June 28, 2003

How to treat your Employees and your customers!

Read this today at John Porcaro's Weblog and it prompted some thinking.

The Secret is You
Diane is a co-worker who joined us several months ago from Nordstrom. She recently gave a speech to one of our OEM partners, giving away the Nordstrom's secret. I spoke with her today about the unbelievable reaction she got from the team she presented to. And after reading the post (June 24 2003), I think I understand why.

"I told them to stop wasting associates' time with talking about how great they as a company are and instead, spend a little bit of time knowing the associate's name and getting excited about how great *they* are. To make the moment about them...not about you. Because in the end, its the associate who is in front of the customer - not a big vendor flag. No one really cares about you - they don't care about Microsoft - and they shouldn't. They should care about why the products work in a person's life and how they work in a customer's life.

Period.

There are other great stories on Diane's blog too!

It made me consider a number of things about my behaviour and about how people behave within ntl.

One region regularly communicates stories like those on Diane's site of Associates going out of their way to own and solve customer problems. When I get chance maybe I will post one. Yet within the mythos of the company are all the bad and down right disgusting behaviours of other associates.

In a similar vein there are a number of managers who understand Diane's point about how to treat associates and realise it should be about them. However until relatively recently they were in the minority. Management was normally about how good the manager was and how lucky you were to work for them.

Things have changed. Things generally feel like they are getting better. BUT there are still examples of plain stupidity (see email stories below as a prime example).

One key area I see as missing is trust. Managers don't trust Associates. Associates don't trust themselves. Associates don't love customers (as per Nordstrom's view) and definitely don't trust them.

On a course last week even the trainer was pointing out the 'Cover your arse' culture. Perhaps this is why we don't get things right as a company? Although individuals do.

Posted by Paul Goodison at June 28, 2003 08:35 PM | TrackBack


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