Nominations open January 4th 2011
Closing date for nominations March 31st 2011
Closing date for entry submission 5pm March 31st 2011
Finalists’ announcement April 11th 2011
Finals & Awards July 8th 2011

If you wish to nominate someone, submit an entry, be a judge, sponsor or exhibit then please let Anne Marie Lose know right away. The pre-launch interest has been massive.
For further information or to submit your entry please go to http://www.customerservicetrainingawards.com/

I look forward to celebrating with you.

Caroline

It was a great night in our house for a lifelong Fulham fan (well at least 5 out of his 9 years) and his more recently converted Dad and older brother but as I’m no football pundit I decided to listen to Roy Hodgson’s interview for his views on the secret of their success.

Two things came up very strongly:

1. The team played to their strengths. Even after going 1-0 down following a brilliant Hamburg goal they stuck to their plan and continued to play in a way that suited them rather than making a desperate change. They plugged away and were rewarded with two goals.

2. Once again Hodgson praised the character and determination of the team something he has done consistently all season.

Both of the above are consistent with so much that has been written about great leadership – try any of Marcus Buckingham’s books for a start – and reflect our beliefs at Leaps & Bounds too.

So, are you encouraging your people (at work and at home) to play to their strengths and continually giving them the support and praise that will develop a real determination to succeed?

I do hope Roy can do that for Fulham for one more game. Come on you Whites!

Gill

As such, for those of you who enjoy psychometric tests and quizzes, the Chartered Institute of Management (CMI) have brought out a wonderful app that allows you to explore your management style – and I’d love to know how you get on. It consists of 12 simple questions and regardless of the outcome, the questions make you think, quickly, about some simple changes you can make to help you be the best leader you can be. The link to their site is here

In the news this week, it was reported that in Yorkshire people resorted to crawling across roads to avoid falls on the ice and in Oxford the inner child came out as we saw police officers sledging on riot shields. http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/oxford/hi/people_and_places/newsid_8458000/8458645.stm (couldnt resist posting the bbc link!)

Both of these stories struck a chord with me for different reasons.

Firstly, how capable and tenacious we all can be in the face of adversity. Whether adversity is physical conditions like the weather or increasing pressure at work, if we focus on a solution rather than hooking into the problem, then we can make progress. Pedestrians in Yorkshire simply had enough of falling when taking the usual steps to cross a road so decided to go on all fours and crossed safely without injury.

So how can we apply this lessons at work? Ask yourself these questions:

1. What am I doing that is just not making progress i need/expect? (analyse)
2. What do I want to achieve? (check in the desired outcome)
3. How else can I make progress? (challenge if there are alternative methods.. knwo that there is ALWAYS a different way to make progress)

As we all know, the quality of our solution can often depend on the quality of our questions and it is easy to get hooked into the ‘usual practice’. Take this time to focus on your outcome and try a different way.

More on questioning on our website www.leaps-bounds.co.uk/insights/freereport/

The second story interested me because many people were appalled that police officers were taking time out whilst on duty and using police gear to get them down the slope. On one level I completely understand that judgement but also let’s face it, wouldn’t most of us take a moment to enjoy the play if given the chance? How many people didn’t go into work during the snowy days even when they possibly could have? Let’s watch who and what we judge and checkour own actions before cricising others. We all make choices and decisions that have a knock on effect . For example, in our locality, very few primary schools in our area kept open during the snow. One of them that did was our children’s school (they were gutted ) The reason is because the Head teacher understands her responsibility to the community and that if the children couldn’t go to school, many parents couldn’t get to work and many carers couldn’t get to care for the vulnerable people in the community who need their support. Her teachers come from far and wide and those that could came in. Some parents also mucked in to help. Paths were cleared and salted before the children arrived to make sure they were as safe as possible. They opened and the children had great fun. Just for the record, this school is www.bromptonwestbrook.medway.sch.uk/ These people know that for every action and choice they make there is alwasy a consequence and it is important to think through these consequences befroe taking action.

So maybe we could all challenge ourselves more about what is the right thing before we criticise others. Let them play! I bet these police officers do a great and very valued job when they are off the slopes.

Make this year the year when you think through alternatives when things don;t go quite right or question the consequences of your actions on others and if all of us did a little bit what a great place it would be.  Remember ti is oftne the little things that make the most difference. Take a look at http://www.wearewhatwedo.org/ to help steer your everyday actions. Enjoy

What I’ve noticed from my analysis is that every time I shop in Waitrose I look for Janet on the tills because without question, if she is working I will queue just to be served by her… the reason?

No, not because I’m a creature of habit … It’s because Janet provides that extra little bit that always makes me leave the store with a smile.

Now, take nothing away from the other employees in my local store – they are all extremely polite, efficient and always provide great service… but there is something slightly different about Janet.

What I’ve noticed is that she always does the following – with what seems to be any customer who comes to her checkout:

1. Asks you how your day is going, and genuinely listens to start a conversation
2. Smiles – and genuinely smiles… she truly looks like she is enjoying what she does, so you cant help but smile with her
3. Treats you with real care

And as a result she gets me returning to her checkout time and time again, because of the way I feel after my interaction with her!

So, how many of your team members create repeat customers like this? What could we all learn from Janet?

Enjoy your customer interactions this weekend!

Carly x

http://leapsbounds.whitespacers.com/insights/freereport/

This has been one of our most commented on threads and its been great to see the development of the topic.

I was then sent a link to a video of Dan Pink speaking about the Surprising Science of Motivation – by our ‘online guru’ Carl Jeffrey and it has inspired me this morning to STOP WHAT I’M DOING AND SPREAD THIS MESSAGE FURTHER!

Dan Pink now proves the conflict that there is a mismatch between what Sciences Knows and What Businesses Do when it comes to motivating staff.

No longer can we continue to use external motivators to boost our team members performance, we must develop the internal motivators so they want, need and boost their performance for themselves.

The new model talks about encouraging three things:

1. Autonomy

2. Mastery

3. Purpose

I encourage all of you to watch Dan Pinks very engaging talk about the scientific proof that building internal motivators is the best way forward for our businesses to increase and enhance productivity (it will take you about 20 minutes to watch and digest so get yourself a cuppa). Please pass this link on to anybody you feel would benefit!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y[/youtube]

I’m a customer who has experienced World Class Service from a call centre advisor who’s got the internal motivators to do the best they can and it makes a massive difference! So help me spread the word and encourage managers to use the new model!!

Enjoy!

p.s. Thanks to Carl for passing this on!

Carly

There was an interesting piece on GMTV yesterday morning questioning whether people were getting their work-life balance right or wrong. Check out their article here http://www.gm.tv/articles/36522-work-life-balance.html

Whilst there are some interesting suggestions in the article – People confiding in colleagues more than partners and people spending more time planning their annual review rather than a romantic dinner at home etc – what was much more poignant for me was the conversation between Penny Smith and ‘The Apprentices’ Phillip Taylor.

As part of their conversation Phillip said to Penny something along the lines of ‘Is it any wonder that people are spending more time at work – because of the climate I would want to show my boss how committed I am’ (sorry if I haven’t quite got the words exact, but the gist of it was:

Current Climate + More Hours at Work = Shows you are a committed employee and your boss will recognise that.

This is something I am experiencing in lots of organisations I am visiting at the moment.

It’s an interesting one – managers don’t seem to be expecting people to work longer, but employees seem to be doing it off their own back… and the biggest thing for me is, how come people are more focused on doing extra hours at work as opposed to working out how they can increase their contribution for the same amount of hours.

If you were a manager would you rather people focus on the overtime they could be doing or how they can maximise their contribution in their normal working hours?

And if you are a manager, how can you encourage this rather than having staff doing unnecessary (and often unpaid) overtime which then has a detrimental impact on their work-life balance.

As we know, if peoples’ work-life balance isn’t right they won’t be able to perform at their best…

So top tips would be:

· Notice – Have you noticed an increase in the time your people are spending at work

· Question – Ask yourself if the extra time is increasing your people’s contribution

· Talk – Talk to your people and ask how their work-life balance is (Use solution focused scaling questions to explore how it could be improved with no impact on the business)

· Coach – ‘A Managers job is to get results through people’… so coach your people, have regular conversations to stretch performance and recognise their contribution.

· Check – Check your Work-life balance… are you getting it right (sometimes we can fall into the trap of being busy for being busys sake… so make sure your time at work is spent fully contributing to the business and your time at home is dedicated to you and your home life)

Enjoy the ride!

Thanks to www.gm.tv for inspiring this blog!

Carly

With all this talk about the credit crunch, with some banks making money and some banks still losing money, house prices up, house prices down it got me thinking about the need to continuously plan, do and review.

Both at home and at work the need to keep doing this now more than ever, why? Well we live in an ever changing world, at work things change from moment to moment, at home it’s the same because we spend more time at work then we do at home it naturally feeds from one to the other.

I’ll give you an example both my wife and I are self employed and my wife’s contract comes to an end in 2 months time so last weekend we decided to do a review of our finances and applied a “just in case” scenario and this covered things like:

· contract does not get renewed

· unable to find another contract

· fall ill and unable to work for 6 months

Did we have enough to make sure we could get through and the answer was Not Enough!

Just to give you some background we are pretty good at planning our finances and the last time we reviewed them was back in March. The interesting thing was having reviewed it last week we were still able to slash 20% off our monthly budget to go towards our “just in case” fund. So for example we have declared the month of August as a “no spend” month apart from essentials, did we need to have a glass of wine every night with our meal-but we can have a glass with our meal at the weekend. Cook meals at the weekend that can act as leftovers during the week-a curry a few days later are soo much nicer – if you ask nicely I will email you the recipe. Now we are spending all of August at home we have made a list of the things we were going to sort out around the house that have been in storage in the attic and will put any good stuff on ebay or gumtree and sell them.

So how does this relate to business-well it’s a good opportunity to look at your plans more regularly rather than leaving them., have you thought about all the “just in case” scenarios so that you, your team, department or business are as prepared as possible.

Good luck with your planning, doing and reviewing and let us know how you are getting on.

Dilesh

Some useful websites:

www.moneysupermarket.com

www.comparethemarket.com

www.moneysavingexpert.com

www.businessballs.com

www.ebay.com

www.gumtree.com

If you are interested in joining a comment competition with Chartered Management Institute http://blog.managers.org.uk/

So Amazon have bought Zappos – wow – a video of Amazon CEO talking to Zappos staff http://blog.managers.org.uk/post/jeff-bezos-talks-to-zappos-561.aspx#id_1fcb87d1-e0a1-45ed-b0f4-459cfb470848

Some interesting thoughts on professional speaking http://realsmartnow.net/2009/07/06/speaking-it-real/

Beware of giving poor service – a song about United Airlines http://blog.managers.org.uk/post/Beware-giving-poor-customer-service-United-Airlines-broke-my-guitar3d6261.aspx#id_ec65e9af-1573-49c2-860f-86def496143b

Last week sees BA staff being prepared to work a month for free in order to help their company – is this the start of a transformation in the employee contract? www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XNFYBB1j_Q

How to thrill your audience with Power Point http://www.psychotactics.com/artpowerpoint

A short interesting blog on how blinkered we can get and how this inhibits innovation http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/anthony/2009/07/how_knowledge_can_hurt_innovat.html

Non business

If you have a new kitten – http://www.whiskas.co.uk/MyWhiskasKitten.aspx?cellID=GB_1452_2

Your mission if you choose to accept it http://thenextweb.com/2009/07/23/mission-today-accept/

Want a garden composter? http://www.thegreenfamilia.co.uk/garden-king-220-litre-composter/

If you live in South London and want something fun to do on Saturday afternoon http://www.younglambeth.org/Play-Pathfinder/Events-Calendar.aspx

Enjoy and have a great weekend.