by David Tomkinson
One of the biggest demands of organisations is for consistency of delivery. They go to extraordinary lengths to set the standards, measure the behaviours and tell staff how far away they are from being ‘competent’. My experience is that they are focussing on the wrong things – they tend to be trying to control inputs rather than measure outputs.
Let me give you an example – I was talking to a Marketing Director about a cultural change programme we were running for him to improve the customer experience. He started to ask me ‘when I go into a store, how will I know that the programme is working?’ My reply was ‘you ask the customers coming out of the store about their experience and you look at the sales figures’. This confused him – he was expecting the response that he would be approached within 30 seconds of entering the store or that he would hear staff reciting standard phrases to the customer. However if you focus on the outputs and let the staff determine how they get there, it is much more empowering for them and a lot less time consuming for the management. Otherwise it is trying to control something that isn’t controllable – people are different and they will only behave in a consistent, robotic way if constantly checked up on and punished for non compliance. Hardly the recipe for a happy, empowered workforce.!
Why do we recruit staff with individual personalities and then spend considerable amounts of time and money trying to get them to all be the same? Far better to reward and punish achievement of outputs and let the staff determine how to get there. Of course this requires other skills from management – coaching, feedback, listening, identifying training needs, providing support, to name but a few. However the rewards when you get this right are phenomenal – the Marketing Director above saw a 20% increase in sales and customer satisfaction almost doubling. Not surprisingly we didn’t have many conversations about inputs after this! If you want to genuinely empower your organisation, contact david.tomkinson@andpartnership.com or visit our website www.andpartnership.com
