A further nail in the coffin of the Royal Mail?

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Tomorrow is Christmas Day. It is also a Friday. On Boxing Day, Saturday, most major retailers in Britain will be open and happily doing business, and so will most on Sunday too. Although Monday is technically a public holiday, you can fairly safely predict that most shops will be open then too. Lest anyone is in any doubt, retail involves people and for the retailer to be open that means that people will be working.

Most service businesses are operating either as normal or with a limited service over the long weekend that Christmas Day and Boxing Day have created this year. For weeks, shops and other businesses have had signs up telling us of their opening hours. They know that they must compete, and that being accessible to the public is a vital component of that.

That so many people will be working over Christmas is isn't surprising - despite the huge volume of seasonal well-wishing that is happening this year, the vast majority of it is just that - seasonal - rather than Christian. According to recent surveys, 66% of the population have NO personal connection with any Faith group, and roughly 25% of the population that do are not Christian, so "Christmas Day" only really has meaning to about 3 out of every 10 people in the country. It has returned to being a seasonal celebration as it was in Pagan days, much like the American Thanksgiving. The concept of it as a spiritual celebration have long gone.

We know that the use of the postal service is in decline. So, I don't think it is unreasonable to expect them to be thinking of ever better ways of delivering their service, of doing so in ways that cost less than their competitors, and that are as accessible.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to me to take my post up to the letter box in our village today several hours before the advertised, normal collection was due (4:45pm) only to discover that it is not going to be emptied again until next Tuesday. No warning, no card in the window on the box, nothing. It seems I wasn't the only person who was caught out by this, as the box is already nearly full.

I do find it a little amazing that, in this day and age, the Royal Mail has decided to close down for four and a half days. I find it particularly strange as they keep telling us that they desperately want our business and don't want to go bust. Perhaps we should stop looking at the Police as a place for institutional racism, and instead look towards the Post Office, if it really has such a disproportionately high number of devout Christian workers who want the time off.

While I find these decisions amazing, what I object to is the discourtesy that they have shown, indeed the arrogant disregard, for people's time and energy, that failing to tell them that this is what they are doing represents. It is an institutional complacency born out of their once massive nature that is simply no longer justifiable.

I had already been looking at the number of physical greetings cards that I send each year and how many more this year were sent electronically. It seems to me that there's a simple technology gap that will soon be filled by someone. At the moment, most people will not print out the electronic greetings that they receive, but I am sure that the growth in digital picture frames will mean that someone, somewhere, is working on a device and a formatting standard that will mean that greetings sent electronically can be displayed in our homes without having to turn on the laptop and point it into the room! It is easy to do, it just needs a little work to make it practical and convenient. I would not be a bit surprised if Hallmark aren't beavering away at it as we speak. There are millions of people accepting that they can't send an aesthetically pleasing card, but instead using instant messages on Facebook and the like as a way of making contact with one another. When the facility I describe comes live, I am confident that there will be a huge demand.

So next year, I shall send even fewer greetings cards. I shall not be surprised at the news that the Post Office has gone forever. And I shall look forward to a resurgence of people sending aesthetically pleasing personal greetings, albeit electronically, rather than in sound-bite emails and instant messages as they do today.

Incidentally, I did try ringing the Royal Mail complaint's line to express my amazement. The response I received was really quite dismissive. The person on the other end of the line assumed that I was Christian and therefore was going to be taking the time off myself. He tried telling me that it would be too much work for the post men who collect from these boxes each day to slip a notice in the display panel with the Christmas closure times on it. He explained that closing like this was a tradition that "goes back hundreds of years" (which I can categorically say is not true as my Grandfather was a postman and he used to work on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day). He was "personally astonished" that I wanted to complain about the lack of information and that I expected them to collect at 4:45pm.

He did however, register my complaint, taking my address and telephone number, and gave me a reference number for them. I asked what kind of response I could expect. He explained that I couldn't - the complaint would be handled internally but I would not be contacted.

Another case of institutionalised contempt for customers.

WAKE UP ROYAL MAIL - THE WORLD IS CHANGING AND YOU NEED TO CATCH UP WITH IT!

On that not so positive note, to those of you who fall into the minority, I wish you a wonderful Christmas. To those who treat this as a seasonal celebration, I wish you the compliments of the season. To the millions of people who will be working tomorrow (not only in the armed forces, the emergency services, the retail sector, the services sector, and those in remote roles where it is simply not practical to switch off and come home) I thank you for your diligence, and wish you a very happy new year!

I am happy to comment, or deliver keynote sessions, on any of the topics that I post about.
For media and speaking enquiries, please call me, Graham Wilson, on 07785 222380.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
grahamwilson.org - businesscoaching.org.uk - inter-faith.net
thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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Would you help me with an ebook? Collaborative project. NO CATCH!

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Every year, around this time, I start to pull together my notes about goal setting and New Year's Resolutions.

I shall be doing the same again this year. To make it a little different I began to wonder if it would be a nice idea to produce an ebook of examples of New Year's Resolutions - to give a little stimulation to a few people. Just to stress one thing, although I shall write the foreword, I would never dream of making any profit from this - I shall offer it for download from as many places as possible - my aim is to inspire people to think outside the box when they make their resolutions this year.

So this is what I'd like to do... I'd like to produce an ebook, with 52 different examples of New Year's Resolutions in it. I'll collate them and may just tweak the English, but anyone contributing an example will get full credit - in the form of their name, their website name, and a short description that they supply. I'll do my best to make the book presentable and hope that you will be happy enough to want to forward copies to your friends and colleagues too. Interested?

I'm planning on pulling this together on December 21st, so get thinking! If I'm short of entries, then I'll add more after that but absolutely no guarantees.

Why not visit this page and make an offering - http://www.gbw247.info/newyears/

I am happy to comment, or deliver keynote sessions, on any of the topics that I post about.
For media and speaking enquiries, please call me, Graham Wilson, on 07785 222380.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
grahamwilson.org - businesscoaching.org.uk - inter-faith.net
thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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An apocalyptic view of leadership (v2)

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My clients and colleagues know where I am coming from in my leadership development work - I have a strong interest in personal growth, authenticity, the spiritual dimension to work. I worked in the empowerment industry for 20 years, and trained as a psychotherapist.

Why the preamble? Well, I'm about to write something that may shock a few of you. You see, this morning I saw a message on a forum that nicely summarised the model of leadership that we've preached for many years - the leader in touch with themselves, highly relational, empowering of others - both employees and customers - and so on. But it worried me. This stuff has been promoted by myself and others for a long time. It has been promoted for millenia. If it was all right, surely evolution by natural selection would have made it the predominant model for leaders throughout the world? But it hasn't.

Here's my response:

The list of leadership behaviours and values that we promote, bears a strong resemblance to the kind of list that someone reading Tom Peters books back in the 1980s or Robert Greenleaf's in the 1970s would have seen. Indeed, I'm sure that Dale Carnegie would identify with them from the 1930s.

So what's new, and why do we keep needing to preach the old stuff?

In the early 1990s, the US Air Force conducted a very impressive study into future worlds, specifically those around 2025. The material is all in the public domain. They identified three global trends and used these to extrapolate a number of scenarios. The three axes were:

The rate of growth of the growth in technology

The polarisation of global power

The focus of US military activity - ie whether it was domestic or international

The scenarios developed showed that under many conditions we were moving slowly and steadily towards a less-caring, more militaristic, and even apocalyptic world - whether dominated by feudal barons or martial law.

Out of this came many insights. Among them was the recognition that our perception of many of the practices that we assume to be static - and I'd suggest leadership skills would be one of those - needs to shift. Just because we have grown accustomed to the kind of emotionally benign leadership models spouted by Carnegie, Greenleaf and others since the emergence of management from the industrial revolution dark ages, doesn't mean that life is going to be so easy for much longer.

Since the movie Wall Street hit the screens, we have had images of a less humanistic approach to management portrayed to us. Gecko wasn't the first of his kind - it was the proximity of his character to the real experience of followers that made it so close to the bone.

The factors identified by the Airforce 2025 project are leading slowly but relentlessly towards a midway point between a couple of their scenarios - a world dominated by a few axial powers (based on powerful commercial empires rather than democratically elected ones) and attacked by growing, but only loosely coordinated, terrorist/subversive forces. This is why the US is seemingly so obsessed with the imposition of democracy and the eradication of Al Khaida outside their own territories. Sooner or later domestic terrorism will prevent them from expending their efforts there, and we will see the consolidation of Eastern commercial influences focused around China and the northern Pacific Rim.

Interestingly, in the UK a disproportionate part of the population suffering from severe mental health issues and being forced into homelessness are from military backgrounds. The same is true in the US. In the US, post Vietnam, a large number of highly trained 'killing machines' returned home unable to adapt to a gentler society. Many of these adopted lifestyles that were self-sufficient and kept them on the perimeter of society and social intercourse. Many of the Al Khaida followers promoting a terrorist campaign, are said to have been trained to respond as guerillas to the threat of Russian military actions a couple of decades ago. It is from this environment that domestic terrorism may well emerge. Our present military efforts are likely to be fuelling the very force in our own countries that we are trying to eradicate elsewhere.

In this militaristic world, I agree that there will always be leaders who have the soft skills that make them NICE people to follow, but I think it is time we gave up trying to force that model down the throats of a future generation of prospective leaders. The world in which they are going to have to operate is a far harsher, far more violent, far less 'rational' one than you and I would like or have experienced.

Leaders then will command loyalty through ruthlessness, manipulation, and providing the basic physical needs (especially security) of their followers and their families by being constantly on their guard against attack. We already see this model in eastern Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other communities. It is not a million miles from the environment of the early 20th century in Italy and Chicago, and later in Northern Ireland.

Let's stop kidding ourselves that softly, softly, touchy-feely leadership is going to work into the future, and start exploring why it is that some of us want to perpetuate these approaches when the survival of the next generation depends on a far tougher approach. It is interesting that few of, even, today's leaders join this bandwagon - I don't hear Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Rupert Murdoch, Mark Hurd or Steve Jobs preaching employee empowerment, customer focus or emotional intelligence, and they aren't exactly an ethnically diverse group are they?

It's time for a tough revision of our thinking and a very different approach to preparing thr future generation of both leaders and followers.

There now, I wonder if that shocked you?

I am happy to comment, or deliver keynote sessions, on any of the topics that I post about.
For media and speaking enquiries, please call me, Graham Wilson, on 07785 222380.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
grahamwilson.org - businesscoaching.org.uk - inter-faith.net
thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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Have you tested your own Customer Care experience?

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Given that I spent the first third of my career helping organisations in the pursuit of Excellence (a la Tom Peters), the first element of which was to be "obsessed with customers", it is hardly surprising that I notice customer facing issues.

Today's experience with a software manufacturer highlighted an important aspect of Customer Care.

Coffee Cup Software produce tools for people preparing websites. There are some very sophisticated ones and some quite simple ones. They are low cost (rarely over £20) and work remarkably well. (OK they aren't as tried, tested and proven as other suites, but for this kind of utility I've found them to be pretty good.)

As some of you may know, I've just revamped my business coaching website (www.businesscoaching.org.uk) and in the process I used two of the Coffee Cup utilities.

One of them, which produced the enquiry form, had a simple glitch at one stage, but was easy to fix and now seems to work perfectly.

The other is intended to pull RSS news feeds from some of my special interest sites (mainly on ecademy (http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=club&op=group&cl=357)) .

Sadly it refused to work. I checked the software support forum and read through their FAQs, all to no avail. So I filed a 'ticket' with "Support" - through a medium known as "myroom". A day or so later, a message arrived from "CustomerCare@coffeecup.com" telling me that the 'ticket' was updated and that I should log on to "myroom" to read it. Keen to resolve the problem, I did so, only to find that there was no sign of either my query or their response.

So, I replied to their email asking for further help. Guess what? Yes, the message bounced back telling me that:

This "is an automatically generated message. We will not see or read the email you send to this mailbox..."

Let me get this right - the company has an email address "CustomerCare@coffeecup.com" but messages sent to it are bounced back and we are told that they DON'T READ THEM. That is not what I call 'customer care'.

It is almost akin to Marks and Spencer making people wanting to return defective items go up to the top floor and queue to speak to someone behind a metal grill! I kid you not.! They thought their exchange policy was 'customer friendly' - it was the experience that most definitely was not. It was instead totally humiliating.

Now I know that coffeecup will resolve this hiccough, but it illustrates a phenomenon that seems increasingly common lately. The leaders of organisations believe that they have listening ears - for news from within and feedback from without. They may even have invested fortunes in the systems and processes to achieve this degree of listening. And yet, the reality is that those systems aren't working properly.

So the moral is simple really. Go home, and get your son, daughter, husband, wife, partner, friend, mother, father, or simply a mate from the pub, to go through the process of testing it for you. Give them a simple but pertinent bit of customer experience and see how easy it is for them to feed it back.

It could be a salutory lesson!

I am happy to comment, or deliver keynote sessions, on any of the topics that I post about.
For media and speaking enquiries, please call me, Graham Wilson, on 07785 222380.

Best wishes

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Working behind the scenes, helping leaders achieve things they never dreamt they could
grahamwilson.org - businesscoaching.org.uk - inter-faith.net
thefutureofwork.org - corporate-alumni.info

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