I was having dinner the other night with a former employee, and I surprised her with something I said. For the previous 11 years we had worked together in a business in which one of my responsibilities was furthering the culture. The culture when I arrived was of the consensus style of collaborative management, and it was made clear that there would be no other approach. Not having run a consensus management approach before, I embraced it and did my best to carry it forward.

As the business grew significantly over the years (it got to well over 500 people), the challenges of requiring full consensus became more and more difficult. Many times I wondered if we were doing the right thing, and my leadership group frequently expressed discouragement and frustration with the process (and sometimes, the results). But consensus style was the requirement, so we created new and useful methods of enhancing communication and encouraging buy-in and performance.

Looking back on it, I believe we did more with a full consensus management approach than any other company I have been able to find information on. And I think the tools we developed will have tremendous application in the years to come. But the thing I said that surprised my dinner date so much was that I would not do it again.

“But, I thought you were a full supporter of it! I thought it was primarily your idea!” she said.

Full supporter, yes. Primarily my idea? Well, the management style was clearly not my idea. A lot (but not all) of the tools were my idea or were tools that I incorporated based on others’ ideas. But sometimes we support something because that’s what we’ve been hired to do. And it was an exciting challenge. I had no reason to believe that full consensus management was a bad thing, nor did I have enough experience (nobody did, back then) to suggest it couldn’t scale to what we were trying to accomplish.

I do believe that with the help of a powerful management team we created tools that will be wildly effective in other environments. But my experience also taught me full consensus management can not be successful beyond a few dozen people.

Learn More About Collaborative Management Tools

However, I do believe in collaborativemanagement.

To be specific, there are three management/cultural styles: control, competitive, and collaborative. Within collaborative management there are two different styles: consensus and consultative.

Consensus is where everyone has a voice and the requirement is for the group to work hard to come to full agreement before proceeding. I think this is very important for marriages and partnerships. It’s important for boards of directors. It is style that can work among people who are essentially equals in intellect, experience and commitment.

Consultative style is where the people in authority say “I’ll gather your opinions, I’ll take them seriously and learn from them, but then I’ll make the decision because it’s my responsibility to do.” Some decisions may be made by one authority, others by a group of similarly responsible authorities. It’s still collaborative management, but with parameters.

Why do I think consultative works where consensus does not? Part of the answer is in this sentence: “Consensus is possible among people who are essentially equals in intellect, experience and commitment.” Part of the answer lies in the fact that people want, deserve, and expect to experience good leadership. And part of the answer is that when you try to export democracy into entities that have fundamental constructs that will prevent them from benefiting from it, all you get is anarchy.

Criticism: The Fire in the Forge of Great Leadership

People respect responsibility and authority when they are appropriately demonstrated. When a business leader spends all his or her time saying, “well, what do you think?” “Maybe we should let an ad hoc address this,” or “I think the answer will present itself if we have the right discussion with the right parties present,” those are not the messages the people hear. What they hear is, “I don’t know,” “I’m hoping an ad hoc will bail my ass out,” and “I’m hoping that if we get more people together you won’t find out that I don’t know.” Even if that leader means to be collaborative and show respect for the opinions of others, the result is that they’re being indecisive and wasting time.

I was told by the founder of the company I mentioned at the beginning of this article that if you get a group of people together and ask them a bunch of questions they’ll come up with the right answer. I was further told that the question-asker didn’t even have to be an expert in that area. Where the heck did he come up with that idea? It’s a complete bastardization of the Socratic concept, preached by someone who never understood it in the first place. Either the question-asker or the question-answerers have to know what they are talking about. Otherwise, it’s that old cliché of the blind leading the blind. And the idea that Socrates only asked questions and didn’t outright teach? Well that’s just not true. Read the dialogues of Plato or of Xenophon and you’ll see that Socrates talked a lot more than he asked! Which is no criticism of Socrates – it was right that he should talk when he had so much to teach.

When people are being led down a blind alley, they don’t appreciate it. And they shouldn’t. They might get beaten up or mugged. Consensus management in its pure, theoretical form would hold out not just for agreement but for complete understanding. Complete understanding on a broad range of topics (such as one confronts in a business) requires an elevated level of knowledge and thinking skills, not to mention maturity. In the absence of that sort of parity, consensus management descends into the abyss of equalness and fairness, along with a strange tendency for everyone involved to think they know more than they actually do.

I will definitely do collaborative management again. I like collaboration. I like creating an environment in which everyone is encouraged to contribute their ideas and their knowledge and to step out on a limb from time to time with something truly outrageous or from left field. I have always loved the thrill of realizing that person working on the dock is actually on the school board of their town, that the guy in receiving skis Switzerland every winter, and that the woman in the Call Center once owned her own business and sold it for nearly a million dollars. People are interesting and intelligent and a lot more complex than most businesses want to recognize. Yep. I want to get to know all those interesting people. I want to incorporate their ideas and their knowledge, and I want to include them to the full extent they wish to be included and at the appropriate level of responsibility for their skills and experience.

But I’ll do it in a consultative style. Because at the end of the day, people have a right and a desire to know who is responsible for what, and to expect their leaders to be well-informed about the topic at hand. They have a right to expect their leaders to be voracious in acquiring new knowledge. And they have a right to expect their leaders to be teachers, passing that knowledge on every chance they get. People don’t mind being led, and when they understand the ground rules, they are great about contributing their ideas. What they dislike is being waffled. Don’t you?

What is a fair compensation rate for retail sales staff today? And how should commissions  be structured? Andrea Hill gives advice for the jewelry industry in this article in InStore Magazine.

From InStore Magazine online, April 2, 2019:

I have an employee who makes $16 an hour and 6 percent on retail (although for loose diamonds, commission is based on gross profit). She earns close to $60,000 a year but feels underpaid and that paying gross profit on diamonds is contrary to the industry standard. How can I convince her she has it pretty good?

She does indeed have it pretty good, says industry consultant Andrea Hill, owner of Hill Management Group, noting that her hourly rate is almost 50 percent higher than the average for retail salespeople of $11.50, and even more than the average of $15 paid by very high-end luxury retailers (think Gucci). The commission is also higher than the industry average of 3-4 percent on retail, although, significantly, Hill notes, “wise” businesses are increasingly moving away from such a formula to pay commission on gross margins. “In this way, sales professionals are challenged to balance the need to get the highest price possible with the need to close the sale. When commissions are paid out on total sales only, then it becomes very easy for the salesperson to sacrifice profits for the easy close,” she says. While exposure to such numbers should mollify your associate, what you really want to do is excite her about the potential of earning as much as $100,000 a year — which is what top luxury salespeople make — although that requires building a “strong book” of customers through active networking, clienteling and prospecting work. Keep in mind, however, that even the most generous commission rate won’t help if you’re not on top of your game, meaning advertising intelligently, keeping up with changing retail trends, providing the right technology for how consumers today want to shop, and maintaining an exciting inventory that reflects current tastes, says Hill. “If the retail business owner does not ensure that they are running a strong merchandising and marketing operation, then even the best salesperson in the world will not be able to turn the promise of commission into actual earnings.”

It's been a long time since I had to report to anyone at work other than my customers or a Board of Directors. But not so long that I couldn't remember being asked to fetch coffee, pick up a birthday gift for the wife, have my suggestions mocked (instead of politely declined), or simply ignored. I'm fairly thick-skinned, and that type of treatment most often inspired a wait-until-I'm-rich-and-you're-still-working-here internal response. But when I witnessed this behavior happening to others, and ultimately to my children, my response was much more emotional. What does it mean to honor an employee's dignity? For starters, it means remembering that you are not doing them a favor. The employer/employee exchange is one of parity - one works, the other pays money. These exchanges need to be in balance for dignity to be a possibility. Second, it means that the employer takes seriously his responsibility to train, guide, and communicate. People don't come into any new job automatically knowing how things work. Even the same job in a different company can be radically different than your version of that job. To bring a new employee on and then doom her to failure due to lack of structure, expectations, or instruction is to undermine her dignity. Its a bit too easy, when you're the boss, to forget that there are often many ways to arrive at a particular destination. It's your responsibility to honestly identify which paths are nonnegotiable and which have some flexibility of approach. To deny others the right to think any way but your way is to discount their value - and therefore their dignity. Unfortunately, many business owners believe that the absence of profanity or yelling means they have created a dignified workplace, but some of the most demeaning behavior I have ever witnessed was done with a smile and polite language. To respect someone's dignity is to respect his essential equality, his inherent value, and his full potential to not only contribute, but to teach you something as well. To create a workplace imbued with dignity, we must endeavor to be genuinely dignified ourselves.

This week, at Initiatives in Art and Culture’s Gold Conference, the opening evening event – normally reserved for an outing at an atelier or exhibit – was instead devoted to a panel on issues facing women in the jewelry industry.

The topic of gender bias is hardly unique to our industry. But as a small industry, it is perhaps more important to our overall success and more difficult to discuss than for other industries.I won’t try to recap the conversation in a linear way. I don’t think I could. Hedda Schupak kicked things off by asking the panel how the jewelry industry was managing gender bias relative to other industries, and within three or four minutes, the entire audience was involved in the conversation.

Immediately, women began telling their stories. One woman’s career was ruined by a male colleague's idea of a  “joke.” He liked to tell their co-workers that she had slept her way to her current position. After being passed over for promotions for which she was more than qualified, she approached Human Resources. The HR representative told her that the belief she had been sleeping with higher-ups had led to her being passed over. An investigation discredited the male colleague and his “joke,” but it didn’t matter. Her career there could not recover. She transferred to a different company, and the male colleague suffered no consequences.

Another woman, a senior marketing executive, spoke of advocating to be included in a major advertising agency meeting as part of a powerful diamond industry group. She was the only trained marketing executive in the group, and the only woman — in a market that sells almost exclusively to women. And yet, when the meetings commenced, they made her leave the room. It was humiliating for her (and genuinely stupid of the men).

Participants spoke of women in our industry being belittled, ignored, talked over, humiliated, passed by for promotions. Groped. Raped. Trapped in jobs they could not afford to leave. Of women contemplating suicide.

At one point during this free-wheeling discussion, a women in the audience expressed how upset she was with the panel. She said she had expected this to be a positive experience, claiming, “All I'm hearing is negativity! Stop with all the man vs. woman stuff! ” I could see that several women agreed — and many more empathized — with her.

Then I looked at the faces of some of the men I know well — some alone, and some with their wives. Men who would gladly make gender discrimination disappear. It occurred to me how difficult this conversation must be for them. Yet, I could see that these men were fully present, along with us for the pain and discomfort, willing to listen, learn, and participate. And I could see that none of their wives felt the need to shield them, nor make excuses for them. These wives trusted – and expected – their husbands to handle it.

Painful Things are Hard to Discuss

Ask anyone who has ever been on the brink of divorce, only to turn the corner and go on to have a stronger marriage, what changed. You will almost certainly hear that they finally learned to discuss the hard things in a productive manner. Not necessarily a positive manner — it’s practically impossible to have a hard conversation without saying difficult things, and difficult can be scary and painful. But productive conversations lead to positive outcomes.

This isn't just a painful topic. It's a confusing topic. So much of what we know about being men and women, and communicating with one another, is indoctrinated, inculturated social behavior. Much of what we enjoy about hanging out with members of the opposite sex is the dynamic tension and and perspective that comes from being different from one another. But we aren't really equal, are we? When two groups come together to share experiences and work, and one group has inherently more power than the other, even seemingly innocuous statements and behaviors can be fraught with hidden meanings and interpretations. So there are sandtraps and land mines everywhere we turn.

It's also very difficult to understand privilege from the perspective of privilege.

One of the things it is hard for men to recognize is how insidious gender bias is. Most men would agree that groping and rape are wrong. But what about all the other behaviors that undermine women? Studies demonstrate that women are expected to answer phones, set up meetings, fill out paperwork, take meeting notes, fetch beverages, bring or order food for office events, and head thankless committees at more than twice the rate of their male peers working the same jobs. Women are still treated as a servant class within business.

Men are more likely to take calls from other men, more likely to return voice mails left by other men, and take chances on men when making decisions about investments. In other words, men have more access to power and money than women have. They are also the often unconscious beneficiaries of presumed excellence. According to Forbes magazine, “when symphony orchestras started using blind auditions by placing candidates behind screens and drapes, the number of women in the five leading orchestras in the US increased five-fold.”

Women Still Lack Representation in Jewelry Business

In the jewelry industry, it is difficult to identify the percentage of women in leadership, as so much of the industry is very private and family-owned. However, of nine major jewelry industry associations, women make up only 20.5% of overall board seats. This is a far cry from the 50.8% of US population represented by women, or the fact that – other than engagement rings (which, even if men buy them, women still heavily influence) – women make a whopping 78% of women’s jewelry purchases (and wear over 90% of all jewelry sold).

When women cannot penetrate places of power, and cannot benefit from the same presumed excellence that men experience, it damages our ability to improve our lives.

The solution to these problems isn’t A) try harder and B) be patient. We’ve been trying damn hard, and we’ve been more than patient. The solution is for men to make a point of bringing women into their circles of power. If every enlightened man would do that for just two women, how fast could things change? Educated, qualified, hard-working women are extremely easy to find. If you’re reading this and you don't (realize you) know some of these women, give me a call. I’ll be happy to make the introductions.

In addition to issues of access, presumed excellence, and equal treatment, many women on the panel and in the audience agreed that sexual harassment continues to be an issue in our industry. Jenny Luker and Brandee Dallow talked about the sexual harassment training initiative the Women's Jewelry Association (WJA) has put together with the Jeweler's Vigilance Committee (JVC) to educate jewelry  businesses. We need this training at all levels. If people won't stop harassing one another because it's the right thing to do, then at least let them be aware of the legal consequences. If you have never been through a sexual harassment training before, please avail yourself of it immediately. Apparently, character and ethics are not sufficient to solve this problem. So let's all get educated. The more of us who understand what sexual harassment is, the more likely we are to take the proper legal action when it occurs.

But what about all the behavior that is discriminating, yet doesn't meet the threshold of illegal?

The Difference Between Sexual Harassment and Hostile Work Environment

I am a big fan of public shaming. It doesn't happen often enough, because women are trained to politely laugh off inappropriate comments and behavior, and men are trained not to notice it (or to not go against other men). But imagine this: What if, every time one of us – male or female – heard someone else (male or female) make a gender discriminating comment, we said, “That’s not cool. Don’t say things like that.” Publicly, calmly, in-the-moment. If we consistently shamed the behavior, the intentional discriminators would become intimidated, and the obtuse would (hopefully) become educated.

It’s unrealistic to expect people to stand up for themselves in this way. If you’ve ever been at the receiving end of a personal attack, even a joking one, then you know it can take your breath away and leave you feeling unable to respond until after the moment has passed. We must step up and denounce discriminatory behavior for others.

Where's My Prize?

Later that evening and again the next day, several people asked why some are women so averse to discussing the topic of gender bias. I suspect that some have simply drunk the social Kool Aid. Issues of gender bias are currently all caught up in our divisive political discourse - though frankly, they shouldn't be identified with any political position at all. Some people don’t like to think deeply and resent being required to do so.

But some women are carrying around the pain and shame of their own victimization, and self-preservation demands that they keep it buried. My heart goes out to them. It takes a lot of resilience to discuss terrible things that have happened in the past. And now, I have another insight, which came from a woman in her 30s who was in attendance. As we left the building that evening, she asked me – her eyes filled with tears – “Where’s my prize for sucking it up all these years? Because that’s what I’ve had to do."

That, perhaps, is one of the hardest things to explain to gender-discrimination-deniers and the chauvinism-blind. How we suck it up. How we laugh it off. Not because we want to. Not because we think it’s funny. Not because we aren’t humiliated and angry and sick of it. Tired of it. All of it.

As Barbara Palumbo said, we suck it up because this may be the only jewelry company in town, and we can’t afford to spend 15 years in a different industry learning new skills and getting back to what we are earning now. We suck it up because we don’t want to move away from family and friends to do work we love, work that supports our families. We suck it up because the next place could be just as bad, so why make the sacrifice in the first place?

One of my male colleagues asked me the next day, “Is it any better? Is it getting better?” And I told him, yes, it is. If I compare now to the late 1970s, the statistics support (and I’ve seen) a steady, incremental, improvement. But better isn’t the same as fixed, and gender discrimination is still a real problem that holds us back and leaves women more vulnerable to violence and poverty than men will ever experience.

I do feel bad for some men right now. Men who would never use the phrase “like a girl,” or discount a woman. Men who are conscious that, even though they don’t discriminate, they bear the burden of being part of the solution. These men must take accountability for their gender to make things right. These men suffer the skepticism and distrust of this moment; distrust they haven’t done anything personally to earn.

I even have some compassion for the tin-eared men who say inflammatory things about women because they think they are being funny. Men who may be good husbands and fathers, but who struggle to understand their own bias in order to overcome it. This can be a painful, confusing process. I hope they are tough enough to stick with it and get through it.

But I could never, ever feel bad for men the way I feel bad for women. From the mouthy to the meek, young to old, optimistic to jaded — women have put up with men’s insistence on our second-class personhood while expecting us to keep their homes, extended families, and communities functioning for over a millennium. We’re so conditioned to this bullshit that we don’t recognize it when we do it to each other.

So we must have these hard conversations. We must vent, and listen, and strengthen one another. We may have to re-hash the topic many more times, because we’ve been holding it in for so long, and real change requires a lot of attention. These conversations will help us confess our pain, find our support networks, put on our armor, then get out there and change our world. One chaotic, painful, and exhilarating panel at a time.

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Thank you to Lisa Koenigsberg, PhD, founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture, for making this panel happen at the 8^th Annual Gold Conference. Thanks also to Hedda Schupak, panel moderator, and panelists Wendy Brandes, Brandee Dallow, Jenny Luker, and Barbara Palumbo.

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Data published in Tim Smedley’s "The Inclusive Workplace" found that teams that are representative of their target client are up to 158 percent more likely to understand their client. No wonder the diamond industry is in such a mess right now.

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Gender Makeup of Jewelry Industry Boards

Organization	Male	Female	% of Women
MJSA	11	4	26.7%
Jewelers of America	15	9	37.5%
American Gem Trade Association	13	3	18.8%
American Gem Society	12	6	33.3%
Jeweler's Vigilance Committee	30	11	26.8%
Diamond Manufacturers and Importers of America	26	2	7.1%
Diamond Dealers Club of New York	21	0	0.0%
Natural Color Diamond Association	13	3	18.8%
International Diamond Manufacturer's Association	6	0	0.0%
Total gender balance	147	38	20.5%
The only jewelry association with a strong female board makeup is the Women's Jewelry Association
Women's Jewelry Association	2	29	93.5%

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References

Bergstein, R. (2017, August 9). Female Self-Purchasing Isn't Just a Jewelry Industry Pipedream. Forbes.

Catalyst. (2018). Women's Representation on Fortune 500 Boards Inches Upwards. New York: Catalyst.

Joan C. Williams, R. D. (2014). What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know. New York and London: New York University Press.

M. E. Heiulman, J. J. (2005). Same Behavior, Different Consequences: Reactions to Men's and Women's Altruistic Citizenship Behavior. APA PsycNET, 10.

Pham, T. (2016, December 20). Think You're Not Biased Against Women at Work? Read This. Forbes.

Sheryl Sandberg, A. G. (2015, February 6). Madam CEO, Get Me a Coffee. New York Times.

Smedley, T. (2014, May 15). The Evidence is Growing - There Really is a Business Case for Diversity. Financial Times.

Tristan L. Botelho, M. A. (2017). Research: Objective Performance Metrics Are Not Enough to Overcome Gender Bias. Harvard Business Review.

Williams, J. C. (2014, April 16). Sticking Women with the Office Housework. Wall Street Journal, p. 1.

Micromanagement limits your business. By focusing on the strategic aspects of managing, you cultivate more innovative, effective employees. Your bottom line -and your employees!- will thank you. #ManagementStyles #Leadership

I am fixated lately on the topic of outstanding customer service. As a road-warrior and constant consumer of restaurant, hotel, car rental, coffee shop, salon, apparel, and convenience store services domestically and abroad, in community sizes ranging from tiny Iowa towns to London, I suspect I encounter a reasonable approximation of what customer service means today. What I have encountered is a strange dichotomy.

Customer Service Out, Customer Service Culture In

On the one hand, excellent customer service is no longer treated as a differentiator by consumers. Twenty years ago, a business could set itself apart by touting its fantastic service. Advertising one’s customer service prowess or awards for customer service meant something to consumers, and it was often excellent service that businesses chose to feature in taglines. Today, excellent service is a minimum standard necessary to compete. Boasting about or branding with excellent customer service is like advertising an automobile and saying, "It runs! It goes up to 75 mph!"

On the other hand, excellent customer service can be very difficult to find, even in the luxury sector. At a time when consumer expectations regarding service are higher than ever, why aren’t businesses stepping up and delivering?

Because excellent – no, outstanding – customer service is one of the hardest things to do. You can’t automate it. You can’t script it or cookie-cutter it. You can’t ensure it with policy or rules. Excellent customer service is about people, and people run on motivation.

When I refer to customer service, I’m not just talking about direct personal interactions. Think of all the people in non-customer facing roles that have significant influence over how the customer feels about the company:

• The web developer that cares about customer experience creates shopping interfaces that are simple, fast, and efficient and filter or search functions that quickly provide the right answers.
• The systems person that creates strong data warehouse tools helps customer-facing team-members quickly find and deliver information to interested customers.
• The purchasing staffer who does such thoughtful forecasting and planning that the right products are in the right places at the right times – so customers can find them.
• The CFO who supports the creation of simple, easy return policies to ensure customer satisfaction.
• The marketing team member who thoughtfully manages customer lists to ensure that the most relevant email campaigns go to each list subscriber.
• The production worker who looks for the tiniest errors to ensure a customer never finds one.
• The shipping clerk who packs every box as if the contents are fragile and going to his own mother.

To deliver outstanding customer service, a company must motivate every single employee in every single role to think about how his or her work will affect the customer.

Outstanding Customer Service Starts with the Right Ingredients

I do not believe in the adage you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But I do believe that our essential ingredients – personality, character, and self-discipline – are fairly set by the time we reach adulthood. The truth is, some people are wired to deliver an outstanding customer experience because they are empathetic, interested in others, and motivated to serve. If the people you hire don’t start with those essential characteristics, no amount of training, cajoling, or threatening will induce them to become passionate service people.

But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? Because those aren’t the only ingredients you need. When you hire a sales person who must deliver outstanding customer service, they must combine empathy and service-orientation with self-confidence and the ability to influence someone to part with their cash. On the other hand, if you are hiring a nurse, you need a person who combines empathy and service orientation with the ability to handle tremendous pressure, mete out pain, and deliver difficult news with pragmatic calm, all while keeping the patients from becoming frightened. An airline attendant must combine empathy and service orientation with vigilance. These are three very different recipes.

The Human Resource function has evolved to do a much better job of finding the best ingredients and matching them with roles and teams, and many new business tools and practices are available to support best practices in hiring, onboarding, and training. But are most businesses using these tools? Unscientific research (i.e., observation) would suggest that they are not. If you invest in one area of improvement for your service-dependent business this year, do a better job of matching the right people with the right teams and jobs.

Pre-Employment Assessments that Help You Build a Customer Service Culture

First You Solve the Processes . . .

The full saying goes, first you solve the process, then you solve the people. The source of most people-problems at work is process problems. If your processes are unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, inconsistent or – worse! – nonexistent, your people cannot give consistent – let alone outstanding – service. Make sure that your business processes are simple, effective, complete (which means no opportunities to drop the ball), documented, and trained. In that order. Let’s do that again:

1. Simple
2. Effective
3. Complete (this means that each process design is complete, from beginning to completion and monitoring)
4. Documented
5. Trained

Walk into any company that delivers consistently outstanding customer service, and you’ll find excellent process management. Why? Because the end result – outstanding customer service – is dependent on each company defining what service means according to its own brand and standards, defining the services that deliver the required level of care, and being able to train all employees involved in each service area to deliver the same services in the same ways.

Outstanding Service Comes from Effective Management

Good management is essential to business success. Too many businesses approach management as a personality trait, or the thing we do when we’re creating schedules, granting time off, or creating reports. In fact, great management comes from two terms that are not terribly in vogue these days, concepts that seem related to old, hierarchical models of business: command and control. But when you break these concepts down and examine the details, you see how important they are.

Command

I use the term command because it’s still the term that is taught in business schools and recognized as one of the pillars of management. Other effective terms would be influence, motivate, and inspire. In fact, “lead” is the concept we’re going after, but in management theory terms, leadership is more than just this element. So, what is a manager supposed to be doing in this regard? Command is about having a clear vision, communicating it to the team, and ensuring that the team achieves its objectives. Communication skill is critical, because constant, effective communication helps a group of people embrace and share a common set of goals. A manager with a grasp on command creates an environment where people understand what is expected, have enough information to buy into the goals and objectives, are excited about the pursuit of excellence, and are clear that failure to deliver on the team’s goals will result in consequences.

Control

Control is not about controlling people – it’s about controlling the way in which the work is done and whether or not the work is done correctly. Processes, procedures, efficiency, and structure are the domain of control. Good managers not only communicate expectations and motivate people to do as required (command), they also create project plans, delegate activities, evaluate, monitor, measure, and share progress with their teams.

If you’re not being successful in the management areas of command and control, then it is unlikely that your team is capable of delivering outstanding customer service.

Culture is the Binding Agent

A company’s culture is the glue that binds all the important elements of the company together. A strong, positive business culture reinforces the brand, and in the best examples, defines it. The culture of a workplace determines and reflects employee commitment. To create a company culture that will nurture and serve customers, you must have a culture that nurtures and serves employees. Please don’t confuse nurturing with coddling – they are not the same. Employees want to be treated as professionals, with dignity and respect. Study after study demonstrates that employees who are trusted and expected to perform admirably will rise to the occasion.

A strong, positive business culture is created by thoughtful leadership, the right people in the right roles, good processes, strong management, and positive, goal-oriented behavior.

Every business culture is different, but all should include these ingredients. Without a strong culture, you cannot achieve outstanding customer service.

I’ve heard people blame today’s lack of customer service on the continued automation of service, reduced congeniality in society, or on an angrier, more demanding workforce. There may be particles of truth in all that, but I don't think those are the core reasons. Rather, what I observe in both the businesses I patronize and those I consult, is that the frantic pace of business combined with frequent economic and social uncertainty causes business owners and executives to work in a very tactical manner. This leaves little time for thinking about and managing the basics, and does not lend itself to long-term thinking and planning. Which, among other problems, erodes the company’s ability to deliver outstanding customer service.

Delivering outstanding customer service is one of the most critical things a business must do, particularly at a time when consumers expect nothing less. The good news is that dedication to known management fundamentals is half the battle. What will be harder for many companies is the creation of a strong, positive business culture. In fact, strong, positive business culture may be the differentiator of the future. A worthy, rewarding goal to shoot for.

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Ready to hire outstanding customer service people? Use Andrea Hill's highly informative, immediately useful handbook, "The How-to-Hire-Handbook for Small Business Owners," and make better hiring decisions today!

Build the Ultimate Competitive Edge

I have been a student of creativity for most of life. My original career goal was to be an opera singer - I'm a mezzo soprano. So I trained all through adolescence and studied drama and music at university. But what I saw there quickly turned me off forever to a career in opera. In that world, everyone was fixated on having a competitive edge. The intense focus on standing out individually ultimately isolated everyone from the collaboration that would make us exponentially better together. I found my solace in jazz — quite the opposite of opera.

Jazz performance depends on one's ability to intensely listen to and feel one's fellow musicians; to complement them rather than compete with them. I learned that the very best musician experience — at least for me — was the art of completely blending in and becoming part of a "body" of creativity that was bigger than myself. It is this experience that informed my  business ideas about how to create a competitive edge.

Some people think that radical inclusiveness hides mediocrity. And it can. But what I learned as a jazz musician is that each instrument and voice has to be the absolute best for the ensemble to be the best. It's not that we sacrifice excellence — it's that excellence is each of our individual gift to the whole, so the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

I've worked with many jazz ensembles (and choirs - a magnificent choir has the same allure) over the years. Some were merely a diversion. Others, I got such a thrill out of working with I wanted to sing with them every night. The difference? Part of it was individual excellence for sure. It's magical to work with extremely talented people. But mostly the difference was in the bond, trust, and respect within the group. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it is strong enough to welcome new-comers and still maintain its cultural/artistic core. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it can bring in a student, an apprentice, and help them achieve virtuosity quickly. When a group is extremely tight-knit, it experiences explosive creativity.

And when you're experiencing explosive creativity, the concept of competitive edge becomes mundane. Why settle for being better than the next guy, when you can be better than your own imagination?

These things I learned as a musician quickly carried over into my business life. First, I noticed that some teams were more effective than others. Then, I realized it was more cultural — not just a team issue, but a company issue. Some companies experience almost virtuosic, sustained, creativity and innovation. But most do not. And the difference isn't determined by the individual talents and skills of the employees. The difference is determined by the quality of shared vision and trust. Trust in one another, and trust in leadership.

There are many things leaders must do to create trust: clarity of vision, consistent behavior, accountability for failures. But the one thing I want to address today is equality.

If a company wants to experience sustained excellence, it must invest in a culture of equality. This doesn't mean everyone is the same. Strong companies are built on teams of subject matter experts (SMEs), individuals with unique strengths and talents that can be applied in different ways. Each individual also has weaknesses, but if you build the right team, no one weakness will stand out, because it will be offset by the strengths of those around them. So everyone is not "the same," nor do we want them to be. When it comes to taking on certain projects, entrusting people with certain objectives, then we lean on expertise, talent, and capability. We recognize that some people have more talent and skill for some things than others.

But outside of the creative or skilled output — when it comes to the humans in the workshop, troupe, or company — then everyone must be equal. One set of rules for everyone. One set of expected behaviors for everyone. Rewards equally available to everyone. I'm not saying everyone gets paid the same. But everyone must know that their pay is based on objective factors related to their responsibility and tasks — not based on subjective, opaque criteria.

Equality means choosing inclusiveness over exclusiveness every chance you get. If you are the leader, equality means challenging your own preferences constantly. What do I mean by that? Well, as humans we gravitate to some people more than others — it's natural. As a leader, you must constantly check yourself, to make sure that your own behavior doesn't create a sense of inequality where one is not intended. This is really hard — in my opinion as someone who has led many companies, it is the hardest thing to do, and one of the things I have most consistently failed at.

Without equality, the dynamics of the group suffer, which damages the results of the group. Since the only reason that group is assembled is for their shared goals, why would you risk damaging the group in any way?

It can be difficult to teach the importance of equality to business leaders — particularly those fueled with a sense of competitiveness. There is a tendency to think that equality is a kindergarten platitude. But it's not. It's a business imperative. If we want to be the best, we have to hire the best, yes. And then, we have to treat them the best.

Because ultimately, each one of us is not the sum of our parts. We don't bring just our relevant skills to work each day. We bring our whole selves. And we expect to be honored. At some level, each of us knows that we are a reflection of godliness, and therefore . . . equal. Fail to honor that, and you fail the one element that will make your company (or your family, or your team, or your club, or your musical troupe) exquisitely successful. The human.

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There are few things I have been more disastrously bad at than dating. I was the poster child for dating the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and then continuing to date them for more of the wrong reasons. Not only was I bad at it … I was bad at it for more than a decade. It was so bad that I caused my friends considerable discomfort. So bad that there was finally an intervention.

The intervention went something like this:

BFF 1: “What are you even doing? What is it you’re looking for when you go on a date?

Me: “What do you mean what am I looking for? I’m looking for a date. How is this even a question?”

BFF 2: “No you’re not. We know you. You want to have kids. You want a family. You’re the nesty-est nester of all of us. You’re not looking for a date. You’re looking for a relationship.

Me: “Well that’s why I go on dates! How am I supposed to be finding a relationship if I don’t go on dates?”

BFF 1: “Yes, but you’re doing the dates all wrong.”

Me: “Well I’m not going home with them on the first date if that’s what you mean.”

BFF 1: “That’s not what we mean. You’re not asking the right questions. You’re not even putting them in the right setting.”

Raised by Wolves

There is an ongoing joke between my siblings and me that we were essentially raised by wolves. Case in point: How had nobody ever bothered to explain to me that there was a point to dating, and that the point was relative to what it was you were trying to accomplish? My friends went on to illustrate how each of our dating approaches were different because we each wanted something different. Who knew there was a science to dating?  (apparently, everyone but me)

The intervention landed me in dating rehab for a few months while I stopped to evaluate how I should approach dating to achieve my desired life goals. And it wasn’t long before I started applying this new lesson to everything I did.

As it turns out, most job interviewers were also raised by wolves; trained to do job interviews by people who had no training themselves in job interviews. Or, worse yet, never trained by anyone at all. And the result is a lot of disastrous dates hires, many of which go on to be relationships that are disappointing, psychologically and monetarily expensive, and hard to get out of.

There Is a Science to Interviewing

Interviewing is used in a lot of roles: Journalists conduct news interviews, scientists conduct research interviews, criminologists conduct case interviews, law enforcement officers conduct interviews of people adjacent to crimes, health care professionals conduct patient interviews … and all these professionals are trained in something called interview science. Yet when it comes to job interviews, most managers just start firing questions at candidates about whatever pops into their heads.

It's no surprise that so many hires are just another bad first date followed by a U-Haul rental.

One of my companies is a strategic HR advisory consulting firm, and it has become somewhat of a mission for me to help our clients do a better job of dating hiring, and that means doing a better job in the interview process.

The Science of Interviewing

You could spend (as I have) months of coursework and years of practice to learn the science of interviewing, but some basic knowledge goes a long way.

Interviewing is an interdisciplinary field, which means that it draws upon principles from psychology, communication studies, sociology, and data analytics to create a process that is intentional, structured, capable of delivering a specific result, and fair. Science is required  because interviewing is about understanding human motivation and how that motivation influences behavior. While we cannot perfectly predict future performance for anyone based on an understanding of their past actions, a well-structured and conducted interview can get us closer to understanding than a random collection of questions without any strategy behind them can.

And if you think you can depend on your gut for this, you’re destined for many bad marriages hires. I won’t even try to explain in this already longish blog why that’s a bad idea, but you could read this book if you want to know more. In it, Malcolm Gladwell does a fantastic job of laying out the risks of trusting one’s gut too much when it comes to assessing people.

The principle we lean on most in interview science is Behavioral Psychology. Behavioral psychology is the branch of psychology that focuses on how past behavior influences future actions. Social Psychology also plays a strong role, helping us understand group dynamics, communication patterns and — of grave importance — understanding how biases influence interview outcomes. The Communications discipline, including active listening and attending to non-verbal cues, is crucial to creating a productive interview environment.

Like most scientific disciplines, there are many theories about the best ways to use all these principles to do interviews. Some theories are more suited to some professions than others. For example, the Reid Technique is a police interrogation theory that would not be at all suitable for job interviews. Likewise, Cognitive Interviewtheory as used in forensic psychology would be deeply intrusive and inappropriate for a job interview. But there are several interview theories and practices that are applicable to the hiring process.

One of them is Competency Based Interviewing Theory, which focuses on assessing the specific skills and competencies relevant to a job. Most people who have never studied interview science would say, “Yes! That’s the theory I’m using!” But there’s way more to it than simply asking about skills and experiences. Competency Based Interviewing Theory uses structured behavioral questions to elicit detailed examples of past experiences. It provides a framework for getting past superficial knowledge and into deeper understanding of a candidate’s abilities and suitability for a given job. Competency Based Interviewing also provides the necessary framework for ensuring a fair and objective assessment across all the candidates for a given job.

Another theory used in a good hiring process is Cognitive Ability Theory, which assesses a person’s problem-solving abilities. Again, if you’ve ever asked “how would you solve such-and-such problem,” this does not mean you were using Cognitive Ability Theory. Unlike simply asking about past problem-solving experiences, this theory involves tailored assessments that delve into a candidate's innate abilities, providing a more direct evaluation of their cognitive aptitude and analytical reasoning skills. To do this, you need suitable assessment tools to provide the data necessary to analyze each candidate and formulate the right questions.

We also use Situational Judgment Theory in the hiring process, which involves presenting candidates with hypothetical scenarios to evaluate their responses and test their judgment and decision-making skills. Again, this isn’t as simple as asking “how might you …” questions. Using Situational Judgment theory, the professional interviewer studies the role thoroughly, identifies the critical competencies and scenarios relevant to the position, and then creates a set of situational questions designed to specifically assess these competencies. The questions are designed right down to the way the questions are asked, because if the questions themselves are vague, or are asked differently from candidate to candidate, the results will not be fair or reliable.

A well-structured interview process involves all these practices and sometimes a few more, depending on the professional requirements of the role. All candidates should be asked the same set of questions to ensure fairness, though the questions asked during the probing of cognitive ability are likely to be different from candidate to candidate based on their differing attributes, qualifications, skills and experiences. The key is to strike a balance between consistency and customization to gain insight into each candidate’s qualifications and potential.

Since all humans have biases, it is also essential to provide bias awareness training, to include diverse interview panels, and to make use of good data for the assessment, interviewing and decision-making process. Efforts to mitigate the effects of bias will produce more equitable — and higher quality! — hiring outcomes (see new section on the use of AI in hiring, added on 10/30/2023 as an addendum at the end of this article)

If you are getting the impression that you must interview someone 32 times to understand if they are the right candidate, that would be wrong. In fact, the majority of good hiring decisions can be made with just two interviews … as long as those two interviews are well-structured.

What Skills and Experience Won’t Tell You

Of course, a candidate can have all the skills and experience in the world, and still be a douchecanoe that gives you a chronic headache and makes all your other employees want to quit. Most skills can be trained on the job, but you cannot train someone to have character, to be kind, to care about others’ needs and opinions, or to be disciplined. These are all attributes that each interviewee has already been born with, raised to, or chosen, and nothing you do in onboarding or training will change those fundamental characteristics.

There are simply some personality and behavioral traits that make candidates a better employee, and you must uncover those in the interview as well. You can use a combination of Behavioral and Situational Judgment interviewing techniques to uncover these issues. But again, I  caution: Simply asking the question “You discover a colleague engaging in unethical behavior. What steps would you take, and how would you balance your loyalty to your colleague with your commitment to the company’s ethical standards?” will not give you the insight you need, because everyone knows how to answer that question “correctly.” You must also employ Depth Interviewing skills to ask the right follow-up questions in the right way to encourage candidates to provide more detailed, specific,and … eventually … genuine responses.

The Interview Sequence

I prefer a two-interview strategy for most hires. I say for most, because for leadership positions and other roles with great strategic impact, two interviews are rarely sufficient. But the majority of hiring activity is for the rest of the roles, and two interviews can work very well if you structure them properly.

In my experience interviews are best done with more than one interviewer, which helps balance out preconceptions and biases and allows you to take advantage of differences in perception and interpretation. But if there will be multiple interviewers, it is important to have the whole group follow the same script and to train the group on how to interview together.

The first interview is to get at the questions of character, personal discipline, and orientation to others. This can be a short interview (20-30 minutes). In the first interview, I only probe skills and experiences as a mechanism for exploring character, discipline, and behavioral or communication issues. No matter how smart or experienced a candidate is, if I see warning bells on issues of character and behavior, there’s no second interview. Why bother? A less skilled candidate with better behavioral attributes will serve the company better in the long term, so there’s no risk when it comes to passing on people that come with a behavioral warning label.

Besides, most of what you need to know in the first interview should have been visible from the resume and/or your job application. Where they worked, what they did, skills required to do the job … these are all things you should review before the first interview is even scheduled. If you don’t receive sufficient insight on the resume, send them your job application (which should ask for sufficient insight) before scheduling the first interview.

For those candidates we deem interesting enough to do a second interview, we schedule them for a pre-employment assessment first. We administer the 16 Personality Factors Comprehensive Insights assessment by Talogy, because it gives us the greatest insight for developing further interview questions, and it benefits from greater peer review and anti-bias development than any other assessment we’ve researched (which is not to say there’s any such thing as a personality or performance assessment that is completely without bias, but that’s another article).

The second interview typically lasts an hour and includes a selection of questions designed to deliver insight into all the candidates’ skills, experience, abilities, behaviors, and motivations, plus individual questions derived from our analysis of the pre-employment assessment.

It is important to group the first and second interviews together as much as possible. This helps to remember candidates more clearly relative to one another and can also help to reduce personal biases and filters from interfering with good hiring decisions. In most cases we have enough insight to choose from among the candidates after second interviews are complete.

Conclusion

The science of interviewing integrates psychology, communications, social sciences, and ethical considerations to deliver a systematic approach for evaluating candidates. Does that sound like a lot of work? Well, it’s not so much a lot of work as it is a lot of learning and study. These days I can prepare for a good interview process in an hour or two, but it’s taken me 30 years of study and practice to get to this point. Is it worth it? Most definitely. Understanding human behavior and using best practices improves the accuracy and the fairness of hiring, which leads to making better choices and, ultimately, to running better companies.

Which brings us back to dating. After what I lovingly refer to as the “Big BFF Intervention, or BBI” my dating took a turn for the better, and it wasn’t long after that I found the relationship that would turn into the love of my life and (at the time I write this) nearly 25 years of commitment. Though I do appreciate the mistakes I made before the BBI, I’m also quite relieved that I was able to stop making them. After all, dating is fun … for a while. But what you really want to do is get on with your life, and when it comes to the quality of life … and business! … the decisions we make really matter.

 

 

Addendum: AI in the Interview Process

The following addendum added on 10/30/2023 to reflect accelerating use of AI in the hiring process.

The fact that HR departments — and companies that have no formal HR process at all — are increasingly integrating AI tools into the hiring process is concerning on many levels. It is hard enough to get human beings past their biases, poor listening skills, and vague communications; though producing structured interviews and providing training can at least help with that. But the algorithms powering AI tools are opaque, and we have no idea if they have been meticulously designed to avoid biases.

AI systems learn from historical data, and if that data contains biases, AI will perpetuate those biases and cause discriminatory outcomes. To date there is very little transparency regarding the data used for AI decision-making. You need to understand and be able to explain how AI systems make recommendations (download our e-book to understand the evaluation process you should use when implementing AI in any business process).

Of equal concern, the lack of human empathy and understanding in AI systems could lead to misinterpretation of candidate responses. Human emotions and contextual cues are vital for successful interviewing, and AI cannot respond to them the way a trained human interviewer would. If an initial video interview is conducted using AI, only to be skimmed watched by a hiring manager after-the-fact, there’s no opportunity to further probe candidate responses. This can lead to failure to understand a candidate’s suitability for a role. Additionally, reliance on AI hiring tools might result in a loss of the personal touch needed to effectively evaluate a candidate’s soft skills, emotional intelligence, and cultural fit within an organization.

AI is being used to increase hiring efficiency, but it should be used sparingly. Concerns about fairness, unbiased evaluation, and privacy protection are important, but perhaps most important is that AI still does not have the ability to use psychology, sociology, and communication sciences sufficiently to improve HR outcomes. The result for most companies will likely be making all the same hiring mistakes they make now … only faster.

To Succeed in Business, You Need to Play the Long Game

 In this six-minute video, Andrea Hill talks about the importance of using your marketing strategy to build a long game of exponential value.

 

 Transcript

I’m thinking a lot the past few days about how hard it is to play the long game in business. It requires several things most people lack: trust in the future, confidence about their choices, and patience. The requirement for a long-game is true in many areas of your business, but nowhere is it more stark than in the area of creating a meaningful online marketing presence.

When social media first hit the scene in 2007-2008, we were all struck by the instant-ness of it all. I think of an idea, I write it, I publish it. I come up with an idea for a visual, I turn it into a graphic, I post it. Fast, fast fast, right? The problem, is that the ability to produce and post things quickly has nothing to do with creating customer awareness or becoming a fixture of their consciousness. That is slow work, tedious work, and it takes a long time to see results. Because in today’s marketing environment, success isn’t measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. Let me say that again, because what I just described to you is the most basic understanding of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Success isn’t measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. When we talk about telling stories online, when we talk about creating rich content, what we’re talking about is all the words and phrases you bake into your website that will help a searching person find a product or a service you offer. And that takes time.

Time isn’t the only thing – it also requires a strong CMS website. It requires the creation of lots of good content across articles and products and promotions on your website, and it requires patience as you build out that content over time, and that content gets turned into links by search engines. But time . . . time is the thing that most small business owners underestimate. After all, in the past, you could run a radio ad, and a few people would come in off the street as a result of it. You could run a TV ad or a newspaper ad, and you could see pretty quickly if there was a response. You can run those same ads today, and you might even have a few people respond. The problem is that today’s consumers are completely distracted by whatever is happening on their smart phone, they are inundated with marketing messages everywhere they look and listen, and they aren’t “shopping around” for products like they did in the past. They do their shopping online, and then – if they like what they see – they come into the store to buy (and yes, 90% of all purchases are still happening in a store).

In a recent report on retail, the NRF, or National Retail Federation, reminded its membership that it’s not about “online versus retail.” It’s about “retail dependance on online.”  Today’s consumers see online marketing as a seamless part of their retail experience, as they search online for products, knowledge, and references, and then seek products out in stores and in-person. And, how do those consumers FIND your business so you can be the store they walk into? Using search. They search for what they seek, they drill into the links that show the most promise, they check out the ratings and reviews of the seller and the products, and then they decide where to go to buy. The creation of that website content, leading to meaningful links, takes time. The creation of a strong system of references and reviews – which we call Social Proof – takes time. And patience. And more time.

But here’s the interesting thing. In the first two or three months, it feels like you are doing a lot of work for absolutely no results. Then, in the four to six month range, you start to see tiny benefits, but it’s hard to trust them. Then, if you’ve been super disciplined and continued to develop content despite the fear and frustration, at around one year you really start to see results. They begin to build slowly and steadily.

When I first started my blog in 2006, I had a grand total of three readers, and I was related to all three of them. Now, 13 years later, my blog drives thousands of visitors per day to my websites. All those blog posts over all those years serve as links to my online presence. I don’t pay for any advertising beyond my blog, because the rich content I have put on the internet is all the marketing I need. Of course, 13 years is a long time. You won’t have to wait that long to see results – and if you are selling jewelry or other luxury goods, you will need other marketing tools besides a blog. I just use that as an example of the exponential power of rich content.

What you need to remember is that a year or two is not very much time at all. You also need to remember that this IS the way marketing and selling work now. So if you haven’t already, you need to commit to a long game of content creation, so that a year from now, you have already made significant progress. After all – the time is going to go by either way. What do you want to have to show for your business’s marketing presence when next year rolls around?

I encountered a situation the other day that has been on my mind all weekend. For a number of months now, one of our most high-performance employees has been on a downward slide -- in her performance, her morale, and unfortunately, in her behavior. The downward slide coincided with the addition of a new member to her department -- a member she demonstrates a clear and seemingly irrational distaste for. The results are reasonably predictable -- the new employee does not get well trained or mentored, assimilation of the new employee ground to a halt, and other members of the department felt forced to pick sides. What a disappointment.

We've been fairly straightforward in dealing with this problem. The star performer has been there for nearly a decade, and continues to grow in her capabilities. We don't want her to go anywhere. The new employee comes with great experience and references, though from a related field. It's very difficult to find quality employees with this background who can also get through our rigorous pre-employment assessment process. There's no reason to think she won't ultimately be great, and we don't want to lose her. So we (that would be myself and the leadership group involved in this area) have been direct, have held individual and group discussions, and have made it clear that in the absence of information to suggest the new employee can't be successful, we expect her training and assimilation to continue, and that we'll provide support as appropriate. We worked with the department to break down the walls that had formed as people chose sides. For the most part the new employee began to assimilate and the group returned to more productive working behaviors.

Except for our star. She continues to spiral, and went so far as to confide to a co-worker that the new employee had "stolen her mojo." This deeply threatened behavior continues to show up, and as recently as last week, when asked if she was providing training as appropriate, our star said, "Well, if she asks me a question I try to find time to answer it." I was completely at a loss. It was honest all right. But you'd have to be completely delusional to admit you were behaving so pettily in front of a group of peers!

I decided after that comment that I better take an active role in the training of the members of that team. I don't want to take the risk that they will continue to divide and slide, and I have the direct knowledge necessary to assist with the assimilation of this person and any new people they bring into their area. Clearly we can't keep depending heavily on our star's abilities, because she's demonstrated that she's stuck at the interpersonal conflict level.

So on Friday I brought some training information to their group meeting. And as I shared the knowledge I brought, I could see that it was not only meaningful to the other members of the team, but that our star was actively engaged, writing down notes and asking questions. And I had an insight about our star.

I think she may be totally intuitive. I think it's possible that she is so naturally good at what she does -- is so clearly playing to her personal strengths -- that she doesn't really know "why" she does certain things, or perhaps doesn't reflect on what she's doing at all. And if that's the case, when a series of new employees (because the woman referred to above is the third near-failure in adding teammates to this area) have been handed to our star with an instruction to train them and mentor them, maybe she had no clue how to impart what she knows to someone else in a way that permits them to become independently successful. And if that's the case, then even as her frustration with her new team members grew, it's very likely that she began to suffer from feelings of inadequacy and shaken confidence as a trainer as well.

Some people simply don't know how to train others, because they aren't process thinkers. We can train others to think as we think to a small extent, but we can train others to do as we do to a great extent. If we train desired outcomes and specific activities and behaviors, our trainees are far more likely to be successful. If we train someone to "be" like us or to think like us, they are likely to fail and we are likely to be frustrated. A process thinker can break down what they do into small increments and then train those increments. A process thinker will turn seemingly complex jobs into a series of discreet tasks. Our star isn't a process thinker, and there are probably a lot of other stars like her.

I'm going to invest in a careful strategy of breaking down the work in that area and working with all the members of the team to ensure they know the processes that will lead to success. I'm hoping that by using my process approach the other team members will quickly catch up to the point we were hoping they would be at before now. I'm also hoping that by taking some of the training burden off our star, she'll have the capacity and the inclination to do the internal work of accepting that a lot of the problems on her team and between herself and the other woman have to do with her difficulties training and her handling of her feelings when she couldn't get the results she wanted.

It's possible that my observation on Friday was incorrect, so I'll pay attention to this thing as it unfolds. But if this insight is correct, then I'll have learned a very important lesson for the future. From now on, I'll consider whether or not someone is a process thinker before entrusting the training and mentoring of new team members to them. And when training and mentoring are taking place for new associates in the future, I'll also keep a keen eye on how the new associates are progressing, and whether their trainer is focused on teaching the new person how to think (like them), or whether the trainer is focused on teaching the new person the desired end results and actions required to achieve them.

And hopefully, everyone will live happily (together) ever after.