Tag: Ideals

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Lead. Follow. Friend.

positive diverse friends with bike walking on street

Managing your team is a lot like coaching your family. In some cases, you like the person, and there is mutual respect, so the management is easy. In other cases, you simply did not choose your family, but there they are all the same.

Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Anonymous

Through many years of experience, I have learned the above does not apply, so why do I want to share this somewhat well-known quote as part of this conversation?

Let’s break down the whole thing to understand better how you can use this all the same.

Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.

Yes, you can work with the understanding that your team will blindly follow your instructions, but they should be helped and coached to accomplish the goals you set for them. Please work with your team to maximize their skills and talents.

Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.

You should not be following behind your team to pick up the pieces. Your job is to manage your team so they can recognize when something gets missed and how to reconsider best and pick up their pieces. Following behind is tantamount to micromanaging, which ultimately will drive down productivity.

Just walk beside me and be my friend.

This quote is almost valuable on its own. However, what it means to be a friend should still be considered, as should creating a friendly atmosphere. A very fine balance needs to be maintained in this case.

Developing a friendship with a team member can have many valuable benefits, but it can also create an atmosphere where directions are not followed or ignored. The friendship can smooth over the indiscretions, but that does not get the work done. Creating a friendly atmosphere will promote better, more transparent conversations and more constructive feedback in both directions.

In life, take the full quotation as you will, but with work-related situations, remember that, in general, and at best, the quotation is both a guideline and a warning. Make sure it serves you well in either case.

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Step Up

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

Amelia Earhart

Helping others can often time mean doing something others cannot, or just will not, do. This could be a special skill or adeptness, or simply choosing to “muck out the stables” when fetching the water could also be done.

In many cases, the real defining aspect is the work needed to be done… and whether you have already put the efforts in or just need to put the effort forth. Helping others is still going to be “work” in that sense although stepping up and putting yourself in the position to do the work can only be better for your customer as well as yourself.

This also speaks to challenging yourself with new goals and ideals. It doesn’t necessarily translate into being the first, or the best (although it could); it really should be considered as just being more capable of helping more people.

Possibly even more important, when you are stepping up your skills, is to help others do the same so they can step up their game, too. In the end, everyone wins as everyone else gets more done and there are fewer things others cannot do or will not do.

Image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay

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Helping Others

Success is attaining your dream while helping others to benefit from that dream materializing.

Sugar Ray Leonard

There is no reason to climb over others to reach the goals you have set for yourself. You will feel much better and more accomplished by having others rise up with you.

Make room for your family, friends, team, circles of influence, and acquaintances to benefit from your dreams. Make room for everyone you meet along the path your dream takes you on, and to share the successes and benefits of the goals you achieve.

A dream shared is much easier to turn into a goal. Sharing a dream with others means they may be able to help you turn that dream into a goal and perhaps even make their own dreams come true along the way.

It is far greater to share a dream with others than to sit alone, at the top, and have no one to share the successes it can bring you.

Image by rawpixel from Pixabay

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Support Needs Support

Service and support should not just be for front-facing interactions with customers it must also be for those that provide this front-facing communication.

It is vitally important to take the time and spend the energy to care for your own team’s needs and requirements which in turn will allow them to continue and improve in how they provide the service and support your customer deserves and needs.

On-boarding and training are not just some catchwords to bandy about the office space. The company must focus on actually providing an on-boarding process and ensuring training is at least at a minimum standard for the support team member to understand what they do not know.

Knowing what you don’t know is a great starting point to improvement and although you will never truly know what you don’t know it will become less over time as you continue to provide and receive the appropriate training to do the job well.

This is not necessarily something only in the purview of customer care teams it can happen in any role although some of the most common places to find this are in support focused roles.

Also to note, most providers of customer care and support need to know that it is OK not to have the answer immediately. They also need to know where best to look for the answer as the case may be.

On-boarding is often one of the best cornerstones when it comes to providing a basis to finding answers and it often leads to pointing out potential gaps in a company’s internal support systems as well as external support services.

Ongoing training will fill these gaps and in so doing so can only improve the company, its support team, its product offering … and ultimately its customer’s approval rating.

Support is a lynchpin to greatness in moving a company forward. The team that provides it should be recognized and offered any and all assistance to continually improve and strive for more.

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Gone Fishing

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

ancient proverb

When a person finds a solution themselves (with help from support) they will often times feel more empowered to use the product and promote its usefulness.

Leading a person from point A to point B may accomplish the short-term goal of getting them a resolution although it does nothing at all to really provide a takeaway that is going to be beneficial in the long-term.

Making the efforts to help a person understand the concern they are having, in a language they can relate to and understand, will more likely give them a better viewpoint on possible future similar issues they may come across and allow them to help themselves more easily.

Obviously, from the aspect of providing customer support, you should still let the person know you are there to help them no matter the case although ultimately they will be helping themselves all the same.

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Smile

Wearing a smile is telling everyone you are here to help.

No matter the issue or question you are addressing and no matter how you are addressing it always smile. Smile in your heart and put a smile on your face, too!

When you communicate with a smile it comes through to the person you are having a conversation with and it will help keep things moving more smoothly and with less stress and frustration.

It’s much easier to work with people when you smile as you have a natural feeling of goodwill and empathy towards others built into every smile you share.

A smile is a great stress reliever and allows you to relax that much easier. Approaching the customer in a relaxed low-stress manner will also help difuse difficult situations.

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One Tribe

Staying on course and getting to your destination is just as important as following your heart to the same place on the map.

Although it’s great to have a list of questions and answers to follow it is often better to know those questions and answers and be empowered to go off script as needed.

Great customer care comes from the intuition and empathy of the support team and they should be striving towards this at all times.

The key to having this “tribal knowledge” approach based on intuition and empathy is to use it as the basis for the common documentation all team members use.

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Focus

Do one thing at a time. Do it well. Move on to the next.

There are many proponents of “multitasking” which I find is better described as the skill of focusing on one thing at a time with the ability to seamlessly shift that focus to other things as needed without losing a beat. By expanding and enhancing this skill you will find you are handling multiple tasks at the “same time” whenever the need arises.

A key concept to take into consideration here is documentation. Make notes of your progress and steps taken so you can easily return to the task at hand and know where you were; or, when in a team environment, allow another to pick up where you left off.

Working to improve recall and other similar memory functions will also help to make these shifts in focus much more seamless as well and remember to always use what works best for the environment you find yourself in.

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Moving Forward

Never stop growing, there will always be a bigger role to fill.

Being complacent in your work or your life will eventually lead to stagnation. You should always be looking forward to possibilities and potential as they will always be in front of you no matter the path you take.

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Training Required

CFO: What happens if we train them and they leave?
CEO: What happens if we don’t and they stay?
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Remember you can also follow your own self-learning curriculum and improve your skills at almost any time. Promoting learning in your career and work-places is never a bad thing.