You Have to Trust (WT427)

You Have to Trust (WT427)

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by Shirley Dalton | 31 Aug, 2018 | Blog, Business

WT 427 You have to trust

This week presented two opportunities for powerful lessons about trust.

The first came as participants in my workshops reflected on their behaviours and outcomes for one of the games. Working in pairs, they competed against each other to produce a standard product in the shortest amount of time. The successful teams found that they divided the product into sections and delegated its construction to individual team members.

The not so successful teams tended to have both people working on the same thing at the same time.

The teams that delegated the tasks found that they had to trust that the team members would get their parts completed as efficiently as they could.

The game generated an interesting discussion around what it takes to delegate. For many bosses, delegation appears hard because they don’t trust their team to do the work as well as they can.

This can be easily overcome by having systems and processes in place and ensuring the team are trained. Of course, the manager has to be willing to let go as well.

The second point from the game included repetition. The teams had a number of trials before competing for the winning round. During the trials, the teams found that they were able to reduce the amount of time it took and in most cases they reduced the time by a whopping 75%.

Repetition leads to Mastery and Mastery leads to Trust and Trust leads to Delegation.

The second event occurred as Ross and I drove back from Woollongong to Newcastle. It was my turn to drive as we approached Sydney. Our GPS gave me instructions that I considered to be counter-intuitive. I was heading away from the signs directing me to Sydney.

I was nervous, and yet I trusted and followed the GPS and I was rewarded for doing so. We emerged on the motorway and completely missed the Sydney CBD, which is where we would have ended up, had I followed the signs and not the GPS.

How about you?

Do you trust your GPS?

Do you trust your team to get the job done or are you micro-managing?

Remember, your team want to come to work and succeed. You have to trust and let them do the work.

If You Don’t Train Them (WT421)

If You Don’t Train Them (WT421)

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by Shirley Dalton | 20 Jul, 2018 | Blog, Business

WT 421 If you don't train them

I was sitting in the waiting room. The phone rang. The junior answered. I didn’t hear what the caller asked, but I could guess based on the answer. “It will be $50”. 

My guess was that the caller asked how much the service would be. 

As soon they got the answer they hung up.

If you were the owner or manager of this business, would you be happy if you overheard that conversation? 

I know I wouldn’t be and yet you can’t blame the junior. The junior did what she was asked; she answered the question about cost. 

If you don’t train your people, you can’t be angry when they don’t do things the way you would like them done.

Most customer enquiries in any business, in any industry usually start with a question about cost. Why? Because customers don’t know what else to ask. 

It’s your job to take control of the phone call. 

You could start by asking permission to ask them a few questions. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions to make sure I understand your situation please?” 

Here are a few examples from different industries that follow once you have been given permission to ask: 

“Is it for your son or daughter?”  

“Is it for a special occasion?” 

“Is this something you need urgently?” 

“Are you looking to buy or rent a property?” 

It’s very important to have a script or cheat sheet so your team can answer customer enquiries in a professional and consistent manner whilst taking control of the call. We call this “Telephone Technique”. 

It’s up to you to develop the script or series of questions. You know the information you need in order to determine if you can help someone. You know why you ask the questions you do. 

If you haven’t done so, please write this down. You don’t have to personally write it down, you can record it and have it transcribed, but someone has to document it. 

You’ll be surprised at how many more sales you’ll make, or time you’ll save by qualifying the right rather than wrong customers, if you’ll just take the time to unpack what you know and train your people.

You might be very surprised (and disappointed) if you were to listen in on your calls and add up the number of potential sales you lose, simply because you don’t have a script and you haven’t trained your team.

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