The message I preach is very simple:
- Give your customer what they are paying for
- Measure your own performance and face into it
- Fix the things that don’t work
- Test and learn from your mistakes
- Don’t scare the living daylight out of your staff
I’m a little like a stuck record (I’m showing my age, do you remember records?), I bang on a bit, I even bore myself. The message isn’t rocket science nor is it brain surgery, but it isn’t common practice.
What I see is:
- People focused on their own personal agendas
- Managers fudging their figures
- Lots of talk and little action
- Dogmatic belief that we know it all
- Targets, bonuses, incentives, performance management and blame
I bet you see exactly the same things.
So why is it so difficult?
We do! We:
- Worry about ourselves first and foremost
- Must look good at all cost
- Only value our own opinions
- Don’t trust anybody else
And for all of those reasons most organisations don’t work nearly as well as they could.
So the biggest barrier to progress is us. You, me, your boss, his boss, your staff… And our own self-centeredness.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself ~ Leo Tolstoy
Perhaps changing your own behaviour is the best place to start.
Mind you that isn’t easy. Do as I say not as I do.
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Image by Martina Yach
Hello James
Great post, love both the simplicity and profound depth to it! Thanks for sharing the Tolstoy quote, I have come across it before and it makes a difference to re-experience it.
So what gets in the way of us being the change? It occurs to me that we are survival machines and we will do almost anything and everything to survive. And essential to survival, in our conditioning, is to fit in, to be approved of, to get on by going along with the dominant way of doing things.
All the best,
Maz
Yes Maz, I agree though surviving and thriving are not necessarily the same thing.
James
Hi James,
Thanks for that. Simple and to the point. Your post reminds me of an interview I did a wee while ago with Phil Barden. He’s done a lot of research into the research about how our brains actually work and in the interview he told me:
1. Our brains have evolved to want to work as efficiently as possible. Thinking is hard, tiring and consumes energy; and
2. The brain’s dominant mental processes are built for action rather than thinking and so we don’t naturally want to think.
Therefore, may be if we want to get better and change perhaps we need to start thinking more simply about the really, really, really small steps that we need to take to start us along the road to behaviour change, perspective change and performance improvement.
Is this why many change initiatives fail? Is it because the steps that we focus on are not small enough and, therefore, require too much thinking and not enough action?
Adrian
Thanks Adrian. If anybody is interested in the interview it is here.
http://www.adrianswinscoe.com/blog/customer-service-and-customer-loyalty-can-be-improved-by-using-decision-science-interview-with-phil-barden/