The Weiman Consulting Letter, December 2007

Wynnewood, PA

Here’s Looking at You, Kid
Quotation of the Month
Memo to the Customer Service Department
Updates from Weiman Consulting

Here’s Looking at You, Kid

I love the end of the year. Aside from holiday parties and spending time with friends and family, it is a wonderful time to reflect on the accomplishments and challenges of the past 12 months.

There is something powerful about reviewing what you’ve accomplished. And what obstacles got in your way. Looking at your goals and measuring your performance against where you had hoped to be.

Almost everyone reading this newsletter is in a senior leadership position. That means that you will be doing plenty of year-end evaluations of others. And you’ll probably receive feedback from supervisors, a 360, or even a Board.

But there’s something else you can do: You can look at yourself. Here’s how to do it:

Clear off your desk. Put everything away. Turn off your cell phone. Turn off automatic e-mail checking if you currently have it turned on.

If you created your own development plan for 2007, take that out and skim through it. But you won’t necessarily need it to do this self-review.

Write the following 7 questions down at the top of a sheet of paper, or copy them to a document, and answer them in order.

1. What was my most significant achievement this year? (In writing your response, include why it happened, who was involved, and why this was your most significant accomplishment. Did it support a major value? Achieve a top goal? What made it stand out?)
2. What was my most significant disappointment this year? (Why did it happen, what was your role, who else was involved?)
3. What values did I live most prominently this year? (What core values do you think you successfully promoted through your own behavior?)
4. What values do I prize, but didn’t live up to? (Were there any values that you wanted to promote more through your behavior, but didn’t?)
5. Whose lives, through my behavior, did I improve this year and how did I improve them?
6. Were there any people who were hurt by my behavior this past year? How and why?
7. What one activity did I do regularly this year that had the greatest leverage on helping achieve growth? (Think in terms of your impact and influence throughout the organization, throughout your team, or your interactions with key internal/external stakeholders.)

When you’re done, you should have a thorough assessment of the past year. If you did the exercise correctly, you scanned your memory for many activities, events, meetings, conversations and more that make up the fabric of executive life. As well, you should have a sense of the value you provided to others and your entire organization, as well as some clues as to where you need to focus your attention in the year ahead.

In other words, you really looked at yourself. And captured in writing what you saw.

Save your answers. In the January issue of the Weiman Consulting Letter, we’ll talk about how to use the key take-aways from this self-review as you plan for the year ahead.

Quotation of the Month

“Bill Gates is a very rich man today… and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.”
– Dave Barry, American humorist, 1947-

Memo to the Customer Service Department

I had a bad experience with a vendor, recently. It’s a reminder that critical information often does not get to the top of an organization: I called a customer service rep to dispute a charge that wasn’t in my contract. She said she couldn’t remove the charge and that I should call “The President’s Line” to escalate the problem.

The President doesn’t answer this line. In fact, no one does.

“Thank you for calling the President’s Line. Please leave a message and someone will respond to you within 24 hours.” I guess they didn’t mean 24 consecutive hours. I left two messages in October. No one has called me back.

I sent a letter to the CEO. An assistant called me two days later to apologize and correct the problem. The assistant was unaware of “The President’s Line,” learning about it for the first time from me. He said that the customer service rep had authority to refund the charge and was wrong for not doing so.

He admitted that they do not regularly monitor the Customer Service department; due to a surge of complaints recently, they were more interested in how bad it was in that department. They waited far too, long, as I easily found two years worth of complaints when I searched the company’s name on Google. I found entire web pages of complaints, and negative ratings of them on the epinions.com website.

Here are the take home points for your company:

• By the time you get a complaint letter, the problem most likely has been festering for a while and has affected many of your clients.
• Directly monitor customer service calls live or listen to recordings later. Do this weekly to learn how your clients are really being treated.
• Do not rely on customer surveys to judge your customer service department. People who are frustrated with a company frequently give up, move on, and don’t respond to customer satisfaction surveys.
• Survey former customers as a group to learn why they left your company.
• Root out rotten customer service supervisors. They will eventually kill your company’s reputation.
• Search your company name online with pejorative terms like “stinks” (and worse) to learn if there’s a groundswell of discontent about your company. The customer services department is the connective tissue between your company and your clients. Make sure you’re not the last to know that they’re the cause of a customer exodus.

Updates from Weiman Consulting

• In April 2008, David Frees and I are presenting The 3 Keys to Mastering Your Future, a two-day Las Vegas workshop experience where you will learn how to radically redefine and create the next level of success in your business life, your personal life – your whole life. There will be a limited number of seats for this workshop, so please if you want to be added to the mailing list for an invitation to this outstanding event.
• The Stress Solution, a stress reduction workbook for busy executives, is now available for immediate download as a PDF file. Use it to quickly and easily identify and overcome the sources of stress in your life. This is the first time this has been offered in electronic form. Visit The Stress Solution for information.