Delivering quality products and services should be top-of-mind for every business leader, regardless of industry.
It doesn’t matter whether you are a professional services provider or manufacture automative products, you should aim to improve quality. It drives sales, and will reduce costs and reenergize employees, too.
In a Inc.com post, Drew Greenblatt, president of Marlin Steel, offers five tips to help you improve quality, both in your products and your business.
Greenblatt recommends that two important KPIs to begin measuring immediately are quality escapes and quality captures.
Quality captures are process and product errors that are identified and captured internally before the client sees the finished product or service.
“Captured quality errors aren’t as bad because the client never knew — maybe they suffered a delayed delivery, but that’s it. Your client is not injured by the stumble.”
Quality escapes are more dire, because they were discovered by the client. They risk the long-term relationship with the client, and escaped internal quality checks.
“Measuring these mistakes transparently will bring your team’s attention to these issues, and they will understand they are important.”
When quality errors happen, focus on the process. Often, the root cause of a decrease in quality isn’t a person, but an organization’s internal process.
Greenblatt cautions against playing the blame game, saying that it will ultimately affect morale, and decrease productivity.
Address process issues by adding new checks or revising timelines so employees don’t feel rushed to produce on tight schedules.
Regular meetings about quality are necessary, but initial meetings can be lengthy. It’s important to have conversations with everyone involved whenever a quality issue emerges, in order to identify the root cause.
As processes are strengthened and systems become more robust, these meetings will become periodic check-ins.
A quality chart is a good way to prioritize quality issues by size, scope, and importance.
When addressing any quality issues, Greenblatt recommends devoting the most time and energy to those areas that experience issues most frequently.
Quality improvement is an iterative process, so organizations should always be looking for ways to deliver the maximum value to the client or customer, while streamlining internal processes for efficiency.
“Work the biggest quality issues until they become smaller issues.”
Make the results of your quality evaluations and checks public.
Post them around your place of business, communicate why they’re there, and give context to the numbers. Your employees should see this emphasis on quality as a company-wide endeavor, and posting the latest numbers to your team publicly is a great way to demonstrate the organization’s commitment both to quality and its people.
Are you currently grooming someone on your team for a leadership position? Or is there a person you see who has leadership potential but you’re not sure how to go about offering her the support she needs to move ahead?
There’s an art to becoming a great workplace coach, says Yael Bacharach, co-founder and director of training at the Bacharach Leadership Group. “As a coach you have to set the right tone for your protégé,” Bacharach writes in this article for Inc. “How do your actions and intentions come across to your protégé? How do you project yourself toward your protégé? And how does your protégé project back to you?”
The challenge, Bacharach says, is to “achieve consistency among these perceptions.” She offers the following rules to balance your coaching approach.
You want to provide your protégé “with a sense of momentum and a feeling of confidence.” A slap on the back, a good word at the right time - this “you can do it” spirit can help him through a difficult time, when he knows you’ll be there “with the right note of support and encouragement.”
But cheering must also be appropriate. Celebrate your protégé’s achievements, but don’t let the cheering become too aggressive or it may seem “as if you’re trying to get someone to go further than his or her capacity will allow.”
You want to support the efforts of your protégé and offer guidance so he can avoid what Bacharach calls “organizational pitfalls.” But while you assist him in navigating the terrain, you must avoid becoming a “micro-political consigliere” who becomes “overly involved with a protégé’s tactics and strategies.”
It’s important to help a protégé “think about and analyze their interpersonal skills in the context of the situations and the people they are dealing with.” In the event she starts alienating others within the organization, you should be there to “suggest ideas to handle the various office personalities.”
However, understanding how your protégé looks at the world shouldn’t lead to a blurring of professional boundaries. “Letting your empathy overwhelm your boundaries will kill your objectivity and weaken you as a coach.”
As a workplace coach, you’re also an educator, Bacharach says. “Your objective is to share your expertise and experience,” so your protégé is better equipped to “meet his or her personal goals.”
And while inevitably you will speak with authority, take care not to become authoritarian. Feel free to share your ideas and convictions, but you “must not dictate and insist upon them."
A workplace coach never wants to dominate the protégé. Instead, work “toward being accessible and ready to listen and assist when called upon.”
What techniques do you practice as a workplace coach?
As in any skill or trait, the ability to lead comes more easily for some than others. While there are those who are natural-born leaders, many develop the skills necessary to become a person of influence.
In this article titled “Leadership Lessons from the Dalai Lama”, author Drew Gannon highlighted some of the exiled monk’s teachings. The one thing that stood out is perspective or, as I like to call it, attitude.
Great leaders understand the importance of a positive attitude in building strong and effective organizations. One's outlook dictates a person’s response to the present and determines the quality of your future, it is a great influencer in a company's culture.
Clearly there are personal benefits for the individuals as well as the team as a whole, I’ve outlined three below.
Helps to Achieve Business Goals. Persuading customers is much easier for a person with a positive attitude. Research studies have shown sales professionals who think positively have improved sales performance. If a person is optimistic about achieving goals and success, they are more prone to take action in order to achieve it. Positive thinking is conspicuous in an achiever.
Improves Team Morale. A leader’s attitude is infectious – whether in a positive or negative way. Conscious or not, your team looks to you to create a positive attitude in the workplace. When you’re in a meeting or facing a challenge, steer the conversation on teamwork and focus on solutions. More likely than not, your attitude will begin to affect change. Soon people will be drawn to you, not only because of your strong leadership, but because they can’t help but like being in the company of somebody positive.
Develops a sense of gratitude. While several factors go into optimism, cultivating a sense of gratitude can help maintain a more positive mood in daily life. Thankfulness is one of the simpler routes to a greater sense of emotional well-being, higher overall life satisfaction, and a greater sense of happiness in life. People with a greater level of gratitude tend to have stronger relationships, less stress, resulting in increased health benefits.
This tweet from Dalai Lama sums up the best advice for leaders:
Appreciate how rare and full of potential your situation is in this world, then take joy in it, and use it to your best advantage.
Leaders make decisions daily and know the value when they listen to others. They weigh their own opinions with advice from others.
Whether it’s a big or small decision, someone will be ready with well-meaning advice. Whether or not you take it depends on a few factors.
“To use advice when growing your business you must learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, the good advice from the bad,” says Matthew Swyers, contributor to Inc.
He shares some pointers on how to separate quality advice from that you should avoid.
Great advice can come from anywhere, from the cafeteria to a bar. “But great advice rarely comes at a bar at 2 a.m. after a night of tequila shooters,” says Swyers.
It’s important to understand the bigger picture. It determines the weight you should put on the advice given.
Swyer suggests people be especially mindful of unsolicited advice.
Why?
Because their advice is typically off-base and driven by a need to hear themselves talk. Take it with a grain of salt because you don’t know their motivation.
Ask yourself a few questions to determine the motivation behind the advice: What is their end game? Are they trying to help determine if your concept can work? Or do they have an ulterior motive?
“Often the most valuable advice you can receive is from a potential investor or venture capitalist as they want you to make money, and they want to as well,” says Swyer.
You've probably met a handful of these know-it-alls throughout life. No matter what the subject matter is, they have the knowledge, but ask yourself this: Is it reliable?
Swyer suggests you do the following:
Listen politely then simply inquire as follows: That's great stuff. Thank you. Did you read that somewhere or how did you come by this?
If they give you a legitimate answer, perfect. If they give you a blank expression, you know not to take their advice.
We typically solicit advice and feedback from people we trust, whether they are colleagues, friends, or family. Just because someone is successful, doesn't mean they are experienced in your industry.
“That is not to say that their advice may not be valuable, but again it must be understood that these are people who have not done what you are doing,” says Swyer.
Sage advice can go a long way, but leaders can’t listen to everyone. Some people love to give advice, but keep in mind all of it isn't necessarily good. Learn to determine what advice is good and what is not.
What else do you consider when someone offers advice?
photo credit: Under 30 CEO
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A customer's needs and buying habits are often a mystery to sales teams, and the businesses they represent. But a recent study from the Rain Group identifies 10 things most customers want—a useful guide shared by Geoffrey James, contributor to Inc.
Businesses striving to meet a customer's needs must be very good at the following actions and processes.
Customers wouldn’t need to purchase your solutions to their problems if they could come up with them on their own.
When they look to your business, it’s because they hope they’ll benefit from your fresh perspective. When you think about a customer's needs from that perspective, the fresh ideas funnel begins to flow.
Customers are looking for a partner to help them achieve a goal. They’re not looking for someone to sell to them.
Be responsive to their concerns, and willing to work together on solutions. “Ideally, customers want you to be integral to their success,” James writes.
Unless you truly believe what you have to offer will help them reach their goal, customers won’t want what you’re selling. Part of your challenge is persuading them with the utmost confidence in your product or solution.
“You must make your confidence contagious.”
Customers can tell when you’re selling instead of listening.
It’s difficult to shut off your “inner-voice” and discard your well-crafted sales pitch, but unless you show that it’s all about them, customers will turn away.
Listen to a customer's needs and sales will happen...more quickly than anticipated.
Your job is to understand a customer's needs often transcend the most immediate problem they face. Connect with them in a comprehensive way, not merely the narrow buy-and-sell formula.
As James says, customers must “understand how buying from you will satisfy their personal needs, such as career advancement and security.”
When customers decide to purchase your product or service, they’re taking a conscious risk. Address this by clearly identifying what might go wrong, and how you’re prepared to ensure the problem won’t happen again.
Yes, customers continue to want a workable solution to their problem. But as James notes, “this is the ‘price of entry’ and not enough, by itself, to win in a competitive sales situation.”
The issues that matter most to customers, such as price, discounts, total cost, and add-on options, should be discussed in “plain and simple language.”
What does the potential purchase involve? How will it take place?
Customers do not want to be surprised by last-minute upsells.
A sale won’t happen if the two people involved don’t connect on a personal level.
The old truism still holds: Customers would rather buy from someone they like and trust.
Customers will compare the price of your product with what your competitors offer. Unless they can see how the value of your offering is what sets it apart, they will likely buy elsewhere.
Identifying these ten qualities is a good first step. Becoming superlative at them is the necessary next step.
Which of your customer's needs can you identify?
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