Contributing Blogger Geoff Rowe shares his thoughts on the Phoenix Workforce Connections Process.
Nick is an EXTREMELY interesting guy with a very varied background. If you get a chance to go to one of his seminars, take it!
A few words necessary about him; he’s president and chief executive of Consultants to Management, a Phoenix based firm that assists companies grow profits and people through improved operations management, marketing, sales and human resources strategies. He’s previously served as senior vice president of Service Companies, a division of Dial/Viad Corporation. I’ve missed more than a few other credits so you could say that he’s pretty experienced!
Nick started in the usual style with us introducing ourselves to him. By now we all kinda knew each other so this was getting much easier. The trick was to find something new to tell the class. Nick made this a little easier by giving us a framework to speak to. So we had to give name, previous employment, what we were looking for, some family info, and ‘something odd’!
Nick had some great sayings for us. Here is one of the really good ones, “All people who work hard are not successful however all successful people work hard”, attributed to John Johnson.
We did a short form of the DISC self-analysis. In my case it pretty closely matched the results of the longer one I did early via JobseekersAZ. Initial this is for you to understand yourself but it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to realize that you can use these processes to ‘read’ those around you. If you can do this successfully you can start to ‘read’ those interviewing you and know the techniques for responding to them based on their personality type! A big advantage I think you’ll agree! Nick used it to build some balanced teams for some team exercises on ethics we did later.
As a project manager I know this so well, but what do you think is THE most often cited most common, most annoying source of issues and problems in just about any work situation? COMMUNICATION!
Back in the day, about 22 years ago actually, when I was a silicon process engineer doing sustaining work one of the jobs I had was writing and checking the specifications we had for the operators to carry out process tasks. So as the engineer who developed the process you walk though it in your mind and document everything that needs to happen to get the job done. Easy; right? WRONG! Whenever we would release a new update to the documentation we would watch the operator carry out the task, and intervene where necessary. You would not believe the number of times the operator ends up doing basically the complete opposite of what you intended! I learned a few lessons about clarity of communication and the implications of getting it wrong on that job!
Lesson number one is that whenever you’ve described something or asked someone to do something for you; seek clarification from the person you’ve asked to do the job! If they recite back to you want you want, big gold stars all around! The worst thing you can do is be vague, if you want a job done by next Tuesday, say next Tuesday not “oh early next week is okay!” If you want a quick and dirty job done say “Just an hour on this is fine!” not “I want it quick but do a good job, but be quick”, it’s misleading!
Anyone have any problems with stress? You’re out of work, you have no income and you have bills so yeah I am guessing that qualifies as a stressful situation.
Bottom line is this. If you are worried constantly about where the next meal is coming from, you get into a ‘defensive’ mode. You’ll never get anything done so guess what; the next meal isn’t coming from anywhere. As difficult as it is, you have to put that stress in a box somewhere in your mind and ignore it!
There was a part of our two days presentation dedicated to ethics. Whether we admit to this or not ethics has to play a very important role in our working life. We did several exercises and also watched a few videos and the important thing to note is that the ‘ethics’ question isn’t just limited to “do I take a pen from the company stationary cupboard” but also your dealings with fellow employees. This reminded me of a situation with a previous employer of mine – I’m not going to name names ‘cause this is serious but I was horrified and disgusted with their sales approach which was most definitely NOT ethical!
Customer Service: I loved the video that went with this. Let me say this first though. You Americans really don’t know what bad customer service is like! Try dealing with UK banks, government organizations etc. over ‘there’ and you’ll really start to appreciate what you have here! That said there are plenty of examples where customer service falls flat on its face here too! Banks are often cited as delivering bad customer service (though nothing as bad as in that video; you have to see it!). The thing is you have to treat your customers how you would like to be treated, maybe even better! You also have to remember that EVERYONE is your customer or a potential customer. This is so obvious that it surprises me that people forget it however in stressful situations e.g. where something has gone badly wrong with a product or service delivery, it’s easy to go defensive and fail to deliver on service.
We all put up with poor customer service to a certain extent, however what do we do? We tell everyone about the poor experience we had with a certain bank, airline, hotel chain (you wanna hear my stories about the Hyatt Regency in Chicago?). Actually we’ll tell 10 people about our bad experiences but we are rather less willing to praise the good, this is unfortunate but its human nature!
We have a really good example of how customer service can go horribly wrong. BP and that oil spill. Think about how the BP CEO handled the press and you can clearly see some examples of ill-chosen words leading to a public relations disaster. The BP oil spill is probably going to be a text book example of how not to handle a major disaster; however we can all use it as a teaching example!
Diversity: This is a word that has, I think, gotten some very bad press and it’s not deserved. Diversity in the workforce encompasses everything! Techies vs. non-techies, management vs. non-management etc. etc. the list goes on and that is before you add the more often recognized diversity definers such as religion and race. When we don’t have an eye on the issue of diversity we build walls within an organization and they are very bad! Those walls work to blur and prevent communication, break down trust and generally make a business uncompetitive. So the last thing you want to do is bring a load of uncompetitive baggage along to your interview!
Thanks Nick, for two fascinating and informative days!
I could go on but I think you’re getting the message. This program is amazingly good, thoughtful, well put together and a real tribute to the many people working hard to get you back to work. I should mention a few names; firstly Mary Wolf Frances, who persuaded me to get into it when I spoke to her at a recent JobSeekersAZ event. Jessica and Denise for actually holding the JobSeekersAZ events! Janet Hidalgo, my CA, Dr. Jamise Liddell who’s got more energy than the Energizer Bunny! Neva Smith and Kristen Hall for some thought provoking lectures and some great resume tools. Dr. Kim and Dr. George for the very interesting and fascinating Innovation workshop…. I could go on!
I should also thank the “May 17th Alumni PWC Class” who were a wonderful bunch of people who I most definitely want to meet up with again and find out how they are doing!
Good luck everyone!
