Category Archives: Leaders

Employability, Leaders, Leadership, Leadership Insights Series, Marcus Pitt, Webinar

Leadership Insights Series – Marcus Pitt, President Director (CEO) of SOHO Group

In the first of our ‘Leadership Insights: Ask successful leaders what really works’ Series, Gary Ryan will interview Marcus Pitt, President Director at the US$1B turnover SOHO Group. The SOHO Group is an Indonesian based pharmaceutical manufacturer and distributor.

Marcus became President Director of the SOHO Group at the age of 37. Three years prior he was working as the Strategy and Business Development Manager for a subsidiary at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The progress of his career is quite a remarkable story.

In this 30 minute webinar you will learn about Marcus’ practices that enabled him to rise to his current position at a relatively young age. You will also learn about how Marcus has managed the challenges of such an important role and you will have opportunities to ask him questions.

Seats are limited for this exclusive webinar, so register now!

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Employability, Employability Skills, Graduate-Students, Leaders, Leadership, students, Team, Teamwork

Free Group-Work Course for University Students

Many university students have recently re-commenced their studies. In this context this short online course (that includes no homework!) is perfect timing to ensure that you make the most of this semester.

Students report that university group-work is one of their most dreaded experiences at university. Yet employers highly value university group-work because it is where students have to learn how to work with different people, just like in the ‘real world’.

This free two week introductory course will ensure that you give your university groups the best chance to achieve the success you desire. You will also learn how to ask some critical questions that will help your team to be successful. These questions are not unique to student groups – which is why they are so useful to master while you are a student!

Click here for more information.

Please share your experiences of putting the lessons from the course into practice.

This course includes access to a free ebook titled Teamwork For University Students.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Employability, Employability Skills, Leaders, Professionals, Service Excellence, What Really Matters For Young Professionals

Discover the five service ‘gaps’

Parasuraman, Zeithaml & Berry introduced the SERVQUAL framework in 1985. It is essentially a process that describes five potential service gaps that organisations should minimise if they want to be known for consistently delivering service excellence. Minimising each gap contributes to an organisation’s capacity to meet or exceed the expectations of its customers.

The gaps are described below with an examples provided to help you to understand what each gap ‘looks like’.

Gap 1 The Management Perception Gap
A gap can exist between managements understanding of customer expectations and the actual expectations of customers. If management get this wrong, everything else they do will be wrong and the service gap is likely to grow exponentially. Organisations must do everything in their power to minimise the chances that Gap 1 exists.

Example
Cocac Cola has dominated the soda drink market for decades. yet, in the early 1980s Coca-Cola decided to introduce ‘New Coke’ (some of you will remember, many of you won’t.) The tatse for ‘New Coke’ was supposed to be a modern taste that the ‘consumers wanted.’ Nothing could have been further from the truth. Coke sales plummetted. Management had clearly misunderstood their market and had made a series of poor decisions as a result of their misunderstanding.

If you create Gap 1 then everything else you do as an organisation will take you further away from providing what your customers want. It is for this reason that Jack Welch, former CEO of GE said:

Quote
“Service. If you haven’t got it, don’t even bother getting out of bed if you want to be a senior leader. It’s such an entry level requirement it isn’t even worth talking about it.” (Jack Welch, ex GE CEO)

Gap 2 The Quality Service Standards Gap
It is one thing to be able to understand the expectations of those you serve. A gap can then emerge if your translation of those expectations into service standards is inaccurate. Service standards are effectively the systems and processes that you put into place to ensure that you can consistently meet the expectations of your customers. This is very easy to get wrong and requires a high understanding of the expectations of your customers, as well as a high level of understanding of how your organisations works if you are to minimise this gap.

Example
An example of Gap 2 in action is provided by a quote from a research participant. The person was a fitness centre manager. In this example, niotice how it connects to the concept of Structure Drives Behaviour.

Quote (Research participant)
The members said that they wanted the gymnasium to open at 6am. So I employed the staff to start their shift at 6am. The members were still not happy. I was confused. When I asked them again why they weren’t happy they said, “We told you that we wanted the gym open at 6am, not ‘opening’ at 6am. There’s a difference!” Finally I understood. The staff would be paid to start at 5:45am so that the gym would be truly open as had been requested. I had been wrong. I had misinterpreted the expectations of the members.

Gap 3 The Service Delivery Gap
After all the systems and processes have been created, both the automated and human elements of the system must do what they are supposed to do. System errors or breakdowns and humans not doing what they are supposed to do can create immediate service gaps. No system or human is perfect or infallible. As such your organisation must consider what it will do if a Service Delivery Gap does occur.

Example
A retail operation requires staff to work from a start time to a finish time. Usually there will be a staff member who is responsible for opening the retail outlet at a certain time. If that staff member is late then the retail outlet may not be open when customers expect it to be open. In this example, human error is responsible for creating a service gap.

Quote (Research participant)
Ultimately your staff have to do the right thing. It’s important to have the best systems and processes that you can, but ultimately your staff have to do the right thing. They have to properly implement what they are supposed to do.

Gap 4 The Market Communication Gap
If you say that you will respond to online customer feedback within 24 hours and you consistently take 48 hours to do it, then you have created a Market Communication Gap.

Example
The local barber who cuts my hair has two signs out the front of his barber’s shop. One sign says that the shop will be open at 8:30am. The second says 8:45am. The barber is rarely there before 9am. He has no idea how many people have looked in his window when he wasn’t open when he advertised that he would be. My expectations are consistently not met. One day a new barber will move into an empty shop in the shopping strip. What do you think I will do?

Quote
Sorry mate. I know that I said sorry the last couple of times but my car broke down and I had to wait for my wife. Sorry mate.

Gap 5 The Perceived Service Quality Gap
The final gap is the perceived service quality that the customer has of their total experience in relation to their original expectation of the product or service. Ideally there is no gap here or, if there is a gap, it is in the context that the perceived service level is higher than original expectations. Unfortunately, the four previous gaps can create a significant negative gap at Gap 5.

Examples
I describe this gap like this because service providers are often unaware that this gap exists. As such they don’t do anything to close this gap. This leaves them exposed to a competitior or new service provider from appearing to ‘steal’ their customers ‘overnight’. The reality is that their customers were simply waiting for a better alternative to ‘pop up’, so when it did they ‘defected’ as quickly as they could. Do you think my barber (Gap 4 above) is at risk of this occuring?

A similar gap can exist for internal service providers. I am aware of teams of internal staff who have failed to provide high service standards to others within their organisation. When their service has been ‘outsourced’ those staff and team members have become indignant. “How dare they outsource our department!”. Yet they had not been prepared to ‘see’ other staff as their ‘customers’ and treat them accordingly.

Quote (Research participant)
You know they don’t really have to do all that much. If they just met my expectations I’d be happy. But they really don’t seem to care. And as soon as I get a chance to go somewhere else I will. And they won’t even know what happened to me. It’s a shame, really. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Your challenge is to be aware of these five gaps and to be pro-active in managing them. This is a never-ending activity because customer expectations can change ‘overnight’.

Please share your experiences with relation to how you have managed the five service gaps.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Communication, Employability, Employability Skills, Gen Y, Leaders, listening, Professionals, Young Professionals

Do you listen ‘…with your answer running’?

Last night I was facilitating a workshop for mentors for Monash University, Australia’s largest university. Throughout the workshop the participants had been holding a conversation regarding the importance of listening. One participant suggested that if you listen, “…while your answer is running in your head, then you are not listening at all.”

I had never heard this description for not listening and it struck me a s a clear example of what really does go on when people are supposed to be listening.

Often people are simply waiting for the other person to stop speaking so that they can ‘take their turn’ and now say what they have been preparing to say. Recently I facilitated a development half day for an executive team and one of the activities that I facilitated was called Turning Points. In that activity participants share significant events in their lives that, if they had not occurred the person believes that they would not be in the physical room on that day; they would be somewhere else in the world because their life would have travelled a different path.

Due to the personal nature of the stories I ask the participants to, “Do whatever it takes to listen with one hundred percent attention”. After people have shared their stories we then talk about the quality of listening that was occurring throughout the conversation.

Participants commonly report that they couldn’t believe how much they ‘heard’. When asked why they heard so much, the regular reply is, “I wanted to hear what they had to say. I wanted to give them my full attention. I didn’t have any opinions about what they were saying so it made it easier to listen”.

I then ask team members if the quality of listening that they just experienced is regularly present in their team meetings. “Rarely, if ever” is the normal response.

Listening is regularly listed as one of the most important characteristics of effective leaders. So how do you listen with 100 percent attention when you do have an opinion about what the other person is saying?

A couple of techniques to consider are to consciously make the choice to listen to someone. You might even say to yourself, “I am going to listen to this person with one hundred percent attention.” Choosing to listen to someone from the perspective of trying to understand fully what they are saying is a powerful way to enhance your listening. It re-enforces that your own opinion is not worth saying of even fully formulating until you have understood the other person to the best of your ability.

Statements such as, “What I think you just said was…” are ways of checking your understanding.

Listening is not easy. In fact my view is that it is the most difficult of all the skills of effective leadership. yet it is also a critical skill to master. So it is worth making the effort to:

  1. Make the conscious choice to listen; and
  2. Listen first to understand.

What practical tactics to you use to enhance the quality of your listening, particularly when you are in team meetings and you do have strong views about the topic?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Graduate-Students, Leaders, Leadership, Professionals, Sayings, students, Young Professionals

What sayings guide you on a day to day basis?

Sayings can be very powerful and act as a guide for our lives. Two Australian sayings that I find very powerful and very useful for helping me to live my life are:

  1. ‘Get fair dinkum’; and
  2. ‘Have a crack!’.

‘Get fair dinkum’ means that you need to be honest with yourself. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that everything is okay if it isn’t, and don’t go thinking everything is terrible if it isn’t. Appraise both the good and the bad and most of all, be honest!

This enables you to be honest with others, an important trait for building relationships.

‘Have a crack’ means, ‘to have a go’ or ‘to take action.’ People often miss out on achieving what they want in life because they are afraid of what might go wrong. The saying, ‘have a crack!’ reminds me to focus on what I want to achieve, and to go for it! Usually the worst thing that could happen from having a crack is nowhere near as bad as not being prepared to give yourself a chance of creating whatever it is that you want.

So, get fair dinkum and have a crack!

What sayings guide your life?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Leaders, Leadership, Professionals, Service Excellence, Young Professionals

Great service comes in many forms

Service is not just a traditional retail experience. Examples of service include the willingness to allow direct reports to make mistakes so that they can learn (even though you could have done the task faster and to a higher quality yourself). Cleaning up after yourself in the lunch room. Picking up rubbish in the foyer and placing it in the bin. Letting others go first through a doorway. Offering your seat to someone not as healthy as yourself when riding public transport. Listening to a colleague when they just need another human’s ear. These are all simple examples of service. Service can be everywhere and it can be nowhere. How present is service in your life?

Quote from a participant in one of our research programs.
I’ve experienced great service from my parents, from the local convenience store and the volunteers working at the drink stations in the running events that I participate in. I’ve also received great service from high class hotels. Great service is everywhere, if you’re prepared to see it!

Please feel free to add a comment to this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Customer Service, Gen Y, Generation Y, Leaders, Professionals, Service Excellence, Young Professionals

Great service connects customers to your busines

Service quality pioneers Zeithaml, Berry and Parasuraman (1985) identified that service quality, reduced service problems and the capacity to promptly and appropriately resolve problems when they arise are significant factors that enhance customer retention, loyalty and referrals.

The challenge here is to do these three core service activities in a cost effective manner that either meets or exceeds the real expectations of the customer. As you will read in another article this does not mean providing a ‘5 Star’ level of service when the customer is expecting a ‘2 Star’ level. It means what it says – providing the level of service expected by the customer at a fair exchange for that service.

Think about it. You are already a potential expert on good service.

“What, I’m an expert?” you might say.

A potential expert.

You spend an enormous amount of your time as a customer, whether in a retail or hospitality context, or as a customer of other colleagues while at work. You know when you receive good service, just as you know when you receive bad service. You know what good service ‘feels like’. Therefore, you also know what poor service feels like. It then follows that good service that helps people to feel good helps them to stay connected to the organisation.

Please feel free to comment on this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com
Elite Sport, Gen Y, Generation Y, Leaders, Leadership, Professionals, Values, Young Professionals

If ‘Everybody’s doing it’ does that make it okay?

The revelations of the systematic cheating by the Melbourne Storm Rugby League Club raises issues that extend far beyond Rugby League and the club itself. Assuming that the reported statement by the Melbourne Storm Chairman Dr Rob Moodie that Brian Waldron, the accused architect of the cheating strategy, told him that he had done what he had done because, “Everybody’s doing it!” is accurate, it raises an issue for all of us. (Please keep in mind that at the point in time of writing this article there is no evidence that Brian Waldron’s statement that everybody else is doing it is accurate.)

As appalling an excuse as this excuse sounds, my view is that many people do use this excuse for their behaviour. Whether it be taking illegal drugs, drinking too much alcohol, backstabbing another person behind their back, not telling your manager or direct reports the truth, people claim that their behaviour is okay because other people are doing it.

To me, leadership starts with yourself. If you can’t lead yourself, then you are going to struggle to lead other people. As we have seen with Brian Waldron many people would have considered him successful up until Thursday afternoon. After all he had guided the Melbourne Storm through a period of apparent on-field and off-field success. This story highlights that there are consequences for not taking a stand for doing what is right. It may be true that if Melbourne Storm had played according to the rules then they may not have won their (now lost) premierships. We will never know. We do know that their brand has been damaged and two major sponsors have already cancelled their arrangements with the club due to the clash of values that has come to the surface as a result of this exposure. If you have ever wondered whether there is a financial cost for lacking integrity in business, here is your proof!

This is why I always laugh when people talk about developing the ‘soft skills’ of management. To me, the so called ‘soft skills’, which include acting with integrity, are the hardest skills to master, which is why so many people struggle to properly develop them. The term ‘soft’ somehow suggests that they are easy. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

To me leadership starts with doing what is right from a personal point of view. This means that many people will never know when you have shown true leadership, because the vast amount of leadership takes place when no one is looking. I suspect that there are a lot of good people at the Melbourne Storm who possess high integrity. While this must be an extraordinarily difficult time for them I suspect that many will stay to rebuild the club’s integrity. In many ways, providing the people running the club at all levels honestly embrace the opportunity that they have before them, they could use this terrible event to create an organisation of the highest order. On many levels I hope that they can.

The final message for each of us from this story is to challenge ourselves not to do any behaviour just because we believe that other people are doing it. If our moral compass tells us that something is wrong, then we should listen and take action that is guided by that compass. It is far better to be able to look in the mirror and be happy with the quality of the person staring back at you, rather than seeing a smug person who is hoping they never get caught for doing what they know is wrong.

Please feel free to comment on this article.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com