Important to understand that this 'secondary group asking process' is ninety-five percent non-verbal! 

You most likely already thank customers verbally and ask them "How are we doing?" through your hospitality training programs and systems.  Our practice is to complement those efforts, not change them, and provide follow-through with an ongoing effort of leading focus, learning, and commitment from everyone.  Simply hands-on, you are allowing your frontline teams to participate in asking "How are we doing?", not only sharing feedback acquired through the enterprise.  Author Gerald Zaltman reminds us as it applies to business that "ninety-five percent of emotion, thought, and learning as well as most of communication is non-verbal and unconscious"  in his book How Customers Think.  

Asking in the practice is synonymous with reflection, inquiry/inquisitive, question, challenge, and anticipation. 

Not a program or system, this practice is a process or set of actions where front-line managers (user-centered) can lead the "how" to deliver the "what" needs to be done, from senior management, to customers.  It is a continuous process of asking customers for feedback, sharing, and assessing it with all members of the provider team.  This Practice of "learning to ask" picks up where the verbal process leaves off and creates experiences for answering:

The result becomes an ongoing secondary feedback, not replacing any feedback your enterprise is currently obtaining,  with a purpose of motivating and involving everyone on the service team.  We believe it is necessary for any group to maintain long-term 1) attention for focus, 2) intentions for commitments, and 3) experiences for learning.

You probably have a program to share feedback and information with your associates, which is important in managing relationships.  But you also need to teach or help them learn to "ask the right questions"!  Asking, as a function of human nature is critical to leadership.  Asking directly fosters learning, ownership, attention, appreciation, recognition, participation, focus, intentions, feedback, and communication.  

Even though you should look to supervisors and/or administrators for the right questions to ask for your group, as they already do this for the overall or long-term plan rather than from a daily or frontlines perspective.  People still want to know what questions to reflect on and share?  I always recommend Peter Drucker's suggestion:

  "I always ask the same three questions whether I'm dealing with a business, a church or a university. And whether it's American, German, or Japanese makes no difference.

  1. The first question is: what is your business? What are you trying to accomplish? What makes you distinct?
  2. The second question is: How do you define results? And that's a very tough question, much tougher in a non-business than in a business.
  3. The third question is: What are your core competencies? And what do they have to do with results? 

    That's all really. There is no great difference between this century and the last except there are so many more organisations today."

    ---- Peter Drucker in an NPR interview and New Zealand Management (October, 2005)

 

“Process of asking is the matrix, the indispensable experience, of nearly every form of learning”

A word about managing versus leading relationships.  Most every enterprise typically uses the same programs and systems we mentioned above to manage relationships in many different areas and communicating, again, "what" needs to be done at the operational level.   Importantly, this secondary feedback is a skill and tool that an operations manager can use to lead relationships, compliment the managing of relationships, and make the manager's job easier by getting everyone participating and learning.

This practice creates an informal feedback with which the importance is not the accuracy of the feedback, that occurs with the feedback that senior management gets to determine the "what" needs to be done for the enterprise.  The critical aspect of this feedback which is received through asking by the service team is in what is done with it. 

 

 

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