Marcia's Leadership Q&As: 3 Essential Skills That Connect Your Customers to Your Bottom Line

Q. What are the most important skills my managers should teach our new hires?

A. New hires are generally eager to learn, contribute, and make a difference. In the onboarding process, make sure you ask questions about what makes a difference for them and what do they want to contribute; what are they passionate about? The leadership team should be involved in the onboarding education.  It may be talking to new hires for an hour welcome and share the values you want to see and expect. It may be a day of education given by the CEO/President. The messages are important and relevant if delivered from the leaders.

A few essential skills that will help an organization rise above the noise and chaos of uncertainty in current work environments are: the focus on quality, being adaptable in supporting each other and serving customers, and continual improvement and innovation (two different processes.)

First, the focus on quality was paramount 20 to 30 years ago with the Quality movement. Sadly, that focus has waned, yet when leaders focus their organization on delivering quality in work, quality in communication, and quality in information, people can work together better to deliver what matters!  Second, in today’s environment, the more people can adapt and pivot and remove barriers to serve each other and customers, the better the impact of relationships—and the bottom line! Third, working together to continually improve (this means meeting and discussing, what can be better from the customers’ perspective?) and innovate with better and different response times, services, products is imperative.

My question to you: How are you doing? If you draw a direct line from what you do and what the customer experiences, do you have your resources focused in the right place? For example, if you have a service (phone service or airlines), how long is your customer on hold to get a question answered or to buy from you? Do calls get dropped? Are customers on hold for 2 minutes or 20 minutes, or two hours? If you are a leader (organization or team), what are you doing to directly allow your customer to connect and buy from you? Or do you have so many barriers you drive them away, in a limousine to your nearest competitor?