ROI of Silence and Solitude

The soul is like a wild animal – tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling, for it to come out. But if we walk quietly in the woods, sit patiently by the base of the tree and fade into our surroundings, the wild animal we seek might put in an appearance.
Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

The quickest way to build your capacity is to add silence and solitude to your list of daily practices. Taking time alone to reflect, think, plan and just be will do far more for you than keeping yourself busy and inundated with the noise and constant stimulations that compete for our attention. The benefits that you will receive will far outweigh your guilt for not being more productive or your discomfort with quiet. You will gain:

• Access to your inner creativity
• Clarity
• Opportunities to tap into insights that go beyond typical thinking processes

This Week’s Action: Pick a time and location that feels comfortable and safe from distractions and disruptions and simply do nothing. Try it for five minutes and see what happens.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2012. All rights reserved.

Action steps to ensure your customer service experiences are exceptional:

1. Gather data: Find out from your customers to what degree that they experience these outcomes as a result of their experience with your employees. Find out what your employees do (and don’t do) that interferes with your customer’s intent to repeat and recommend.
2. Define high priority expectations: Use this data to better define what YOUR employees need to do at your customer/employee moments of truth. Data is essential because every organization is different and what value you are promising is not the same as even your competitors. For example, what drives intent to repeat and recommend differs between Target and Wal-mart customers, even though they are in the same industry. Find out what matters most to your customers.
3. Translate high priority expectations into clear employee performance expectations. Use the outcomes to drive decisions on how your employees need to behave. Create meaningful performance objectives tied into related measures that your leaders can use to help guide and coach your employees.

Balance Thinking and Action
You become more personally powerful when you balance your external action with internal reflection and contemplation. Action without thought and replenishment (which is far, far more common in corporate life and western culture) leads to:

• Frenzied activity
• Controlling efforts to impose your own will
• Pay later decisions (ones that require a great deal of rework, hidden costs, etc.)
• And ultimately…
  • Frantic exhaustion
  • Burnout
  • Sense that our souls are fragmented

When you take a more balanced approach, you achieve greater capacity that enables:

• Your best decisions
• Growth
• Resilience to handle challenges and setbacks

This Week’s Action: Assess how well you balance your actions with reflection.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2012. All rights reserved.

What I appreciate about the book “The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World” is that is provides the following:

• Clear data that not only proves my belief that satisfaction leads to brand evangelism but also the connection between brand evangelism (my words) to sustainable profits.
• Distinction between good profits and bad (bad profits are the earnings that do not endure vs. good profits earned by the creation of value).
• The reality is that there are no short cuts to good profits. No silver bullets.
• The ultimate question that all customers should be asked: “how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”
• An approach for measuring success against this question and what actions to take that include getting your organization and employees aligned.

I believe that the principles that relate to customer service can be applied to improving employee engagement. For example, if you want to create employees who invest their discretionary effort with you (like we want our customers to invest their discretionary income with us), then you need to focus on trust. You can measure trust in that same simple question: “how likely is it that you would recommend working for this company to a friend or colleague.”

Trust is one of those often agreed principles that can be more theoretical and abstract to understand, measure and improve. This book provides an excellent means for quantifying what may on the surface appear to be unquantifiable. It takes out the mystery and replaces it with clear actions.

For more information on this book, check out: http://www.netpromotersystem.com/book/index.aspx

The Luxury of Capacity
Time management is overrated. The real secret to dealing with higher workloads and demands on your time is to focus on increasing your capacity. You have high capacity when you have the inner reserves required to enable you to act in the most effective manner. See visual below.

Rethink time management as self-management. Lack of time can be a barrier but it is only a symptom, not the cause.

This Week’s Action: Pay attention to your stress level and assess if you have the inner reserves to adequately deal with the challenges that your typical day brings you.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2012. All rights reserved.

Therefore, the business case for collaborative branding must begin with an understanding of the correlation between how engaged your employees are, their performance and your ability to fulfill your brand promises and ultimately your sustainable brand worth. Employee engagement relates to what extent your employees are emotionally and rationally committed to your organization. The outputs of engagement are: intent to stay and investment of discretionary effort. More engaged employees will go above and beyond for your customers time and time again.

The business case is summarized in the chart below.

• According to a 2005 study from the Corporate Leadership Council on engagement, there is a “The 10:6:2” Rule which means:
  • Every 10% improvement increases in commitment can increase an employee’s effort by 6%
  • Every 6% improvement in effort can increase an employee’s performance by 2%
• Customer “wins” is when your organization is able to strongly deliver on what is absolutely the most important to your customer (that he or she may or not have been aware of.) A “win” is what your do to far exceed your customer’s expectations. The research team at Walt Disney World was able to quantify the linkage between increasing the number of wins to customer satisfaction and ultimately to revenue.

This business case provides the burning platform for your marketing, operations, finance and human resource executives to work together on your annual strategic brand planning.

The truth is that there is a strong business case for engaging your employees in your mission and brand and it can be quantified. You may or may not have the expertise in house, you may or may not have the solid employee or customer data readily at hand. However, taking the time to create this business case will demonstrate for you and for the rest of your organization that your brand investment is one like any other investment and you should expect a return on it. However, to truly realize the return, you have to look broader than the simple metrics of customer acquisition (# of new prospects, etc.) because if you do, you are leaving money on the table. Increasing the number of new customers and revenue streams is important. But what if you could get those new customers and revenue streams while minimizing your marketing dollars? It is for this reason, you want to establish your business case. When your employees live your brand, your return on your brand investment will be exponentially higher because:

• Your perceived integrity will be higher
• The speed of your brand equity growth will be accelerated
• You will be able get these results by maximizing your existing assets (less marketing dollars, maximizing the return on your human capital investment)

Three Key Actions

1. Collect baseline data on your current levels of employee engagement (the extent your employees are rationally and emotionally committed to your organization) and customer satisfaction.
2. Identify the drivers of employee engagement and what constitutes a win in the minds of your customers
3. Find measurement experts who can help you connect the dots between these data points and your revenue achievement and brand worth.

Are You Successful?
If you believe that achieving success means more than how much money you make, you need to expand the indicators you use to track, measure and evaluate it. Consider adding:

1. Purpose – to what degree am I living in alignment with my values, talents and passion?
2. Presence – to what degree am I able to be fully alive and connected to whatever I am doing, whoever I am with?
3. Peace – to what degree do I have a sense of inner contentment?
4. Personal power – to what degree is my sense of self derived internally (vs. externally)?

This Week’s Action: Add these measures to your 2012 Success and Significance Plan and see how much value you want to (and do) gain and give this year.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2012. All rights reserved.

Success and Significance in 2012
If you want to experience greater success in all aspects of your life in 2012, forget about making New Year’s resolutions. They don’t work, but what does work is creating your Success and Significance Plan.

Your 2012 Success and Significance Plan needs to contain:

• Specific, measureable goals
• Actions to enable you to achieve goals
• Contingencies for when the actions do not work as intended
• Support and encouragement

Accountability is the key differentiator between aspirations and accomplishments. Assemble your own personal boot camp. Join a mastermind group. Get a career leadership coach.

Happy New Year! May you have all the courage, determination and will to make 2012 the year you achieve a spectacularly meaningful career and stellar results in all areas of your life.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2012. All rights reserved.

Look Inward to Define Success
Success can simply be defined as: achieving what is most important to you.

There is only one person who can determine if you are successful and that is you. True success can never be defined by using someone else’s form of measurement. Therefore, if you want greater success in 2012, you have to be clear on what you want. Ask yourself what success looks like in terms of:

• Career
• Family/Loved Ones
• Finances
• Personal growth

Think about which aspects of your life you feel the most and least successful in. And consider what you are going to stop, start and continue doing in 2012 to focus on what’s working and let go of what is not.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2011. All rights reserved.

Look Inward to See Forward
Last week we asked you how satisfied are you with what you accomplished this year. The majority of you said moderately satisfied (57%) and very satisfied (30%).

Albert Einstein once said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Therefore, if you want a different quality of success next year that you did not experience this year, you have to take the time to examine the self-limiting beliefs that might be holding you back.

Ask yourself:

• Why did I not achieve all that I wanted?
• What is holding me back?
• What inner thinking pattern must I change?

Our attitudes and what we believe in our minds and hearts ultimately dictate what we do. Therefore, if you want to soar in 2012, you have to eliminate whatever is preventing your ascent.

The Shine Peer Coaching Program starts in January. Member early bird discount ends December 15. Contact Lisa Martin to register.

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© Betsy Jordyn and Lisa Martin 2011. All rights reserved.