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August 15, 2005

Stories You'll Never Hear

You know the drill: You and your organization come up with a new strategy or idea. Perhaps it's a new commitment to improved member service, or a new mission to pursue on behalf of your constituency. You call the association staff together and roll it out. You talk about how important the new strategy is. How it's going to make a big impact on the association's future (or bottom line). How everyone needs to pull together to make it a success.

Guess what? After your kickoff meeting, your staff will have a kickoff "meeting" of their own. Where they talk about you, your idea, and how it's never, ever going to happen. You won't be invited into this conversation. You won't hear what's said. You'll just wonder why your great idea didn't work out the way you thought it would.

In his thought leadership session yesterday, branding and customer service consultant Stan Slap didn't talk about "branding" as a verb (it's not) or as, god forbid, a logo. He talked about branding as a tribute -- something given to an organization -- based on the experience that organization provides to its customers.

To be rewarded with the brand you want, an organization has to focus on process as much as product. In fact, the most successful companies treat their process like a product. Customers, and members, must enjoy the experience of being served by you. Your member experience must be spectacular, signature (something unique to your organization), and sustainable (affordable and, most important, consistent).

The biggest stumbling block in creating this process is, actually, employees. In a segment of his address that I'm sure most of us who manage people found disquieting, Slap told us the biggest deadly sin in implementing spectacular customer service (or anything else):

"Failing to respect the power of the culture to bury you."

It comes back to the stories the staff in the example above are telling about you in response to your great idea. Not to you; about you. Slap described culture in anthropological terms as "shared beliefs about the rules of survival and prosperity," which are reinforced by the repetitive telling of stories and legends.

In any organization, the stories people are telling are about their managers. You'll never hear the stories. The stories are about you and how you act, and the messages you send to staff about what they must do to keep their job and get rewards.

The most important thing to remember as managers is that we are not part of the staff culture. We can't become part of the staff culture no matter how hard we try. The only thing we can do, to try and get plans implemented, is to align our strategies with what's important to staff.

Not what's important to the organization. Or even what's important to the members. What's important to staff. Because they're going to implement it.

Of course, as Slap pointed out, most strategies in most organizations don't work, anyway. More on that in a future post.

Posted by Kevin Holland at August 15, 2005 08:38 AM

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