s/he won't admit that there are any problems.

Knowledgeum Keeperis

This manager knows everything that there is to know about doing your job (not a bad thing in and of itself). Unfortunately, this manager is also of the belief that knowledge = power = job security, so s/he doesn't share information. You're left to your own devices to figure things out on the fly. You're constantly reminded that you'll never be able to do the job as well as s/he can. And you certainly aren't allowed to make decisions on your own; s/he wants input into everything that goes on, even if s/he's out of the office. Prepare to be micromanaged. Your input is unwanted, unnecessary, and is really nothing but an annoyance.

Semper Tyrannus

This manager has some serious anger issues, and you are going to learn every little thing that will trip that fury line; and you'll learn by experience, of course. Shouting obscenities, slamming doors, publicly chewing people out: none of these are out of character for Semper Tyrannus. Not unlike Knowledgeum Keeperis, Semper Tyrannus believes that you cannot possibly do the job well enough, and s/he will be hypercritical of your every mistake. This manager is extremely unhappy, and wants to share that unhappiness with you.

I don't think that anyone goes into a management role with the conscious desire to make people suffer; poor management is what happens when people move into positions of authority without being given the tools to do the job properly.

In this series of posts, you'll learn about the skills that are the keys to effectiveness in a management role:

• Recruiting
• Managing performance
• Delegating
• Managing up

I'll leave you with one piece of advice that you can start using today: You can't go wrong by using common sense and treating people with common courtesy.

Growing, growing... gone

Last week, Jeffrey Phillips wrote about identifying the purpose of your business. This topic resonates with me, because I've seen firsthand what can happen when companies get stuck on growth as the Prime Directive.

While it's true that we all want our businesses to maintain a healthy rate of growth, Jeffrey is completely correct in his assessment that money is an outcome rather than a purpose. The same is true of growth; growth is the result that you get when you do everything else right. But if you instead frame growth as that right thing to do, it can skew your perspective and force your business into making decisions that are ethically and morally questionable. Enron is just the ugliest and most public example, but lots of businesses create small-scale disasters every day because they're more concerned with growing the bottom line than with anything else.

If you put growth before all else, then everything else suffers. No matter that your company's mission statement is filled with the most flowery, buzzword-laden language ever; if your key strategic driver is growth, then the customers don't come first, period. If your key strategic driver is growth, then the employees don't come in first (or second or third, most likely), period. If your key strategic driver is growth, then innovation probably isn't even in the Top Five.

I'm not suggesting that it's wrong to want to grow your business; it's perfectly fine to list growth among your company's goals for the year. However, you have to be very specific in terms of how you frame the goal.

I'm a big believer that we can all have what we want, by stating specifically what that desire is (and then working like a dog to get it). But if you're not careful about how you state what it is you want, you can set yourself up. The old adage, "Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it" rings true to me. It's not so much that you might find that you didn't want "it" so much after all; it's more what you might get along with "it" that you didn't plan on.

Let me put it this way: I've heard countless jokes about genies granting wishes that go horribly awry because the Wisher wasn't quite specific enough (my personal favorite ends with the punchline, "and so his legs fell off"). And while I don't think that the gods of business are just waiting for you to state a goal that's just vague enough that they can wreak havoc on your company, I do believe that it's critical that you frame your goals specifically enough that you have a clear path to the goal.

Here are just a few of the negative outcomes when growth is the Prime Directive:

• Innovation gets short shrift, because thinking is costly under the Time = Money model.
• Employees who work in cost center departments (rather than profit centers) start to get the feeling that they're expendable. This usually happens because that's how they're treated.
• The corporate culture shifts from "it's about the customers, stupid!" to "it's about the profit, stupid!"
• You treat your customers differently, because you're looking at ways to make money from them, rather than ways to serve them.

If you want to grow your business, you're going to do so by achieving other goals: goals related to your customers, your employees, or the meat of what your business offers. By developing your goals according to relationships and business effectiveness, you're going to focus your energy (and that of your employees) on how you can be better, rather than the somewhat vague intention to grow.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Does our mission statement really reflect the company we are and want to be?
2. Are we about making money, or about doing something great?
3. What are the messages we send to our employees about what's important to the business?
4. Do our clients think that we're partners instrumental in their success, or are we just another vendor?

Tomorrow, I'm going to start a series of posts about management skills for the new manager.

You stab my back, and I'll stab yours

In business, there has always been an epic conflict between Sales and Service. To hear Service talk about it, Sales is the girl who can't say no (think Rizzo from "Grease"): they'll promise everything, to everybody, ever time. They don't think the down side, they never play devil's advocate, and they don't worry about setting realistic expectations.

Of course, Sales thinks that Service is the buttoned-up good girl (think Sandy from "Grease"): they're no fun, they're unwilling to bend the rules or shake things up, and they don't worry about making the customers happy.

There's probably a grain of truth (or more) to both of these characterizations, but they're small potatoes compared to the smaller-scale battles that many of us fight every day. That's right, kids: I'm talking about office politics. It's bad enough that we have to "fight"  with our competition; it's worse that we have to fight the sales/service conflict; let's find a way to make things really hard on ourselves - and our employees - by fighting each other, too. Because no day is complete unless you walk out of the office feeling as though you've been beaten up by  people who are supposed to be on the same team as you.

And of course, because the computer gods are fickle, the rest of my post got lost when my TypePad connection fizzled at 4:30 this morning. Don't you love it when that happens?

Rather than attempt to recreate the genius that was my original set of thoughts (not really), I'll just give you a few tips to survive an ugly political landscape:

1. Be true to yourself. If playing the game has you so stressed out that you're sucking down antacids like candy, then you might be in too deep. Perhaps it's time to reconsider your position - or your employer.
2. Sometimes, politics can work to your advantage without killing your soul in the process. Don't automatically equate office politics to evil.
3. Bottom line, remember that it's not your life, and it's not a reflection of your value as a human being. It's just a job, not matter how much you love it. Your family, your friends, and your self-esteem will always matter more - so don't sell your soul for empty success.

Tomorrow, we'll talk about growth as a strategic driver of business.

This Week in the Blogosphere for October 13, 2006

I realize I promised an entry about dealing with office politics, but that's going to have to wait until Monday. On Fridays, I'm going to offer up my five favorite blog posts from the week:

• Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users gives us a lesson about why companies hire robots instead of the passionate, kickass people they say they want to hire.
• Jeffrey Phillips of Thinking Faster tells us how important it is know - really know - the purpose of your business, and how critical it is for your employees to know it, too.
• Pamela Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation shares a cautionary tale about Big Businesses who ask bloggers to review their widgets before all the kinks are worked out.
• Curt Rosengren of The Occupational Adventure serves up some suggestions on what to do when you're trapped in a job (or life) that's not quite what you want.
• Finally, Yvonne DiVita of Lip-Sticking shares some reminders of what's really important, courtesy of the late Erma Bombeck.

And although it's neither business-related nor a blog, I have a present for the paraskevidekatriaphobes among us: snopes.com gives us the scoop on why Friday the 13th is associated with bad luck.

Have a great weekend; spend some time with people you love, and recharge your mental batteries.

I have seen the enemy; and it is us

We really can't talk about training without mentioning Sisyphus, because corporate training can be about as Sisyphean a career as it gets. I've lost count of the number of times I've climbed the mountain of educating peers and leaders about what training can and can't fix.

How many times have you been asked to train the management team on improved communication? How many times have you heard, "Sally over in Production shipped out the wrong size widget; she needs to be re-trained"? Or, my personal favorite: "Joe screwed up the contract on the Higgins account; when we talked to him, he said that he wasn't trained on the pricing matrix for our widgets. I know you've got his proficiency tests that show he passed the certification on pricing, but clearly, something was missed. Can you schedule a training session for the contract reps to get them back up to speed?"

It's enough to drive a trainer to distraction. The truth is that there are lots of reasons why people don't communicate effectively - and just as many reasons why people make mistakes - and lack of training is only one of 'em. Sure, it's easy to point to poor training as the problem (it sure is a convenient out for the employee whose feet are getting toasty from being held to the fire). And sure, sometimes poor training is the problem. But if you're going to be effective, you need to get your leadership team on board with one simple concept: training is not the answer to every performance problem.

So, how do you know whether training will fix the problem? There are all kinds of analyses you can perform to figure it out, but there is a quick and dirty method that works just as well as a full-on research project - in my experience, anyway. All you need to do is ask yourself a few simple questions (have you noticed I'm kinda big on that?):

1. Did the employee make the mistake because s/he legitimately doesn't know how to perform the task? By "legitimately doesn't know," I mean this: if I hold a gun to his head and tell him to do it right or die, will he do it right? If so, then you're not dealing with a training issue. Disclaimer: I am NOT suggesting that anyone should actually DO such a thing; it's used as a hypothetical.
2. Do you have one employee who makes this particular mistake regularly, or is it a group of employees having the same issue? If you've got only one person who keeps screwing up, that points more toward a personnel issue. If you've got two dozen employees who keep screwing up in the same way, then you need to dig a little deeper: you've got either a training opportunity or (more likely) some kind of systemic problem.
3. Is this task one that's performed frequently? Training a group of employees on a task that they'll do once a year is a waste of everyone's time; no matter how well-executed the training, no one will remember it a year from now. If that's the case, work on developing some job aids (signs, checklists, etc.) to help them when they need it.
4. Is your management team calling it a mistake, when it's really just an employee responding to the corporate culture? Sometimes people take shortcuts or work around the system because there's something bigger at play. Maybe you're engaging in performance punishing (that's when you load down the top performers, because you know that they'll get it done; eventually, they start to break down and make mistakes under the impossible load). Maybe you're engaging in rewarding the poor performers (by taking work away from them and giving it to your key players), which encourages them to continue to perform poorly. Maybe you just aren't paying much attention at all. Maybe the policy or procedure you're trying to enforce is stupid.

Look, there's an entire process (root cause analysis) designed to help businesses figure out why people make mistakes and why processes fail. And I'll definitely write about root cause analysis in the future, because it's a terrific tool in your performance management toolkit if the management team is willing to take a good look in the mirror and admit that they are contributing to many of the problems they've always blamed on the rank-and-file in the past.  But you can't execute a full-blown root cause analysis for every performance problem that comes up, so use the questions above as a starting point.

Don't be afraid to turn down the occasional request for training if you know that training isn't the solution. Training just for the sake of training is like putting a band-aid on a bruise: it might make things look better, but it doesn't fix a thing. Instead, save the day by figuring out what's really driving the performance problem, and recommending several ways to fix it.

No "ask yourself a few questions" at the end tonight, since I already did that a few paragraphs up. Tomorrow, I'll tackle communication in a politically-unstable office environment.

There are no mistakes; only happy accidents

Do you remember Bob Ross? If you never watched his "Joy of Painting" series on PBS, then you missed a real treat (FYI, you can still catch the show in some PBS markets). In thirty minutes, Bob would take a blank canvas and turn it into quite a lovely painting.

I was always fascinated by the process, in part because I have virtually no talent when it comes to visual arts. More than that, however, what I enjoyed about Bob was his attitude: if something doesn't work out quite the way you'd planned, that's okay. You can work with it and come out with something terrific. As he often said, "There are no mistakes; only happy accidents."

That's a great attitude to have when it comes to delivering training, and it's especially useful in classroom training. You see, classroom training is particularly challenging because your audience is seated (and therefore likely to get restless and/or tired), and you may not have an in-your-face task for your students to accomplish. This can result in no sense of relevance or urgency, which in turn leads to lack of retention.

Here's where we separate the trainers from the presenters. Mind you, there's nothing wrong with giving presentations; I often give presentations. But a presentation or speech, however enlightening, is not a training session by my definition. If the goal of training is to help your students gain competence in a particular skill, then you're going to need to do a lot more than simply talk. And the talk you do give needs to engage your learners and get them involved in the process.

At a high level, here's what you need to do in order to maximize the classroom time and make sure your learners get what they need:

1. Identify the discrete tasks that the learners should be able to perform at the close of the session. If you're training people, then there must be skills transferred to the learners; no matter how entertaining you are, if your learners don't gain the skills you're trying to teach them, then you didn't do your job. So your first step is to figure out precisely what those skills are. Go ahead and get as granular as you want here; you can filter later.
2. Figure out the components of each task. Are there new vocabulary words they'll have to learn? Foreign concepts that they'll need to grasp? New tools they'll have to know how to use? What are the procedures they'll need to perform?
3. Determine the most effective way to facilitate learning for each component of each task. It's at this point that many trainers head down the wrong path. In a corporate environment, where Time=Money, we're often convinced that we need to get training completed as quickly as possible. This hurry-up mentality sometimes leads us into doing the worst thing possible for our learners: spoon feeding.

Why Spoon Feeding is Eeeeeeeeevil

Spoon feeding - as I define it relative to training - is the act of the trainer walking his or her learners step by step through the task that s/he's teaching. Spoon feeding is quick, to be sure; if you tell the students everything that they need to know, and you do that the moment that they need to know it, well then... you're going to zip right through the material.

Here's one problem with spoon feeding: if you spoon feed information (or even provide a demonstration), the students never engage their brains; they don't have to make any cognitive leaps, and there's nothing to get past what Kathy Sierra refers to as the brain's crap filter.

Here's another problem with spoon feeding: if they do manage to learn anything, your students will learn only the right way to perform the task. What's wrong with that?, you ask. Well, how do you expect folks to be able to deal with a problem in the process when all they've learned is what to do when everything goes right?

Here's one last problem with spoon feeding: it requires that you, the trainer, must know every last detail about the task; it requires that you become a subject-matter expert rather than a facilitator. This means a lot more work for you. That's not to say that you shouldn't be knowledgeable about the task you're teaching - but you can do a great job of training without being an expert.

Here's What You Should Do Instead

When you design the method you're going to use to train your learners on a given task, start thinking creatively: you may have to introduce some of the concepts via a lecture (of sorts), but that doesn't mean that you don't have some tools at your disposal to help engage the students. I once rewrote the lyrics to the song "M-O-T-H-E-R" in order to help my students remember the characteristics of root cause for a root cause analysis class. Silly? You betcha - but they remembered it.

When it comes to performing (or simulating) the task in your training session, you should probably give a lot less direction than you think; provide a framework, and provide guidance, but make the students do the work. Yes, they're going to make mistakes, but that's the point: we learn best from the things that don't work right the first time. By giving the students the opportunity to make mistakes in a safe environment, you're going to help them figure out what to do in the real world when a mistake happens. You're going to be able to help them learn how to troubleshoot the process or procedure; you're going to teach them to fish, instead of giving them a fish. And you might learn something new, as well. And I promise you, it doesn't hurt your credibility if you occasionally say, "You know what? I'm not sure how to fix that; let's figure it out together."

At the end of a training session, what matters is whether or not your learners can perform the task or function independently. If they think you're terrific, that's great; but what's important is whether they learned how to do what you brought them there to do. Liking you is gravy.

Here are some questions to ask yourself the next time you develop a training course:

1. How can I creatively help my students understand this concept? Can I use music? Art work? A crossword puzzle? A game of charades?
2. What are the most common mistakes people make when they perform this function? How can I guide them to make those mistakes in training, so they learn how to deal with them in the real world?
3. Is the way that I'm building this training designed to make me look smart, or is it designed to make sure that they get it?

In tomorrow's post, I'll be talking about what to do when everyone else thinks that training is the answer, but you know it isn't.

This is your brain on training

Traditional classroom training is alive and well in corporations, despite all evidence that it's craptastic. Sure, if the trainer in question is a really dynamic speaker, and if the material is relevant to you, and if you can manage to pull the gems of wisdom out of the lecture, then you might come out of it with a few nuggets you can actually use back at Ye Olde Cubicle Farme.

But most of the time, and for most of us, a classroom training session is a great opportunity to catch up on e-mail (curse you, BlackBerry!), daydreaming, or some light doodling; for the record, none of the above is conducive to you leaving the room able to do something new (or better), which is what training is supposed to be about.

I'm not suggesting that it's impossible to get effective training in a classroom setting; I am saying that you can't get effective training in a traditional classroom lecture with a 3,000-slide PowerPoint presentation (and you just know that all 3,000 slides have line upon line of bulleted lists, don't you?). That training model is a push model: I know stuff that you don't, and I'm going to talk about it until I'm blue in the face and you're imagining me in a muzzle. I'm going to spoon feed you factoids and concepts, and by golly you're going to leave this room knowing everything I know.

Listen, there's a time and place for speeches and presentations, but a training session isn't it. Let me give you a few reasons why:

• If you're giving a speech in front of, say, your local Chamber of Commerce, you have a willing audience that wants to hear what you have to say. In a corporate training setting, you likely have a captive audience, and at least a few of those audience members have a list (as long as your 3,000 slide presentation) of things they'd rather be doing.
• In a speech or presentation, your goal is to enlighten and entertain; if you're training a group of people, the goal is get the audience to be able to do something they couldn't do before.
• In order to achieve the goal of helping people gain competency in a task or job function, they have to be engaged in using that competency or job function.

In tomorrow's entry, I'm going to talk about what you can do to make classroom training worthwhile to the students. In the interim, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

1. When you develop a training course, is your goal to help your students learn, or is it to help them do?
2. Do you want your students to think that you're knowledgeable and smart?
3. When was the last time you told the powers that be (hereafter known as TPTB) that training wouldn't fix their problem?
4. Before you develop training, how much research do you conduct in order to make sure that the skill you're teaching is the skill that's needed to deal with the performance gap?

Turning lemons into lemonade: how mistakes can cement your customer relationships

Last month, after living in denial for over a year, I finally decided that it was time to accept the fact that I couldn't read. Well, I could read; I just couldn't read small print. No, that's not quite accurate. I could read small print; I just couldn't read small print while wearing my contact lenses. Middle age, it seems, waits for no one.

I paid a visit to my local opthamologist, who informed me that I am an extra-challenging case. You see, in addition to being quite nearsighted and the new development of presbyopia, I also suffer from astigmatism. Now, multifocal lenses for the aging population are fairly common; toric lenses for astigmatism are quite common. Toric multifocals? Not so much. But I digress, because this isn't a story about my new (and fabulous) contacts; it's a story about a mistake that turned me into a loyal customer for life.

Because I knew that I wouldn't be able to wear my contacts every day, I ordered a pair of bifocals as well. I picked out some lovely frames, the optician measured... whatever it is they measure in order to figure out where to place the near-vision correction, and I planned to get my shiny new glasses in about a week.

A week later, I received a call from one of the women who works in the optical department; we'll call her Kristy, because that 's her name. I was conducting a training session that day, so she left me a message to tell me that there was a problem with the lenses, and she'd have to reorder them. This meant that I'd be waiting at least another week for my new glasses.

When I called Kristy back to ask what the problem was, she did something unexpected: she admitted that the problem was her fault. When she put the lenses into the cutting machine in order to trim them to fit the frames, she failed to secure them properly. The end result was that the lenses couldn't be secured in the frames.

Without any stonewalling, and without any excuses, Kristy took full responsibility for the error. Was I still annoyed? You betcha. But it kinda takes the wind out of my angry sails when someone takes responsibility for her mistakes. So I thanked her for being honest, and asked her to put a rush on the re-order, which she willingly agreed to do. Then she thanked me - repeatedly - for being so nice about it. As if that wasn't enough, Kristy followed up with me by phone every few days to keep me updated on the status of the order.

When the new lenses arrived (ten very long days later), I had some scheduling issues that made it difficult for me to get there before closing time. So guess what Kristy did? She offered to stay at the office until I could get there. She said that after the problems I'd had, it was the least she could do.

I'm betting that I wouldn't have gotten that kind of consideration from a large eyecare chain, for several reasons:

• Large companies have Big Books o' Policies that dictate every move they make; employees are discouraged from varying from The Book.
• A large company probably wouldn't have even bothered to contact me; they would've waited until I called them, and then I probably wouldn't have gotten the full story (I'm really not biased against big business, but I know that large companies breed bureaucracy and impersonalization).
• Large companies likely don't treat their employees as well as The Eye Center clearly does; let's face it, the CEO of your average Fortune 500 probably hasn't even seen most of the people who work there. That being the case, said CEO certainly can't have any kind of working relationship with the employees, which it turn makes it easier to ignore the needs of those employees.

That last bullet point is the single most important predictor of customer loyalty, in my opinion. Unhappy employees don't go out of their way to give the customer a delightful experience. Unhappy employees don't generally take full responsibility for their mistakes and then do whatever is necessary to fix them. Unhappy employees typically don't care if their employer loses a customer (or 1000 customers), because unhappy employees typically don't care about their employers' success.

So what's the moral of this very long story? First, that astigmatism becomes a real pain in the bum once you get past 40. Don't say I didn't warn you. On second thought, I suppose that's not a moral so much as it is a warning, so let's try that again: the moral of the story is that treating your employees well is one of the keys to building customer loyalty and a successful organization. If you treat your employees like faceless, nameless drones; if you make them feel insignificant and unimportant; if you treat them as costs rather than as assets... well, then you're missing a big opportunity to evangelize your business from the inside out.

The kind of passionate word of mouth you get out of customers? You just can't buy that. And whether that word of mouth says that you rock or that you suck is not up the CEO or the senior management team; it's up to the rank-and-file. Your front-line employees are the people who deal with your customers. Treat them well, and they'll treat your customers well. When you do that, everyone wins.

Ask yourself a few questions:

1. How much freedom do you give your employees when it comes to making your customers happy?
2. When your organization makes a mistake, do you admit it freely and openly, or do you try to hide it?
3. When was the last time one of your employees went way beyond the call of duty just to help a customer?
4. What's the one thing you can do today to make an employee feel special enough that s/he'll take that extra step for your customers?