It’s not peaking if it’s a plateau.

I’m running and my running training has stalled. I’m an area manager and my area management has stalled as well. I couldn’t get any traction. I kept thinking about how much better our customer service was now than just two years ago when our company’s direction and focus changed with the ownership changed. Seriously. If you came in our stores 3 years ago and came in today… you really wouldn’t recognize the place. And I was really happy with the progress. (hence the first quote.)

Then the store’s owner went on a store tour while I was in San Diego training a manager and supervisor out there for a couple weeks (I’m coming back to this part, it’s important) and his tour notes weren’t bad at all. They were pretty good. The facilities continued to show improvement, the stock and displays showed improvement… and when he was greeted by the employee sitting on a stool behind the counter instead of standing up I put my face in my hands and read the rest between my fingers. When the employee didn’t go to the sales floor to offer assistance but instead barked from the counter “AnythingIcanhelpyoufind?” I was thunder-struck. Obviously I was missing something. I’d gotten complacent. I’d gotten used to things being better and I’d stopped to take a breath. That breather had turned into a loss of forward momentum on the part of me and subsequently my managers and the crews. (More on THIS later too, an entire future blog post, with luck I’ll remember to come back and add a link here.)

While training the manager and supervisor out in San Diego I found myself doing a lot of talking obviously. It’s a lot of training when hiring someone off the street from outside the company to do management positions. It’s not something we typically do, and it was the first time I’d trained at this level someone who’d never worked for us at all. What I noticed was how much I was talking about customer service (I started training on Monday and the owner’s visit I was talking about happened on Wednesday so the customer service song was obviously ready on my lips.) a lot. I would talk about it while discussing all sorts of things. What I didn’t do was talk about any of the things I’ve talked about here or here in relation to any of the training material or handbooks we give new employees. Our training curricula has nothing in it about customer service other than we’re supposed to greet customers when they enter the building. Nothing about offering to help them, nothing about knowing anything about the product, nothing else about customers at all! How were we in retail and none of our material ever mentioned customers? They’re somewhat important to retail aren’t they?

In fact! Are you sitting down? Our store product training consisted of the trainer saying to the new trainee “While I do this (something managery, maybe payroll), you go on the sales floor and look around. If you have any questions just ask.”  Yep. You read it right. Product and store familiarization was a way for the trainer to get some alone time. How could we POSSIBLY render good customer service when we never had any program explaining our products or how we expected our customers to be treated? We’d spent the last two years making managers perfect HR passable mechanical managers. They can all do perfect write-ups that will stand the scrutiny of any unemployment judge… but we’re not teaching them HOW to give good customer service. I’ve considered not confessing this horrible short-coming all day.

Personal aside: I really thought a long time about it. It was so normal it didn’t occur to me until I was training someone completely green that it was stupid. We’d always promoted from within so they always knew the stuff. The sales associates often had lots of time to familiarize themselves with it on their own time and I wouldn’t abandon them that way, but I’d seen others do it for years, YEARS, and never thought anything of it. Now I’m ashamed of it. Seriously. How did I not see how insane that was? It stopped this morning.

Me? I love customer service, and I do it really well. I would coach people to do it when I would see them doing things not great, but I typically work with managers and I wasn’t conveying, obviously, that I wanted THEM to do that with their employees. I was making my managers really good at customer service themselves, and really good at fixing problems to keep customers, but what I wasn’t doing was making sure my managers were spreading the love down the chain. They were working their collective butts off to make sure their employees didn’t do anything wrong so they wouldn’t lose their jobs or have to fire them. That was from on high and me because it was my boss’ priority. But there’s a huge chasm between being “not doing wrong” and doing right. We’d somehow wound up making sure our front liners weren’t doing wrong.

I know it sounds like I’m saying we were astonishingly mediocre (which I hear is a huge sin!) and I’m not. We really aren’t that bad, and we’re MUCH better than we were… but we can improve so much more now that I realize that we weren’t training for great. We were training for “not wrong.”

So, just like in training for a race (I am training for a race by the way) or dieting, or striving for greatness instead of good enough, the training needs to be shaken up a little bit. There need to be more intense days, and days where the focus changes entirely for a while. Runners don’t run hard every day. They take time to work on other things to let those muscles recover. We’re going to do things differently around my neck of the woods for a while. It’ll be intense for a bit, and it’ll mix up the focus for a bit. But one thing that’s going to be consistent. Every employee from janitor to manager to supervisor is going to be involved helping us develop a Customer Service training program that includes product knowledge, store set-up, store knowledge, and anything else that we decide is part of great customer service. I think they’ll be excited to be part of the program to watch themselves grow. It’ll mean a lot more to them if they help me than if I try and top down dump the new way of thinking on them.

Personal Aside 2: It took all I had to not talk about Ho`omau in this post. That’s the chapter I was re-reading a few nights ago when all of this gelled. Last night I was reading through it again as I’d bookmarked it on the kindle and wasn’t reading my marked up copy and I swear it was like reading that chapter again for the first time. If you haven’t read Managing with Aloha: Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business yet I recommend it. As your management challenges change over time and different things come into view and other things fade different parts of the book become more pertinent and they resonate differently. The reason I didn’t want to frame this post around Ho`omau honestly is because I’ve just read that chapter of the book twice and I was afraid I’d sound too much like I was quoting it or being too derivative. Suffice it to say that the value of Ho`omau, the spirit of perseverance, and sticking to it, and not giving up… those values are very much what I’m talking about in this post.