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Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness

July 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To keep your customers in the present day, you can’t be content just to please them. If you want your business to thrive, you have to produce enthusiastic aficionados—customers who’re so keyed up about how you treat them that they want to tell stories about you. Customers should be satisfied no matter what service you provide, from selling merch to thesis help services to providing hairstyling. These customers and their cult-like loyalty become a key element of your sales force.

'Delivering Happiness' by Tony Hsieh (ISBN 0446576220) American entrepreneur Tony Hsieh built the online retail store Zappos on the fundamental idea that great service is not a happenstance. It starts when leaders decide what kind of experience they want their customers to have—and articulate that approach in a clear mission and vision. As in the case of luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton, leaders keep the mission alive by empowering their employees to go the extra mile for the customer. Above all, when it comes from the heart, great customer service keeps customers coming back over and over.

In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (2010,) Hsieh discusses the importance of cultivating happiness as a launch pad to better results for your business.

How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

Hsieh did not create Zappos. He was one of the startup’s initial investors but got sucked in to help the original founder after six years. Zappos operated in survival mode for a while. As it began to outlive its financial struggles, Hsieh and his leadership team went about building an intentional corporate culture dedicated to employee empowerment and the promise of delivering happiness through a valued workforce and devoted customers.

Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Hsieh tells his entrepreneurial life experiences, often presenting biographical stories to make his line of reasoning. Many great entrepreneurs got started early, and Hsieh is no exception. He started with worm-farming (age 7,) button-making (elementary school,) magic tricks involving dental dams (high school,) burger joint (college,) and web-consulting (post-college) before having considerable financial success with the internet advertising firm LinkExchange (sold in 1998 to Microsoft for $265 million.)

In 2009, Hsieh sold Zappos to Amazon for $847 million under pressure from Sequoia Capital, a major financier of Zappos. As a point of reference, Hsieh later recalled,

Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project—“Tony’s social experiments,” they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view–namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board’s attitude was that my “social experiments” might make for good PR but that they didn’t move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.

How Zappos Fostered a Culture and a Business Model Based on the Notion of Happiness

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh of Zappos Zappos’s corporate culture is guided by ten core values, which aspire to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace (employees are encouraged to “create fun and a little weirdness” in the office and build personal connections with colleagues,) and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

  • Zappos’s core values include: deliver WOW through service (#1,) be humble (#10,) do more with less (#8,) be passionate and determined (#9,) and create fun and a little weirdness (#3.)
  • Zappos wants only those employees who really want to work for the company. All new employees attend a four-week training program that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and customer-obsession. Zappos offers $2,000 to walk out at the end of the first week, and the offer stands until the end of the fourth week. Only a small number of new employees take the offer.
  • Zappos challenges all employees to make at least one improvement every week. Allowing employees to improve the tasks they’re doing and enhancing the processes that they’re responsible for executing allows them to make their jobs more meaningful.
  • Instead of measuring call center efficiency by the time each call center operator spends on the phone with a customer, Zappos developed its own scorecards. Zappos quantifies such things as the personal and emotional connections operators make with customers using measures such as measuring the number of thank you cards.

Zappos is Obsessed with Impressing Customers

By focusing on company culture, everything else—such as building a brand with sustained revenue growth, fast turnaround times at warehouses, and passionate employees—fell into place.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships,) and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself.)

Recommendation: Read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. This insightful tome is brimming with practicable ideas on customer service, building a positive company culture, best hiring practices, how to motivate and train your team, and setting business goals and values. The core elements of Zappos’s DNA—purpose, happiness, culture, and profits—are an effective framework for making happiness a business model.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How Starbucks Brewed Success // Book Summary of Howard Schultz’s ‘Pour Your Heart Into It’
  2. How Ritz-Carlton Goes the Extra Mile // Book Summary of ‘The New Gold Standard’
  3. Employee Engagement: Show Them How They Make a Difference
  4. Don’t Over-Measure and Under-Prioritize
  5. Incentives Matter

Filed Under: Business Stories, Leadership, Leading Teams, Managing People Tagged With: Books, Customer Service, Entrepreneurs, Goals, Human Resources, Likeability, Motivation, Performance Management, Persuasion

How to Develop Customer Service Skills // Summary of Lee Cockerell’s ‘The Customer Rules’

July 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Becoming great at customer service doesn’t require you to excel at a zillion things. You’ll just need to identify the core principles and get the basics right.

“At the end of the day, everything a business leader does is in the service of customer service … the customer always rules, and there are Rules for winning customers, keeping customers, and turning loyal customers into advocates and emissaries for your business,” writes Lee Cockerell in his prescriptive manual on The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service (2013.)

'The Customer Rules' by Lee Cockerell (ISBN B01N8Y8ZU8) Cockerell is a veteran of the hospitality industry and an eminent corporate trailer. He spent eight years with Hilton, 17 years with Marriott, and 16 years with the Walt Disney. Before retirement, he was the executive vice president of operations at Walt Disney World in Florida and oversaw the resort’s 40,000 employees at 20 hotels, four theme parks, and two water parks.

Non-obvious Customer Service Insights

Cockerell structures his guidebook along 39 tips to serve customers with consistency, efficiency, creativity, and sincerity. He glosses over everything—hiring right, communicating a clear and relevant customer promise, fostering a customer-oriented culture, and creating a superior employee experience. Those employees can deliver a great customer experience, respond to complaints, and practice verbal skills to express empathy.

  • Make customer service every employee’s responsibility. Everything every employee does can have tremendous repercussions on the service your customers receive, and therefore your bottom line. “Pay close attention to every decision you make, every policy you announce, every procedure you introduce, every person you hire, every promotion you award, every e-mail you send, every conversation you have, every hand you shake, and every back you slap.”
  • You win customers one at a time and lose them a thousand at a time. Satisfied customers will spread the word only if they’re truly blown away their experience. Angry customers are “far more motivated to shout about their feelings, and furious exposes get a lot more attention than glowing testimonials. Humans are wired to pay more attention to the negative than the positive.”
  • Anticipate your customers’ needs. Discover what customers aren’t getting from your competitors and give it to them. Customers’ problems are a good source of business innovations. “Great businesses stand out by being different from the rest in the right way: by finding customer needs that are going unmet and figuring out a way to meet them.”
  • Keep an eye on your competitors. Be a copycat. Look outside your industry for great ideas and tweak them for their own purposes. “Don’t just imitate; pay attention to everything around you, spot the best ideas, and then find a better way to apply them.”
  • Treat customers the way you’d treat your loved ones. “First and last impressions have a tremendous influence on a customer’s lasting impression. A cheery hello and a sincere good-bye can leave a customer with a memory of a positive experience, regardless of what happens in between.”
  • Treat every customer like a regular. Familiarity breeds repeat business. “Do whatever you can to make regular customers feel like family and new customers feel like regulars. Remember the theme song from the TV series Cheers? Don’t you want to go “where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came”? Make all your customers feel that you’re really glad they came.”
  • Prioritize WIN, “what’s important now,” your customers’ immediate needs, desires, and concerns. “Even a nod, a gesture, some brief eye contact, a pleasant “I’ll be right with you. Please make yourself comfortable”—that’s all it takes. People want to be acknowledged.”
  • Surprise your customers with a little extra when they least expect it. Neuroscientists have confirmed that the human brain “craves the excitement of surprise. The region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, aka the pleasure center, experiences more activation when a pleasurable stimulus comes unexpectedly than it does when the same pleasure is predictable. “So if you get a present for your birthday, that’s nice. But you’ll like it a lot more if you get a present and it’s not your birthday.””
  • Don’t try too hard. “Being excessively solicitous and eager to please is annoying.” It makes you seem phony. “Think how annoying it is when a server at a restaurant stops by your table every five minutes to ask if everything’s okay with your meal.” No one likes to be pestered constantly. “If your customers have to stifle the urge to scream, “Go away!” or, “Leave us alone!” you’re trying too hard.”

Recommendation: Read Lee Cockerell’s The Customer Rules. With plenty of anecdotes, experiences, and very short no-nonsense chapters, this book is an enjoyable summary of the many simple—but often overlooked—first principles of building a customer-oriented culture and delivering great customer service.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How Ritz-Carlton Goes the Extra Mile // Book Summary of ‘The New Gold Standard’
  2. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  3. How to Promote Employees
  4. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  5. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave

Filed Under: Career Development, Mental Models Tagged With: Coaching, Courtesy, Customer Service, Human Resources, Likeability, Performance Management

How Ritz-Carlton Goes the Extra Mile // Book Summary of ‘The New Gold Standard’

April 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Psychologist Joseph Michelli’s The New Gold Standard (2008) describes how luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton has programmed its organization to foster customer-centric behavior in employees at all levels.

'The New Gold Standard Ritz-Carlton' by Joseph Michelli (ISBN 0071548335) Ritz-Carlton’s clearly-defined and well-implemented cultural principles, called “Gold Standards,” enable the company’s employees to deliver the exceptional service that its refined customers have come to expect. Ritz-Carlton’s brand recognition is so deep-rooted that such phrases as “ritzy” and “putting on the ritz” have become part of the lexicon.

Values First

Ritz-Carlton propagates its customer-centricity goals by making a compact trifold “Credo Card” part of each employee’s uniform. These cards describe the “ultimate guest experience,” and they are shared with guests eagerly. Michelli writes, “Ultimately the value of the Credo or any other core cultural roadmap is the opportunity it affords those inside the business to realize how the ideal customer and staff experience looks and feels.”

Ritz-Carlton Gold Standards Credo Card - Customer Service Service Principle #10 of Gold Standards states, “When a guest has a problem or needs something special, you should break away from your regular duties to address and resolve the issue.” Irrespective of rank and title, every employee can spend as much as $2,000 per day per guest without a supervisor’s approval to solve a guest’s problem. This distinctive policy not only permits the employees to fulfill their guests’spoken and implied needs but also empowers employees to use their best judgment to create memorable and personal experiences for guests.

While some might think that this type of empowerment is both ill advised and financially irresponsible, leadership at Ritz-Carlton has determined the trust they place in employees is well founded. Rather than being extravagant with the resources entrusted to them, the employees tend to be very cautious … the advantage of the $2,000 staff empowerment is that the employees don’t have to delay a service response by taking it up to the next level in the organization, and they can take the initiative to enhance guest experiences.

Ritz-Carlton Gold Standards of Customer Service

Empowerment through Trust

Guided by co-founder Horst Schulze’s oft-cited business principle, “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen,” Ritz-Carlton selects, trains, and cultivates a dedicated workforce of outstanding professionals who are just as deserving of respect as Ritz-Carlton’s upscale guests.

Ritz-Carlton’s customer-centric principles and culture inform its hiring and training processes and preside over the rewards and promotion systems. Managers use every opportunity to go over the company’s values and remind everybody to polish up on caring for guests. For example, at the start of each shift, everyone—from laundry staff to executives—participates in a 15-minute “lineup” to talk about the nitty-gritty of the Gold Standards.

Michelli observes, “When it comes to the Gold Standards, Ritz-Carlton leaders and frontline staff alike can appear, from an outsider’s perspective, to be teetering toward the fanatical.” No wonder, then, that Ritz-Carlton has become a paradigm for the highest level of sustainable customer experience. In the year 2000, the company launched the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center to offer courses and to consult for anyone interested in its cult of customer service. In 2001, when Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson were preparing to launch Apple Stores, they sent executives to Ritz-Carlton’s leadership program to learn about offering the best customer experience. Apple’s notion of anticipatory customer service and the concept of Genius Bars originated from Ritz-Carlton.

Delivering Wow!

During the “lineup” meetings, Ritz-Carlton managers and leaders also reinforce the customer-service principles by sharing “Wow!” stories of delighting guests. The internal communication department collects such stories each week and publishes them in the in-house newsletters. “Positive storytelling. The ability to capture, share, and inspire through tangible examples of what it means to live the Credo and core corporate values.”

The New Gold Standard includes many anecdotes from hotel guests, employees, managers, and executives to explain how Ritz-Carlton has “going above and beyond the call of duty” embodied in its culture.

  • A breakfast waiter scurried to a neighborhood grocery store to buy a guest’s preferred grape jelly when the dining room did not have it on hand.
  • At the Ritz-Carlton Dubai, a manager and a staff carpenter built a temporary access ramp made of wood boards to allow a guest and his wheelchair-bound wife to access the sandy beach, dine by the ocean, and watch the sun go down.
  • When a guest called the Ritz-Carlton Naples to notify that she had run out of gas, a doorman filled up a few five-gallon gasoline containers and drove 40 miles to help out the stranded woman and her children.
  • During Hurricane Katrina, employees of the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans pushed laundry carts loaded with luggage and guests through flooded streets to get them to safe locations.

Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center $2000 Empowerment Lest the reader dismisses these as cherry-picked examples of “overdoing it” in Michelli’s laudatory narrative, these cases in point are demonstrative of the Ritz-Carlton DNA. The employees feel thoroughly invested in and trusted by their employers. And Ritz-Carlton recognizes that customer loyalty is dependent upon the frontline employees who administer such sophisticated service daily.

Idea for Impact: Foster a foundation of customer-centricity

Speed-read Joseph Michelli’s The New Gold Standard. It offers ample insights into establishing your own gold standards for achieving excellence in customer service.

  • Create a customer-centric culture that identifies, nurtures, and reinforces service-excellence as a primary guiding principle. “Leadership often involves fostering the environment in which everyday creativity emerges in response to the needs of specific customer groups.”
  • Foster a culture where employees take up personal accountability for resolving customers’ problems.
  • Train employees to anticipate and fulfill the unmet—even unstated—needs of customers.
  • Reiterate that providing a ‘wow!’ experience should be each employee’s goal during every interaction with a customer.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. How to Develop Customer Service Skills // Summary of Lee Cockerell’s ‘The Customer Rules’
  2. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  3. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  4. How to Promote Employees
  5. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around

Filed Under: Business Stories, Leadership Reading, Managing People Tagged With: Coaching, Courtesy, Customer Service, Human Resources, Likeability, Performance Management

Executive Compensation: Pay Them Well, But Not Too Well

January 23, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Our executive compensation system is broken. Surveys show that the average public company CEO compensation is many hundred times that of the average employee. This gaping disparity in pay vis-à-vis the relative value they bring to their organizations is a moral embarrassment to our society, a point that wasn’t lost on the Occupy movement of yesteryear.

The debate over executive pay won’t die away anytime soon. As election year approaches, grandstanding politicians are vying to outdo each other with pledges to implement pubic policies that limit executive compensation, whereas theorists argue that, in a market economy, compensations should be set by supply and demand for executive talent.

Disproportionate executive compensation can demotivate employees The latter position is commonly echoed by company boards and executive compensation consultants—both of whom owe their cushy jobs to the CEOs and their top teams. They assert that leaders need to be provided with personal incentives to attract and motivate them.

Strangely enough, such incentives often demotivate the leaders’ followers. Financial incentives that are directed disproportionately to the leader in isolation often prove downright counterproductive.

Leadership is an outcome of the relationship between leader and follower, and excessively compensated leaders do not engender followership effectively.

This comports with financier J. P. Morgan’s observations at the start of the twentieth century that the only characteristic common to his failing clients was a tendency to overpay those at the top. As Peter Drucker commented in The Frontiers of Management (1986,)

[J. P. Morgan found] eighty years ago that the only thing the businesses that were clients of J. P. Morgan & Co. and did poorly had in common was that each company’s top executive was paid more than 130 percent of the compensation of the people in the next echelon and these, in turn, more than 130 percent of the compensation of the people in the echelon just below them, and so on down the line. Very high salaries at the top, concluded Morgan—who was hardly contemptuous of big money or an “anticapitalist”—disrupt the team. They make even high-ranking people in the company see their own top management as adversaries rather than as colleagues…. And that quenches any willingness to say “we” and to exert oneself except in one’s own immediate self-interest.

Idea for Impact: Employees’ efforts are devalued markedly under conditions of gross inequality. Pay leaders well (if you pay peanuts, you’ll get monkeys,) but not too well.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  3. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  4. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  5. How to Promote Employees

Filed Under: Managing People, Mental Models Tagged With: Great Manager, Hiring & Firing, Leadership Lessons, Management, Motivation, Performance Management

A Guide to Your First Management Role // Book Summary of Julie Zhuo’s ‘The Making of a Manager’

December 16, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

First-time managers are often unprepared for—even unaware of—the responsibilities and challenges of being a manager. This is particularly true at fledging startups that don’t have bonafide HR departments to guide their novice managers nor can afford management coaches. Besides, it takes a new boss a year or two to learn the basics and become comfortable in his/her new role.

Julie Zhuo, Vice President of Product Design at Facebook When Facebook was small enough and “the entire company could fit into a backyard party,” 25-year old product designer Julie Zhuo was asked to become a manager. Zhuo had started at Facebook as its first intern and then gone full-time. Having no prior managerial experience, she acted how she thought managers were supposed to act and made many mistakes. In due course, she found joy in the role, expanded her skill set, and evolved to become Facebook’s VP of product design.

In The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You (2019,) Zhuo has chronicled her experiences from ramping-up into management and getting to know herself better. It’s the book she wishes had been there for the novice manager that she was.

Zhuo offers many hard-earned insights that only time in the trenches can reveal:

  • Operate from first principles. “Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.”
  • Not everyone is cut out for a managerial responsibility. “Being a manager is a highly personal journey, and if you don’t have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.”
  • Let go of your old “individual contributor” role and make the shift to being the boss. Don’t spend time trying to do the work. Invest your time in coaching, supporting, and developing employees. Don’t run interference between them.
  • Discover your decision-making proclivities. Map out your strengths and weaknesses. “Great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses.”
  • Realize that the source of your power as a manager is everything but formal authority. Respect trumps popularity.
  • Don’t manage everyone in the same way. Learn to appreciate how distinctive each individual is in what he/she wants from work and what animates him/her to work well.
  • Trust is a critical ingredient in relationships. “Invest time and effort into creating and maintaining trusting relationships where people feel they can share their mistakes, challenges, and fears with you.”

'The Making of a Manager' by Julie Zhuo (ISBN 0735219567) Zhuo offers practical—if basic, but sufficient—advice for setting a vision, assessing the culture, delegating problems, giving feedback, aligning expectations, setting priorities, establishing a network of allies and confidants, hiring cleverly, and other responsibilities of leading a team. She delves into many difficult circumstances she’s encountered, e.g., handling previously-peers-now-employees whom she passed over for a promotion.

Recommendation: The Making of a Manager is an excellent primer for novice managers. It offers an insightful, practical, and relevant playbook for making the transition from being an outstanding individual contributor to becoming a good manager of others.

Complement with Andy Grove’s High Output Management (1983,) Loren Belker et al.’s The First-Time Manager (2012,) and Michael Watkins’s The First 90 Days (2013.)

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees
  3. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  4. Five Rules for Leadership Success // Summary of Dave Ulrich’s ‘The Leadership Code’
  5. Management by Walking Around the Frontlines [Lessons from ‘The HP Way’]

Filed Under: Managing People, MBA in a Nutshell Tagged With: Books, Coaching, Conversations, Feedback, Getting Ahead, Great Manager, Management, Mentoring, Performance Management, Skills for Success

Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees

August 27, 2019 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Firing is About an Underlying Commitment to Retaining Great People

The former General Electric leader Jack Welch earned the moniker “Neutron Jack” for sacking some 100,000 employees in the early years of his tenure as chief executive. Welch defended the dismissals by emphasizing that it would have been far more heartless to keep those employees and lay them off later when they had little chance of reinventing their careers. The dismissals were part of his deliberate efforts to establish a corporate culture that emphasized honest feedback and where only the “A players” got to stay.

Many Fired Employees Feel Surprised That the Axe Didn’t Fall Sooner

Fire Fast---It's Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees Managers know that ending a bad fit sooner is better than doing it later. Firing a bad employee is often better for both the employee leaving and the employees remaining.

Then again, many managers hesitate because firing is awfully difficult. No one likes to fire people. Looking an employee straight in the eye and telling he’ll no longer have a job is one of the harshest things a manager will ever have to do.

Besides, some managers are so uncomfortable with conflict that they are unwilling to deal directly and honestly with a problem employee, not to mention of confronting the risk of a wrongful termination claim.

If an Employee is Not Working out for You, Fire Fast

By holding on to a bad employee, you are really doing a disservice to the employee. Forcing a person to be something he’s are not, and giving him the same corrective feedback—week after week and quarter after quarter—is neither sustainable nor considerate. Trying to keep the employee in the wrong role prevents his personal and professional evolution.

  • Give the employee a chance to turn the situation around—people can change.
  • Try to find him an appropriate role within your company. Recall the old Zen poem,

    Faults and delusions
    Are not to be got rid of
    Just blindly.
    Look at the astringent persimmons!
    They turn into the sweet dried ones.

    However, if the employee is a truly bad fit, reassigning him just shifts the problem to a different part of the company.

  • If your efforts to remediate a bad employee haven’t worked out, cut your losses and fire him promptly. Help the employee move on to a job or a company where the fit is much better.

Idea for Impact: It is much worse to retain someone who is not suited for his job than it is to fire him. Help him find a new role quickly and land on his feet.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. How to Manage Overqualified Employees
  3. What To Do If Your New Hire Is Underperforming
  4. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  5. How to Promote Employees

Filed Under: Career Development, Leading Teams, Managing People Tagged With: Change Management, Coaching, Conflict, Conversations, Employee Development, Feedback, Great Manager, Hiring, Hiring & Firing, Human Resources, Mentoring, Performance Management

Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity

January 10, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re a manager, you can become a motivator by inspiring your employees to high performance—and produce beyond the ordinary.

  1. Seven Easy Ways to Motivate Employees and Increase Productivity Purpose. Even the mundane can become meaningful in a larger context. Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks once said about providing propose, “People want to be part of something larger than themselves. They want to be part of something they’re really proud of, that they’ll fight for, sacrifice for, that they trust.” Sometimes that’s all people need to get their skates on—because nothing is worse than feeling that they’re are stuck doing a meaningless task.
  2. Autonomy. Empower people to innovate and make decisions. Be clear about performance expectations. Reduce your direct supervision of their work. Don’t micromanage.
  3. Appreciation. Reward your employees’ small as well as big successes. Recognition is easy and need not be expensive and time-consuming.
  4. Involvement. Interact directly with frontline employees, observe their work, solicit their opinions, seek ideas for improvement, and work directly with the frontline to identify and resolve problems. Encourage employees to talk about the “undiscussable,” even if others don’t want to hear it.
  5. Challenge. Put people in situations where they can grow, learn new skills, and gain new knowledge.
  6. Urgency. Disregard command-and-control and, instead, become an expediter and facilitate your employees getting their job done. The pioneering management guru Peter Drucker encouraged managers to frequently ask of employees the one question that can initiate more improvement than any other: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?”
  7. Empathy. Care about your employees’ success and give them hope about their performance. Be sincere. Demonstrate you value differing opinions.

Idea for Impact: The bottom line on motivation is this: People know what motivates them. Ask them. You may not have any idea what they want.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  3. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  4. To Inspire, Pay Attention to People: The Hawthorne Effect
  5. Four Telltale Signs of an Unhappy Employee

Filed Under: Leadership, Leading Teams, Managing People, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Coaching, Great Manager, Human Resources, Mentoring, Motivation, Performance Management

Five Pitfalls of Coaching Success

December 20, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

According to Coaching, Mentoring and Managing: Breakthrough Strategies to Solve Performance Problems and Build Winning Teams (1996) by William Hendricks, et al., some managers instinctively do things that thwart their team’s performance.

Examine if you’re guilty of one or more of the following.

  1. Five Pitfalls of Coaching Success Do you tend to speak at your employees, not with them? Your style of instruction could be accompanied by the frequent use of phrases such as “I want” and “you should.”
  2. Do you tend to exaggerate situations or behavior? Your tendency to color an employee’s behavior using qualifiers such as “always,” “never,” and “everyone” could be dragging him down. Generalizations could crush the employee’s sense of self-esteem. If you want to create positive change, instill pride, not shame.
  3. Do you sometimes assume that your employee knows a problem and the solution? It’s possible that the employee may not recognize the problem. Skillfully use lines of questioning that can help the employee drill down into the details and reveal a higher-level issue.
  4. Do you often fail to follow up? If you don’t follow up on directions or performance expectations, you will inevitably find yourself reacting to unpleasant surprises.
  5. Do you not reward improved behavior? If you don’t reward positive changes in behavior, you will not expand behavioral adjustments to permanent performance improvement. Managerial feedback and coaching is all about reinforcing positive behaviors and encouraging corrections to damaging behavior.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Self-Assessment Quiz: Are You A Difficult Boss?
  2. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. Don’t Push Employees to Change
  5. Don’t Reward A While Hoping for B

Filed Under: Leading Teams, Mental Models Tagged With: Coaching, Feedback, Motivation, Performance Management

A Sense of Urgency

December 18, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The most successful managers I know are highly attentive of their colleagues’ sense of urgency and incessantly adapt to them.

In his excellent Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson evokes Apple CEO (and operations wizard) Tim Cook’s responsiveness and a sense of urgency:

At a meeting early in his tenure, Cook was told of a problem with one of Apple’s Chinese suppliers. “This is really bad,” he said. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes later he looked at an operations executive sitting at the table and unemotionally asked, “Why are you still here?” The executive stood up, drove directly to the San Francisco airport, and bought a ticket to China. He became one of Cook’s top deputies.

Idea for Impact: Bosses and customers often respond more positively to your focus on creating a sense of urgency before emerging problems erupt in a crisis.

Wondering what to read next?

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  2. What it Takes to Be a Hit with Customers
  3. No Boss Likes a Surprise—Good or Bad
  4. Make ‘Em Thirsty; or, Master of the Art of the Pitch
  5. Creativity & Innovation: The Opportunities in Customer Pain Points

Filed Under: Leadership, Managing People, Project Management, Sharpening Your Skills Tagged With: Attitudes, Conflict, Customer Service, Decision-Making, Great Manager, Leadership Lessons, Mental Models, Parables, Performance Management, Persuasion, Skills for Success, Winning on the Job

Rewards and Incentives Can Backfire

November 15, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Rewards and Incentives Can Backfire

Rewards and Incentives are Gateways to Behavior-Change

One of the great struggles of life is to get others to do the things they should, but don’t want to—getting your daughter to cleanup her bedroom or do homework in her least favorite subject, convincing your employee to do a task in the manner that your company expects, and so forth.

One tried-and-true technique to get reluctant people to do what they should is to hold back an incentive. For example, parents who want children to eat vegetables at dinner could stipulate that they eat their vegetables (the non-preferred behavior) before they can eat their desserts (the preferred behavior.)

Preferred Behaviors Can Be Used to Reinforce Unpreferred Behaviors

This motivational rule was formally studied by the American psychologist David Premack. The Premack Principle, or the “relativity theory of reinforcement,” makes it easier to do an unpleasant activity by putting a pleasant activity right after it. In this manner, a reinforcer could observe what an individual chooses to do voluntarily and offer that favored task as an incentive to gain compliance or to increase the likelihood of another less-favored behavior occurring.

Grandma's Rule or Premack Principle: Relativity Theory of Reinforcement As expected, although an academic, Premack enjoyed a very successful vocation as a highly paid “productivity expert” dispensing age-old techniques. He traveled around the country and advised thousands of corporate executives to manipulate themselves into becoming more motivated and more productive by organizing their day such that they schedule first anything that’s unpleasant and important and then reward themselves with something they really like doing.

Grandma’s Rule: “Johny, Finish Your Homework Before You Watch TV”

That a high probability behavior could be used to reinforce participation in a low probability behavior is the unassuming “Grandma’s Rule”—arguably the most universally recognized principle in the field of behavior change. Workplaces use the grandma’s rule by offering future “plum” assignments for employees who “pay their dues” by doing “dull and dirty” work in the present.

The grandma’s rule anchors in the fact that people, including children, are willing to do something they don’t really want to do if that’s the only way they can do something that they really want to do. Absent this established reinforcement, people left to their own devices tend to do what they like doing instead of doing things they don’t like doing even though latter are more beneficial.

Preferred Behaviors Can Be Used to Reinforce Unpreferred Behaviors

The Hidden Costs of Rewards and Incentives

Rewards and incentives can guide and modify behavior. The goal of offering rewards for positive reinforcement is to have the unpleasant tasks become less and less unpleasant. Therefore, the true measure of the effectiveness of any reward is how well the preferred behaviors become internalized. For example, offering rewards to children for reading books is not merely to get them to read books inside the classroom, but to internalize the reading behavior with the goal that they read even during the summer when they don’t have to read for school.

Offering rewards for motivating people to do unlikable tasks could sometimes become counterproductive. In what psychologists call “the overjustification effect,” a reward, instead of motivating, could fortify a person’s revulsion for the task. In other words, the reward could reinforce the belief that the task can’t be worth doing for itself.

Rewards Can Backfire

Overjustification effect is controversial because it disputes the general principles of motivational psychology and behavioral reinforcement—especially in the contexts of parenting, education, and the workplace.

Idea for Impact: Locating the pleasure in the future, when the reward will be imparted, could turn the present-moment doing of an unpleasant task into tedium. For example, insisting that your child eat broccoli for being rewarded with dessert could make her hate broccoli even more.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. Don’t Reward A While Hoping for B
  2. Incentives Matter
  3. How to Kick That Bad Habit
  4. Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness
  5. This New Year, Forget Resolutions, Set Intentions Instead

Filed Under: Managing People, Mental Models Tagged With: Discipline, Goals, Motivation, Performance Management, Persuasion

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About: Nagesh Belludi [hire] is a St. Petersburg, Florida-based freethinker, investor, and leadership coach. He specializes in helping executives and companies ensure that the overall quality of their decision-making benefits isn’t compromised by a lack of a big-picture understanding.

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