Isn’t it infuriating when things you come to rely on to work perfectly – even (or perhaps especially) when you only use them occasionally – suddenly don’t? I had one of those experiences with my (fairly new) shredder recently. It worked perfectly last time I used it. This time – no sign of life whatsoever.
With anything electrical, there are a few things I always try first. A different socket? Nothing. Change the fuse in the plug? Still nothing. See if it’s just having an off day and will feel better tomorrow? No different next day. Painstakingly fish out from between the sharp blades as much of the old shreddings as I can, in case it’s just a jam? No good.
At that point I hunted around until I found the user instructions. They didn’t seem to have a trouble-shooting section. Perhaps it was time to look at the guarantee, so I went to the website looking for details. Nothing much helped, but I did find a ‘contact us’ button, so as it was a weekend I wrote an email explaining the situation.
Much to my surprise, I got a phone call on the Monday morning from a lady saying she was from Fellowes and she believed I had a problem with my shredder? She took me through a fault-diagnosis process, tailored to my shredder model, and including the sorts of things users do uninstructed (like putting a plastic bag in the bin to collect shreddings). In less than five minutes the problem was solved.
Great customer service
What a great customer service experience! I finished up being a very satisfied customer with a working shredder. It felt a more positive experience than I would have had if I had identified the problem myself from the instructions. There were minimal delays and no one had any costs of shipping the unit anywhere. The cost to the company must have been minimal. In fact it was a very economical bit of promotion. Providing written fault-finding might seem the obvious thing to do. In fact, even if it had worked it would have been a missed opportunity. It pays to think beyond the obvious! This article was first published at www.otteryconsulting.co.uk.
There you are, head down in a report, a spreadsheet, or some other urgent bit of business. There’s a knock, and your mind returns to your desk from miles away. Someone says they have a problem and can they talk it over with you please? An interruption. What are you going to say?
Your work is high-value, it takes real concentration, and you need to keep your focus to get it done right. On the other hand, if you send them away, you may be telling them that you do not value them and what they do.
Of course my own work seems urgent, but I know I’ll get it done one way or another. My colleague on the other hand is important, because it is essential for the longer term that they feel valued. I could easily – and quickly – damage a relationship I have taken a long time to build. I know they would not interrupt me when I’m busy unless they felt it was important. It is really important to give them something to show that I’m taking them seriously.
Even if I decide I can only spare 5 minutes now, I’ll always offer that as a first step, at least to give them things to be thinking about until I can pay full attention. If I give them proper respect, value them, take their problems seriously, I find that they respect me back – and interruption is rare unless it really is necessary.
So if you really can't deal with the interruption fully there and then, at least find some compromise. It will pay you back in the long run. 
Many years ago, I was given a piece of advice by a sales manager colleague which has stuck with me ever since: “God gave you two ears and one mouth. Use them in those proportions!”
This is not just about sales in the formal sense. Whenever we are trying to influence people for any kind of outcome – and let’s face it, that is most of the time – we should remember it.
Where does influence come from? To gain influence, first we need to be trusted. People need to believe that we are behaving with integrity, that we have their interests in mind, not just our own. Naturally it is best if that is actually true. Second, we need to be respected (in fact, ‘respect for’ is almost shorthand for ‘willing to be influenced by’). Much of respect comes from a perception that we speak with authority, which presupposes trust in what we say.
How do we establish trust? That is where the ears come in. Sadly, the experience of many people in many organisations is that managers never find the time to listen to them properly. Even if you are sitting in front of him or her, it may be clear that the manager’s mind is only half on the conversation you are trying to have. How can you know what matters to someone if you don’t listen when they tell you? If you don’t know, how can you be trusted to look after them? Those ears are very powerful!
As a change manager, listening is a particularly powerful tool. It is a truism that most people dislike change, but I believe that much of that is about feeling they have no voice in it. Even when people come into a meeting feeling angry about a change that is being imposed on them, it always amazes me how much more acceptance can be achieved simply by spending time really listening to them tell you what they don’t like – even if you can’t alter it. Good listening involves the mouth as well: how do they know you heard them if you don’t play it back?
Once you have listened and built some trust, you are in a position to build respect too: by explaining the changes in a way that relates to their concerns but is anchored in reason. They will still need to move through the change curve, but by using your ears and your mouth in the right ways and the right proportions you can make that easier for everyone. 
I have been reading Brene Brown’s best seller “Daring Greatly”, which I think has some profound lessons for leaders. That prompted me to reflect on a recent problem I had at work.
Like most managers, I have occasionally had to talk to one of my staff about shortcomings in their performance, and I had another instance recently. I’m sure that few managers start a performance management conversation lightly, because deliberately choosing the uncertainty of potential conflict and relationship damage is uncomfortable. Some managers never find the courage to go there at all.
On the other hand, as a manager I know that I easily forget that such a conversation is usually at least as stressful for the staff member. Neither of us want to be having the conversation; certainly neither of us want to have to repeat it. Both of us tend to exaggerate the power the other has in the situation – as a result, both of us feel vulnerable, which for most people is a profoundly uncomfortable place to be, and so can lead to unhelpful behaviours. The problem is likely to appear to be a zero-sum game with a winner and a loser.
However, there is another way of looking at it. Provided we are careful not to take advantage, that mutual vulnerability can be a foundation for strengthened and renewed trust, which in turn may mean that the staff member cares more about the improvements you seek. Taking that approach may well give you the best chance of a successful outcome, but to do so requires you to be careful to avoid hiding behind the power of your authority as a manager. To do that takes courage – but done with openness and integrity it can work.
Obviously every situation is different, but a good place to start is with an honest and straightforward explanation of how the person’s actions are making you feel, avoiding emotive language. If the other person feels it is safe to reciprocate, and to help you to understand their point of view, you have a chance of working out how to improve things together. That's real performance management! You may even finish up with both of you feeling you are winners: more cake for both of you, not different shares. 
There is a rather impressive new office building going up in the City of London at the moment. Colloquially referred to as the Walkie Talkie building (London likes its building nicknames), instead of the usual flat walls, its walls are gently curved, giving it a very sculptural quality. And like many modern office blocks, it is covered with floor to ceiling glass. It will look amazing when it is completed.
However, people living, working, or even just passing nearby are feeling amazed for all the wrong reasons. It seems that the architects didn't join things up - they forgot to take account of – or underestimated – the effects of the laws of optics.
Think of a reflecting telescope. It works because the concave mirror in the telescope focuses the light from the stars that falls on it. What have the architects put on the front of the Walkie Talkie building? In effect, a gigantic concave mirror. And like all such mirrors it focuses the light – in this case particularly the sunlight - falling on it. On a hot summers’ day, the temperature in a nearby street has risen enough to blister paint and melt plastic. Now it’s called the Walkie Scorchie.
Joining things up
It’s a great idea to reflect sunlight so that your offices don’t overheat, but it is not OK to give someone else your sunlight problem instead. Frequently an internal focus on solving our own problems can blind us to the difficulty that our solution may export to someone else. However expert each of us is in the areas we know about, we may blunder into basic problems outside those areas. In this interconnected world, it is wise to think carefully about any possible external effects; otherwise an embarrassing oversight can quickly become a PR disaster. Joining things up so that such things do not happen is far from easy, and needs a commitment to cross-silo working that few organisations seem to recognise. Busy managers may not have time – and frequently have no incentive – to consider wider impacts. Making it happen requires explicitly recognising the need and creating processes in response.
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View of Chernobyl taken from roof of building in Pripyat Ukraine. Photo Taken by Jason Minshull, then digitally zoomed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]
Have you noticed how often it happens that when things go wrong, they don’t just go wrong, they go horribly wrong? From the truly horrendous disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima to the merely painful like a company going bust, once things have started to go bad, the interventions people make often exacerbate the situation. Why is that?
When things start to go wrong, there can be a number of immediate reactions, depending on the circumstances. One is to hide your head in the sands, and pretend that there is nothing wrong. That is almost guaranteed to make things worse! More common is the fire hose approach: do something drastic with the intention of stopping the immediate threat, which may deal with the underlying causes (although it may also exacerbate them), but certainly soaks everything, whatever the consequences. Following the analogy, the fire hose is good at putting out some sorts of fires, but inadvisable on oil or electrical fires! In between is the timid approach – not wanting to do any more damage than can be avoided, the attempted cure finishes up being too little and too late. How difficult it is to get the balance right!
View of Chernobyl taken from roof of building in Pripyat Ukraine. Photo Taken by Jason Minshull, then digitally zoomed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption]
Have you noticed how often it happens that when things go wrong, they don’t just go wrong, they go horribly wrong? From the truly horrendous disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima to the merely painful like a company going bust, once things have started to go bad, the interventions people make often exacerbate the situation. Why is that?
When things start to go wrong, there can be a number of immediate reactions, depending on the circumstances. One is to hide your head in the sands, and pretend that there is nothing wrong. That is almost guaranteed to make things worse! More common is the fire hose approach: do something drastic with the intention of stopping the immediate threat, which may deal with the underlying causes (although it may also exacerbate them), but certainly soaks everything, whatever the consequences. Following the analogy, the fire hose is good at putting out some sorts of fires, but inadvisable on oil or electrical fires! In between is the timid approach – not wanting to do any more damage than can be avoided, the attempted cure finishes up being too little and too late. How difficult it is to get the balance right!
Fast disasters …
It is understandable that in a crisis people react by tackling the obvious problems. If your house is on fire, stopping the flames obviously seems more important than avoiding ruining the furniture. When the situation is relatively simple, that approach works. The problem comes when the situation is more complex. In a crisis, you act instinctively, and you do not usually have time to think through the consequences of your actions. Almost by definition, complexity will bring unforeseen consequences. How many organisations have no more complexity than they need? What to do about this? There are two possible approaches. You can minimise the risk of unforeseen consequences in a crisis by keeping the organisation as simple as possible. Or you can practice crisis management through exercises and so attempt to learn what adverse consequences might occur and how to avoid them. Or you can do both, of course. Clearly though, both of these have a cost which needs to be incurred when there is no crisis in sight.… and slow disasters
Slow disasters pose different and much more difficult problems. The fire-hose approach is much less likely; head-in-the-sands and timidity more so. It all starts with ability to acknowledge the problem in the first place. The organisation’s leaders may not believe that what they are seeing are signs of a problem. Even if they do think there is a problem, they may not want to admit this. They or people they are connected to may have vested interests; they may be unwilling to admit failure, or believe that admitting problems will damage confidence and make them worse; they may believe that other issues are more urgent. Perhaps the most common situation is that leaders recognise the problem, but simply underestimate what is needed to fix it. Most managers are optimists at heart, and in deciding what – often painful - actions are required, optimism bias will tend to creep in to minimise the pain. These can be very difficult decisions: for example, no manager wants to make any more staff redundant than they absolutely have to. However, if the ‘cure’ is insufficient, the problem remains, and will have to be treated again – with the ‘patient’ now in a weaker condition than previously. Underestimating can be fatal: death by a thousand cuts is a phrase I have heard repeated too often, and the consequences for staff can be worse than being bold at the outset. In summary then, perhaps the message in both cases is the same: optimism rarely provides salvation; taking what feels like unnecessary pain early may do.
Let's face it, if innovation isn’t change, what is? So in thinking about why change is difficult, and how to overcome the challenges, thinking about how to make innovation successful may help.
A frequent characteristic of innovations is that the needs they address, or could address, are not recognised. History is littered with examples, from Marshal Foch’s view that aeroplanes were of no military value to Thomas Watson’s famous assessment that there might be a global market for at most 5 computers. Most people have heard the saying “build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door”. Innovations still fail, though, because the world didn’t know it needed a better mousetrap, and so it wasn’t listening. Before you can even start to persuade people to adopt your innovation, you may have to help them to recognise that they have a problem it can address.
Change initiatives are no different. I was recently helping an organisation plan a major change. I believed that the change would have consequences for other aspects of the operations, and that these consequences needed to be planned for too. Although I made several attempts to explain this to the CEO, I failed to convince her. Needless to say no such planning was done, and so I shall not be surprised if there are later problems requiring emergency solutions. A pity, but you can’t win ‘em all!
How do change initiatives start? One or a few people have an idea about how to do things differently. Sometimes there may be a widely-recognised problem, but even then it may be a big step to create the link to the proposed solution. Often most people – even management – have not yet recognised that there is a problem, and before they will consider any change, they need to be persuaded that the need is real.
Change initiators are often the people who are able to see what will trip up the organisation before others can, but that means that they also have the challenge of helping others to see what they see. Think of the lookout on a boat – their vantage point means they can see rocks ahead before anyone else, but before they can get the boat to change course they have to be believed. The power of the human mind to cling on to existing beliefs, for example that the rocks are miles away, is very strong.
So change management starts with taking the time to educate people about the problem that needs to be addressed. Until they believe that there is a problem – that there are rocks ahead – trying to persuade them to accept the change required to address it is likely to be wasted breath.
If you need help seeing the rocks, or persuading people they are real, do get in touch.