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Blame Management for Poor Service
By Jim Clemmer
Buried in the publicity of a nasty airline strike was a vivid example
of how misdirected management's service improvement efforts can become.
To improve service, the airline ordered all attendants to attend three
hour "Commitment to Courtesy" classes without pay. "They
told us the reason we were losing money was because we were rude to passengers,"
said one attendant.
How reasonable would it be to hold a shipping dock worker responsible
for the quality of the goods in the boxes he or she is shipping? Not only
would that be unfair, it would be bad management. A good manager would
argue, quite rightly, that the manufacturing process should be traced
back to find the ultimate source of the defects.
So how reasonable is it for managers to hold the final deliverer responsible
for the quality of the products or services he or she is delivering? The
person on the front serving line is a symptom carrier, not the source
of the problem. While he or she may be contributing to low service delivery,
blaming him or her is not only unfair, it's unproductive.
The basic problem is that people are visible, but the systems and organization
culture by which group and individual behavior is shaped are largely invisible.
So when something goes wrong, it's easy to trace the problem back to whoever
touched it last and lay the blame there.
If you put a good person into a bad system the system will win. This has
been proven so often that it has become a truism in the quality improvement
field called the "85/15 Rule". The 85/15 Rule shows that if
you trace errors or service complaints back to the root cause, about 85%
of the time the fault lays in the system, processes, structure, or practices
of the organization. Only about 15% of the ricochets can be traced back
to someone who didn't care or wasn't conscientious enough.
I've seethed in the seats of all too many airport gates waiting for a
late aircraft, or scrambling to find an alternate way home. Having a flight
attendant then give me a bag of peanuts and a big courteous smile doesn't
turn me into a satisfied customer. I often feel sorry for the attendants
(and the harried gate agents) while plotting my revenge for the faceless
bureaucrats and managers that can't get the organization's act together.
Frontline servers often provide delightful service in spite of, not
because of, their organization's support and systems. Given the many obstacles,
it's a minor miracle that service is being provided at all by some exceptionally
caring employees!
Many manifestations of the "our workforce is to blame" assumption
stem from the all too common, but badly misguided, inclination to begin
error "seek and destroy missions" by asking "who"
rather than "what" went wrong. Symptom carriers of the organization's
system and process problems are hunted down and hung by the neck. The
result is a culture of fixing the blame rather than the problem. A culture
of fear, cover your backside, and finger pointing.
If senior management truly wants to find the source of their organization's
declining service levels, the best place to start is with a long and deep
look in the mirror.
| Jim Clemmer is a bestselling author and internationally
acclaimed keynote speaker, workshop/retreat leader, and management
team developer on leadership, change, customer focus, culture, teams,
and personal growth. During the last 25 years he has delivered over
two thousand customized keynote presentations, workshops, and retreats.
Jim's five international bestselling books include The VIP Strategy,
Firing
on All Cylinders, Pathways
to Performance, Growing
the Distance, and The
Leader's Digest. His web site is www.clemmer.net.
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