E – Empower your team to deliver on expectations and then some! If your team needs to check with you for every little thing, you’re in trouble! Either you don’t trust them or you’re a control freak! Either way, it’s not good for business.
Empowerment is not just a matter of saying, “Do whatever it takes!” It is so much more than that. If you want your customers to keep coming back, you need to give your team the freedom they need to deliver a positive impact.
Do your employees know the vision you have for the business? Do you have one? I am constantly surprised at how few business owners have any clarity about where they want to take their business into the future. Do your employees understand and live the values of the business? Do you? When looking to empower your team, you need to be a leader that displays a level of congruence with your vision and values, so that the team has a framework with which to make good decisions that are aligned with the direction of the business.
Have you created a working environment that supports your team in doing what they do effectively and efficiently? Have you encouraged the removal of bottlenecks and barriers to delivering a powerful customer experience? As a leader you need to be supporting the efforts of your team. You need to encourage learning and decision-making, and you need to be a coach and a mentor to help your team step up.
Perhaps the most important aspect of empowering your team is trust. You need to have mutual trust and respect for all of your team members and a belief that your employees all want to do the right thing.
Ask for ideas and suggestions and input into planned changes within the business. I created a program some years ago that generated 42 ideas in five months to the value of $1.5 million in value. These ideas came from employees in the front line and the program was designed to provide support by the leaders to get these ideas implemented. It was a huge success both in terms of dollar value and team morale.
Inform your team members about your business strategy and share the key performance indicators (KPIs) that ultimately measure your overall success. I am constantly amazed at how secretive some business owners are about making a profit. Your team knows you’re a profit making entity (unless you’re a registered charity / not for profit organisation) so sharing this information can actually be a motivator for team members to contribute more. Just remember who actually makes the profit for you!
Set joint targets with your team and then monitor performance against them. Refer to some of the measures mentioned in the last article on the ‘M’ and encourage the team to find ways to improve on them continuously.
Do you employees know who your most important customers are? Do you? How do you determine this? I created a tool some time ago to help you discover this so that you can focus your efforts for greatest return. Your team must understand who your most important customers are so that they can make it count with every interaction.
Do you encourage your team to stay in touch with customers? How much scope do your employees have to make decisions and take action to solve customer problems? A customer can’t stand it when they’re dealing with someone who really can’t influence an outcome or make a decision without checking higher up the ‘food chain’. It causes frustration and angst for both the customer and the employee when their hands are tied with unnecessary bureaucracy. It also means you have to get involved which is not a good outcome!
Have you got a training plan in place that builds your team’s skill and confidence so that they can better handle the entire customer experience?
If you encourage dialogue and allow changes to be made that will improve their work, your employees will be more willing to step up. Encourage cooperation, problem solving, idea generation, and innovation in your workplace. Bring the team together once a month for an hour over lunch to work on problems, challenges and opportunities and you’ll be surprised how effective your team will become. It will keep you ahead of the competition and keep customers pleasantly impacted.
To sum up, you need to provide the vision and values, the tools and skill development, the encouragement, the trust, and the positive recognition to empower your team. Without these things in place your team will perceive empowerment as a buzzword that gets paid ‘lip service’! Embrace it and you are building a powerful force in the marketplace that doesn’t just rely on you to make a positive impact!
The final letter in our series on focusing on your C.U.S.T.O.M.E.R. is ‘R’. Next week we bring it all together by ‘Reviewing or Repeating’ the things that work and make them a part of the way we do business each and every day.
Build massive momentum!
