Leaders can't just tell people how to serve; everyday they must show people how to serve and teach them why it's so valuable. But how it works? People in every level of an organisation will not engage in making a service vision come alive unless their leaders are living it.
In my experience working with leaders in a service organisation, I have discovered 7 essential rules these leaders always follow. Some leverage the power of one rule more than another, and you may do the same. But each of these rules is essential to lead your team to success.
Rule 1: Declare Service a Top Priority
Declaring service a top priority means senior leaders understand that focusing on service improvement leads to commercial results. Profit is the applause you receive for serving your customers well. When middle managers declare service a top priority, the message to everyone is clear: procedures, and budgets surely count, but creating value for others counts the most. And when frontline employees declare service their top priority and delighting others becomes their goal, they uplift customer satisfaction- and job satisfaction too.
Rule 2: Be a Great Role Model
Leaders are the people who others choose to follow, not those who simply tell other people to do. By their own example, leaders inspire others to do what they do, too. It can be a small gesture but it could make a big impact that held them together.
Rule 3: Promote a Common Service Language
Everyone talks about better service from a perspective that makes perfect sense to him or her. What's missing is a common language to enable listening and understanding, clear distinctions to appreciate what other people want and value. To build a culture of uplifting service throughout an organisation, leaders must promote a Common Service Language everyone can apply. Asking your team to upgrade service without enabling language is unwise and inefficient. Giving them a Common Service Language but not using it yourself would be foolish. If you want everyone on your team to deliver uplifting service, you must speak fluently and frequently about it. You must demonstrate your understanding and commitment with observable admirable actions.
Rule 4: Measure What Really Matters
Many people get confused when it comes to measuring service. This is understandable because you can measure so many things: complaints, compliments, expectations, levels of engagement, relative importance, recent improvements, performance to standards, customer satisfaction, retention, intention to repurchase, referral, share of wallet, share of mind, etc. A service leader cuts through this confusion to measure what really matters. Start by recalling the definition of service: Service is taking action to create value for someone else. The ultimate objectives in business is revenues, profits, market share, reputation, shareholder value and growth. One way to achieve these: when satisfaction scores, loyalty scores, share of wallet scores, and employees engagement scores are all improving, your ultimate objectives will improve, too.
Rule 5: Empower Your Team
Empowerment is a buzzword in business, and many leaders and employees seem to fear it. What they really fear is someone who is empowered making a bad decision. If a leader is not confident in her people, she doesn't want to empower them with greater authority of a larger budget. And if an employee is not confident in his abilities and decisions, he often does not want the responsibility of being empowered. In both cases, what's missing is not empowerment, but the coaching, monitoring, and encouraging that must go with it. If you knew your people would make good decisions, you would be glad to give them the authority to do so. And when your people feel confident they can make good decisions, they will be eager to have this freedom. Empowering others cannot and should not be decoupled from the responsibility to properly enable those you empower.
Rule 6: Remove the Roadblocks to Better Service
Most frontline staff members are taught to follow policies and procedures. Often they are hesitant to "break to rules". Yet some rules should be broken, changed, or at least seriously bent from time to time. What roadblocks to better service lurk inside your organisation? What gets in your people's way? What slows them down? What prevents them from taking better care of your customers? What stops them from helping their colleagues? Service leaders ask these questions and remove the roadblocks they uncover.
Rule 7: Sustain Focus and Enthusiasm
It's not difficult to declare service as a top priority. What's challenging is keeping service top of mind when other issues clamour for attention. It's not hard to use a new language for better service; what's hard is using language day after day until it becomes a habit. It may not be hard to track new service ideas and actions, but it can be difficult to keep them top of mind in the thinking of your team. Sustaining focus and enthusiasm for service is vital when building an uplifting service culture, and world leaders seize every opportunity. It is also critical- in business, in life, and in service. This is not something leaders should view as a soft and therefore less important rule. Nor should it be entirely delegated to others.
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