egyii blog

It’s time for change.

No more pushing products and services at customers in an effort to meet monthly targets. No more macho, aggressive behaviour pushing employees for results without stopping to think about how to get them. And no more grandstanding about how the customer comes first without stopping to see the situation through your customer’s eyes rather than your organisation’s.

It’s time to step back. Nick Morgan, in his latest book Trust Me – Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, tells us that being authentic in all our dealings with others is the secret of building trust and loyalty. And this starts not with actions, behaviour or words, but with intent.

If you’re trying too hard to be authentic, it means you’re thinking too much. You’re concentrating on how your are behaving and what you are saying. If you’re a company, you’re focusing on crafting the perfect message for the public or your employees. All these ‘up front’ actions will continue to fall on deaf ears if you don’t step back and reflect on your true intention in meeting a client or an employee, or in creating your company strategy.

It’s time for leaders, relationship managers and organisations to look inside themselves and connect with the higher cause that drives them personally and organisationally. Forget about your targets and the pressing need to win more business. Why are you doing this in the first place? What is it about you that you want to give to the world? Why was your company originally set up? What difference does it want to make?

Connect with your intent and the world will see you and your organisation as more authentic, patient and understanding. Only once you arrive at this place can you then begin to build your business based on integrity and trust. And in the new world of business that we must now enter, stepping back and addressing the fundamental issues of intent and authenticity is the only way to create the trust that leads to hard business results.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore

How much of new learning from a training programme actually gets applied in a value-enhancing way back on the job? It’s probably somewhere between 5% and 20%. That means out of a hundred learners, only a few are actually delivering performance improvement that leads directly to business results.

The solution? Most organisations would go on a search for a ‘new’ training programme that promises to solve their immediate problems. This training will then be seen as the ’silver bullet’ that produces the long-awaited results. Hopes are raised amid an atmosphere of expectation and excitement. And more often than not, the training proceeds according to plan, the learners finish the programme highly motivated and determined to apply their new skills, and – nothing happens. Back at their jobs they react to the same interpersonal and environmental triggers that set off their familiar patterns of behaviour, and within a few days have lost their motivation and forgotten much of what they had learnt. The trouble is, they don’t return to the same situation they were in before they went for the training. Rather, they feel deflated and exhausted, and they work with a feeling of promises broken. The impact on morale can be devastating.

Often, the reasons why the learning was not applied on the job do not lie with the training programme. Much good training has met with similar results. It is a waste of time to blame the training programme and then go on to sign up an alternative training provider in the hope that this time it will be different.

Instead, a holistic approach needs to be taken. Training on its own will never result in performance improvement. What is needed is a whole-organisation approach to performance improvement and training support. Training effectiveness is influenced by many organisational, cultural and systemic issues.

For example, research indicates that new skills will only be applied back on the job if the employee receives proactive support for the change from his line manager. In many cases, learners return to work full of enthusiasm to try out their new skills only to receive at best a lack of interest and at worst an injunction to do things the way they’ve always been done. I have received feedback many times from participants on business writing skills courses that it is all very well learning new ways to communicate, but when they produce such writing in the office their boss changes it back to the ‘old’ style of writing. What a waste!

But merely acknowledging that the learner has some new skills and passively observing him trying them out is insufficient. The line manager needs to have a method for systematically following-up with the employee, monitoring the results he produces, giving regular feedback and support, and providing the Learning and Organisational Development Department with sound evaluations of performance resulting from the training.

This is but one of a variety of actions that can and should be taken before and after the training event so that training moves from being a one-off event to a performance improvement process. It requires the inclusion of all the stakeholders, from learning executives to line managers, senior managers and employees who all need to be aligned behind an agreed set of objectives and actions to be taken.

Training done the right way is one of the most powerful methods for creating positive business results, so let’s bring it out of the closet and let it show us what it can really do.

James Irvine and the Egyii team, Singapore

The ‘best dressed” Asian Santas…

..from Trip Allen and James Irvine, your Egyii Team.

Ho Ho Ho!

Today’s ‘crazy’ financial services market presents flexible, forward-thinking financial industry players with an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and grow their business.  This is the time for change. This is the time for those responsible for client contact to stand back and take another look at how they influence their clients.

To date, banks have emphasized product over relationship by offering what seemed like good returns on a whole host of financial products to a hungry audience. The time has now come where, like a guilty husband who has cheated on his wife, they have to re-seduce their clients. They have to be sensitive, caring and patient, all the time approaching their clients gently and testing the water.

This style of influence emphasizes the relationship first and foremost and the product a relatively distant second. But true relationship-building requires more than knowing how to ask the right questions to uncover recognised and unrecognised needs, and present a tailored solution. True relationship-building requires authenticity on the part of the Relationship Manager. And a client can sense when a Relationship Manager is inauthentic, however smoothly he runs through the sales process. 

This means there needs to be a focus on the second-by-second human behaviours passing between people. Relationship Managers need to learn to ‘calibrate’ effectively, which means paying attention to the many small signals their client is sending through their face and body language, their tone of voice, and the words they use. In this way they can ‘enter’ their client’s world and see the situation and themselves through their client’s eyes.  As Henry Ford said, “If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.”

Why is this so important? Because being able to see through your client’s eyes opens the window to what she truly wants. And as we all know, the secret to winning other people’s trust and loyalty is to give them what they want. And at the end of the day, in addition to products and solutions, your client wants to be heard and understood. Then you can start writing your own cheque.

So take a minute to think about the way you behave in front of your clients. Eliminate everything from your mind, including your well-prepared script and your client strategy. Just go in there and open your mind to the world offered to you by your client. Treat your client like a great teacher, there to help you go places you have never gone before.

Bank clients today are like swinging voters. They are neither Republican nor Democrat, but are lost as to which way to turn and ready to turn towards a bank which can win their trust. What an opportunity! Go and get it!

James Irvine, Team Egyii Singapore

Web 2.0. Social networks. Twitter. Facebook. Mash ups. Wikis. Social feeds. Widgets. Blah, blah, blah…

Huh?

These are all a new language to the “digital foreigner” (those of us born before 1980) and Generation X and above. But for the “digital native” (born after 1980) and much of Generation Y, they talk about this in their sleep. Add to this iPods, personal communicators and mobile phones that we are all so familiar with and you have new means of communicating and learning.  It is amazing the changes technology has and will affect the world.

So what is all of this driving? It is driving a fast paced, information hungry society that wants variety, “everything now” with a very limited attention span. It may also be driving a different way of learning for the “Digital Learner.”

In a recent study “Living and Learning with New Media” by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, November 2008, the following was discovered: “New media allows for a degree of freedom and autonomy for people today that is less apparent in a classroom setting. People today respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from elders or leaders. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented toward set, predefined goals.”

So how should learning be addressed? First let us describe learning platforms. “Formal learning’ is classroom. “Informal learning” is peers, friends, family, on the job. Together it gives you Workplace Integration learning. Workplace integration means you cannot separate training from work as you should constantly be learning. So the combination of the two is integral.

What needs to be done is to utilise the new technology platforms and social trends (Web 2.0, social networks) with effective learning platforms (Workplace Integration). How? Short and sharp programs (2-3 hours in length vs 8 hours) that can be done in a classroom environment (with peer interaction)supplemented by E learning (as E learning is difficult on its own), digital games (for FUN!) or on social platforms (peer to peer) and peer to peer interaction in the office and at home. This would cater to the attention span of the Digital Natives (and the Digital Foreigners who are bored with the same old programmes), would give them the ability to “learn in chunks,”would give themfun/new engaging environments (yes FUN!), and would allow them to learn from their “switched on” peers, too.

Now that is what I call TRUE blended learning!

Isn’t it time we started doing things differently? Isn’t it time for a change to adapt to the new world? The learning space needs a drastic overhaul to cater to the ”bored” learners and ot the new Digital Learners, who are today’s and tomorrow’s decisionmakers.

(For those of you interested, I suggest the book “Born Digital” by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser which explores the behaviours of digital natives in today’s society).

Trip Allen The Egyii Team

It’s at times like these that I find re-visiting classic pieces of writing about performance and success worthwhile. Yesterday I took another look at Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which included this item written in 1934:

“One of the first people in American business to be paid a salary of over a million dollars a year (when there was no income tax and a person earning fifty dollars a week was considered well off) was Charles Schwab. He had been picked by Andrew Carnegie to become the first president of the newly formed United States Steel Company in 1921, when Schwab was only thirty-eight years old.

Why did Andrew Carnegie pay a million dollars a year, or more than three thousand dollars a day, to Charles Schwab? Why? Because Schwab was a genius? No. Because he knew more about the manufacture of steel than other people? Nonsense. Charles Schwab told me himself that he had many men working for him who knew more about the manufacture of steel than he did.

Schwab says that he was paid this salary largely because of his ability to deal with people.”

Fast track to 2008 and Joe Takash says in his book Results Through Relationships, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m called on to deal with dysfunctional teams, to coach a talented but flawed leader, to increase profit, or to improve productivity and morale; there is always a relationship issue. There may be other issues contributing to the problem, but relationships always play a large part in the cause of the problem… and its solution.”

I know that obtaining degrees and certificates helps to qualify you as an expert in a particular field. I also know that the way most businesses are organised, you are spending the vast majority of your time dealing with tasks such as emails, reports and research. Yes, knowing your business inside out and dealing with everything that lands on your desktop are critical. But isn’t this time of economic turbulence a great opportunity to step back and assess what areas need a laser-like focus to bring you career success and your company growth and profitability in the next few months and years?

The secret is relationships. Your ability to deal with people is now the critical success factor. In fact it always has been. And the only way to deal with people effectively and to get them to do anything, is simply to give them what they want. And what they want is, as John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers said, “to have a feeling of importance”. I doesn’t matter what situation or task you apply this to – what will enable you to forge lasting relationships and influence people is to make them feel valued and recognised. And this, above all else, leads to results.

So let’s spend some time thinking about our people skills and how we are going to use them to achieve much more than we ever thought we were capable of.

The Kapuas mud snake (Enhydris gyii) is a native of Borneo, and can change its colour spontaneously… Today’s business turbulence is the greatest opportunity of the last five decades. If today’s business leaders can learn to behave more like the the Kapuas mud snake, we might see nothing less than the passing of the ‘Old World’ of business into a ‘New World’ of business.

The Old World of business may have been saying ‘customer first’ and ‘relationship management’, but the truth is that the approach to winning more business never really changed. Sales executives, relationship managers and leaders are still taught that the key to revenue growth lies in going through a ’scripted process’ that everyone can apply equally effectively. All you really have to do is find out your customer’s recognised and unrecognised needs, present your ‘tailored’ solution, and hey presto!

This approach to business growth is just one symptom of a general malaise where everyone is at the ‘front line’ (whether in product development, operations or sales) rushing to meet perceived customer needs. This rush to perform means that little real thought is given to other, possible underlying drivers of business success which ultimately determine whether these ’front line’ strategies will work. 

For example, a relationship manager in a bank will have been taught a set of behaviours that are predicted to lead to increased investments from customers. These behaviours will probably include questions to ask the customer, ways to gain agreement, and how to present a product solution. But these ‘front line’ behaviours only scratch the surface of the potential relationship between relationship manager and customer. And so the customer leaves the meeting feeling a bit deflated without knowing exactly why. Certainly, the meeting will have made no progress towards establishing trust.

Now is the time to move into the New World of business success and take a step back from this ‘front line’ thinking. Let’s not rush to be at the front pushing, pushing, pushing. Yes, targets are important, but businesses will never reach them from a position of desperation and impatience. It’s not about facts. Facts about what the customer wants. This is easy. No, today it’s about giving the customer what she wants from the very first second she lays eyes on you. These are not facts which can described. They are underlying drivers of human interaction which are working second by second in a dance as the relationship manager leads the customer through a melody of turn-taking. And there’s no end to this dance. It continues through the end of the meeting and into the conscious and unconscious thoughts of the customer all the while she is walking away and going about her business the next day and the next. And if you want to build a relationship of trust and loyalty, you had better make sure this dance continues on and on and on.

So much for ’scripted’ behaviour. If you don’t enter this dance as a unique individual with your own way of expressing yourself and your own personal way of responding to every tiny signal your customer sends you, then your authenticity will be lost and your customer will be left in neutral about you. And you’d better treat every customer as a unique individual too. No two dances can ever be the same. Each time you engage with a customer you embark on a journey of exploration and discovery. How exciting!

These are things that cannot easily be reported back to a department manager in a weekly submission. They are not easily listed and analysed. But they are the ‘back office’ of business success at the front line. It’s time that business leaders put more challenging thinking into their behaviours – that they stop and try to really understand what drives people, rather than relying on age-old prescriptions that come to them without any effort.

So, welcome to the New World of business. We’ll never regain our customers’ trust if we apply Old World thinking and practices. Those businesses that take a step back, have some patience, and look beneath the surface will find opportunity in abundance in today’s turbulence. Just pay attention to the human being  in human beings for a change, and watch the results roll in.