Category: Leadership & Management

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Building trust

 

There’s a saying that people only buy from trusted sources, and if you combine that with the one “people do business with people” you begin to recognise just how important it is that your prospects and customers can trust you / your organisation / your people.

Establishing trust is difficult and can take a long time. Destroying it can take seconds. I know I have quoted this before, but it bears repetition:

Trust arrives on foot and departs in a Ferrari – Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England.

The rules for maintaining trust are actually very simple.

Be consistent. Trust requires certainty and inconsistency is the enemy of certainty.
Be very clear. Nothing destroys trust faster than disappointed expectations, and they often result from a lack of clarity. Who is going to do what by when?

Keep your promises

If you are going to fail to meet a promise, tell your customer early!
Be responsive. If you don’t answer questions or provide information when requested, your customer will think you have something to hide.

Building trust takes longer and is a little more complex.

Be visible. Your prospect has to know you first. If you know who your prospects are, and where they are, make sure you are visible there. That might be a trade magazine, a particular website or an exhibition. If your prospects are there, you should be too.

Be helpful / of value Your prospect has to like you. If you provide something for nothing or for very little (an email address) you are helping your prospect. We like people who help. What can you give away?

Make it easy. Your prospect will still be nervous and hesitant. What can you do to make the decision an easier one? Is there a trial version or a low cost “light” program they can experience?

Give guarantees. You are confident that you deliver value, so guarantee it to your prospect.

That’s it from a customer / prospect perspective, but what about building trust within your teams?

Similar principles apply – do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it. That will take you a very long way.

 

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Was the fault in the system or in the execution?

Every business has times when things don’t go according to plan. A customer was let down and made a fuss, you are embarrassed and have to take remedial action. All of this costs money and time.

It is really easy to jump to conclusions and decide it was the fault of an individual. You remonstrate with the individual and that makes you feel better.

It doesn’t make them feel better – and it may not make their colleagues feel any better!

Take a step back & consider if the fault was really with the individual, or was it with the “system” they are operating in?

Consistent performance comes from well-established processes and procedures that miniseries the amount of human input required to achieve the end result. In many respects that is the basis of a quality system.

Do you have a set of processes and procedures, or are you just relying upon the knowledge and skill of the individual? Is it a blend of the two? You have processes, but they only work because of the individual’s ability to interpret them and apply their experience?

The perfect system is one where you could put a new person on the job, give them the procedure and they achieve the right result. Ultimately you are trying to de-skill the operation, so that everything is easy.

One great advantage of getting the procedures right is that it allows you to assign more complex tasks to the people who were using all their skills and experience to get the result without the procedure. You can give the de-skilled process to less experienced or less capable people.

That allows you to recruit at lower levels, invest in training those new people to learn your systems and grow into the business. If you don’t de-skill the processes, you have to hire people with greater skill levels who are going to be more expensive.

Time invested in creating processes is never wasted – but be a little wary. If you create an “idiot proof” system, someone will prove themselves to be a better idiot!

 

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Is loyalty hurting your business?

 

When I ran my own business I was proud of the fact that I cared about the people who worked for me. I gave them every chance, treated them fairly and looked after them.

I found out that one of them had been more than a little devious. He was a salesman, on the road all the time, visiting the office perhaps once a month. I had weekly reports on his activity and phone calls during the working day, and he was generating what appeared to be a sensible prospect list.

Somehow, the prospects never quite turned into sales. When I eventually let him go I discovered that he had actually been working for another business whilst claiming to work full time for me.

Looking back, I could see when this had all started. He had worked for me for about 18 months by the time I let him go – or more accurately I had paid him for 18 months. I think he was not focused on my business for perhaps 3 months.

I liked Derek and he was a really professional salesman. His initial results were so good I had him “buddy” one of the other sales guys for a few days.

I didn’t see the fall-off in performance until too late. I was suffering from misplaced loyalty – I thought he would come good again, but my delay and inaction cost us money.

Working with clients I often see the same problem. What is clear to me, as an outsider with no relationship to the individual, is clouded and obscured to the business leaders by their loyalty.

Sometimes it is not an individual in the business but a supplier you’ve worked with for years.

In every case you need to separate the emotional connection from the business need and do the right thing for the business.

If you don’t act, you are not doing good. You may be doing severe damage – perhaps even putting the business and all the others who rely on you at risk.

Weigh up all the facts and make the business decision.

 

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Actions speak louder than words

 

In business it is important to remember that only a part of your message comes from your words, whether they are written or spoken.

You may have a company mission statement that refers to customer service and support, and create web content that talks about world class customer service.

Perhaps you have a statement that talks about continuous improvement, but do you actually have a system or process that supports the statement?

Internally, perhaps you have something in the induction program that refers to every team member being valued and part of the family?

In each and every case if you don’t follow through with actions to support those words they become worse than meaningless.

Your statements are promises.

You promise to provide a level of service and support, you imply that you value your customers and will “go the extra mile” to help them.

You promise to your customers (and your team) that you will improve the products or services.

You promise to make every new employee welcome and create a family atmosphere.

If your actions don’t support your words, you are breaking your promises. When you break a promise, you sow the seeds of mistrust. If you can say one thing but do another, why should I believe you next time?

If you say something – whether it is verbal, or on your website, or perhaps in a proposal – make sure you do it.

That means that sometimes you will have to say no, and disappoint the other party. No, Mr Customer, we cannot do it that quickly. No, Mr Customer, we don’t support that feature.

Say what you mean, and do what you say you will. Your customers and your team will respect and respond to it.

 

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Bad Weather shouldn’t stop you

They say there’s no such thing as bad weather only inadequate clothing.

I walked the dog one morning in a howling gale and with heavy rain driven on the wind, but I was wrapped up warm with hat, boots and gloves.

In your business if you are properly prepared for whatever events are coming your way then coping with those events is easy.

What if events catch you unaware on the other hand?

That would be like going out in that howling gale in a t shirt, shorts and flip flops. Some people might enjoy it, but most of us would not (the dog wouldn’t care either way as long as she got her walk!)

What events might catch you out and what can you do to prepare for them?

Markets
If the market you serve – or the market your customers serve – is going through a down-turn, or seems likely to do so, does your business plan reflect that? It’s all very well taking last year’s numbers and adding a bit, but if in the meantime the market has taken a turn for the worse your plan is probably unrealistic.

If the market is picking up and there is more business out there, does your plan (and do your sales targets) reflect that or are the sales team getting an easy ride?

Forex

If you do business in multiple currencies, do you have a plan for exchange rate movements or are you just hoping for the best? At the very least you should be hedging your exposure but I’ve always preferred natural hedging, where your income and expenditure are matched by currency, whenever possible.

Customers and Suppliers

If your business is dependent upon any one customer or any one supplier, you should have a plan to secure your position, but also a plan to minimise your risks.

Throughout your business think of the external risks, seek to minimise them and develop a plan to cope should the worst happen.

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Do you make enough time?

 

Many of my clients are not very good at training and developing their staff, but to be fair that was also true throughout my career in the corporate world.

I remember being sent on a management training course after my promotion to lead a team, but that it was almost a year after I started in the new role that I went on the course. I’d made my mistakes and learned on the job!

I also remember it was a residential course in London, so we took advantage and the family had a couple of days touring the sites. My son must have been about 8 when he asked me what I had been doing that day and I was able to truthfully reply “playing with Lego”

Why wouldn’t you train your staff? There are no good answers, only excuses. Not enough time, it’s too expensive and so on. It’s not seen as a priority for the business so gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list.

There’s an old joke about a conversation between the finance director and the managing director that goes:

FD “What happens if we train them and the leave?”
to which the MD relies “What happens if we don’t and they stay?”

It’s not just the time on the training course though. If you don’t put into practice what you have “learned” you haven’t really learned anything. You may have had an entertaining time (any trainer worth their salt will have made the sessions fun) but that’s all.

That’s a lot like the bookshelf in many offices, groaning with business tomes from the great and good, most of them unread. Take a look around your office – I know I have a few and I am sure you do to. My speaking colleague Nigel Risner calls the phenomenon “shelf development”

If you don’t take time after the training to put it into action, you wasted your time and money. If you don’t read and absorb the lessons from that book, you wasted your money.

 

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Management by expectations

I’ve always been a great believer in people. I don’t think many people set out to fail in their jobs, or set out to fail to complete a task or a project.

I do think there are a lot of managers who find it difficult to let go. They insist on telling their team what to do – sometimes in great detail – and quite often forget to tell the team why they are doing something.

The worst of these are the managers who forget to communicate altogether, so that the team carry on doing what they have always done. The fact that the boss wants them to do something else passes them by – the boss didn’t tell them, he expected the team to be telepathic!

You might be thinking “That would never happen here” but what if you go into a board meeting at the end of the day. You have a detailed and somewhat heated discussion in the board meeting and agree to do something different. You leave the meeting to find everyone has gone home for the day.

That night, your mind is buzzing, working out all the ramifications. The following morning, you have worked out a plan and you stride into the office & start issuing instructions.

The team weren’t in that meeting; they weren’t part of the debate. You’ve changed direction and they don’t know why or where we are all going!

An alternative management strategy is to manage by setting expectations. You focus on the outcome, not the tasks that might lead to the outcome. The team working for you have a series of goals. They know what you are expecting, and it is down to them to make it happen. You are empowering them to get on, use their brains and skill to get to the desired outcome.

If you couple this management style with supportive language and actions “Let me know what help you need to achieve this” you’ll really engage the team and get fantastic results.

 

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Sometimes we get it wrong

Sometimes we get it wrong and when we do there isn’t much choice we have to go and apologise.

It might be that you jumped a little too hastily at somebody when they gave you some bad news, but if you don’t apologise the following day or even earlier if you can you create a sense of resentment and a real problem for the future

They say it takes a big man (or a big woman) to apologise but actually I think you just need to be honest. Say “I made a mistake” and move on.

You’ll have the respect of the other person – they will respect your openness and will tell everybody else. Your reputation won’t be damaged by that momentary slip of your attention or that unwarranted reaction. Your reputation will be enhanced by the recognition from your team that you are big enough to say

“Sorry guys I got that one wrong”

If you don’t admit the mistake the team know that you made a mistake they know that you reacted hastily and your reputation is diminished. The level of trust the team will give you is reduced and if you’re not careful the team will stop sharing with you and you will lose out.

There’s no protection or face saving in hiding from the facts.There’s no point pretending to the customer that everything will be fine, when you know the delivery will be late or the project will over run. They won’t thank you for avoiding the issue and giving them a nasty surprise.

In the same vein, if something has gone wrong with your department or your area of responsibility, tell the boss – sooner rather than later.

Honesty really is the best policy

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It can be lonely at the top

The more responsibility you have in whatever field, the fewer people you can share with.

If you are leading a business, the people in that business look to you for advice and guidance. You are supposed to have the answers – because if you haven’t got them, who has?

In the workplace you are bound up with all the emotion that comes with leading a team.

You’ll be feeling responsible for the team, and for the business.

That can make your position a lonely place. You can’t talk about your problems to your colleagues, your customers, your suppliers or your service providers – all the people you come into contact with on a daily basis. Some business leaders are lucky enough to have an understanding partner, who will at least listen!

There are two strategies to deploy to help you avoid the worst effects of this trap.

Firstly, surround yourself with trusted advisors. These are people you must be able to trust and discuss issues with, and who can bring dispassionate objectivity to bear on your problems. They could be independent business advisors (I know one of them!) or perhaps other business leaders who operate in a different sector. There are many peer groups to facilitate such support.

Secondly, be more open with your colleagues at work. There’s nothing wrong with being human, and indeed if you are more open you will build stronger relationships with the people around you. The stronger those relationships, the greater the trust and honesty will be and the easier you will find things.

There will always be those areas where you cannot discuss the issues, but they are probably far fewer than you think they are. Just make sure you are not spreading loads of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt)

Business Leaders are people too!

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Is there a SPOF in your business?

Is there a single point of failure in your business?

I’ve lost count of the number of businesses I have helped identify and deal with the single point of failure in the business.

Sometimes, this is a computer system. It’s not robust, possibly not backed up properly and if it were to fail the business would grind to a halt.

More often, it is a person. If that person isn’t available, is sick or on holiday, things don’t get done and eventually the business fails. That’s not you, is it? It is often the business owner, with all the levers of control in their own hands.

Perhaps it is a single contract with a customer. That represents such a high proportion of your business that if you lose that contract the business will go under. You don’t have to do anything wrong for the worst to happen – it could be something completely out of your control. Perhaps the customer is taken over, or they lose their customer…but you still lose out.

Sometimes it can be a supplier, or a component from a range of suppliers that is rapidly coming to the end of its life.

Do you know where your points of failure are?

Are you sure that computer backup is actually working ok? When was the last time you tested it? How many people actually know how to restore from a backup?

If it is an individual, training can help. Delegation is often something that doesn’t come easily, but it is a vital skill to avoid becoming a road block. Delegate a responsibility, not a task, and try offering support with the delegation “What do you need to make this happen?”

If it is a customer or a contract, put your efforts into diversifying that business. It it’s a supplier, look for alternatives.

If you do have a single point of failure there is a law that says you will get caught out – eventually!