Be Different or be dead

June 11, 2018

6 absolutely insane actions that will kill your business growth

Source: Unsplash

6 absolutely insane actions that will kill your business growth.

Every organization wants to grow; the way they hope to achieve it is by gaining a sustainable strategic advantage over their competitors.

However in my experience I find that many of the more common practices used by organizations are actually counterproductive to the intent of achieving an unmatched position in the marketplace — they work against the intent of standing out from everyone else. They don’t actually represent an effective way to achieve a growth imperative.

The practices below are typically followed by most organizations today. They are very common yet, ironically, they are positioned as an aid to help differentiate an organization from their competitors yet they have the opposite effect.

The very fact that they are followed by the masses means that they can’t possibly create uniqueness, they create sameness.
They serve no strategic driver; they typically are a response to either internal interests — keeping costs down — or with the belief that since the experts — academics or strategy advisors — advocate them, they must surely work as a means to differentiate and grow.
But they don’t.

These are the common tactics organizations employ to grow their business.

Avoid them at all cost.

They will only stunt growth.

1. Following others — Looking to another organization for new ideas and believing that this approach will grow a business — commonly referred to as employing best practices.
The process is well known: find a best in class organization that does what you want to do and incorporate their methods and solutions into how you do business.

And there seems to be a halo effect around applying best practices. It’s almost like you are wise and creative to be in the best practice copying game. You are somehow among the elite if you are ‘applying best practices’.

The problem is that strategic advantage is achieved by innovating and by being different from the competition.
The best practices approach may help improve operational processes but it will never produce strategic benefits — it’s not a strategic driver of long term growth.

2. Snubbing the frontline — Treating the frontline as if they were at the bottom of organization. And in frontline positions, applying modest recruiting standards with minimum skill and competency prerequisites.

The problem is strategic advantage is determined by how well an organization executes, and this is largely in the hands of frontline employees. Treating them as second class citizens encourages them to deliver second class results.

On the other hand, if they meet high standards and are honoured in their work, they will catapult any organization ahead of any competitor.

3. Outsourcing — Managing call centers to control costs. Maximizing throughput and productivity. Rewarding employees who take the most number of calls and spend the least amount of time on each call.

The problem is strategic advantage is achieved by creating memorable experiences for customers; this is rarely achieved by imposing internal productivity constraints on the customer transaction. Rather a WOW! experience happens when the customer is amazed with the outcome of the call.

Treat the call center as a customer loyalty center to create an advantage.

4. Pursuing mass markets — Searching for opportunities in mass markets. Pushing solutions to as large a market cross section possible.
Looking for lowest common denominator solutions that apply to the masses to maximize competitive market share.

The problem is strategic advantage is earned by discovering and satisfying the unique wants and desires of individuals not by flogging products to the masses. It’s gained by maximizing the share of wallet not share of market.

It’s the result of serving the chosen customer group so they never leave.

5. Offering special deals to get new customers — Prioritizing new customer acquisition to fuel revenue growth. Trying to gain new customers by enticing them from their current suppliers through special deals and promotional offers -  ‘With every purchase of our internet service you will receive a free flat screen TV.’

The problem is strategic advantage requires a healthy base of existing customers who are loyal and willing to be an active source of new business referrals. Offering special deals to attract new customers while ignoring current ones can lose business and destroy market position.

6. Paying too much attention to the strategy — Spending too much time seeking the perfect plan. The strategy doesn’t deliver results; brilliant execution does.
Yet so much time and attention is paid to formulating the perfect plan using all of the sophisticated tools available, with the underlying belief and expectation that if the strategy uses the rigour of the state of the art toolbox then it must somehow be right — and get closer to perfection.

I have been involved in many painful planning sessions where we have tried to squeeze another 10% more accuracy out of our plan to no avail rather than use our time to determine how to implement the imperfect plan that we had created to that point.

Absolute rubbish.

Competitive advantage is achieved by organizations that can execute imperfection brilliantly not by the efficacy of their strategic intent.

Take a close look at the portfolio of tactics used in your organization to gain strategic advantage; make sure you’re not fooling yourself.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.11.18 at 04:04 am by Roy Osing
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April 16, 2018

5 easy ways you can be successful with angry people

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5 easy ways you can be successful with angry people.

Anger can be turned into adulation; pissed off can be transformed into hugs.

In the world of an organization, this fact is huge because, however unintended, customers get screwed over from time to time.

There are two actions that every organization should take given this eventuality.

▪️First, ensure internal systems, rules and procedures are designed to make it easy for the customer to engage with and do business with you.

Design your ‘inside’ with the customer in mind so they have a pleasant experience with you not a nightmare.

▪️Second, given the fact that Murphy’s Law is always lurking in the shadows poised to strike, develop a strategy to deal with customer screw ups.

Most organizations don’t even think about determining the appropriate course of action when customer engagement goes sideways; they hope and pray it doesn’t happen and put all their resources and energy into preventing its occurrence.

Prevention, as a singular approach, won’t work; it will help, but it will never avoid the unintended mistakes that makes a customer go postal.

Leaders should view dealing with customer complaints as a priority and as a vital component of the organization’s strategy to differentiate themselves from their competition.

Every customer ‘anger moment’ is disguised as an opportunity to improve the strategic position of an organization if the customer is handled the right way.

Customer Anger Management 101 — There are 3 overriding principles that need to be understood to achieve the benefits of anger.

1. Relationships

Recovering the right way from an angered circumstance can improve the relationship you have with the person you pissed off.

If an organization recovers from a complaint exceedingly well, the customer is delighted and they are more committed to the organization than they were before the anger episode. They remember the recovery not so much the problem that caused it.

2. Speed

Speed is of the essence; the screw up needs to be fixed FAST.
When you have committed an egregious act the customer expects their complaint to be rectified, but it must be done quickly.

Studies have shown that you have at most 24 hours to repair your blunder; after that period you’ve missed the opportunity to be in the game for a hug.
If immediate action is not taken, the hug never comes and your victim typically communicates far and wide how disastrous your service is and the crumby values you have as an organization.

3. Actions

Do more than fix the mistake; Surprise the customer with what they don’t expect. Even if the OOPS! is dealt with expeditiously, all you’ve done is met their expectations. It’s the surprise element that turns them from “expectations met” to leaning in for a hug.

The SURPRISE is the magic dust that amazes and delights the victim; leaves them awestruck and breathless. And bonds them to you more than they were before the OOPS!

Tactical plan — To implement these principles, you need a solid tactical plan that must be consistently practised in every anger moment to earn a hug and build a band of loyalists.

1. Apologize

Apologize regardless of who’s fault it is. Trying to blame the customer for the event won’t get you a hug.
Apologize for the impact the event had on the customer. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you” is a way to move forward into the recovery process without having to admit culpability for the OOPS!

And when it’s your fault own it! Your currency in the customer’s eyes depends on your honesty.

2. Shut up about company policy

NEVER quote company policy to justify what was done to piss the customer off. EVER!
People don’t care about them your and to remind them that they ‘don’t understand’ how you do business and that they should have behaved differently will only anger them even more.

3. Don’t escalate

NEVER have the issue referred to a supervisor as a means of control; empower your employees to solve the problem then and there.
This gives your employees currency in the customer’s eyes and enables a fast resolution of the complaint. And gets you closer to a hug.

4. Personalize your surprise

Never use common ‘trash and trinket’ items as the surprise vehicle you use to move beyond merely fixing the OOPS!
People hate them. Develop a list of more personal surprise tokens that employees can choose from depending on what they learn about the customer during the complaint experience.

5. Have humans standing by

Have a real person standing by any of your self serve applications.
Complaint recovery cannot be suitably handled through automated systems. When is the last time you enjoyed being served by technology - like an automated voice messaging system - when you had a problem with an organization?

Every organization looks for an edge over their competitors, but most of them miss an obvious strategy that can truly separate them from the herd.

Be the ONLY one that leans into customer anger and takes its energy to earn a hug — hugs breed success.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.16.18 at 03:44 am by Roy Osing
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February 19, 2018

How the best leaders inspire great teams that work together

Source: Pexels

How the best leaders inspire great teams that work together.

How the best leaders get people working well together.

A colleague of mine, Ron Cox, Founder and CEO of Tailwind Consulting in Tampa Florida says that “a staggering 95% of employees in a company are either unaware of or do not understand the strategy”.

No wonder execution fails!

One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of congruence between what the strategy says and what people do on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy says one thing and not only do people do another, they do different things out of sync with the strategy.
Massive inconsistency and dysfunction results.

This is a failure of leadership.

Leadership tends to place more focus on direction-setting rather than on determining how the strategy will be executed.
Precision is applied to ‘getting the strategy right’ and not how it will be implemented in the trenches where the real work gets done.

The gap between strategic intent and actual results is due to this skewed attention.
If only 20% of leadership’s attention is placed on the details of how the strategy will be implemented, the strategy will likely be hit and miss as employees find it necessary to execute the plan the way THEY believe it should.

Effective business plan execution occurs when there is clarity between the functional roles that employees play in the organization and its strategy.

It is about translating the strategy into what it means to each function involved in delivering it. What specifically should the call center rep do differently? The product analyst? The sales person? The internal audit manager?

If at the most granular level each employee in the firm doesn’t know how to behave and what results to produce within the context of the new direction change will simply not happen and improved results expected by the new strategic game plan won’t be achieved.

Line of sight

Line of sight to the strategy means what it implies; each employee can “see” the strategy from their position and they understand what they specifically need to do to contribute to the strategy.

If direct line of sight is defined for every role, flawless execution results whereas indirect line of sight results in people having a clouded understanding of what action the strategy demands.

Most leaders absolve themselves of ensuring activity and strategy are aligned. It generally gets relegated to functional heads to sort out by declaring their priorities that THEY contend are homeomorphic with strategic imperatives.

The problem with this process is that subjectivity is introduced at a very high level in the organization and is magnified again and again as teams are asked to do the same thing through middle and junior management levels.

And the tipping point, of course, is that leadership doesn’t approve detailed functional plans which would at least show whether they were bordering on out-of-alignment or not.

Any inconsistencies between activity and strategy at the highest level in an organization are multiplied by an order of magnitude factor before it reaches the frontline people.

Under these conditions it’s not difficult to see why strategy and organizational activity diverge and not converge.

What can leadership do about this problem?

First, ease the precision around business plan creation and tighten it up around execution. Get comfortable with getting the plan “just about right” and applying rigour to implementation and adjusting the plan on the run.

Next, take ownership of aligning organizational activity to strategy.

Alignment plans

Institutionalize ‘Alignment Plans’ with functional heads; ask for sufficient granularity to the determination of whether or not a team has direct line of sight to the strategy or not. Make them work at it until they get it right and your leadership team approves.

Alignment Plans submitted to the leader should:

▪️ Define the key elements of the strategy that everyone in the organization must align with.

There are many dimensions to any strategy but it is critical to prioritize and focus on the critical ones. Greater alignment success will occur by focussing on a handful of the critical strategic imperatives rather than trying to ‘herd the cats’ around a dozen.
                         
▪️ Define what needs to change in every functional team with an action plan to achieve it.

If the organization is pursuing a new or revised strategic direction, there will most certainly be projects, company values, people skills and technology that will have to be re-vectored to enable the execution of the new plan. Details of everything that needs to change must be defined in detail.

▪️ Identify activities, projects and behaviours that have to be dropped in order to take on new activities required for alignment.

Leadership is just as much about what has to be stopped as it is about what has to be started.

If out-of-alignment activity is not stopped, additional unnecessary resources will be most certainly requested. All non-strategic activity must be isolated and resources removed and redeployed to new challenges that must be undertaken.

Personal initiative

If you’re an employee in an organization that chooses not to impose a process to explicitly align activity to their strategy, take personal initiative to align your own work priorities to what the organization wants to achieve.

Successful careers are built on the backs of the organization’s strategy and those that execute more effectively than others are quicker to reach their personal goals.

These personal actions will propel you forward.

#1. Translation

Help others translate what the strategy means to them in the organization.

Once you have determined your own line of sight, help others through the same process.

Everyone needs to understand the new things they will have to do and the CRAP they will have to dispose of. Unless this translation for all employees is done, the organization will be frozen in momentum management and no progress in the new direction will be achieved.

Get involved in organizing and leading workshops with various departments in the company and explore a new blueprint for each that represents the new course for them to follow. 

The role of translating the new strategy for various employee groups is one that rarely gets performed. It’s a difficult task as it requires an intimate level of understanding of the strategy.
You can’t drill a strategy down into individual action if you don’t truly understand it at a detailed level.

If you’re a leader, you must dedicate much more of your time seeing that people treat this as a priority and hold them accountable.
Wander through the workplace asking people to clarify the top three things they are going to do to help deliver the new strategy and what dozen-or-so things they are going to give up.

And get the expectations hard wired into the performance planning process. It is the difference between an effective one where everyone is working in parallel to support a common purpose, and a dysfunctional one where people are working at odds with one another to deliver some things that are on strategy and other things that are not.

Synchronized outcomes release the power of execution - and competitive advantage; inconsistent outcomes zap the energy of the organization, encumber execution and impair competitive success.

#2. Set your calendar

Let the organization’s strategy guide your daily calendar. The ultimate manifestation of direct line of sight is a calendar composed only of activities relating to the outcomes you have deemed necessary for you to deliver the new strategy.

If you can’t strategically relate a particular activity you plan to do on a given day, question why it is occupying your time.

Zero base your calendar and build it through the weeks and months ahead in the image of your strategy.
If you are in a leadership position, ask to see the calendars of those reporting to you. Is each of them doing the things required of the new direction or are they continuing on as custodians of the past?

#3. Communicate the strategy personally

Communicate face to face with others in your organization as the most effective way of injecting the emotional component necessary to get people to believe and act.
E-mail blasts to a broad distribution list, employee newsletters and other mass means of communication don’t work as effectively. Use technology like ZOOM if physical distancing is a challenge.

These mass communications vehicles preclude the ability for people to engage in a conversation to enhance their understanding of where the organization is going.

You need to press the flesh even if it’s virtual, and make it matter by showing up in person, explaining the strategy and answering the tough questions.

In non-pandemic times, I used ‘Infonet sessions’ as well as the bear pit to communicate the company’s strategy to all employees.

They required high levels of energy and were extremely time consuming, but what else could be more important?
People in the organization need to understand where it is going and they have a right to challenge it if they are not convinced it is appropriate. You can’t capture their hearts and minds if you’re a ‘no show’.

#4. Use the strategy as the context for solving problems

When confronted by a business problem or issue, always assess it and talk about it with others from the perspective of your strategy.
Create the strategic context for the discussion and then assess your options. What does your strategy suggest is the appropriate action to take?

It’s an effective way to increase understanding and awareness of your strategy and establish you as a leader and the strategy hawk for your organization.

People suddenly forget that they have set a new course in motion for the organization and they look for solutions to problems in the old strategic context.

The opposite is also true; people often don’t relate the visible changes being made in their organization to the new strategic direction that has been put in motion. They don’t get that the cause of the changes they are witnessing is the new strategy.

Assume the role of connecting the dots for people in your organization. Reinforce that the changes that everyone is seeing are the result of your new strategy.

Line of sight leadership is necessary to build teamwork and commitment to the organization’s strategic intent. Take a personal role is making it an essential ingredient in your culture.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.19.18 at 04:19 am by Roy Osing
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January 8, 2018

The best competitive advantage is being ‘the only one’

Source: Pexels

Never has it been more important to carve out a distinctive and unique place for your organization in the market than it is today.

▪️The economy is unpredictable;

▪️Insane forces like COVID descend upon us;

▪️Competition is intense as new competitors are entering the market at a blistering rate;

▪️New technology ‘rains down’ on organizations relentlessly;

▪️Markets are cluttered with sameness; products and services are undifferentiated, relying on price to be the difference. And competitive claims are lost in the crowd;

▪️Customers are more empowered than ever before, establishing relationships with suppliers that deliver distinctive solutions and ignoring those that don’t.

Which organizations are successful and survive this challenging business environment, and what separates them from the others that struggle, hang on and eventually fail?

Those that are able to win this battle are different from their competitors.

They survive the scrutiny of the discriminating customer by providing relevant, compelling and unmatched value.

They die.

Survival

How do you create a competitive advantage that will survive the dynamics of a chaotic world?

Let’s face it, organizations have difficulty explaining to a prospective customer why they should do business with their organization and not the many others in the market that basically look the same.

If you can’t give specific reasons why your company should be chosen over every other, then you won’t be chosen. The choice will be owned by the organization that is able to cut through the clutter and provide the reason with clarity and simplicity.

“You don’t want merely to be the best of the best. You want to be the ONLY ones that you do.” — Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead

An effective competitive claim isn’t about being “the best”, #1, “the top”, “the leader” or using any other qualitative descriptor that ranks your team against your competitors.

Any descriptor such as these is argumentative and unclear.

Claims like “We offer the best customer service” or “We are #1 in the market” don’t provide the clarity required to be convincing to anyone who is considering a purchase decision.

It’s like throwing your claim out there and hoping it will resonate with someone and that they will believe it.

Uniqueness

The ONLY Statement is the way to express your uniqueness - “We are the ONLY ones that…”
It’s binary; it claims that your organization does something (that people desire and care about) that no one else does. It’s simple and clear without the need for lofty language that lacks substance.

Building the ONLY statement is a disciplined process. It requires that you have a strategic game plan with an intimate understanding of what your target customers ‘crave and lust for’.

And it will separate your organization from the crowd.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.8.18 at 04:58 am by Roy Osing
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