Have you ever had one of those days where you just feel like – “Why am I doing this?” or “This is just pointless.” These thoughts are usually accompanied by a terrible sinking feeling, at least for me, that I am totally missing out on doing something really meaningful.

Having and living out a strong mission and vision is such a vital part of life, don’t you think? And it doesn’t matter what your profession or position in that profession – we all need to have a sense of purpose. Or at least I think we do.

I totally agree with Hyatt’s post about Why Vision Matters as I am in the process of working through to reconnect with my own sense of vision and mission. 2009 was a challenging year, wasn’t it? I remember starting out, almost 365 days ago, with a great sense of excitement and uncertainty around what would happen during the year – namely: what would happen with our Economy.

Was I connected with my company mission and vision then? For sure. I was eager to go after it and build it up. But now? Almost a year later, I can honestly say that I feel like I’ve been bumped off track. My focus is not on my company’s mission and vision. It’s on paying the bills. Keeping cash flow – flowing. All of my attention has been sucked into this area of my company’s life, and I just know that it’s creating a hollowness inside me that really sucks.

This quote sort of sums it up:

“They don’t know why their efforts matter. They cannot connect their actions to a larger story. Their work becomes a matter of just going through the motions, living from weekend to weekend, paycheck to paycheck.

This is where great leadership makes all the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters.” (Why Vision Matters by Michelle Hyatt)

What a great insight about vision. And a great thing to think about for leaders (and everyone, for that matter.) We (leaders, managers, teachers, janitors, ALL OF US) from time to time, need to remind ourselves to connect with what makes our lives matter. The big picture – something beyond our normal every day activity. Or be prepared to get lost in scribbles.

What are you doing to connect with your sense of vision and mission?

“As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.”

And so begins a very strong anti-textbook post by Seth Godin.

What I’m amazed about is that I am no longer 100% anti-textbook. I’ve complained about them – price, tendency to become out dated rather quickly, how impersonal they are, etc. But are they always bad? What do schools, teachers, and students do that make them bad? And what makes them good?

Bad Practice 1: Your book=Your English Level

Common language school malpractice is to equate a course book to a language level. If you’re a beginner student for example, your course book could be Market Leader Elementary. When you finish the book – you finish the level. Common practice, but totally not correct.

When you finish a course book, you’ve done just that: Finished a course book. Hopefully you’ve learned some new vocabulary, you’ve hopefully improved your reading, and listening skills – but have you actually mastered enough English to move up to an intermediate level?

Most course books in the ESL market boast content that averages between 60 to 120+ hours of course time. But is that enough time? According to Cambridge University, the average post beginner student (A2) needs at least 80 to 200 hours of class time to move up to the next level. (See Guided Learning Hours from Cambridge website.)

So equating your course book to your language level is NOT the best way to make use of your course book. Your course book should help make your course better – more interesting. It should support you through the learning process by giving you activities and lessons to review – but should never tell you when your ready to graduate to the next level.

Focus on customer. Those in the middle have long positioned change initiatives through the voices of their customers. Now is a perfect time to make the changes to products and processes that customers have been asking for. They too may have some time to consult with you; their businesses are impacted too. So use the down time wisely.

Frame This Crisis to Your Advantage – John Baldoni – HarvardBusiness.org

Times have been tough. In the month of March alone, we’ve had record breaking amounts of cancelled classes – thankfully nothing permanent. We’ve noticed that many of our clients are busier. Lots of running to keep worried head offices satisfied, and catering to VIP visits – just checking in on how things are going locally.

But I have noticed that the above quote is totally true. We’ve started working with a new client who has been doing a lot of talking with us about their specific development needs. These conversations have been like gold for me – as they have represented, in some cases, 180 degree changes in how we work.  Most interesting: they have been positive changes.

1. Tighter – smaller module based work. Goodbye to those 150+ hr courses that seem to float around in the clouds. Hello to 12 – 30 hour chuncks that are easy to see the beginning and end of.

2. Performance and Goal driven. Since stepping into the world of the CEFR, we’ve slowly started moving into a more performance based system of work – but now with our new client – it’s what’s conditioning forward development and growth. What has hit me  is – so why not roll this out with all our clients?

Kind of underlinesn the importance of this tip from an article I read this week:

“Tip #1: Guarantee Short-Term Benefits

Most consultants and firms talk about the features of their service. “Smart methods” are features, cost savings are benefits. Clients want to hear about benefits and they want to know that the benefits you bring will save them more than you cost.

In a recession a client’s view of benefits shortens to one year, not five years or even three, as they might not have a job then. You must deliver benefits this year. By the way, they would also like you to guarantee those benefits by making your fees contingent upon success. Build a contingent value proposition with a maximum one year ROI and you will prosper.” (8 Tips for Building a Value Proposition that Sells in a Recession, Collins.)

But goal driven and performance based not just to survive the recession – but to start stepping up and enhancing quality and service. It’s what will keep you moving today – and help push you forward through the coming upswing.

VIA IndustryWeek : Dont Forget Your Customer.

To continue the ideas touched upon yesterday, I found another article that relates to the concept of creating excellent customer experiences. Again: in the saturated ESL industry of Mexico City – developing an exceptional customer experience will be vital to gaining new clients and surviving the economic downturn.

But, like was mentioned yesterday – customer experience is not a one time event. It’s a way of being as a company.

Cohen steps into some really interesting ideas of how to build a great experience.

Design: Understand the experience your customer wants, recognizing that one size does not fit all, and design “service products” that fulfill these needs. (“Don’t Forget Your Customer.” Cohen)

What would be the experience my customers want? As mentioned yesterday, I know the HR folk are looking for quick but meaningful reports on a regular basis. So one design oriented question for us is how can we present more meaningful/useful info each month, and deliver it faster each time?

Students would want something similar. To know where and how they’re going with the course they are enrolled in. I also think an increase in asking for feedback would be helpful – how are they experiencing our services?

The conversation is open – how can we imrove our customer experience?

User Experience and satisfaction are vital indicators of success for a business, and in a saturated market, service and experience become strategic to gaining new clients and keeping old ones.

Just read Becoming a Customer Experience-Driven Business by Peter Merholz at  HarvardBusiness.org, and started thinking about the importance of becoming aware of my company’s touch points, processes, and service. Where and what are they? How are they? And how could they become better experiences?

I really like what Merholz has to say about developing customer experience -

“Customer experience is an organizational mindset. It’s not something a business buys, it’s something a business becomes.”

So where do I need to become? Some thoughts…

1. With my internal customers (teachers): I think the most obvious experience point for teachers would be in the pay scale they ride. I feel that this is perhaps one of my big areas of strength in that we strive to pay above market wages to our employees. We also strive to schedule regular increases according to inflation and performance.

A potential area of opportunity would come from one of our differentiation points: we adapt course content to client needs. While this offers a strong advantage in the sales process, it also creates a potential weakness in that we do not always follow text books. This could likely mar our experience with our internal clients. (“I don’t have the material I need.”)

Solution: We are currently working hard to create a “living textbook” online that would easily allow teachers to find and use client centric content. However,  ongoing training will be essential to help make this a great experience. (Databank info as well as content development ideas should be included in a welcome pack to new hires. Online options could also be made available.)

2. Reporting – a great deal of attention should be placed in how we report to our clients. Information that is valuable to clients should be identified and krafted into a regular reporting process. This process must also be streamlined and designed to deliver within 3 business days after each month ends. Our goal should be to provide timely and valuable information to our client that will help them – not suck time away from their review process.

(And what if the reporting process no longer had to be paper based? What if there were online options available that the client could access at any time and any place? This would reduce paper usage, storage issues, and increase our reporting speed.)

Customer Experience is something that businesses – especially service oriented ones – must think and act about on a regular basis. With the economy the way it is today, a delightful customer experience could mean the difference between you being a defined as a cost to be cut, or an indispensible added value.

Generally speaking, those companies that not only survived but also thrived during the Great Depression were those that continued to act as though there were nothing wrong and that the public had money to spend. In other words, they advertised. These are industries that didn’t wait for public demand for their products to rise. They created that demand even during the most difficult of times.

How brands thrived during the Great Depression – iMediaConnection.com

 

30 Second Takeaway:

• When times are tough – initiate. Be proactive – not reactive.
• Don’t hold your money or you’ll loose it. Invest strategically and often.
• Make sure your market knows you’re there, and stay with them. (But how do you do that if your business offers a service – not on a wal mart shelf. Hmmm)

Many people have not really experienced even a moderate degree of synergy in their family life or in other interactions. Theyve been trained and scripted into defensive and protective communications or into believing that life and other people cant be trusted. This represents one of the great tragedies and wastes in life, because so much potential remains untapped – completely undeveloped and unused, Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. They experience synergy only in small, peripheral ways in their lives.

Stephen Covey Author & Consultant

On synergy by Stephen Covey Gurteen Knowledge

Ineffective people live day after day with unused potential. What if a company saw part of its role as taking the initiative to help people step into and discover their potential. Sure – businesses exist to make money, but that’s such a shallow vision to have.

Business can and should be much deeper than that. What if they became places where people could discover potential – harness it – and become more effective.

It’s hard to becomer a firestarter. Companies tend to be boxed in places – where processes and lots of straight lines flow.  But how many of the people that work around you are walking about with unused potential – simply because they have not connected to your company’s vision or mission? How many are simply there to collect a paycheck?

Wouldn’t things work better for everyone if we took the time to deeply connect the people working with us to our company’s mission and vision? I dare to say that few who work in companies know their mission statement. Fewer still have bought into it. Unused potential.

Imagine an English class where your students could select the theme, and select learning objectives based upon their level of urgency – for THEM. What if a language consulting firm was able to listen that closely to its clients – not only in developing lesson themes around topics that matter, but also in working with the client so they can influence the actual learning objectives within a course based upon what is most important for them at the moment.

How it’s usually done: normally, ESL schools help clients organize their employees according to their English level – beginners, intermediates, and advanced. Books appropriate to each level are selected by the school or company – usually because those books have been used by the school for the last year or so. But it’s mostly been all about the school to this point: their content, and their method. The only “client listening” that has been done so far, is in organizing the groups according to level.

Many ESL companies sell “personalized” learning. But in my experience over the last 9 years, “personalization” simply means that your class size will be no greater than 6 students so that your teacher has greater face time with each student.

This definition of “personal” is important for sure – you need to be able to give quality time to each student to help them grow. But could there be a deeper alignment to personalized classes?

Obstacles to Personal – There are obvious obstacles to deploying personalized learning solutions where the client has greater control over content and learning objectives. Namely: how do you deal with multiple people in a group? Each person will have their own interests and levels of skill development urgency. (What’s important for one person, will not be so for another.)

Obstacle two: Personal is not Efficient in the short term. It’s so much easier to follow the pack and issue course books on a broad level based system. Basic users will all have the same material for example. That’s easy to deploy from an organizational standpoint – and just plain efficient for everyone – administrator, teacher, and student. It’s more efficient for everyone, but I wonder if it’s the best and most effective possibility?

Self-service: Viable Alternative?

“Value creation, as described in my book, Relationship Economics (Wiley 2008), is derived from value chain disruption. Only by continuously and consistently evaluating your personal and professional value creation efforts compared to the changing needs and demands of your market (both external or internal) can you continue to adapt and innovate. More and more of our clients are adapting self-service functionality into their corporate environments.(David Nour Combat Economic Sluggishness with Adaptive Innovation.”)

Self-service. Wouldn’t that be an exciting innovation to create in the ESL market? Imagine having a class where students could login to a special section of your website and select content themes like “Leadership Development” or “Coaching” or “VOIP Communication Strategies for Distance Training” – all based upon their needs at work. And what if they could rank, in order of importance or urgency, the skills to be worked on over the next week or month? What if those choices and preferences were then pushed down to the teacher? – and he or she would then adapt their lesson plans accordingly. What would happen? What would that look like? Would this lead to a more engaged and effective classroom?

But most importantly, would offering this level of “self-service” to clients – something that doesn’t seem to exist in the local market, make a difference? Would this level of service strengthen your relationship with your clients, and most importantly – increase the value of the service you offer?

Via Whatever… Why Employees Stop Caring About Work | Sterling Performance | BNET.

“There’s evidence to suggest the level of people’s engagement declines with their length of service in an organisation. They start off keen and try to perform at their best. But if they receive no support, or get disrespect, zero encouragement or acknowledgement, praise or reward, they learn that being “engaged” is a mug’s game.”

What a great quote, and terribly true. The longer you’re with an org, the greater your chances of disconnecting with them if their’s not a continued effort to let you know you’re a valued worker.  A few years ago I started working for a young start-up company. The people were great – fresh – alive – and amazingly friendly. I felt like I had walked into a second family. And, as you can imagine, my engagement level with the company was through the roof. I loved working for them.

But over time, that feeling deteriorated into a flatline. I still enjoy the people. They’re still friendly and fun to be with – but one of the reasons why I decided to stop working with them was because they lost their focus on making me feel like I belonged…that I was contributing to something great.

What changed, and how can I avoid this?

Community -we long for it. One of our basic human needs is a need to belong. I think businesses – my business – would do well to not forget this. At the beginning of my previous work, we often met together over dinner or coffee (staff of 4.) and often got together with the bigger crew for celebrations or mini parties. The feeling of family was made strong and perpetuated by these little events.

Souring factor: I think perhaps a tighter orientation to expense reduction. Sure companies need to watch their cashflow – especially so in times like these – but not at the expense of sacrificing community. Community and engagement are pretty close friends: remove at your own risk.  But really: how expensive do community developing events have to be? The can cost little to nothing. What matters is getting together, having fun, and getting to know the others working with you.

Appreciation – one thing that matters is being rewarded and recognized for excellent work. Simple things can go a long way: I got “thank you ” cards – a donut and coffee before a class once…and won a few employee excellence awards. They weren’t big deals – but they really meant something to me. It made me fee valued, and increased my engagement levels.

This engagement factor never soured in my previous work – but it’s so vital for leaders to show appreciation for what their team of people are doing. A strong point for me to remember. Saying Thank you can go a long way.

Ongoing Support- I’ve noticed that it’s alarmingly easy to stop providing ongoing support and development. It’s not because I’ve stopped believing in its importance…but I think I’ve gotten distracted somewhat by other things going on in the business. Sadly, even the long term top performers will blink out if you fail to connect and offer your support. I’ve had it happen. Roll out ongoing ProD and support sessions!

Employee engagement isn’t such a difficult thing to develop and maintain. More than anything I think it requires the constant awareness  of leaders of what helps employees feel “part of something” and “valued. ” But not just awareness….regular doses are required.