Sooner or later you have to trust your people.
—Jim Barksdale
CEO of Barksdale
Management Corporation
Bill had worked through lunch so he could get back to his hotel to change clothes for an important dinner meeting in a nearby town. He was staying on one of those fancy upper floors, the concierge level as they liked to call it. By 4:30 P.M., he’d made the quick change and realized he had almost half an hour before the client was to pick him up. Having skipped lunch and with dinner still several hours away, he realized he was starving! Not to worry, he figured. The concierge floor had a lounge area that provided small sandwiches and spicy meatballs to guests. A quick snack and a soda would tide him over.
Alas, Bill had not figured on the prickliness of the guardian of the concierge lounge. “Hors d’oeuvres,” she informed him with all the pointless authority of the petty bureaucrat she apparently aspired to be, “are served from 5 P.M. We’re not ready to open yet.”
Over the rumblings of an empty stomach, Bill started to explain his plight. “It’s wonderful that the hotel is willing to lay out such a nifty spread,” he said. Yes, he certainly understood the rules, he acknowledged. “But since the chafing dishes are obviously already hot and full, and the plates and silver ready and waiting, we could surely jump the gun by a few minutes, right?”
“Sorry,” came the reply in a tone of voice that made it clear she wasn’t. “I don’t make the rules. You’ll just have to miss out, I guess.” And with that, three very bright, positive days in that hotel turned ugly brown, done in by an employee more concerned with policies and procedures than serving and satisfying customers. Bill hasn’t been back to that hotel since, nor will he be stopping by anytime soon. He’s taking his business someplace else these days.
Was the woman genuinely nasty, mean, and awful? Or was she just another unempowered employee, afraid all heck would break loose if she sidestepped policy and passed out a single meatball twenty minutes before the posted time? It’s hard to know from the here and now. But we do know that genuinely empowered frontline employees are the ones who most genuinely delight in shaving this corner and bending that minor rule to make a customer happy. And the managers of genuinely empowered people are the ones most prone to aid and abet them at every turn.
Many managers have an ongoing and often irrational fear of the “E” word—empowerment. They have heard one too many speaker and seen one too many film suggesting that “empowered employees” are simply inmates placed in charge of the asylum, set forth unbounded by rules to “do whatever it takes to make the customer happy.”
What are they afraid of? The predictable things, of course: that employees who are turned loose will give the store away to conniving customers or that they’ll try to buy customer satisfaction at the expense of profit, ducking the hard and nasty work of telling a customer no when that’s the right (or only) answer.
Our experience (and we’ve yet to encounter anyone whose own experience doesn’t agree) has been that customer service people seldom do such things—if they are well trained and managed and if empowering them is a process rather than a pronouncement.
Empowerment is the self-generated exercising of professional judgment and discretion on the customer’s behalf. It is doing what needs to be done rather than simply doing what one has been told to routinely do. From the manager’s perspective, empowerment is a key element in the process of releasing the expression of personal power at the front lines. It is the opposite of enslavement.
Because personal power is already present within the individual, empowerment is not a gift one gives to another. To the contrary, personal power is released when managers and supervisors remove the barriers that prevent its expression. The distinction is important because it focuses us more on what we take away from the system than what we give to our people (Figure 20-1).
What does empowerment look like? An empowered act, by definition, is exercising initiative beyond or outside the conventional norm. Confidently following the policy may be appropriate, and quite frequently satisfying, to a customer seeking nothing more than the standard offering. But it is not an empowered act.
Empowerment kicks in when the customer’s long-term loyalty is at risk because of an unforeseen problem or unanticipated request. It’s also at work in the little value-addeds that can make the most ordinary of service transactions extraordinarily memorable and positive for the customer.
Figure 20-1. Empowerment Is Not a Gift.
Service quality research over the past two decades has shown empowerment to have many benefits:
• An empowered employee can more effectively manage the customer relationship and turn superficial contact into a true partnership than one who must constantly balance instincts to “do the right thing” against the fine print of a policy and procedure manual.
• To the customer, an empowered employee is a powerful commentary on the whole service orientation of the organization. Nothing sets an upset customer’s blood boiling faster—particularly one who’s already invested significant time and energy trying to solve a problem or get an answer—than hearing a frontline employee say, “I’ll have to check with my manager.” Empowered people send a message that a business truly does put customers first. Unempowered people tell customers that the organization has so little regard for its customer contact staff that managers are unwilling to give them the power to make customers happy.
• To the employee, empowerment has significant effects on self-esteem and morale and carries a strong message about management’s priorities and behavioral style. As the University of Maryland’s Benjamin Schneider has repeatedly demonstrated: Treat your people like gold—or dirt—and they’ll treat the customer accordingly.
Today, more than ever before, we want and need people whose sense of responsibility to serve the customer takes precedence over a jumble of organizational red tape. It’s up to managers to strip away the layers of organizational inertia that have calcified over the years so people can do that in a professional way that benefits themselves, their customers, and the organization.
“How do I empower my employees?” is a question as flawed as “How do I motivate my employees?” It may be even more flawed, since eliminating “boss control” is at the core of empowerment and the “how do I” part of the question, no matter how well intended, still reeks of “boss control.” So where and how does real empowerment start? And what can a manager do to see that it starts at all? A short story will help explain the forces at work.
A patient at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee lost an inexpensive but favorite pair of sneakers during his stay. Housekeeping, after learning of the man’s complaint, concluded that someone had mistakenly thrown out the sneakers and was quick to offer a heartfelt apology. Not good enough. Offers to pay for the patient’s sneakers also were not satisfactory. The patient wanted those sneakers.
At that point, the traditional response would likely have been a diplomatically insipid form letter saying something along the lines of “Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Your satisfaction is our only goal. If we can ever . . .” and making it clear that reasonable people had done all that could reasonably be expected over a pair of sneakers. End of story.
Instead, a young part-time housekeeper who had been involved in some of the phone calls over the incident took over. Acting on his own and not on a managerial directive, he got a detailed description of the sneakers from the patient, left work, went to a store, and, using his own money, purchased a replacement pair of identical shoes.
The patient was surprised. And elated. And the young part-time housekeeper? He received St. Luke’s first ever award for the most meritorious act of empowered behavior. It’s called the Golden Sneaker Award.
That’s what empowerment looks like. No one “gave” permission for the housekeeper to leave work to go buy sneakers. He exercised the personal power he had always had on the customer’s behalf. He thought first and foremost about what was really at issue—a pair of shoes, not assessing internal blame or hewing to the strict interpretation of hospital policy over patient claims of lost items.
By choosing to celebrate his action on an organizational scale, managers at St. Luke’s sent the message that this kind of behavior is not aberrant or suspect. It’s an example of what everyone can and should do if the hospital is to continue to attract patients.
Of course, not all your employees will be as eager as the St. Luke’s housekeeper to go above and beyond to satisfy customers. As much as they might dream of taking such bold actions, the reality is that when push comes to shove, many of your people would rather someone simply tell them what to do rather than devising creative solutions themselves. Others might resist because of “doing more with less” work environments—they feel like their work plates are already overflowing and replicating the housekeeper’s actions doesn’t feel plausible given the strict productivity and efficiency goals they’re expected to meet.
So how can you get more frontline employees to take the initiative with customers? One way is to treat them more like partners than subordinates. Position-based power management—the “because I said so” type—is fast becoming the last resort of the inept. One of the quickest ways for employees to learn whether they are really empowered or not is to make a visible mistake in the name of pleasing customers. If the error is met with rebuke and punishment—if the empowered decision is denigrated by a superior—it sends quite a different message than if the manager sees it as an opportunity for learning or improved problem solving.
That doesn’t mean you should give employees unlimited license to please customers—some elastic guidelines are still required. The manager who says “just do what you think is best” is more likely demonstrating abdication (or fatigue at the end of a long work day) than empowerment. The goal should be to give your people “responsible freedom” defined by clear, real-world examples of how they might fix customer problems in a variety of service situations—without first coming to the boss for the green light.
Today’s new partner leaders focus less on sovereignty and more on support, with controlling behaviors taking a back seat to a coaching mindset. If empowering people truly is your goal, it’s a leadership model you would do well to emulate.
Our people in the plants are responsible for their own output and its quality. We expect them to act like owners.
—Ken Iverson
author, Plain Talk: Lessons from a Business Maverick