Vision – Page 3 – Elisa K. Spain

Quiet

June 4, 2017June 2, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Quiet time, a luxury or a necessity? Call it meditation or simply call it quiet time. Taking time to clear the mind, we are told by our spiritual leaders, is the secret to awareness and peace. For years, perhaps centuries, we humans go to mediation classes, yogis, ashrams, the Dalai Lama, etc. in search of The Way.

More recently, our physicians have begun to tell us, meditation will lower your blood pressure, protect from cancer, manage pain and more. Mayo Clinic’s website contains this article on the health benefits of meditation.

And, in this powerful article, the author reminds us our businesses will benefit too. Because, when we think less, we think better.

Summer is a great time to experience quiet, to test this out and see if perhaps a few moments of quiet each day could add value to our lives.

What If That’s Not How I See it?

May 21, 2017May 19, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

How often are we in situations where what we want and what others want are not aligned? We make assumptions daily, mostly about other people. These assumptions enable us to take shortcuts and at the same time, they cause disagreement that perhaps wasn’t there to begin with.

We assume a person attended or didn’t attend an event because…
We assume a person responded to us a certain way, because…
We assume a person took an action or didn’t take an action because…

What if instead of assuming, we paused and asked:

What is the reason you made this choice or took this action?
When your customer complains about “service”, do you probe to understand what is really going on?
When we see something, as the TSA reminds us, do we say something?
When an employee behaves a certain way, do we ask what is going on?

And when what we want seems far from what “they” want, what if we asked and explored the possibilities..

As We Search For What Matters, Must We Choose?

May 14, 2017May 12, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

The Choice

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse.

William Butler Yeats, 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939

I came across this poem some time ago and was reminded of it in a recent discussion in my Vistage groups about “what matters”. Today we constantly talk about achieving balance; we perceive that it is the stress of modern times that creates this challenge. Yet this poem was written in the early 20th century. A reminder that this quest is the human condition, a daily challenge of choice. Here are the questions that come to mind:

Must we choose between success in life and work?
Or is it the search for perfection of one or the other that forces the choice? e.g. Albert Einstein was portrayed by his biographers as a poor husband and father. Was he, or was this the judgement of the biographers?
As we search for meaning in our lives, must we distinguish between what defines “life” and what defines “work” or is it possible to simply pursue what matters to us?
On this day devoted to mothers, what are you telling or demonstrating to your children about this question?

Care, Attention, Competency

May 7, 2017May 6, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Care, Attention and Competency (CAC), these are the watchwords of the client service model for one of my Vistage member’s business. This business is in the construction industry and as he explains, bottom line of what they deliver is service, not construction.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the progression (regression) from Better, Faster, Cheaper to simply faster and cheaper. So where does CAC come in? Perhaps as several of my readers responded, the bifurcation is already happening, certainly in the consumer world (think airlines premium seats/status vs. economy/discount seats), and beginning in the B2B world. If this is so, then in order to deliver better, CAC must become the standard.

What exactly does this mean? For me it means, we meet the customer where they are, we provide care, in the manner they want us to show it. We give them our attention when they ask, and not wait until they demand it. And, we remind ourselves that competency, while the baseline, isn’t enough. In fact, studies show that customers who receive care and attention are more tolerant of errors, because they trust we will resolve them.

In short, CAC begins with the Golden Rule, and reaches it’s full value with the Platinum Rule. The Golden Rule implies the basic assumption that other people would like to be treated the way that you would like to be treated. The alternative to the Golden Rule is the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

Here are the questions I leave you with:

Assuming the bifurcation is happening, where is your business on the continuum?
Are you focused on Faster/Cheaper or are you seeking to differentiate by offering Better?
How might CAC apply, or not, to your service delivery? And are you delivering by the Golden Rule or the Platinum Rule?

Better, Faster, Cheaper

April 23, 2017April 21, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

For many years, the adage was “do you want it right, on-time or cheap, pick two”. And then somewhere in the 80’s and 90’s, perhaps associated with the dot.com era, marginal costs moved close to zero in some industries. Because of this, we began to expect all three. In fact the new adage became “better, faster, cheaper”. And, some believed we had moved to an era where all three were in fact possible.

Or did we?

I wonder if instead, more and more businesses, driven by customer unwillingness to pay for quality, have simply picked two on our behalf, with the two being cheap and fast. We see this happening in B2B, B2C and B2Self (i.e. w/internal corporate customers) three examples:

Amazon delivers using their own drivers because they are cheap. Amazon made this choice because they believe what we consumers want from them is fast and free delivery and when quality of logistics suffers (packages left in strange places, in the rain, etc.), we are willing to accept that cost.
Airlines overbook and sometimes have to deny boarding to passengers or in a recent highly profiled United airlines case, remove passengers to accommodate crew. This recent scandal with United brought attention to the consequences of this (and while this particular situation captured on video was awful, we all know it isn’t just United Airlines that overbooks and removes passengers).
HR support and IT support is outsourced in many, perhaps most?, large corporations. Ask any employee or user of IT which 2 of the three choices they are getting?

In an article entitled “Why Flying in America Keeps Getting More Miserable” Matthew Yglesias of Vox news sums this up well when he says, decades’ worth of evidence suggests we prefer cheap and safe to pleasant. Pleasant, defined as available seats all the time combined with higher prices to cover the costs, is a price we pretty clearly could bear as a society if we chose to, but as consumers we have collectively and repeatedly chosen not to. Instead, wherever competition has reared its head in the industry, the mass market has aimed for low prices above all else, followed by a vigorous culture of collective complaining when something goes wrong.

Where will this take us in the future…

Will this trend toward faster and cheaper continue to drive most products and services?
If it does, will there be exceptions where quality is the driver? The obvious exception is medical products and medical care, or is it?
Will some markets bifurcate such that parallel services will develop where consumers are willing to pay for quality?

What are the implications for your business?

What Does “Implement Dictatorially” Mean?

April 16, 2017April 3, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

A few weeks ago, I posted the following as the leadership quote for the month of March:

“Decide democratically, implement dictatorially.” —Peter Schutz, CEO of Porsche 1981-1986

One of my readers replied with the following comment:

“Schutz got the first part of that quote right. I however believe you implement collaboratively.”

In our conversation that followed his comment, I was reminded how everything is subject to interpretation. My reader heard Schutz say “command and control”.

What I hear in this quote is, gather input in the planning and then once the decision is made, get it done. It is incumbent upon a leader to hear input from those impacted by a decision. Two reasons for this:

to inform the decision, perhaps others see opportunities or risks that the leader does not
to allow those impacted to feel heard, to weigh in

And, it is incumbent upon a leader to move quickly once the decision is made. The time for feedback is over, it is time to execute and for all parties involved to move together toward implementation so as to maximize the benefits of the decision once it is made.

How do you see this question?

And What About Our Own Resistance?

April 9, 2017April 3, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Whether leader or follower, we are all in the position of having change thrust upon us. Vistage Speaker, Mike Scott, responded to my March 19th blog (Is Resistance The Problem?), with the questions I asked, turned inward. Thank you Mike for this wonderful reminder of the responsibility we each have to notice our own resistance.

HOW DO I OPERATE?

I justify my resistance when:

1) I resist when I don’t “get it.”

2) I think I know more than I do therefore I don’t actively listen. Then I resist.

3) I think I heard all you said when I didn’t. Then I resist.

4) I think I know what you’re going to say so I stop listening. Then I resist.

5) I mentally criticize what you’re saying and how you’re saying it. Then I resist.

6) I really don’t know what you mean when I think I do. Then I resist.

I blame others when I should be asking, “What was my part in this problem that was created?”

In my workshops one of the principles is to have people repeat or paraphrase all verbal requests. I’m going to use this as the logical justification for repeating and paraphrasing. A new context.

Is Resistance The Problem?

March 19, 2017March 18, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Leading change in an organization is full of challenges. Most of these challenges are associated with creating a vision, inspiring action, achieving buy-in, and sustaining the change.

And sometimes, we don’t take the simple steps to achieve buy-in. Put simply, everyone hears through their own filter. Therefore the actions we see may not be the actions we expected. Obvious perhaps, and yet when leading change, we sometimes think that things are not happening the way we want because people are resisting.

Sometimes, they simply didn’t hear
Sometimes, they heard, but we haven’t made the effort to help them see the value from their perspective, i.e. the WHY
Or what they heard is different from what I thought I said
Or they need to hear it more than once; 7 times I have been told is the magic number
Or they need to do it more than once, or even twice, to “get it”
Or we simply need to allow time for the change to settle in

So, next time, before calling out a “resister”, first pause and ask them what they heard.

Continuous Improvement

March 12, 2017March 10, 2017 by Elisa Spain Comment Closed

Last week I talked about ratings and how we seem to have lost the purpose. So if ratings have taken on a life of their own, what do we do instead to foster continuous improvement?

In the manufacturing world there is the concept of Kaizen, brought to the U.S. by Edward Deming. It’s a simple concept that goes like this. Intentionally and continuously look for ways to innovate and improve your business processes. Employees, customers and other stakeholders can be a source of those ideas.

So, rather than give up on surveys, what if we turned them into something useful?

Instead of focusing on the ratings, what if we focused on the comments?
Instead of looking for what is wrong, what if we looked for what is right?
Instead of focusing on big initiatives, what if we encouraged our stakeholders to share ideas for continuous improvement?

Once we start collecting these ideas and small innovations, what metrics can we put in place to measure the results of our continuous improvement efforts?

Is Everyone a 5 or a 10?

March 5, 2017March 4, 2017 by Elisa SpainNo Comments

We seem to be in a place where everyone is rated, everything is surveyed and everyone expects a rating of 5 (or when a 10 point scale, a rating of 10).

It began with the car dealer who tells us, “You will be getting a survey and if your rating will be anything less than 10, please let me know now so I can fix it”. They make it sound like they will lose their job if they get anything less than a 10, and perhaps that is so. Then came Uber and Lyft and customer service surveys every time we call anyone for anything. And the message is the same, the results of a rating less than 5 (or 10) will be disastrous for the person being rated. Frankly we have a similar system in Vistage with our resource speakers.

I want to believe the intent of all these surveys is to solicit feedback for continuous improvement. Somehow we moved away from feedback to scoring; and from scoring to ranking; and from ranking to “everyone gets a 5”; kinda like the stereotype we hear about the millennial generation where everyone gets a trophy.

So what to do?

Do we all just play along?
Is it worth it to give a fair rating, and what we believe to be a true rating, knowing that most everyone else is giving a 5 or a 10?
Is it worth it if the person on the receiving end may actually lose their job for a 4 or an 8, or lose their opportunity to get more gigs?
What happens when we encounter that rare person who truly is a 5 or a 10, what then? How do we reward them, communicate to them that they are a star?
Or is finding stars not the point? Is the goal simply to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable, pass/fail?

What do you do in these situations?