Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

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Ease of Use, Lean CX Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

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…is often a situation problem.  Have you ever had a really bad day – maybe your car breaks down, your boss yells at you, you break your watch and then someone asks you to do something and instead of helping out you yell at them to leave you alone?  And they think “What a rotten guy!” when the reality is you would normally help, you were just having a bad day.  It was a bad situation.

People tend to blame the person, instead of realizing that it’s the situation that is the real issue.  If you were having a great day it would be easy to take on one more thing with a smile.  But the situation made you cranky, and lowered your likelihood of helping as a result.

What looks like a people problem, is often a situation problem.  This is one of the greatest lines from an excellent book – “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath.  And they make an excellent point.  If you change the situation, more often than not you change the people as well.

This is also where designing your work and your customer experience for Ease of Use comes in.  If the work is easy to do for your teams – with no rework, no waiting, no searching, as few steps as possible, and the right result at the end, then there is a very good chance they’ll do it right and do it more often.  The thing is, most people don’t really design their work at all, let alone get intentional about designing their work for ease of use.

Most leaders just let the work happen, and give some vague outcomes to their team to try and make it work.  In reality they are trying to find the treasure without making a map.

And in most cases, it’s not your fault.  The majority of people don’t know how to define difficult work in a way that reveals solutions to their problems.  Having the right framework, in the form of Lean CX, makes it easy.  By ensuring you have a clear outcome and a clear set of steps to get there, you are closer to getting the right result every time.  But by reducing the steps to getting that outcome, ensuring your staff or people know what to do first time without having to ask, make it impossible to make a mistake, and check in to see if they are on the right track, you will be creating a process that is extremely easy to do and you will see the profit, productivity and engagement flow as a result.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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