Although only a few minutes in length, the scene I refer to is one in which Inigo Montoya finally meets up with the man who killed his father and after being wounded by his father’s murderer, he repeats the phrase “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”. He starts off with a weak and unsure voice, which with repetition of the phrase quickly increases in intensity and volume until it wakes a hidden strength in him and he vanquishes his opponent.  While I don’t usually take my philosophical lead from Hollywood, I do subscribe to the notion that passion and intensity are two of the most important aspects of long term success in any endeavour.

Why?  For me the equation is very simple.  Although the list of Human Universals is over a hundred elements long, at the forefront is the fact that humans are emotional creatures at their very core.  We may like to think that we follow logical paths in our lives, however research has repeatedly shown that even those who sit in the executive suite and have the most expensive leather chairs, fundamentally take emotional decisions and then create rationalizations with which to justify their choice.  While spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations may pretty things up, the emotions are choosing which spreadsheet data to consider most relevant and images are used to generate the appropriate emotional impact to sway the board of directors in the desired direction.  Look behind most spreadsheets and you get business’ single most widely replicated gift to the world – SWAG, the Scientific Wild Ass Guess.

When it really boils down to it, the world’s most prominent examples of success, be it political or financial, don’t point to strategy and planning as the pivotal drivers.  Those things that change the world, those that make life interesting and rewarding, are driven by passion.

Imagine, if you would, what Fred Astaire would have accomplished if he didn’t have a passion for dance, if Michael Jackson hadn’t loved his music, if Michael Jordan didn’t have a passion for basketball, if Babe Ruth had been unsure about his desire to hit home runs, if Einstein had only dabbled in physics, if Edison were to have had only a passing interest in electricity.  Where would Apple be if Jobs didn’t have a passion for his vision of making a difference?  Had Ghandi or Mother Theresa not been passionate in their beliefs, our global ethical landscape may have quite a different hue.  I doubt that Google, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle or any number of other world leading organizations would have made it half way to where they currently stand had it not been for the passion of key players in the organization.

It is my opinion that the level of exceptional execution from your team is exponentially related to the depth and breadth of passion that your team embodies.  Create a team of “ho-hum, get into the office by 9:00, head home by 5:00, you can’t have fun on the job, nobody really cares, it’s just a job anyways” kind of people, and the execution you will get pretty much falls into the category of poor to miserable.  Create a team of individuals who enjoy their job, who feel empowered and appreciated, who actually come alive when they explain to others what they do, then you have passion and the opportunity to create outstanding value.  Create an environment where people actually get a kick out of what they do, where they feel that they are making a meaningful difference in the world, and you’ll absolutely rock.  The difference, I argue, has little to do with inherent skill, pay scales, educational background, implementation of technology, or a meaningful mission statement.  The difference, I argue, is passion.

I don’t think one has to be much of a genius to figure this one out, but courageous as hell to put it into action.  Passion doesn’t fit well into a balance sheet.  It doesn’t lend itself well to ROI.  It implicitly acknowledges that the value that individuals create is not because they follow someone else’s orders, rather because they follow their own conscience and inner drive, thus leadership is more a function of enabling teams and keeping paths clear, than being the great visionary.  If you want to drive a passionate team, you have to face the gauntlet of non-believers when you push for your program funding as well as deal with the unique challenges presented by passionate team.  They won’t always agree with you, and sometimes vehemently so. The only gratitude you will receive is the growing momentum of accomplishment and success where lesser individuals feared to tread.

To live passionately, is to live at the edge of society’s accepted norms.  Passionate people seldom fit into anyone’s pre-defined mold or role perception, except for that of the wild-eyed asocial genius with unkempt hair.

While it is possible to quickly and easily kill passion, it clearly does not lie within your control to make people passionate.  What does lie within your control is the selection of the individuals in your team, ensuring that the personalities you bring on board are well aligned to the goals set and the work being done.  Additionally, although you cannot motivate people, you can inspire them.  It is fully within your control to set an example by the way you handle people, to treat your team with admiration and re-spect, not only listening to their ideas and concerns, but to creating an environment in which they feel compelled – if not obligated – to express their opinions.  As a leader, bringing out the best in your team is your primary deliverable.

As odd as it may seem to some people, most passionate individuals do not work primarily for money.  They work for the experience of creation, for the pleasure of making a difference.  Sure, there are legions of people who work ungodly long hours, fingering out endless messages through their crackberry, and while it may seem that they are working for money, nobody works for pieces of paper with the faces of dead people printed on it.  They are really working for what the money brings them – luxury, acknowledgement and recognition.  Money is not the ends of their work, it is just the means by which what they really desire is obtained.

Sustained execution requires consistent focus.  Trying focusing for an extended period of time on something you have no real interest in, and you will eventually become bored and sick.  A consistent focus, year after year, requires more than just interest, passing or otherwise.  It requires a passion that says that what you are doing is more than just a job, more than a means to pay off your oppressive mortgage.  Most people who are truly passionate about their calling – forget the word job – would probably execute for far less than they are paid, if that is the way thing would have to be to allow them to keep doing what they love.  These are the people who enjoy coming to work and have the most ideas about transforming how we perceive our world.

I believe that if you were to take a look at any organization which you feel is one of the best you’ve done business with, either as a consumer or corporation, you’ll find that passion is what drives them.  The only open question is, what is driving you?

You’ll excuse me now, as I break off this piece so abruptly.  I want to head out to the local video rental store and see if I can find Inigo Montoya doing his passionate thing.

I don’t think I am all that unique when I say that I have always been somewhat in awe of people who have exceptional intellectual abilities.  I probably am unique to the end that when I was at university I invariably found myself hanging out with the brightest folks the school had to offer.  Without a doubt, I was always the least clever in the lot. However it gave me the benefit that whenever dealing with my peers, the only way to look was up – intellectually speaking at least.

What my various exposures in business and real life have taught me is that raw intelligence is only tangentially related to business success.  Success in business is a combination of many factors – the ability to manage relationships, the ability to engage in measured risk, the ability to take decisions, the ability to delegate authority, the ability to manage expectations, the ability to sustain execution, and the ability to quickly judge a situation – often with scant information, just for starters.

For any of these abilities, I’ve met no small number of highly intelligent individuals who had weaknesses in several or all.  What makes the whole situation even more entertaining is that one of the most successful business people whom I’ve ever worked with was as dumb as a tomato.  His saving grace was his ability to understand what people wanted and find ways to get it to them – consistently.  Much to his credit, he was always a joy to be with and managed to accomplish his tasks to a very high ethical standard, things I cannot always say of the highly intelligent people I have rubbed shoulders with.

To increase the difficulties, there is an unwritten rule in most organizations that you never challenge anyone who is PERCIEVED to be more intelligent than yourself.  As a result, a very unhealthy situation develops in which the person deemed most intelligent in the organization is almost never challenged.  And it is these people, who usually carry the most responsibility and can do the most damage, who desperately need to be challenged regularly.

Highly intelligent people are invariably aware of their unique abilities and as a result often fall into the trap of feeling driven to protect their intellectual reputation more than to create bottom line value for their organization.  They can become highly gullible for opportunities to polish their ego at the price of becoming known as prima donnas.  When they fail, they are far more likely to scapegoat and not learn from their failures.  Their intellectual pride usually cannot take the bruise of being occasionally wrong.

So, am I saying we should all be tomato farmers?  Not in the least!!  Continue to hire and nurture the smartest people you can.  However, don’t allow yourself to become blinded by the light.  Don’t expect that genius at one level of one discipline automatically transfers to another level or another discipline.  The financial genius who becomes convinced that a company can be run by numbers alone is to be fought, tooth and nail.  The technical guru who wants to build the greatest gadget ever, for which there is no determinable market, needs to be challenged to provide evidence of potential success.  The legal expert who attempts to boil every business relationship down to a 150 page “Partnership Contract” needs to learn that those two words are almost universally in opposition, and that flexibility and trust create more value than perfectly documenting expectations of the moment.

Genius does have value and can make a great difference.  Just be careful how much leash you feed out.

Unfortunately, I had a few naive expectations about what should reasonably be demanded of me. If a customer indicated that his distribution medium was a TK50, I brought a TK50 and only that. If I was sent somewhere to help a customer on an issue, I naively expected that the customer had some sort of clue about what he was attempting to accomplish. If someone attended one of my training classes, I expected that they possessed the minimum prerequisites, wanted the same out of the course as I was prepared to deliver and paid attention to the material. When sales came up with their highly predictable last minute panic attacks, my response was “Your lack of planning does not constitute my emergency”. When sales requested that I assist their clients do something that allowed zero time for the slightest of preparations and I was expected to fly blind, my response was “I don’t live in an information vacuum”.

In short, I thought that my standing as a rational, hardworking and intelligent human being had some bearing on what I should expect from the relationship. Like I said, my expectations were naive.

What I learned in time is that what I expected didn’t really matter at all to the relationship. The sales department and the customer cared as much about meeting my expectations as the morning sun does. I, as a person, didn’t really exist in their eyes. I was an agent of the company and they had expectations of my ability to understand and fulfill their needs regardless of how I felt about the situation. If that wasn’t good enough for me, I should find another line of work. Certainly, there was usually the normal civilized behavior in the interaction, however my own feelings about the situation held little bearing unless it would eventually prove to their benefit.

What is odd is that when I eventually learned to abandon my own personal expectations and focus only on what was right for the situation and the long term relationship, my life improved dramatically. As soon as people saw that I was actively thinking on their behalf, they engaged more readily with me. Once they saw that I was protecting their interests, they became motivated to protect mine. By removing my own expectations from the game, and focusing strictly on what was best for the overall long term relationship, the relationship improved immediately and my long term personal goals suddenly became eminently more achievable.

One could say that I became even more selfish in my relationships with colleagues and customers, but did so using a far broader definition of “good” and a far longer term perspective.

What does this have to do with Customer Service?

Customer Service is fundamentally about serving the needs and wants of others. The people you interact with aren’t always friendly, rational, intelligent or fair. At the most obscene extreme, one could view the situation as “The customer wants what the customer wants. If you aren’t going to deliver it, then get out of the way and make room for someone who will.”

The question is, where do you draw the line and what is your long term goal in your customer relationship? Certainly you need to invest in relationships that eventually bear fruit for you, but you need to take a clear look at how the long term loyalty relationship works.

My suggestion – forget yourself right now. Cease to exist as an individual and start to exist as an agent and perpetrator of your own destiny. Don’t think another second about what you have a right to expect from your customers. Rather, adopt a highly Machiavellian approach of ensuring that the long term relationship with your customers eventually work towards your benefit, even if it means taking it on the chin a few times in the interim. Also recognize that long term benefits for you most often mean long term benefits for your customer, so don’t think too much about slowly caging your customer in or setting them up for a “big bang” payback on the final day of the relationship.

Things to remember:

• You cannot achieve a goal until you set it. In this context, that means that you need to develop a clear picture of what you want out of the relationship on the long term and what investments you are ready to make in order to reach your goals.

• Benefits, as well as drawbacks, aren’t always immediate or tangible. In addition to sending you purchase orders, a loyal customer spreads good news about you and gladly acts as a referral to help you land new customers. An unhappy customer uses the power of the Internet to blab as far and wide as possible about their negative experience, knowing full well that it is human nature to retain negative messages far longer and far more vividly than positive messages. And the unhappy customer doesn’t even have to be in the right. They just have to be convincing.

• Live and breathe “What then…” five times deep. Every action doesn’t just have a reaction, but sets into motion a chain of ripple effects. Understand what ripples you’re sending across the pond before you set the first wave in motion.

One doesn’t have to dig too deep to see that these points are also quite valid in almost any discipline beyond Customer Service.

Instead of looking to the past by asking “Why?” five times, we need to look to the future and ask “What then?” five times.  Anyone who has played chess clearly understands that a key to success is the analysis of potential outcomes not just one, but two, three or four steps ahead.  Perhaps the key reason why “What then?” is so seldom asked and chess is not as popular as video games is that the sequential investigation of possible outcomes is not seen as a simple task.

Whereas “Why?” is typically drilling down into more and more fundamental issues, usually reducing scope instead of broadening it, “What then?” spreads its tentacles with each application.  If you get an average of three potential answers each time you ask the question, the first iteration has three potential outcomes, then the second iteration 9, the third iteration 27 and so forth.  It doesn’t take long for this to become an overly complex and unrealistic practice in pure application.

The good news is that things are seldom as complex as they may initially seem.  The process can be dramatically simplified if you simply select what you feel is the most probable answer for your “What then?” question. For example, if I lie to my customer, the consequences are usually pretty clear.  While I might lie to escape some short term issue, once the pressure is off I usually won’t find the time to address my root cause and can with relative certainty assume that I’ll need to lie again as the unresolved root cause pops its ugly head again.  If I make a habit of lying to my customers, my credibility will suffer because most lies are eventually discovered for what they are.  If I damage my credibility, I damage my brand and risk my future market potential.

Looked at through another lens, I can be certain that it is a rare company that has an official policy of lying to customers to cover for poor execution.  Thus, if I, as a manager or leader lie, I am setting an example for the team I lead – the message being “Lying is acceptable if it saves your hide.”  I, as a manager or leader, may even overtly agree to the widespread adoption of this behavior.  However, I also then make the implicit statement that company policy – which would either implicitly or explicitly state that you are not to lie to your customers – is not to be taken seriously, which leads to the inevitable consequence of individuals in your team determining for themselves which policy or standard they will ignore when convenient.   “Lying to save my hide” becomes “Evading company policy to save my hide” becomes “Ignoring company policy when it is personally convenient”.

Perhaps I thought I was telling a “little white lie” to ease the pain of a particular issue.  While I may have accomplished this immediate goal, I was also laying the foundation of future behavior for everyone in my team.

Large scale corruption, whether personal, corporate or governmental, usually starts small and expands only gradually over time, with each transgression usually being only a minor increment over the previous one.  But like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating pot of water, we’re often cooked before we know it.

Not all news is bad however!  If we take a lesson from Japan, turn “Why?” on its head and discover the consequences of our actions before they have a chance to materialize, we can also ask “What then?” for:

• Treating my team with consideration and respect
• Executing my mandate with passion
• Looking for upside to any “problem”
• Expecting the best from myself and others
• etc…

Later, with Deutsche Telecom as a customer and business partner, I experienced a sense of indifference that is unique to this day.  It was on their premises that I heard the phrase “I can’t use that tool because I haven’t been officially trained on it” for the first and – thus far – last time.  The tool in question was a basic network analyzer, not something terribly complex or dangerous.

Once competition arrived, Deutsche Telecom seemed spend all of their money on marketing.  They came up with a beautiful logo, wonderful advertising and a state of the art web site.  They also promised things they couldn’t deliver.  They were in the boat with everyone else promising 16M ADSL, but only delivering 3M while the competition’s throughput often clocked in at over 10M.  Granted, their 3M was rock solid, but so was the competition’s 10M by that time.

In spite of everything they did to give a high gloss to their presentation, every interaction seemed to be an attempt to keep as many customers as far away as they possibly could.  That is why it came as such a significant surprise to have a customer experience with Deutsche Telecom that was not only good, it came incredibly close to industry leading.

The first clue that something had changed was that I no longer had to pay 12 cents per minute to call their help line.  It was now a toll free number.  The second surprise was a speech recognition system that actually worked.  Note, I didn’t say voice response, I said speech recognition! I speak with a very heavy American accent and the thing understood me almost flawlessly.  Lufthansa tortured their customers with a speech recognition system a few years ago and it was a horrendously frustrating experience, so I assume it was no small feat for Deutsche Telecom to ensure that their system had a high success rate before unleashing it on the public.

As the interaction progressed, the surprises just kept coming.  Friendly and knowledgeable customer service professionals worked my issue through with courtesy and respect.  Technical staff actually called me back and didn’t have any of the old arrogant technocrat mentality.  Best yet, things started working again even sooner than I was promised.  And in the end, I was changed from a ‘Deutsche Telecom customer in spite of everything’ to a ‘Deutsche Telecom customer who would recommend them to anybody who asks’.

In about a month I’ll be moving to Switzerland.  It will be interesting to learn how well the Swiss are dealing with a competitive market.  Hopefully they won’t be stuck where Germany was for so terribly long.

What does this have to do with your Customer Service?

Every market has their bottom feeders.  These are the companies who somehow scrape by and survive in spite of their own consistent attempts at corporate suicide, or are the 12 month wonders who arrive on the scene with amazing promises and vanish in a wisp of smoke once the market learns that they cannot deliver.

Deutsche Telecom was such a bottom feeder.  In spite of a significant technical advantage they bled customers on a massive scale.  I assume the competition simply laughed, learned and grew market share as they easily side-stepped any Deutsche Telecom market advances.  One could say that as a former monopolist they by definition could only lose customers, but even this has limits that Deutsche Telecom continually pushed as hard as possible.

The message is simple – respect your competition!  No matter how bad your competitors are, they aren’t dead until the chains are on the doors and the last former employee waves goodbye.  Until that point in time, and even after, they need to be respected as a market force that can wake up to disrupt the landscape.  And never forget, the closer to the end they are, the greater their desperation will be and the more likely they are to jettison failed leadership and allow a wave of fresh opportunity to breach their walls.  Watch out!

As of late I’ve been running into a series of situations where companies have taken a path that has allowed a leadership position to be structured in such a way that they have over 25 direct reports.  In a managerial position where development is more a function of skills training for the team than individualized attention, I can see this being acceptable.  Heck, I’ve even seen a situation where one manager had over 100 direct reports. But when it comes to leadership roles, not just managerial responsibilities, it is a mortal sin to allow this kind of flat hierarchy to develop.

To begin with, we first have to differentiate between leadership roles and managerial roles.  While there is clearly overlap between the two, a leader has a clearer mandate to develop the team.  Being able to develop people requires that you spend time with them on an individual basis, not just being there for their annual review and giving them thumbs up or thumbs down.

How much time is required for team development depends upon the individuals involved and how ambitious your goals are, however this is an aspect that requires dedicated effort and cannot be allocated to time slots that are coincidentally free.  Thus, as the number of direct reports increase, you have to make a distinct choice between spending less time developing the individuals in your team and spending less time executing against the mandate for your role.  As ~nobody~ can afford to not properly execute their mandate, team development universally gets the short straw.

Additionally, while it may feel like melting butter in the pan of the leadership ego to have a role that makes you, if not indispensible, at least difficult to replace, you are failing in your responsibilities to your team and your organization by not specifically developing a set of individuals who are able to step into your role when you move on.  If your next role is within the same organization, having an onerous external search for your replacement will cost you and the organization additional pain and make it all that much more difficult for your transition to your new role.  If your new role is with a new organization, you’ve just made it all that much more difficult to maintain a good relationship with your former employer.

Clearly, if you develop a team of individuals vying for your position upon your departure, there will be those who don’t get the role and will be at risk of leaving either the team or the organization in disappointment.  However, that is not entirely a bad situation. A fresh circulation of personalities and ideas is one of the healthier things that can happen to an organization.  It can also be a helpful signal for those who are insincere in their roles that they’ll need to kick things up a notch if they expect to go anywhere.

By maintaining a completely flat hierarchy you rob your team members of the learning opportunity that they will need to replace you upon your departure.  You also weaken the organization’s range of opportunities when it is time to establish new divisions or business segments that could be potentially led from your team stars.  This, in the end, reflects very badly upon your abilities as a leader, for one of a leader’s key responsibilities is to create new leaders.

If you are a leader, you owe it to your team, your organization and yourself to limit yourself to a number of direct reports in the single digit range.

Janelle will quickly point out that branded customer service work is really about creating an organizational culture that reflects the brand. When that is accomplished, then the organization is much more likely to deliver the promise it makes with its brand. These questions are topics she deals with on a daily basis in the two companies she runs in the United States:  TMI US and TACK USA.

I hope you enjoy the podcast!

It was disappointing, but also interesting to see how firmly my daughter holds onto her view of the world.  She would rather accuse her father of lying to her than to accept something unproven and suspect into her realm of beliefs.  I guess I’ll have to bring her with me on my next 10k!

What does this have to do with Customer Service?

Especially when dealing in the highly technical realm, it is VERY easy to become jaundiced and quickly believe that you know everything.  And it is actually those who live high up in their technical ivory towers who are the greatest risk of this behavior.  The Germans have a wonderful term for this – “Fachidiot” – someone who is so deeply entwined in their own professional specialty that they cannot see two inches beyond their own professional nose.   These people are especially susceptible to being blindsided by disruptive innovations.

When the gap of technical knowledge that exists between yourself and your customer is very large, it is extremely easy to forget that your customer’s lack of exposure to your topic of expertise doesn’t automatically mean they are stupid.  Anyone who has been looked down upon and belittled by a doctor, lawyer, accountant, plumber, electrician, auto mechanic, etc… knows what I mean.

Those who have truly pushed the edge are aware that knowledge is actually progressive ignorance.  That is, the more you know, the more you appreciate that you really know nothing.

A few things we should all be doing:

1) When your customer says something that you think is completely stupid, think again.  Perhaps they don’t share your professional background and cannot express their issue using terms that are fully correct.  That doesn’t make them an idiot.  If you don’t understand what the customer is saying, then maybe you need to listen better!! Step back and give your customers room to be non-specialists.  Doctors are trained in “bedside manners”.  Technical folks could often use something similar.

2) Don’t confuse “I don’t know how” with “It is not possible”.  Far too often I’ve run into situations where customers have requested features or functionality and have been informed that what they are asking for is a physical impossibility, only to see the competition delivering the requested capabilities six weeks later.  If you don’t think something is possible, rephrase it into “How could this be made possible?”

3) When someone steps in it, don’t rub it in their face.  We all make mistakes.  Instead of rubbing someone else’s mistake in their face and earning their contempt for the rest of their life, be graceful and sidestep the issue, earning their respect for the rest of their life.  I mean, honestly, how do you feel when someone laughs in your face because of an innocent blunder?

What makes Chip’s contribution unique, and why I am selecting him for the Service Superstars series, is that during the dot-com crash his was one of the very few companies who didn’t define their survival strategy around lay-offs.  Instead he cut compensation for management, took a three year salary hiatus for himself, and grabbed the bull by the horns to challenge conventional thinking by making his organization one driven by passion instead of fear.  Instead of layoffs there was a deep and serious questioning of the key human drivers and how to rationally and intelligently apply them to the business setting.

The result was nothing short of spectacular, as joie de vivre gained market share throughout the dot-com crash and exited the crisis stronger and more focused than ever.

In this interview, we’ll be digging into his book, PEAK – How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, in which he developed a business model tied to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as his answer to an economic downturn.  I hope you enjoy the interview!