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Service, service, service
/in Extraordinary Customer/Client Service/by Tom DoescherI am becoming obsessed with great service, and am increasingly intolerant of bad service. I recently received great service in a completely unexpected place — the T.G.I. Friday’s in the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. (You know what airports are like — crowds, lines, cranky people.) When I approached the hostess and gave her my name, I was told there would be a 10-minute wait. My wait, however, turned out to be less than 10 minutes. That was the first pleasant surprise. Then, when I was seated, the waitress politely asked for my order. My food arrived in less than 10 minutes and it was fresh, hot, and delicious. Surprised, I asked my waitress, Monique, “What is going on here?” She replied, “Our guests need to get in and out quickly, so we have to move fast to get them to their planes.” (Monique also said she has worked at other restaurants but this place has been, by far, the most financially rewarding.) My overall experience was refreshing, especially considering I had just left a pricey Florida resort where, poolside, we waited almost an hour for our food. I guess the resort staff wasn’t overly concerned, maybe because no one needed to catch a plane.
Do your customers/clients feel like I did at T.G.I. Friday’s? Are your associates, like Monique, working hard because they’re proud to be affiliated with your business?
Leader versus manager
/in Ideas to help you build a solid team/by Tom DoescherI may lose some readers over this one, but here goes anyway. Many leaders — including Frank Moran, former managing partner of Plante & Moran — have said you manage tasks, but you lead people. I believe this is especially true today, because there are very few purely manual jobs. I have spent the last 20 years in manufacturing, and I love to go on plant tours. Do you realize everything machine operators have to know to perform their jobs today? Running a machine can be very complex work; some of the work cells I have seen remind me of Houston’s Mission Control Center. So what’s my point? There probably are times when an activity is purely a task, and your role may be that of a manager — but I would suggest that, in most environments I have observed, what most associates need is leadership. A leader provides a clear plan/goal, offers relevant training, gives developmental feedback when something does not go right (I did not say screaming!), is accessible to answer questions, and remembers to say “thank you” for a job well done. If you have subordinates, I challenge you to think of yourself as a leader, rather than a manager or a boss.
Create your own path
/in Nuggets and Encouragement Regarding Strategy and Focus/by Tom DoescherBarbara and I got back into cross-country skiing this year. One day, as we were skiing along a groomed track in beautiful northern Michigan, I thought to myself, “It would be more fun to make my own track through the snow, but it would definitely be more difficult.” I think the same is true in business. Too often, I hear discussions where people are analyzing what their competitors are doing versus exploring what their customers and clients want. Is it easier to copy the competition rather than possibly reinventing your product to meet your customers’ needs? Of course it is! Just as in skiing, it is definitely simpler and less risky to follow the track that has already been laid out instead of breaking new ground and trying something different. A few years ago, I read a really thought-provoking book, Blue Ocean Strategy. The authors talked about how most of us operate in the “red” ocean, studying and emulating our competitors. They went on and gave great examples of companies that operate in the “blue” ocean, and have successfully created their own track. Is your team satisfied to glide along in the groomed track, or do you have a mechanism — or, better yet, culture — that encourages breaking out of the mold and trying new things?