|
|
THE FRONTLINE TEAM LEADERSHIP COURSE_______________________________________________
Introduction:Feedback from Ones Own Daily Activities -- The Breakfast of Champions!"Asking" to Lead Relationships on the Front-Lines of Daily Operations"A Career Skill for Frontline Leaders to Keep Associates Involved and Self-Motivated through Daily Operations--Continuously Leading Them Back to the Customer! Also an Enterprise Tool for Engaging Everyone with Long-Term Customer Focus, Learning, and Commitments. In Nashville, Tennessee, over forty years ago, an entrepreneur who had experience in customer service began a new venture as a franchisee in the hospitality industry. With success so great his teams bought the company and grew to approximately two thousand operating units over the next thirty years. His self-professed secret? “Keep it simple, back-to-basics, and grow one unit (team) at a time when the customer tells us we are ready and have it right.” How his teams listened to customers and met the challenge on a day to day basis of “getting it right” is a lesson that I believe has come 360 degrees and is ripe for our challenge of teaming up to compete in a global marketplace. Sure these teams had support and were taught the hard skills they needed to be successful but they had to compete individually in each marketplace and it was the additional soft skills such as frontline leadership and learning that made these teams and the organization grow. Also, a participating factor in the scaling back of the number of units over the past ten years as the organization grew away from its entrepreneurial approach of each team “asking” customers the crucial question: “How are we doing?” The only thing more important than feedback itself, to any organization, is what is done with it. Don’t confuse “Surveys” with “Feedback”. Each should have its own distinctive and separate purpose! Management can use surveys to help make decisions about markets, plan strategy, industry position, etc. All in an effort to determine "what is important" and what the priorities should be today and tomorrow for all team members. These priorities can be shared with teams to create objectives and help them design the feedback that they themselves must, with support, pursue (what this course is about) to become empowered with the "how" and their own success. This practice is not another program but simply a process (set of actions) which compliments your existing managerial activities by leading the soft, non-verbal, intangible people-part of daily operations. What we believe to be the missing-link in daily operations, provide this secondary asking process, set of actions, to lead emotion, thought, learning (informal), and communication (non-verbal).
* Note the differences in Processes and Programs as well as the impact on continuous learning
A frontline leadership example would be that organizations provide programs which manage feedback for associates from their colleagues and supervisors. These feedbacks are either tangible, visible, or verbal and important for the structure and discipline of the enterprise. This practice would compliment these by leading activities for an additional and often missing feedback for associates--that from their own daily activities. This feedback is present in all "star performers" and part of an entrepreneurial ethic. This ethic maintains a continuous dialogue between the people delivering products/services and the customers for them. In fact, our research suggests that participation in this continuous dialogue is necessary to maintain the practice results of continuous customer focus, learning and commitments. In today’s global marketplace it is imperative that service/product team members take an entrepreneurial ethic and ownership in their team’s business. We discovered several important epiphanies in using this best practice to build a new model for customer retention and loyalty. Focus, learning, and involvement can only be sustained if team members are allowed to develop the ability to “learn to ask” the questions as well as share the “answers” regarding customer service! This course is designed to enable teams to collectively do this daily, on-the-job, as these team members take care of customers’ needs.
As a team leader uses this course and initiates the practice they will become a "Guide" relying on support from a "Coordinator" whom would in most cases be their supervisor. Guides will see a correlation between these soft skills being developed and their ability to coach and lead the team members. The practice acts as a catalyst for the maintenance of a variety of coaching and leadership skills needed for teams. A few of these are communication, involvement, commitment, learning (by doing), focus (on purpose), and teamwork. Typical of most soft skills, they are intertwined and must be viewed on the whole.
Another interesting and unique feature of this practice is the development of a
assessment for these soft skills. Although
not scientific, the objective is to create a measure that answers the question
“How are we doing?” and has validity for everyone on the team.
With assessment, the practice can be used today and tomorrow to make
customer service decisions for the team about: o Where are we? o Where have we been? o Where do we need to go? o What do we need to do to get there?
Get
help?
|
 |
