Do you ever feel like you have powerful thoughts running around in your head and your heart but cannot figure out how to communicate them to others in a clear and valuable way?
Well, this is what I’ve been struggling with for the last few days, but instead of just keeping it bottled up, I’m going to start and vomit the thoughts in a Google doc and see where it goes. This may end up being a great message, or perhaps it ends up being a message full of ambiguity, or perhaps it’s a message that I don’t ever let see the light of day…time will tell 🙂
Chip and Dan Heath have written many great books, and of late, I’ve been noodling on their book, The Power of Moments. There are so many great takeaways, one of which I would like to talk about here. The authors cite a study of 120,000 customers from a wide range of industries and asked the customer to rank the last experience they had with the business on a scale of 1-7 (1 being horrible, 7 being exceptional.)
They then shared the results with top executives from each industry and gave them the choice of how to deal with the results. They broke the choices up into two distinct strategies.
Eliminate the negatives–Do everything possible to get the “1-3” customers to a “4” (Plan A)
Elevate the positives–Do everything possible to get the “4-6” customers to a “7” (Plan B)
When the researchers asked the executives which strategy they chose, they tried to accomplish both strategies but admitted that about 80% of their time, manpower and resources were spent on Plan A. Eliminate the negative.
Maybe you agree on that strategy, maybe you don’t. Here is where it gets interesting.
The research group leading the study factored in questions into the survey that analyzed the financial value of each of these customers based on purchasing history. The results are staggering. There was 9x more value in the customer who rated their experience 4-6 vs the group who rated their experience 1-3.
In other words . . . .
“The happiest people in any industry tend to spend more so moving a 4 to a 7 generates more additional spending than moving a 1 to a 4. Furthermore there are dramatically more people in the feeling positive 4-6 zone then in the feeling negative 1 to 3 zone so with Plan B you’re creating more financial value per person and reaching more people at the same time.
How can leaders prioritize so poorly when so much money is at stake? The truth is that we should empathize with them because we all make the same mistake in different areas of life. Research has shown again and again that we tend to obsess about problems and negative information. Sports fans think more about the games their teams lost than those they won. In our diaries we spend more time reflecting on the bad things that happen then the good. Negative feedback packs a heavier punch then positive. We obsess about one negative comment in a collection of 10 supportive ones. Research at the University of Pennsylvania summarized dozens of studies that pitted negative information against positive their conclusion was right in the title of the paper ‘Bad is stronger than good’.”
So what am I trying to say here? Well I think its quite obvious to use the above information and correlate it to patient experiences and Google reviews. We can all relate that a 1 star review kills us a little bit on the inside and oftentimes we spend lots of time and energy to get that 1 star reviewer to change their mind. What if that’s the wrong mindset? What if we should be instead focusing our attention on the 3 or 4 star reviews. What if we called a 4 star review and said to them, “We really value you as a patient . . a lot! What can we clean up on our end to make sure the next experience you have with us is 5 stars?” What if we didn’t get off the phone with that patient until that gave us a tangible piece of info that really helped us become better?
Now what if we took this research and tried to use it in the context of our team. You’ve heard me say multiple times that we have A players, B players and C players.
A Players
- Superstars
- Great core value fit
- Owners mindset
- Leaders that thrive on growing their teams
B Players
- Rockstars
- Good core value fit
- Do what needs to be done
- Work hard but turns it off away from work
C Players
- Suspect core value fits
- Need to micromanage and babysit them
- Don’t seem to get it
- Can be energy vampires and gossips
Would you agree that we spend a majority of our leadership trying to get Cs to turn into Bs? The constant meetings, the rewriting of systems to accommodate for shortcomings, the write ups and the drain on us as leaders.
How much time and energy do we spend on Cs and if we are really honest with ourselves, do we see huge benefits from all that time and energy? How often do we really get a C to turn into a B? 10% of the time?
Time is a limited resource, when we spend all our time as leaders on our Cs, guess who doesn’t get the time and attention they need? Yup…The Bs!
What would happen if we stopped doing that and instead poured into Bs turning into As? What if you spent time coaching team members that actually wanted to be there, that wanted to be coached?
Now am I saying we should cut all our Cs loose ASAP? Not at all! Spend time making sure expectations are crystal clear, give feedback on the blindspots/gaps, make sure they understand the consequences of their actions, provide some healthy tension to grow them.
Give them a chance BUT STOP SPENDING SO MUCH TIME ON SOMEONE THAT ISN’T GETTING IT. I’m trying to say the amount of time, energy, manpower and resources we pour into C players simply doesn’t pay the dividends that we could see if we dedicated more time to our B players. Lets try our best to coach up Cs but if you are not getting any CUT BAIT, own the fact that we made a hiring mistake and focus on growing the Bs into As.
One final offering for a thought I know is rolling around in some of your heads…”But I really cant afford to let this person go, there is now one to replace them…” or some variation of this.
Ask some of us that have been doing this for a few seasons. When you let a C player go, the rest of the team of As and Bs tend to figure out how to keep the ship floating until we can bring on a new team member, only EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.
Hope I’m making sense 🙂
