A fan of The Boss Benchmark told me recently that when reading the book he kept thinking “gee my boss needs to take notice of that” yet the list he had for himself to improve on was suspiciously short. This guy had enough insight to know that something was not quite right about that! He realised he was probably seeing his skills through rose tinted glasses. So… he gave the book to a couple of his direct reports so THEY could tell him areas they wish he’d improve on. GENIUS! I hadn’t even thought of that myself! (This tip will be added to the intro for The Boss Benchmark second edition which should be ready about the end of March).

Number 35 in the book is ‘Don’t Be Soft On Yourself’ which is about getting real and being your harshest critic. Don’t take things personally; instead ask tough questions of yourself such as:
When am I a hypocrite?
When do I practise what I preach?
When don’t I practise what I preach?
Where am I showing a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude?

When you become awesome, so should your staff as they are a reflection of the attitude, skills and expectations of the boss. Before you criticize them, search yourself.

Well now Virgin Atlantic is in the spotlight. Passenger Oliver Beale found the inflight food bizarre and gross so wrote a letter to Richard Branson about it (complete with photos) and it is hilarous!

“I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard.”

“ I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about. Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing.”

“Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month.”

You can read the letter in full here. It, like the board game turned into a big media circus. When the media asked Richard Branson about it he said “I read it and laughed my head off.” He had a great chat with Oliver Beale about it and asked him to help improve their food presentation.

Complaints to your business may not be as epic as these two Virgin stories, but they are just as important. What mechanisims do you have in place to deal with complaints (big and small)? It is something you need to seriously consider before it happens not when it happens. Some companies have fantastic, fast systems and really really go all out for the customer, while others show a really rubbish attitude and try and argue with the customer telling them why they are wrong. It is these places that don’t feel the need to compensate the customer in some way. That attitude makes the complaint even more serious and annoying for the complainer – a defensive attitude from the company is a terrible way to react, and speaks volumes about their business. Think carefully about how your company deals with complaints at every level.

*Do you treat written ones different to verbal?
*Do you react faster when the customer has smoke coming out their ears (and drag your feet when it’s a softly spoken old woman complaining)?
*Is your whole team up with how to handle any complaint?
*Who has authority to compensate the customer?
*How will you deal with future complaints? What actions are you going to take/policies will you change?

I find it very necessary to end with a priceless quote which I shall now use whenever I’m short of something to say…. “Everyone likes a bit of mustard Richard.”

When I showed the checkout lady she rolled her eyes and pulled a face…. I wondered if that look was directed at me for ‘being such a pain’ or if it was a ‘sympathy look’ apologising for the error. I was going to ask, as it seemed quite rude, but then I decided it didn’t matter. I chose to believe (in good faith!) it was a ‘sorry about that’ type eye roll, but if it was meant for me instead – sheesh!! It got me thinking about how things can be misinterpreted.

A boss was giving a power point presentation to a boardroom chocka with people and a slide was a bit jumbled. The boss said “Amy it’s broken AGAIN”. The people thought the boss was berating the assistant in front of everyone and were embarrassed for Amy, they thought they were seeing a new, mean side to this boss. What they didn’t know was that the boss and Amy had worked together all morning on this crazy slide that refused to behave – she actually meant the comment as “I can’t believe it – how funny”. The boss had no idea she had been misinterpreted as a dragon boss.

You can train your staff till the cows come home, but it doesn’t mean they won’t sometimes give the wrong impression to a customer, say something dumb or make a silly decision. I read somewhere that the only thing worse that spending a fortune training your staff then having them leave is not training them and having them stay! So true.

Impressions last. Facial expressions, comments and body language – even the most discrete things can be picked up on. Empathy and fast thinking are not always something you can ‘train’ into staff. Maybe mystery shopping is a great idea to ensure the staff are making the right decisions. As for you the boss, so many things you say and do can be misinterpreted. Most of the time you may have NO idea, but it may cause your staff to fret for days and days – telling the rest of the team “can you believe what he said…” instant workplace fire! If you are the kind of boss staff are totally comfortable with and not afraid to say “what the heck does that mean!!??” it will help you avoid many misinterpretations. If you don’t like being painted as the big meanie (especially by mistake) it pays to be very approachable!

Check out another very simple, very very silly mistake a staff member made, purely because the boss probably hadn’t told them any better:
http://www.andrewgriffithsblog.com/603/don%e2%80%99t-lose-a-good-customer-over-a-few-cents/

What can you do in your business – with yourself, the culture and the team to ensure these type of incidents don’t happen in your business? Talk these stories over with your team so they can understand how little things have a huge impact. They would be mighty peeved if such things happened to them as customers.

If you ask just one or two people you’ll most likely get a wrong answer, but if you ask 20 people it will most likely be right. Ask 100 people and it’s even more likely to be right.

An example James uses in his book is when the Challenger blew up. It could have been the fault of a handful of companies and would take a while to figure out which one. After the accident many shares in the companies involved were sold. It turned out that the company that had the highest number of shares sold was the one who caused the problem! The wisdom of the shareholder crowd was right – they didn’t even need to wait to hear the official cause, the crowd knew.

4 things that make crowds wise
1. Diversity of opinion (private info, interpretation of known facts)
2. Independence (peoples opinions aren’t determined by those around them)
3. Decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)
4. Aggregation (private judgments into collective decisions)

There was a test done to see if people care about ‘the wisdom of crowds’. They made one person stand on the corner of a busy street looking curiously up at the sky. Loads of people passed and nobody else looked up. They then got 10 people to stand there looking up and some passersby did look up. However when they made 50 people stand on the corner looking up everyone passing stopped to look up. The conclusion was the more people doing it the stronger the ‘social proof’ that something was happening – lots of people doing it means there must be a reason.

There were lots of other cool examples of the wisdom of crowds in the book such as to decide if you’ll need an umbrella check if everyone passing your house is carrying one, if not it probably wont rain – apparently this rarely fails. The same goes for moving your car off the street for cleaning in London – if others haven’t moved theirs it’s probably been cancelled this week.

So are businesses engaging the wisdom of crowds? Are they asking their staff loads of questions about things like new product innovations, marketing ideas, solutions to problems or customer relations? The answer is NO. Businesses still seem to be indifferent to the wisdom of crowds – they aren’t actively, constantly and frantically asking their employees anything! The staff surveying I did in the past convinced me of the power in the voice of the employee. But the wisdom of crowds goes even deeper than that. I highly recommend reading the book and figuring out exactly how to make it a way of life at your company – you will stand out a mile.

Then a skill stocktake would be great for you, your staff and your workplace

I’ve come across a Brazilian company that is living its own ROWE. They like to “manage without managers”. They too believe that their staff are grown ups. They encourage people to change seats everyday so people can’t monitor “who is here and who is not” – because they are not supposed to. They don’t care how many hours staff work, they care about what they are going to deliver this month. Every employee has full access to all financial statements (which are also presented in cartoon format) and everyone votes on their business units spending. One business unit brought cheap chairs as they wanted to budget for something more important to them. There are also 2 spare seats at every directors meeting available on a first in first serve basis.

Every six months employees set their own salary. Ask for too little and you’ll be told to set a higher price. Ask for too much and you risk fellow employees sacking you. If they feel you don’t work hard and you are not worthy of a share of the business units profit share you’ll be shown the door. There is peer pressure on bad behaviour – everyone holds everyone to a high standard.

Before you decide cartoon financial statements are just madness, listen to how much this company makes! Further proof that those that are sticking out, being crazy and totally unafraid are truly succeeding. Our workplaces shouldn’t even be as they were 5 years ago – times have changed so much. It is time to stop being so scared of sharing the ‘control panel’.

Click here to see a 14 minute video about this awesome workplace.

Does this mean that when opportunities come up, those you know best get first dibs? Perhaps the people that you don’t know very well are actually BETTER than those you do? What if they have many skills, passions and ideas that are going to waste because you don’t know they exist? If these people aren’t regularly given the time of day by the boss, they may never speak up about what they’d like to do and what they are capable of. What a waste! It is important to know all staff quite well – what they like most in their job, what they like least, where they want to head in their career. You also need to know about stuff that can affect their focus – sick kids, moving house, divorce etc. If you know what is happening for them personally you can cut them a bit of slack where required. Especially since you have humans working for you not machines!

There may be some staff that come across as a little unusual or bizarre – maybe they dress differently, believe they were dropped here by aliens or only ever eat walnuts. That doesn’t mean they aren’t amazing at their job and should be overlooked when allocating a project or promotion. So what if they are socially awkward – they could be sales geniuses! They need just as much of your time and understanding. The better you know them, the better you can utilise them.

I read a great blog entry titled “Never judge a person by how they look” which is a similar kind of thing. Whether different in appearance or personality it doesn’t matter – you need to know all your staff equally well. If you don’t, make the effort and change this. It will be great for culture, performance and engagement.

Working for a company that didn’t listen (but boasted constantly about how much they did) is how I got into staff surveying in the first place. It is UNBELIEVEABLY frustrating working in a place where your voice has absolutely zero significance, yet management bleat on and on about how much it does. Talk about out of touch with reality!

One employee did something about it. Ex-Virgin Blue employee Torsten Koerting designed a board game using Virgin Blue branding that criticises his former company’s decision-making process. It is a modified version of “Snakes and Ladders” and was attached to a farewell email to his colleagues. That turned out to be just the beginning as the media found out about it (I read about it here) and boy did they love it! It seems Torsten isn’t the only disgruntled employee – but he is the only one that has spoken up about it.

The question now is what is Virgin Blue going to do about it? Will they use it as an opportunity to have a frank discussion with staff and find a way to make sure that convo is constant? From the outside looking in, Virgin Blue in Aussie and Pacific Blue in New Zealand have always seemed to exude a fun, funky culture – perhaps that was so at the beginning but it has dwindled now? Maybe the fun times of being thrown in the river are over?

Virgin Blue is just the one of gazillions of businesses full of unhappy staff that are sick of not being heard. 2008 and STILL companies haven’t got this right. What’s worse is that it is not expensive, difficult or time consuming to fix. All you need is a CEO that actually cares, not just says they do. It might however be scary for some. If the thought of listening to your staff scares the heck out of you then (sorry but) HAHA! It means you’ve been so lazy with listening for so long that things have really gone to the dogs. You really deserve the scariness.

If you want to figure out if your company is at risk of being thrown around the worlds media and blogosphere because one of your workers has hit the headlines, ask 10 random staff members “What is it about this company that frustrates the crap out of you?” If they can rattle off 5 things without so much as taking a breath you are in trouble so sit down, shut your gob and turn your ears on! Ignorance is NOT bliss!

The more that people walk around with crappy negative attitudes the more negative things happen. If people smile, keep their head up and KNOW tomorrow will be a better day – it actually will be. I’ve read some similar “enough with the glum” blogs of late:

“This afternoon I was at the hair salon and next to me a stylist’s client was loudly hemming and hawing about how “bad” things are getting with the economy. And honestly I’m rolling my eyes, because here is a well-dressed woman dropping over $200 on her hair color and who valet parked her Mercedes out front. “Bad” – for most of this country – means you have one less flat-screen TV. “Bad” in some other countries means you could be living every day in fear of dying through starvation, or being tortured or murdered. THAT is bad. WE don’t have it bad.Please, stop listening to “news”, whose job it is to make you feel like everything is going to hell in a hand basket. TV news is not a “public service”. It’s a business. Fear attracts ratings, and ratings sell ads. If they told you “all is well” you wouldn’t have to watch anymore. And you must NEVER forget – there is no better way to maintain complete control of your life and income than being an entrepreneur! In fact, some of the greatest fortunes have been made during historical “recessions”. (You don’t hear about THAT on the news.) The GOOD news is, there are ways you can not only maintain your revenues during these times, but make MORE money than ever!” (Online entrepreneur Alexandria K. Brown publishes the award-winning ‘Highlights on Marketing & Success’ weekly ezine with 36,000+ subscribers. Subscribe at www.AlexandriaBrown.com)

“It’s getting pretty crappy out there. People are getting scared and grumpy. Your job: Stay positive. Be friendly. Smile. This will turn around. It always does. That’s why they’re called “cycles.” It sucks when you’re in the down side, but it will absolutely, definitely turn around sooner or later. People will flock to be with you (and do business with you) if you can focus on the eventual upside, and have a positive attitude. People will shun you (and your business) if you are a whiny grouch. Your job: Show your community a path back to the better place. Give people hope and they will give you the support you need to make that hope a reality.” (From http://www.damniwish.com/2008/12/your-job-is-to.html )

If as a boss you are sporting the “boy the shi-et has hit the fan” attitude and are down in the dumps your staff probably won’t want to stick around and help mop up your tears. They’ll find someone who knows they can cope with market changes. Positive energy is contagious, negative energy is boring and draining.

The cycle continues – back behind bars they go even if they sincerely wanted a fresh start and a life free of crime. They need employers that are willing to give them a chance. Getting a job could turn their whole world around as they form a new identity – that of a hard worker and EX-crim.

A lot of employers are too scared to give prisoners a go. They worry they’ll steal, take drugs at work, scare the customers or just be ‘scary’ to be around. If they put worry to the side for a second they may see that prisoners are even better workers than their ‘normal’ ones. They NEED this job, they WANT this job – and they will work their butt off, committed to you. For a lot of people this is the “too hard basket” – they leave it to someone else to help them out. I think it would be hugely satisfying. Giving someone an opportunity to change their life and build self esteem. Through their work they can see that they are important, they are valuable and they are employable. I am sure they would be very loyal to that business/boss that gave them their ‘in’ to the real world. If there is the odd one that needs to be fired because they were naughty then so what – they won’t all be that way.

The Department of Corrections details the ‘Release to Work’ scheme here. It seems they manage the process well and give lots of support. They are also looking for instructors that can teach prisoners skills and trades.

Roading company Fulton Hogan took on 20 prisoners through the prison system’s Release to Work scheme to help build a new motorway through the Auckland suburb of Mt Roskill. The company says they have proved more reliable than many workers employed through labour hire firms, and six are still working on State Highway 20, months after leaving jail. One inmate said he used to lose sleep over no one wanting to hire him when he got out. He knew he’d have to turn back to crime if he couldn’t get work. Inmates’ earnings are held in trust until they leave prison, giving them a useful nest-egg to start their new lives.

Fulton Hogan is doing this country a huge service by helping our inmates and ex-prisoners. Businesses that take on such employees are reducing crime one person at a time – and get to see someone go from ‘naughty’ to absolutely flourishing. Maybe investigating the Release to Work scheme could be a great ‘to do’ for your business in 2009.