Ignorance is Not an Excuse
Today I’m touching on an issue that seems to be at the center of many things going on today. Such things as poor customer service (hot personal topic!), social behavior, leadership, and sales people with little knowledge about their profession, customer or products! A lack of learning and developing a bank of knowledge is very disheartening.
Some examples include leaders or managers have no clue about their people’s performance or no clue about how to deal with people who differ from the manager or leader. A leader or manager should be trained or knowledgeable about personal traits in order to lead and motivate them effectively. In addition, there needs to be interaction to observe and review performance – then train, coach or mentor people for improvement.
Customer service people who are not trained need to be closely supervised – and that includes interacting with customers. Some people don’t understand the need to pay attention to customers, preferring to entertain themselves, talk on their personal cellphones, text message on company time, and chat with other non-customers rather than pay 100% attention to the needs of their customer. Customer or Tech Support is becoming an interesting exercise for customers. Increasingly, the customers know more about the products and company’s policies than the people paid to staff these positions. What a shame. Confidence and trust are destroyed bit by bit everyday.
The question becomes: “What happened to Training and Development?”
It appears the bean counters rule the environment with aggressive budget cutting that targets development at the very moment it should be increased. Can you imagine an NBA General Manager coming into the gym to tell the coach and players – “Look! We’re losing fans due to your performance record. So we have decided to cut out all practice and player development until you start winning again. We can not afford to have practice!” The fans and press would have a field day talking bad about the GM.
So why do corporate managers get away with the same behavior and no one changes the rules or the system? My guess is it will not happen unless the real leaders understand the really big picture and take a stand for doing the right thing. The right thing is to improve your people and their performance will increase – usually significantly. I have seen people turn their performance using one class, one book, one idea or one action commitment.
Be a Leader, lead your people into new areas of knowledge, understanding and practical application. They will amaze you with their abilities, performance, creativity, innovation and inner motivation – if you let them. If you are looking for tools to uncover areas for improvement, contact us immediately to set up a review of the gap between the actual results and the desired results you want.
Voss Graham
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Tags: Knowing-and-Doing Gap, knowledge, Learning, training
