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Using Video to See the Man in the Mirror

Recently, I committed to co-writing a chapter for publication on a technique my firm has been using to work with senior managers in one world-wide company, and also a well-known Caribbean conglomerate. The training technique is one that can be high-risk for the person leading the session, as it involves delivering live feedback in a public session and encouraging other participants to do the same. At the same time, participants have reported that they are able to give and receive more real-time feedback than they ever have before, and some actually demonstrate the new skills they have learned during the training.

As a precursor to writing my portion of the final paper, I thought I ‘d express my thoughts in this blog, as a way of saying a few things about how the process works.
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One of the principles used in our training is to make training as real as possible for those with whom we are intervening. “Making it real” entails doing as little “theorizing”as possible, and engendering as much truthful confrontation as possible, while directing the confrontation towards action-based commitments. In short, we provoke “Action, Not Ah Bag Ah Mout” in the hope that practice will make perfect, rather than further explanations and rationales.

The area that we focus on in this training is that of Critical Confrontations, and the specific training we have the most experience with is in training managers to engage in effective feedback conversations with their employees.

Most training in feedback involves at the least some mention of the principles on how to best frame the right words. These principles are reasonably well known, and there are several excellent texts that describe the “right” approach to use. In most of our training sessions with executives, the majority have been exposed to these ideas prior to the sessions themselves. Furthermore, most training has evolved to the point where each participant is given an opportunity to practice these principles, usually using generic examples.

In our work with Caribbean executives, we have adapted an approach that was first pioneered by a colleague of mine, Grady McGonagill, and perfected at several international companies. In this approach, the following process is followed.

The Training Process

Before the training starts, up to 10 customized cases are developed based on the client’s culture, needs and kind of business. Many are based on actual events, or issues that involve some emotional content.

  1. Participants are divided into groups of 4-6 for training periods of 5-7 hours each
  2. Cases are selected depending on the group being trained
  3. A curriculum is developed to address the training needs, focusing on demonstrable behaviours rather than vague nostrums (such as “be positive”)
  4. At the start of the training itself, the theoretical principles of good feedback are shared
  5. Dyads are formed to give each participant an opportunity to play the role of Manager and Subordinate, and the Manager is given the choice of cases to work on
  6. Managers and Subordinates are given written one-page scenarios that describe the case and their role in the situation
  7. A 5-10 minute interaction between the Manager and Subordinate is video-taped without interruption
  8. The tape is reviewed by the group, and stopped frequently to give the group an opportunity to coach the Manager on his/her “performance”
  9. The Subordinate provides direct evidence of the experience
  10. The group looks for opportunities to deepen the theoretical principles of good feedback
  11. The group continues until every member has had an opportunity to play the role of Manager and Subordinate

New Elements

The following training elements are included in this training that are normally not included in this kind of training:

  • cases built on real-life issues
  • giving public feedback in real-time from the participants and the facilitator, using the principles bring learned
  • using a recorded video-tape as an impartial and factual basis for feedback (rather than memory)
  • asking the Subordinate to share their emotional state at different points
  • using recorded behaviour to “prove” that the principles work, demonstrate how difficult they are to use effectively, and to refine the group’s understanding
  • offering multiple opportunities for trainees to use the coaching being given on the spot in a repeat “performance”

These elements are quite difficult to incorporate effectively and precisely, as the facilitator must be seamlessly competent in a variety of disciplines, not the least of which is the ability to operate and trouble-shoot video-recording equipment.

Results
The public goals of the workshop are quite modest, yet it regularly accomplishes much more than advertised. Trainees are often able to demonstrate a solid progression of increasingly skilled behaviours during the few hours of the training, and are able to receive and use the coaching given from the group to make immediate changes. The knowledge that they increase their effectiveness that quickly in a difficult area some focused practice and coaching is one of the tremendous benefits, even for observers of the process. Anyone can improve, given the right conditions in which to do so.

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An Article that Resonates

A recent article published in Business Week caught my attention. It is entitled “The Secret of Oprah’s Success” and deals with some of the principles of communication that has made Oprah successful.

I found that the article echoes much of what we have been working on in our firm in terms of the kind of communication that is most likely to connect with employees.

One of the books that stuck with me when written years ago, although it is quite outdated, is called “You Are the Message”. The premise was that the best way to communicate was to be authentic, and this article (and the principles we work with) have only built on that idea.

The article is an important one, and makes me think that I should get the book, and this may be the first that actually builds on what Ailes wrote back in the early 1990’s.

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Management, Caribbean Style

Working here in the Caribbean sometimes has an “Alice in Wonderland” feel to it.

That feeling returned when I read the recent reports of two SuperPlus employees being beaten by their managers.

Here are the relevant links to the story:

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/1
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/2
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/3
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/4

Apparently, two employees were caught stealing liquor from the store in Mandeville. They were taken by a group of managers (and including at least one senior manager) to the home of one of the managers. They were bound up, and brutally beaten with a pickaxe and even bitten by a dog.

A demonstration ensued, during which placards were displayed calling for “justice.”

In response, the CEO of SuperPlus, Wayne Chen, (whose younger brother’s home is alleged to be the scene of the crime) responded with the following, from the Gleaner:

Yesterday, Wayne Chen, CEO of Super Plus Food Stores, described the alleged beatings as “unfortunate and regrettable”. In a statement, he said: “Super Plus Food Stores, as standard policy, treats with utmost importance, the welfare and well-being of its employees. The organisation does not condone, encourage or engage in any form of abuse of its employees.”

Mr. Chen promised that Super Plus would cooperate fully with the police to ensure the swift resolution of the matter. He added: “Super Plus Food Stores has a long history of excellent employee/management relations. Depending on the outcome of these investigations, Super Plus Food Stores will do what is necessary to ensure that its substantial record of employee development and welfare is maintained.”

As of today, the SuperPlus website: www.superplusfoods.com has no mention of the incident, and nothing has been said publicly of the incident by the CEO (that I can find). This chain is the largest of its kind in Jamaica with almost 40 branches.

There is a lot that can be said about this, including the non-reaction of the company’s owners, and how best to respond to crises such as this. The text-book answer given by the CEO was as insensitive and remote as those given by other CEO’s in a similar position at Enron, Ford or Arthur Andersen. The lack of further public communication speaks volumes.

One can only imagine the impact on the workers, who in true Jamaican style, have taken to the streets in protest. While this may not ever have happened in Trinidad or Barbados, the response was predictably quick, and angry and featured a call for justice.

There is nothing like a perceived injustice to get Jamaicans riled up, and into the streets with placards, taking industrial action and forming unions. A few years ago, a well-liked Vice President at Cable and Wireless was fired and this was quickly followed by a demonstration and the usual placards. He was not unionized, but the feeling to right an injustice is a strong one.

In the case of SuperPlus, I imagine that the CEO is scrambling to find a suitable way to respond. Unfortunately, in our Caribbean society, inertia can cause us to return to business as usual in an instant, just because it is the path of least resistance. After all, what does produce have to do with an employee beating?

In fact, the prevalence of vigilante justice and mob-beating in Jamaica makes me think that there may be many who are sympathetic to the “managerial beaters” and support what they did. Down the street on Constant Spring Road, I can just make out a spot where a man was killed by a mob after throwing acid on a female worker at the Tax Office one morning. It all happened about 50 yards from the police station up the road, and several of her co-workers apparently were involved.

On the other hand, we have the employees of SuperPlus, who I imagine are traumatized. I don’t know what kind of management intervention to make in a case like this, but I am sure that working at SuperPlus will never be the same again.

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Digicel Woes in Trinidad

The following article was printed in the Jamaica Daily Gleaner, and I thought it was a useful follow-up to my prior post:

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060203/social/social3.html

Digicel woos T&T’s media
published: Friday | February 3, 2006

Barbara Ellington, Lifestyle Editor


Digicel’s head of public relations, Maureen Rabbitt, chats with Marlan Hopkinson of Trinidad’s Power 106 I95 FM. Mr. Hopkinson was one of five media representatives from the twin-island republic who visited the island as guests of Digicel last week. – RUDOLPH BROWN/CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER

DIGICEL JAMAICA Limited last week hosted a five-member delegation of print and electronic media journalists from Trinidad and Tobago. The purpose of the visit was to give the journalists a first-hand look at their Jamaican operations and high level of acceptance it receives from the population.

When they return to Trinidad they will then be in a position to report to Trinidad on their findings about Digicel, who are currently waiting on interconnectivity licence to operate in Trinidad. They hope to be up and running in the twin-island state by April this year.

Since Digital’s entry into the Jamaican telecommunications landscape just under five years ago, they have aggressively gone after majority market share and toppled the previous monopoly owner Cable and Wireless from their number one spot. They have since gained a foothold in several other islands and last year bought Cingulair’s share of the Caribbean cellular market.

SEEN AS AGGRESSIVE

But the road to success in Trinidad has not yet been duplicated, particularly because Digicel is seen as aggressive and TSTT, the reigning cellular provider, is seen as an institution.

“Trinidadians have the attitude that ‘we have problems with TSTT, but it’s ours, so ease off, Digicel’,” Marlan Hopkinson of radio I95 FM told The Gleaner.

Mr. Hopkinson said further that TSTT has embarked on a massive multimillion-dollar campaign, using popular personalities to spread anti-Digicel rhetoric.

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I somehow don’t think that Digicel is seen, or has tried to portray itself, as a Caribbean institution. In the Trinidadian press, the descriptions of Digicel have said more about its obviously Irish roots and ownership, than the fact that the company was started in Jamaica by Irish entrepreneurs.

Also, Digicel (as far as I can tell from the outside) seems intent on hiring non-Caribbean nationals to its highest positions across the region, and therefore keeps reinforcing the image that it is an Irish company. In Trinidad, the whole Irish/Jamaican combination has not gone down well. It only added fuel to the fire created by the mess that the company made in the West Indies cricket sponsorship debacle.

A recent article I read (that I now cannot find) predicted that Digicel will not come close to gaining the kind of market share it did in Jamaica. We shall see.

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Small Market Marketing

Reflections on Small Country Customer Service vs. “Modern” Customer Service.

Recently, my colleagues and I have been giving thought to the idea that the Caribbean as a “single” market is a different animal from the mass markets of North America and the EU. Obviously, the size differences are tremendous — the CSME countries represent a market of only 6 million or so. What is not so obvious is that a single “geographic” market of 6 million
is also very different from a group of island markets, the largest of which has 2.6 million. In addition, island markets which insist on maintaining their political and cultural autonomy further emphasize the psychological distance.

The practical result is that managers in the region must think about customer behaviour quite differently. The way that First World managers think will not work in the Caribbean, if the hope is to increase the market share and profits. There are three hidden assumptions that underly the prevailing thinking of how customers in mass retail markets behave that just do not apply.

Myth #1: Customers are Customers for Just a Moment

In a true mass market there is a limit to which one will go to serve a customer. After all, it makes no economic sense to give too much time, attention and energy to a single person when there are many others (millions of others) right behind them. “It would just not be fair to everyone else,” the logic goes.

Therefore, interactions tend to be brief. While the hope is that the maximum value possible will be extracted (from their wallet) there is also a feeling that Customer Service Representative (CSR) productivity must be maximized by increasing the number of people they deal with. In this particular frame of mind, the customer is something to be processed, rather than a person to be connected with.

This is fine, as far as it goes, for a large market in which customers have been conditioned over time to be treated in this way. However, in a Caribbean market it’s quite jarring to be treated like this. Recently, on a series of Digicel customer service phone calls I had the overwhelming impression that they were more interested in keeping the call short than in serving my needs. I imagined that some training had been imported from Canada or someplace, and that the operators were “being incentivized” with bonuses linked to lower call-times.


Myth #2: Customers Are Strangers

Of course, in a mass market, there is no way to get to know millions of people. Instead, front- line staff is trained to deliver a kind of “fake-friendliness” that a Caribbean-grown, first-time visitor to Miami often confuses with authentic caring. There is the smile, the cheery greeting, and the well-trained question — “How can I help you?”

However, two seconds after the transaction is over, everything disappears as the “fake-friendliness” is turned on to the next customer and the prior customer melts into the mass of invisible strangers. I remember being amazed when I lived in the US that a store attendant with whom I had a long conversation would, five minutes later, not recognize who I was when I walked passed them in the mall. For them, the interaction was indeed the first and the last encounter.

In the Caribbean, there is a different belief at play, which is much closer to the notion that when I meet someone for the first time it is just a beginning.

In social settings, we Caribbean people are often amazed upon meeting someone for the first time that we have not met before! Sometimes, we insist that we must have met, and commence a playful game of “Where Do I Know You From?” If time and circumstances permit, and we are sure that there has been no prior visual contact, then the next game we play some version of “Who Do We Know in Common?”

If that game fails to yield a result, a warm game of “Who Do You Remind Me Of?” can be used to round out the conversation. By the end, a tremendous amount of information has been shared that allows for a second, future meeting to be one that now takes place between acquaintances, and sometimes friends.

In other words, that first encounter is the first…. and it is understood to be the first of many.

Once again, it’s jarring to run into a Caribbean person who acts as if the customer is a stranger. A few months ago on a flight I ran into a BWIA flight attendant I’ve seen at various fetes for years, and got “fake-friendly” treatment. (I know there could be many explanations for why this happened.) I played along by falling into my US/North American “stranger as customer” mode, for the first time outside of that country — and it felt quite foreign.


Myth #3: Some Customers are More Valuable Than Others

The idea of a retail mass-market conjures up the image of millions and millions of people who are potential customers. The first strategy that the thinking mind employs to deal with the idea of marketing to so many, is to segment these millions into manageable mental buckets.

Once the bucketing starts, the prioritization soon follows as it seems to make good sense to maximize sales by directing more attention to those customers with deeper pockets — all the better to extract more sales for the company. This works to some degree in mass markets as the sheer number of customers prevents much coordinated action to be taken, unless there is the kind of extreme neglect or abuse that leads to class-action lawsuits.

However, it is a mistake to think that our consumer markets in the Caribbean operate in this manner. Our markets are small in number, and located on islands for the most part. There is a fixed number of people to meet and greet with, and no-one is more than 3 degrees of separation away from anyone else. (This is why the game of “Who Do We Know In Common?” can be so fruitful.)

One of my clients has been wondering, in exactly the same way that companies in mass markets do, whether or not the company should shed its “unprofitable” customers. I guess this means that they are considering ending their relationship with them.

However, in our micro-markets you don’t really end relationships. They can be altered, however, and it is much easier to make them worse than it is to make them better. Furthermore, the close-knit nature of our societies means that an unprofitable customer can be more influential than they seem.

It would be a mistake to systematically rid the company of customers, who may well turn out to be the head of a PTA or a Deacon in a large church, or the cousin of the head of conglomerate, or the neighbourhood “teh-teh” (gossip.) In such cases, the profit that can be made from a single customer is only a single measure of who they really are, and their value to the institution. By and large, Caribbean want to do business with people, and not institutions, Conversely, they want to be treated like people also, and do not want to be treated as disposable profit-centres.

Digicel’s entry into Trinidad seems to have engendered the kind of resistance that I can only ascribe to a severe misunderstanding of the market they are dealing with. At the moment, Trinis are unified in a way they have never been before by virtue of gaining a berth in the upcoming World Cup in Germany. Also, TSTT is not quite equivalent to Cable and Wireless. The difference is that TSTT is not a foreign company, being owned by the government, and also that the name TSTT carries within it the name of the country – Trinidad.

The Digicel backlash in Trinidad at the moment is palpable.

On a recent trip I was told by several people that they would never get a Digicel phone, based on the Digicel advertisements in the press and the aggressive recruiting currently underway for local talent. Digicel’s service is not due to become operational until April 2006, and already the news that Digicel is sponsoring Carnival events and bands had some of my friends rolling their eyes with nothing short of disgust.

Of course, I can’t tell whether or not any of the 3 Myths mentioned above were believed in this particular case, but I do know that the Trinis who I heard complaining were not angry at a corporate oversight, but were reacting to something like a personal insult.

Such is the fate of companies that are unable or unwilling to understand the unique nature of our Caribbean markets.


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Living the Good Life


When I’m in Barbados, I’m reminded how lucky I am to be working here in the Caribbean.

I woke this morning at about 6am and went for a swim in the sea just as the sun rose. That by itself is not so unusual, and the fact is that most hotels here in Barbados are right on the water.

As I was swimming I was thinking about the news I heard that a major snow-storm is heading towards the north-east. Memories of a project I once worked on in Toledo, Ohio came to mind…

I also know that many people coming here to the Accra Beach Hotel, have saved for years and months for the opportunity to come to the Caribbean on a vacation. I come here every other week or so, and barely blink an eye.

It made me think of how good life is here in the Caribbean, and how easy it is to convince oneself that the grass is greener on the other side — over there in the US, Canada and England, where most migrating West Indians end up. The tragedy is that most are able to fulfill only the first part of the dream — to leave.

Part 2 of the dream almost always includes some kind of return, and this is where the challenge lies. It’s relatively easy to leave the Caribbean to live outside the region, but quite hard to return.

The reasons aren’t legal, either.

They have more to do with the psyche that develops in the minds of those of us who have left. The result is that a return remains nothing but a dream, which ends up drifting into a permanent stage of being “neither here nor there.” Eventually, the kids become American, Canadian or British, and then they get married and have children who have just about no connection to the homeland. Then the only practical thing to do is to live close to them. And, thus, the dream dies.

If only this were understood before making the decision to leave.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to evaluate the pros and cons of migration. Even worse, I’ve never seen any kind of service, website or book that offers any help for those are thinking about migrating. They inevitably end up making the decision on only partial information.

When they reach the U.S. unfortunately, many fall into the “justify my being here” frame of mind in which they complain about their home country in the most exaggerated way. To hear them talk is to to think that nothing good could ever come from such a place. The irony is, they also have no idea that they are also talking about themselves.

The law of unintended consequences seems to be at play here.

For example, most West Indians moving to the US have no interest in raising their children as African Americans. Being West Indian is different. However, for Black Caribbeans, there is really no choice . The forces they confront at school, the workplace and in the larger society are just too big to resist, and they inevitably leave the accent, the food, the music and the vibe behind.

Yet, it seems that these kinds of questions are not openly asked and answered, and most who do migrate end up saving for months for a one week opportunity to return home to enjoy the beaches that they, and I, took for granted. The sad thing is that this all just an unintended consequence.

I’m trying hard to not take it all for granted.