Tag Archives: Success

Between Good Intentions and Great Results

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Next week is another two-webinar week at Soundview, with a focus on the application of virtues in the workplace. How do we live by the best of intentions toward our work and fellow employees, while not letting those virtues hold us back from great results?

Tipping Sacred Cows – Jake Breeden

Jake Breeden starts us off with concepts from his recent book Tipping Sacred Cows. At our webinar on June 25th Jake will discuss the 7 virtues of Balance, Collaboration, Creativity, Excellence, Fairness, Passion and Preparation. By helping us see the dark side of virtues like these, Breeden will reveal hidden traps that lie between good intentions and great results, clearing a path for leaders — and anyone in the workplace — to finally realize their full potential.

As an educator, author, and keynote speaker, Jake Breeden gives you new ways of seeing your world. Breeden teaches as part of the Global Faculty for Duke Corporate Education – the world’s top ranked provider of custom corporate education. He has taught, coached, challenged and provoked leaders at Google, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, OppenheimerFunds, Starbucks, Sprint, Deloitte and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

A Revolutionary Approach to Success – Adam Grant

Our Soundview Live webinar on June 27th will be with Adam Grant, author of Give and Take. Grant takes a different view of virtues in the workplace. For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. Grant illuminates what effective networking, collaboration, influence, negotiation, and leadership skills have in common.

Adam Grant is the youngest tenured professor at Wharton. He has been recognized as Wharton’s single-highest-rated teacher, one of BusinessWeek’s favorite professors, and one of the world’s 40 best business professors under 40. Previously, he was a record-setting advertising director at Let’s Go Publications, an All-American springboard diver, and a professional magician.

So plan to join us for these two events, to hear the provocative views of these authors on virtues in the workplace. We guarantee that you will come away with a fresh perspective on how to work with others and be successful.

What to Say to Defuse Even the Worst Customer Situations

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THE CUSTOMER SERVICE SURVIVAL KIT

CONTROL YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE EMERGENCIES

Customer service people are doomed to face what customer service expert Richard Gallagher calls “uh-oh” moments: those moments when visibly (or audibly) angry customers let you know exactly how they feel about your product or service and demand a response. The problem, Gallagher writes in The Customer Service Survival Kit, is that many if not most customer service personnel don’t know how to respond in the most effective way.

One of the first reactions of customer service personnel in front of angry customers is to defend themselves — either by explaining policies or procedures or explaining that the situation is exceptional and not typical of the company’s results.

The second choice of customer service personnel is to respond to the complaint, which may seem a logical choice but is also often ineffective.

What, then, are customer service people to do? In The Customer Service Survival Kit, Gallagher, a former customer support executive and a practicing psychotherapist who has written a number of books on customer service, provides precise, step-by-step responses for dealing with the most difficult customer service situations.

Lean Into Criticism

Gallagher’s first piece of advice is for the customer service person to “lean” into the criticism of the customer. Instead of trying to make excuses — what Gallagher calls “leaning away” from the complaints — customer service personnel should plunge headlong into the person’s grievances. “Be right there with every bit of anger and indignation he is feeling,” Gallagher writes. “And then watch what happens.”

What happens, according to Gallagher, is the customer realizes that you “get” him, and that realization is enough to diffuse the customer’s raw anger.

Of course, leaning in is not as easy as it sounds. Gallagher offers four steps for leaning in. First, hand the complaint back to the customer. If a customer complains about a horrible kitchen painting job, the customer service person should say, “It sounds like this paint job did not work for you at all. Tell me more about what went wrong.” The next step is to use “wow” words, as in “That’s awful!” The third step is to “steal their good lines” — for example, telling the customer who wants the super-popular Christmas toy that is sold out, “I bet you drove all the way here just to get this.” The fourth step is for customer service people to never defend themselves first, even if the customer is wrong.

Leaning in is just the first of a variety of techniques, tools and responses covered by Gallagher. Other topics include using the four-step ladder of acknowledgment, avoiding trigger phrases (e.g., don’t say “I understand,” even if you do), delivering bad news in the safest way possible and reframing the message around the customer’s interest. Many of the chapters end with “putting learning into practice” exercises to reinforce the techniques of the chapters. In the final section, Gallagher addresses specific situations, including the threat of a lawsuit, or responding to criticism in social media. The Customer Service Survival Kit is a practical manual that will help even the least experienced and least courageous customer service person survive the next shakingly angry customer.

Design and implement the ideal customer experience

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Wouldn’t it be great to know what your customers need before they do? This is especially true in the era of social media, where customers voice their opinions on your company and products in ways that can hurt or help your company directly.

Bill Thomas, co-author of Anticipate, claims to have the methods to make this happen. In his own words Thomas promises “proven guidance on how to design and implement a customer-focused journey that moves beyond the transaction and satisfied customers, to a relationship and culture that creates and leverages loyalty – and the profitability that comes with it.”

Thomas’ 10-point framework was created to guide companies in charting a customer-focused journey that matures, anticipates and delivers increasing levels of loyalty and profitability with their customers, and across their broader value chain.

As one example he sketches out the typical strategic planning process, versus one focused on the customer. The plans speak for themselves:

Fiscal Budget –> Existing Capabilities –> Strategic Goals –> Customer Actions

Customer Needs –> Strategic Goals –> Needed Capabilities –> Fiscal Budget

If you’re looking for a more thorough customer strategy, then you’ll want to join us on June 19th for a conversation with Bill Thomas at our Soundview Live webinar, Knowing What Customers Need Before They Do. Bring your questions for Bill as well, which he’ll answer during the event.

How to Create a Culture for Market Dominance

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UNRELENTING INNOVATION

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT WITH INNOVATION

In the excellent 2001 book Will and Vision, Gerard Tellis of USC’s Marshall School of Business and co-author Peter Golder of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business documented how latecomers to an industry can successfully attack and knock off entrenched incumbent companies, no matter how large and successful they might be. In his new book, Unrelenting Innovation, Tellis looks at the other side of the coin, explaining how successful incumbents can avoid losing the leadership of their industries. After years of research, Tellis has identified three traits of a company’s culture that ensure continued success: the willingness to cannibalize successful products, embrace risk and focus on the future. In Unrelenting Innovation, he details these three traits, then explores the three practices — providing incentives for enterprise, empowering product champions and encouraging internal markets — that create the innovative culture based on the traits.

Who Wants to Be a Cannibal?

In an early chapter of the book, Tellis quotes Howard Stringer, the former CEO of Sony: “Love affairs with the status quo continue even after the quo has lost its status.” Sony invented mobile music with the Walkman, only to let Apple and its iPod take over. The problem facing incumbents is even more complex because, to use Stringer’s terminology, the quo doesn’t visibly lose its status until it’s too late.

Tellis proves convincingly that only a company whose culture enables the cannibalization of successful products will stay on top. Unfortunately, there are myriad reasons why cannibalization is difficult. Kodak is a simple and sad case: It didn’t move into digital photography (which it had already developed!) so that it could continue selling film. Sony’s case is a bit more complex. It was clear that MP3 was the future of mobile music, but Sony had also through joint ventures and acquisitions become directly involved in music publishing and movie production — industries in which piracy is a threat. Sony included safeguards against piracy in its MP3 players, making them less user friendly. Consumers went elsewhere.

With equal depth, Tellis explores in the other two traits of innovative companies the nuances of what might seem as clear-cut directives that in reality are complex and often hampered by not always apparent biases.

Three Practices

In the second part of the book, Tellis describes the three corporate practices that can engender the three traits of innovative companies. The first practice is to provide incentive for enterprise — once again a seemingly simple and clear directive hampered in the real world of business by what appear to be logical considerations. It does make sense, after all, that a very successful company with a large and happy customer base would design its incentives around customer loyalty. Such incentives, however, are not going to spark the innovation and creativity that truly keep customers. Tellis advocates “asymmetric” innovation incentives: strong rewards for success and weak penalties for failure. Understanding the psychology of incentives is equally important. Subsequent chapters cover fostering internal markets and empowering innovation champions.

Each chapter in Unrelenting Innovation is carefully structured, with an explanation of the topic, a series of supporting case studies and a final concluding section. The framework that Tellis has created is an insightful and valuable map for those companies looking to emulate such star names as Apple — or to avoid the fate of Sony, the once-admired innovator that Apple tumbled from its perch.

Lessons in Leadership

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Whether you’re already in a leadership role or are moving up the management ranks, it’s always helpful to hear the perspective of those who have mature leadership skills and are now helping others to develop their own.

Next week we will be hosting two excellent leadership webinars, one for managers who are working their way up and taking on more leadership responsibilities, and the other for leaders who are involved in change. Check out the descriptions below to see how the experts can help you.

How Managers Can Become Leaders with Alan Berson

Often the very same skills and traits that enable rising stars to achieve success become liabilities when promoted into a leadership track. While managers’ conversations are generally transactional, leaders must focus on people, asking great questions and aligning them with the vision for the future.

In this Soundview Live webinar, How Managers Can Become Great Leaders, Alan Berson will demonstrate that leadership mindsets and skills can be developed, and the Leadership Conversations Model provides practical guidance for connecting with others in ways that transform each interaction into an opportunity for organizational and personal growth.

Alan S. Berson is an executive coach, leadership consultant, speaker, and professor. Since getting his MBA from Wharton, he has held leadership, strategic planning and marketing roles at Fortune-500 firms including Gillette, Bausch & Lomb, and Marriott. He was also the CEO of a VC funded training company with Fortune 500 clients.

Answers to the Biggest Questions of Change Leaders with Phil Buckley

In this Soundview Live webinar, Answers to the Biggest Questions of Change Leaders, Phil Buckley will provide complete, actionable answers to the fifty burning questions change leaders routinely ask about how to manage change successfully.

He has detected a pattern to what leaders typically don’t know about managing change in their organizations, and distilled that pattern down to the top fifty questions that keep change managers up nights, giving you prescriptive answers that will build the confidence required to successfully tackle any change project.

Phil Buckley is a senior change management professional with over twenty years of global experience developing and executing change strategies. His experience includes managing twenty-seven large-scale change projects, directly working with teams in twenty countries. His assignments include mergers, de-mergers, organization restructurings, efficiency drives, culture initiatives, strategy creation and deployments, and capability developments.

Please join us for one or both of these webinars. Just click on the title to learn more and to register. Both events promise to give you the tools you need to meet the challenging demands of a leadership role. You’ll have the opportunity to ask your questions of these experts during the events.