By:
On:
In: Decision Making, Operations Leadership

In my opinion, being accountable is one of the most positive personality and leadership traits. When important things need to get done, you and/or your team state with confidence, “I own that. We will review what needs to get done and provide an update next week. We will achieve the end of month target.” When things don’t go as planned, you and/or your team state, “My bad. This should have been done by X date, but I missed that mark. I apologize and would like to discuss an alternative date. I assure you that we’ll meet the adjusted time line.” When a direct report missesRead More →

By:
On:
In: Achieving Operations Goals, Customer Experience

It’s not all about the SLAs or speed of resolution. When we consider options to improve the customer experience, discussions often lead to complex process improvements or expensive tool enhancements, but there is something we can all do that is relatively easy and almost free. This is to keep our customers well informed during the problem solving progress. There are three major components to the act of keeping a customer well informed: Acknowledge that work has begun on their problem. Share the problem solving activities. Set and follow through on time frame expectations. When I receive feedback in customer satisfaction surveys and directly from clients, keeping customersRead More →

By:
On:
In: Decision Making, Improving Results

Lately, I have found myself uttering the phrases “we need to pick our battles ” often followed by “there are bigger fish to fry” at least once per week- enough to notice it and write a blog post about it. When running a complex business operation, there will always be problems to solve and coworkers that you disagree with, but if you take action on every problem and confront every disagreement, you will actually lessen not increase progress. Strategically, picking your battles will increase your leadership effectiveness. How do you know which battles to fight? Ask yourself this set of questions… Does the issue inRead More →