5 Tips to Take Your Strategy Beyond "Hope"

I just returned from a two-day planning session with my business partner. As I said in a recent blog, a plan is nothing; planning is everything. This is the season of the budget and also, hopefully, strategy development, so I’d like to offer my perspective on the things that can make your strategy discussions more productive:

Get away if you can: staying in the office is a terrible idea, mostly because there is a clash of priorities; and the immediate and urgent (but not necessarily the critical) almost always win.

Begin with the end in mind: Thank you, Stephen Covey. For our business, this meant going out to 2014 for a lot of good reasons, including succession planning. Many initiatives can take several years to get right and leaving them until they are urgent is risky in today’s business environment.

Swim into a Blue Ocean: even if it’s going to take longer than 12 months (which may be a long time in American business), dare to create scenarios where your business is doing new and innovative things. This kind of activity expands your thinking and generates more options. Without ideation, your "ocean" gets redder by the minute, as the sharks circle the boat. By the way, reading Blue Ocean Strategy is good preparation for a strategic retreat.

Bite the bullet and take on the tough stuff: Effective strategic thinking means putting the skunk on the table. If you don’t talk about what’s hard, opportunities may never present themselves and, at the same time, challenges are never articulated until they rear up and bite you. Then you’re stuck spending a lot of useless time cleaning up after the skunk.

Boil down your strategy into a memorable sentence: a strategy statement by its nature can be complex and the risk is that a critical piece of your business becomes lost in verbiage. Try explaining two paragraphs of strategic direction to your employees and watch their eyes glaze over. We got ours down to “In It to Win It”. It means something to our company and it’s a lot easier to make decisions when judging them against an easy-to-recall strategy sentence.

The first step in any strategic thinking is to leave the spreadsheets and PowerPoints at the office and focus on the future. Whether your company is large or small; whether you head up a department or the entire business, strategy demands attention and dialogue. Are you using this budget season to take your thinking about your company to a new level?

Hard Wired For Exceptional Customer Service

This week, I welcome Cathy Missildine-Martin, SPHR as a guest blogger. She also happens to be my business partner and Co-founder of ICC!

I have been traveling on business more than I usually do this year. I have really been exposed to the best and the worst of customer service. I find it fascinating how some companies ALWAYS get it right and some companies ALWAYS get it wrong.

I went to my client's preferred car rental company instead of where I am a "preferred member." I was on the bus from the airport on my way to the offsite car rental facility. The bus drive was happy, greeting everyone, almost whistling while he worked. I thought, "That is refreshing." The next week, I come back, he greets me, "Hi, Ms. Martin, how was your flight from Atlanta?" Wow, he saw me one time. I said, "How did you know that?" He just smiled and said, "It's my job."

I wish more employees felt that knowing the customer, "was just their job."

Contrast the experience below to the one above:

I went to my gate to board my plane; the airport is jammed packed at 6AM. The agents begin boarding and are calling rows and zones. I pass by 2 gate agents, 3 flight attendants, 1 captain and no one even says good morning. I know it is impossible for them to know my name, but is "good morning" too much to ask?

When I returned my car back to the rental car facility, I was greeted by yet, another eager, friendly employee just waiting to check me in. I couldn't help myself to ask this employee about why everyone is so friendly around here. He just said, "I guess we are all just WIRED that way."

How interesting is that? I think there is a lot of truth in his revelation. People can be hard wired for customer service. So, how do the companies that always get customer service right, find people that are hard wired?

I know there is a lot of upfront work that has to happen to make sure we hire for that "hard wiredness" but how to you keep those types engaged and more importantly keep them on board?

What is your experience? Please leave a comment or an example of a company that understands the concept of Hired Wired for Customer Service.