Coaching Churches

Every leadership expert that I have read in the last five years understands that the most important asset for any organization is the people who are on your team.  If you have not transitioned from the industrial age to the information age in how you are leading your people you will not be able to compete in the new global economy.

Good to Great makes the point about getting the right people on your bus and making sure you get the wrong ones off.  There is also a priority on verifying that everyone is in the right seat on the bus.

This is where the Peter Principle can create blind spots within your organization.   Just because someone has been a very effective employee in the past does not mean they can continue to be effective in the future.

The natural tendency is when someone does a good job they eventually assume even greater responsibility.  They were the best customer service representative you had when your company started and there were less than one hundred accounts.

When the company reaches three hundred accounts then other customer service representatives are brought on board and now your best practices representative just became a manager of other people.  After all they deserve the job because they have tenure, expertise and loyalty to organization.

There is only one major problem; they are not gifted or passionate about managing a customer service department that one day will grow to over one hundred employees.   These once great team members who are no longer effective have been promoted beyond their capabilities and that is why they are failing.

Never assume that because someone is great in one discipline they can naturally transition to leading others in the same area.  If you do not watch this one very carefully you run the risk of a dysfunctional customer service department and tragically loosing a once great employee in the process.

I have had two very bad experiences with customer service this week.  Not only was I the recipient of this bad “service” I also saw several other people having the exact same horrible experience.

In both situations the people assigned to dealing with the problem made promises they did not keep.  For example setting pickup times and assuring you that if they did not call it would be ready, status updates that did not happen and the approach let’s just try this and I am sure it will work when they really did not have a clue about what to do.

Here is the interesting part at least for my situation.  With both companies only because of my pushing I was eventually given to a supervisor to help me resolve hour’s worth of wasted time and finally fix the problems. 

When I communicated with these new people they had a much better attitude and brought product knowledge that the front line people did not know.  They did simple things like returning my calls on time and then committed to do whatever it took to resolve my issues.

Here is my question?  Why not set the bar for all of the front line people in your organization at the same level where the supervisors were operating either in technical training, people skills or the authority to make it happen.

You will never convince me that it is cost effective for any company to pay less than qualified people to take hours of their time and your customers offending people that will probably never come back unless they get the slim chance to talk with their boss.

The front lines of your organization where interaction takes place with the people who are experiencing what you have to offer will always be the place where you want to make the best impression.  If you’re weakest and newest team members are given these roles thinking they will grow into the job eventually the problem will solve itself because you will not have any more customers to deal with.