Customer loyalty is the gold standard for any business. Loyal customers have a higher lifetime value, refer more business, and become advocates. They won’t buy or leave you on price and will give you another chance if you’re wrong. Customer satisfaction is not the same. Satisfied customers don’t necessarily buy again. The Holy Grail for any business is creating loyal customers. There is a catch. You can’t create loyal customers without committed employees.
Why is this important to me?
I am not doing this summary to waste your time. My vision is to provide concise action steps you can take right now to improve your life. People spend more than 30% of their time on work-related tasks. This is time spent away from family, friends, and other activities. Gallup shows that 91% of employees are disengaged or actively disengaged, which means they hate their job.
One of the main causes of disconnection is the fact that management does not trust its people. This is horrible because customers want action right now, and if your front-line people aren’t empowered to make decisions, then this process gets messy very quickly and causes customer frustration.
It’s human nature to want to do a good job. Given a choice, would you want to do an ordinary job or a magnificent job? Everyone wants to do a good job, but most people are in the wrong places, so they have to use their weaknesses as their main strengths. Management has the wrong people in the wrong jobs.
Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute is a short book with a good message. I will discuss some of the main points in this summary.
1. Empowerment: Empowerment is simply letting people do what they already know how to do. People want to do a good job, but they are afraid because they are not empowered. Sharing information is a key step in starting an empowered organization.
2. Job insecurity: Managers sometimes feel that if they give people too much power, they will be out of a job. I have seen this in every department throughout my career. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sales, Service or Development, people accumulate workloads to protect themselves. The leader’s job is to craft the vision so that people understand that as they stop working, they will get additional work as the company grows and expands.
3. Autonomy – People want autonomy and freedom to do a good job. The problem becomes a balancing act because management generally wants to keep a short check on their direct reports. The way to avoid this is to define what is expected in terms of goals and performance for your people and communicate the relevance of what they do. Each team member needs to have a personal scorecard that measures their tasks each day.
4. Teams – The authors speak of self-directed teams. I agree that you need to reduce the hierarchy and would make a caveat about teams. They should be responsible, definite and small. Large teams will become wildly inefficient just under the load of communications. Small teams are much more effective and should be kept to 5 people or less.
Empowerment is something that can transform an organization if used correctly. This book is a good guide to why it is important. Implementing a culture like this takes work. We are in the process of increasing this further in our software company. The first thing we did was work with each team member and communicate to them the relevance of their role and ask them for things that they could measure every day. All of our departments have weekly scorecards, but sometimes the individual metrics for each job are different than the department metrics.
I hope you found this short summary useful. The key to any new idea is to work it into your daily routine until it becomes a habit. Habits are formed in as little as 21 days. One thing you can take away from this book is individual scorecards. Engaging your people in the relevance of each job and yours in particular is a great start, and the individual scorecard will allow them to track important measures of their work.