It’s Monday.  Your day starts with a 9am one to one catch up, immediately followed by another meeting at 10am.  You meant to block out some time to work on a report at 11:30am but someone has dropped a meeting in to your Outlook and you feel under pressure to attend.  Before you know, it’s 14:30pm.  You shove some food down and just about manage to get on to your 14:45pm meeting by 3pm, apologising for being late.  That meeting overruns so the 16:30 team meeting you were supposed to lead is late starting. It looks like you won’t get through the agenda until after 6pm and meanwhile your inbox is full to bursting and your To Do list is into its 3rd page.  It’s only Monday. 

Does this sound like your every day at the moment?  To us it sounds utterly depressing.  Our clients are telling us this is becoming the norm of the working week, so let’s consider why this might be.

Ever since the majority of us have been working away from our colleagues and clients, our meeting load has become meeting overload.  In the office, what could be done as a chat across the desk or enroute to the kitchen, is now a 15-minute exchange on Slack or Teams.  What would have been a get together and a useful conversation over coffee is now a full-blown Zoom meeting. What would have been a monthly team meeting now happens fortnightly because you’re worried about people feeling isolated. In the office, it was also perfectly fine to pop to the loo, grab a coffee or check your email before your next meeting – and let people know that’s what you were doing.  It is much harder to convey this remotely, without appearing rude or tardy.  Yet we still need those little breaks. 

Our days have become so full of meetings, none of us is getting any work done.  It’s fine if meetings are your work, but for most, meetings result in actions and there is no time to implement them.  Add to that the now accepted practice of scheduling meetings without a gap between one ending and the next starting - and it’s a recipe for fatigue and frustration.

Let’s nip this one in the bud before it tucks itself snugly in to our work culture.  Here are three ways to get off the meeting conveyor belt and restore communal gatherings virtual or otherwise, to events you look forward to.

  1. Ask “Why?” more often.  Why is this meeting taking place?  Why should attendees care that they are there? And why does whatever you’re having the meeting for need to be done at a meeting?  If you have sound answers to all these questions, give the meeting the green light.  If you don’t, consider whether the purpose can be achieved in another way.
  2. Scan the Attendee List – do you have the right people at the meeting?  They’re the right people if they can add something to the conversation and are responsible for at least some of the actions that result.  There are exceptions to this but in the main, meetings don’t need observers or extras.  Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has a novel way of keeping the numbers down.  He says:  "We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas. We call that the two-pizza team rule."  This avoids too many people at meetings.  Elon Musk’s approach is even more radical.  He encourages people to leave a meeting if they are not adding any value.  That certainly focusses the mind of the participant, but it also makes you question if you’re the right person to be occupying the square on the screen.
  3. And this is the big one.  Instigate the 15-minute rule to meeting scheduling.  That is, you don’t allow meetings to be scheduled back to back.  There must be a 15-minute gap.  And if that sounds all too reasonable, why not go for 30 minutes which is even better, but we accept may not be realistic sometimes.  It needs to be agreed across teams and adhered to.  When you think about it, it makes total sense.  You want to arrive at a meeting with the right mind-set – focussed on the impending agenda, not the recently departed one.  People need breathing space (not to mention coffee and comfort!) to give their best, so give them a break. 

And while we’re talking about scheduling, if you do have a report to work on at 11.30, that is a meeting of sorts.  A meeting with yourself and the report – so give it an appointment in your diary which prevents others slotting in yet another meeting.

Those are our top 3 tips for tackling meeting overload, and we have more tips too.  If you’d like to speak to us about how you build a meeting culture which inspires energy and commitment without the song and dance, we’d love to hear from you.  We could even book a meeting to talk about it.  But not until at least 15 minutes after your previous meeting.

Bravery and courage are central themes in so many books and films we have grown up with.  The lion in The Wizard of Oz follows the yellow brick road in search of it, Shakespeare’s Hamlet calls on it to avenge his father’s murder and Jo March, in Little Women, bravely fights gender stereotyping to make her own way in life.

Leadership has always been associated with bravery but never more than now.  As we enter the next stage of this new world, the pressure is on the maintain high performance, often in the face of significant challenge, profit and income shortfalls (unless you are running Zoom or Amazon) and uncertainty about the future. So maybe now is the time to think about what being brave really means in your role and how it may be different from relying on bravado.

First some differentiating definitions:

Bravery is defined as courageous behaviour and character, whereas bravado is described as a bold manner intended to impress or intimidate.

You can see the problem here.  Bravery is all about substance.  It inspires belief and trust in leaders.  Bravado may be motivating and exciting at first but lacks weight if not followed up with evidence, action and consistency from those who employ it.  As the quote says – we need a backbone, not a wishbone.

So, when the pressure is on and whether you lead an organisation, section, team or project, how do you remain brave and avoid the bravado trap?  Here are 3 ways.

  1. Brave leaders have the courage to open themselves up to feedback, welcome it and use it positively.  Acting with bravado on the other hand can make you sound overconfident, even arrogant.  And it closes you off to feedback.  Sometimes we hide behind bravado when we are afraid of what we’ll hear if we seek feedback.  Don’t be.  If you go out to people with a well thought out argument and can back up your reasons, any feedback you seek will acknowledge that you have thought things through and may add a useful dimension to your proposal.  Better that they say it to you than about you.
  2. Share what you know.  Brave leaders are generous with their experiences and don’t withhold information without good reason.  The bravado brigade often chooses to stay quiet, fob you off and withhold information which only breeds a culture of suspicion and scepticism. It is true sometimes you need to access bravery when you don’t feel brave, to straighten up in front to people and communicate with conviction.  No one wants to see their leader unravel in front of them.  But that shouldn’t stop you communicating concerns and collaborating with others to solve problems.  Bravery, like resilience, doesn’t have to be a lone sport.  Sharing what you know will grow the team’s skills and abilities and encourage bravery in them too.
  3. Embrace diverse thinking.  This means being brave enough to surround yourself with people who don’t think like you do and will challenge existing ways of working to drive change for the better.  Leaders who prefer bravado often surround themselves with yes people – those who think in the same way or at least won’t challenge them.  This might be an energy saver and feel good at times, but in the long run is not a good thing.  Research tells us that diverse teams are more likely to be high performing. So have the courage to welcome a range of views and approaches.

We aren’t born brave – or maybe we are and life bashes it out of us.  Either way, being brave is a choice.  It’s scary at times, requires energy and time and you feel the weight of responsibility to lead people relying on you to set the direction.  But it is rewarding too and what we need from our leaders right now.  Anyway, what’s the alternative – fake it till you make it?  You may not make it.

Hello readers.  Last week we looked at some of the positives of learning online in a group or with your team and promised a counter-argument to follow.  Well, here it is – some of the downsides of virtual learning and why we need to balance it with some close contact learning experiences once our country leaders and our common sense give us the green light.

We gave you 8 benefits for learning remotely so in the spirit of balance here are 8 of the disadvantages.  Or maybe not.  Because when it comes down to it, there really is only one disadvantage.  But it’s a big one. Huge.

Here it is.  When you engage in online learning, however skilful, however much group interaction is part of it and no matter how many polls, breakout rooms, whiteboards, and interaction you include, it is NOT the same.  Human learners need connection and that means being in the same room as others, at least some of the time.  Whether it is your coach, your manager, your team, or a learning group you are part of, there is just something about the warm body experience that takes learning to a different level.

We are professional facilitators, used to being in a room with others.  Since Covid-19, we’ve adapted our business to deliver entirely virtually for now, and we’ve adapted well.  But two months on, the cracks start to show, as people crave that connection and inclusion you lose virtually.  As one colleague puts it “You can’t get the smell of people”.  Don’t take this literally.  They mean that the senses are dulled online.  You don’t pick up on the finer nuances of what others say and how they are feeling.  When you’re in a room, you somehow get more from the unsaid – that someone is feeling unsure, has additional questions that need teasing out, or that in a team session there is a tension that hasn’t been expressed.  It is odd that we are staring intently at each other’s faces during online learning (as well as staring at our own faces for hours on end – note to self – smile more) yet we don’t pick up nearly as much as we would do by being there.  This has a major impact on learning and limits its effectiveness.

This whopper of a disadvantage is less of a thing where you are looking to gain knowledge or pick up a set of skills.  Which is why online learning really comes into its own for a quick how to or to gain know how.  As soon as the learning focuses on relationships, interpersonal skills, customer care or anything requiring practice and feedback, the disadvantages of trying to do it all in the virtual space become apparent.

So here are our conclusions as we all start to dip our toe back in to the world.  Virtual learning is serving us well in many ways.  It existed before this pandemic and it will endure in the future.  It’s great for knowledge, remote coaching and self-development.  But when it comes to team coaching, team development, skills practice, and anything where relationships are the first priority, you can’t beat the face to face, scented option.

Seen on social media earlier today: “Human contact and face to face interaction is what keeps us healthy.  The rest is just background noise.”  Over and out.

How many conference calls and catch ups do you have today? Life and work BC (before Covid) was, for most of us, characterised by the warm body experience. Now we live our working lives and quite a lot of our personal lives too, on screen.

This includes the way we develop as many of us now engage in online learning, accessing courses, modules and webinars in the virtual space. As you know, our business is learning and development and some of our work with clients was conducted online anyway – coaching and training people around the globe. Some of our work was – now it all is.

At the moment we don’t have much choice but, in the future, we will have. So, two and a bit months in we thought we’d look at the impact of virtual learning – the good, the bad and the ugly. This week we look at some of the positives of learning online in a group or with your team that we have discovered, and we why should all be doing it more.

Here are some thoughts on the benefits – 8 to be exact.

  1. It’s cheaper without the cost of travel, room hire and accommodation. You pay for expertise and expert facilitation, not all the add ons required by being in a shared space. This is great for virtual teams who wouldn’t meet otherwise.
  2. Teams can learn easily together. Team learning is so beneficial. We see it over and over again. There is something about hearing new concepts and exploring ideas together, that makes application to work (and therefore, time well spent) much easier.
  3. You are in control of your space. Provided you can stem the flow of visits from cats, dogs, small humans and Amazon deliveries, you are in a comfortable space that you have determined, you are ready for learning and without someone next to you with whom you feel you have to make polite conversation.
  4. You get back to the day job quicker. Online learning tends to be shorter, so you’re unlikely to be at it all day. This means you don’t feel so much pressure about what you’re missing and how your inbox is piling up. Once again, the short distance between your learning and your every day work makes application easier.
  5. People less likely to speak up are more likely to speak up. In the virtual space, those who don’t like to give their input to a group feel more inclined to do so. Listening is also better as people can’t really interrupt each other; you have to wait your turn.
  6. You have to give it your all. Seeing everyone on screen (and we encourage our learners to keep their videos on!) can feel a bit full on (we’ll look at that when we examine the cons next week) but it has its plusses. People pay better attention, work harder to be “in the room” and are mindful of distractions, because if you do send a quick text or email during online learning, it’s pretty obvious what you are doing and someone may call you out on it!
  7. Learning in this way requires an extra dose of self-discipline, self-motivation and listening. These are all vital work and life skills and getting the chance to develop them means two lots of learning for the price of one.
  8. It breaks up the day. Groups we are working with at the moment always tell us how much they look forward to these sessions. For some it is the first chance they get to connect with others, a break from the stress of the day and a chance to use their brain in a different way.
    No doubt there are other benefits that you are experiencing to add to our list. This is a time for learning. It feels like we’ve had to develop and acquire more skills and strategies in the last two months than we have in the last two years. Learning online can be a winner.
    It can also be a drain on time and energy but save yours for now – we’ll look at the downsides of developing the virtual space next week.

You’ve set your office up, finally managed to work out how to get on a video call and are secretly enjoying the lack of a commute. You have probably been for more walks in the last two weeks than in the last two years and discovered things about your local neighbourhood you didn’t know. And you are busy, busy, busy…… or are you?

Strange things are happening to us two weeks in. Many of us had different reactions to the working at home directive. You may have noticed that some of us sprang into action, came up with 25 different ideas to grab the opportunities presented by the challenge and set up more social media links than Kylie Jenner to keep in touch with everybody. Then some of us flailed around a bit doing a good impression of Virgil the puppet in Thunderbirds not sure what was happening and how we should respond.

These responses are totally normal and will have produced some great work. Those who have paused, reflected, planned and remained calm will have done lots of foundational work that will come to fruition in the next few weeks. Those who could leap into action will have kept spirits up, kept your organisation agile and bravely gone…

And now the lull where “not busy guilt” can creep in. This is a form of natural guilt which serves as an internal elbow in your ribs to help you identify uncomfortable behaviour and change course. Natural guilt prompts you to call your Mum, leave your phone number when you scrape a car manoeuvring out of a parking space or alert the restaurant to an item missing off your bill.  Natural guilt, some social scientists believe, comes from our ability to empathise with others' suffering.

How do you know you’ve got it? Look at some of these phrases, do any of them specifically or broadly sound like the voice in your head?

  1. My colleagues are snowed under and I’m finding it hard to get dressed never mind fill a working day.
  2. I’ve been busy doing the stuff I thought needed doing but now I’m not sure I made the right choices.
  3. Why can’t I leave Piers Morgan to himself and get some work done?
  4. Another day faffing about with nothing to show for it.

This inner talk could be a sign of natural guilt. These thoughts can stop us sleeping, be weapons to attack ourselves with and generally make us feel useless.

The good news is that if you have a healthy relationship with your personal guilt, you don't agonise over the feelings, you use the dig in the ribs to change your behaviour.

Let’s take the thoughts above and use them as examples of ways we can re frame thoughts.

  1. Your colleagues may well be snowed under, some of us have jobs that have not stopped during this time (think advice line workers, outreach workers, Hospice clinicians). You may have a job that can’t progress now, cannot happen (event organisers for example) or is difficult to do from home. If you are used to being flat out with a huge workload, that’s not normal. When we then have a manageable workload, we think we are skiving. So, chill a little, step back, look at which bits of your job can continue and what you may need to introduce to prepare for the future when all this is over.
  2. If you are not sure what you should be doing, try asking. We are all in the same boat so there is no reason to feel bad about this. A chat with your line manager to agree what is a priority for you now will mean you start producing and stop feeling like you are wasting your time. Becoming proactive now will serve you well if you embrace it as a normal stage of change not wallow in “I should have been doing this all along”
  3. Just say no to Piers. Have a start time, put some structure into your day to give you the reason you need to be at your desk. Maybe Piers can be recorded and be your treat at the end of a productive day?
  4. Are you really faffing? Review your work at the end of the day and recognise the things you have achieved. You may have been grappling with some technology you have never used before which feels like faffing but at the end of the day, you’ve nailed it – tick on your to do list.

If you do need to fill some time how about volunteering to help busier teams? Accessing online learning to skill yourself up, refresh and consolidate your professional skills. Finally doing that not urgent but important progress task you have shuffled around your desk for the last three months – now that would be a huge surge of productivity!

You have the power within you to overcome your natural guilt, proactivity rules!

More resources:

We have created two free online modules to help both managers and staff adjust to working remotely.  They are short, punchy and packed with ways to stay focused, motivated and connected whilst working away from the office. Click on the links below to watch.

It looks like we might be seeing less of each other for a little while.  We didn’t need a virus to tell us that remote teams are a thing – many of us have been part of remote teams for years. But for the immediate future, we may all be part of a remote team.

Time is short and you may be feeling fraught so let’s keep this simple. Here are five things you can do if you are the team’s leader to ensure you don’t lose connection with colleagues, during times apart.

  1. Find ways to recreate the water cooler moments. Teams who work in the same physical space are used to catching up informally when they are in the kitchen, making a coffee or walking to get lunch.  The natural socialising happens without trying.  Remote teams have to make the time to speak about things other than work; otherwise it can all feel too transactional and robotic.  Include in your meetings and one to ones time at the beginning and end, just to engage and chat.
  2. Use video conferencing as much as you can.  It’s the nearest thing to the warm body experience and it allows you to see body language that may indicate how people are feeling.  Granted you can’t wear your onesie and have your cat wandering in and out of the room but the gain is worth the effort.  It also keeps people attentive.  Ban all other technology at the meeting in the way all good face to face meetings do, so that the only screen folks are staring in to is the one that connects them to you.
  3. At one to one catch ups, ask the most powerful question any manager can ask: “How are you?”  And allow time for the answer.  You may need to ask it more than once with people, to get beyond the standard response.  Isolation and loneliness can creep up on even the most independent remote worker.
  4. Make opportunities equal.  It is easy to overlook people who are self-sufficient and forget to tell them stuff or offer them chances to be involved on tasks and projects.  Some team members just stay in contact more, but it shouldn’t mean they hear about everything before others.  Be inclusive in your communication and don’t leave some people of things just because they’re out of sight.
  5. Encourage your team to manage their time differently. Remote working means you get more done in a shorter time. Fact. You don’t have the office traffic to contend with and so there are fewer interruptions. This means the day is likely to be shorter (or broken up a bit more than the typical 9-5) and that’s fine. Don’t clock watch or micro-manage. It’s unlikely they’re using the time to redecorate the spare room or watch box sets so a bit of self-management on expectations is important here. Remote working allows for periods of concentrated time that you don’t get in an open plan office. There has to be a payoff and the payoff is a shorter day.

And finally, when you are physically together again, make the most of what was learnt from remote working.  There may be some practices that work so well and lead to better results and happier people that they’re worth keeping. And for you as a manager, you can say that you have gained experience of managing remotely.  That’s one for the CV.

Do any of the following sound familiar to you?

 If you recognise some of these symptoms you could be suffering from the underuse of the operational management levels in your organisation. The layer of management under the senior team contains a rich seam of knowledge and skills that needs to be mined by an organisation for growth and success yet so often is ignored, wasted and undermined.

If we look at the big picture around leadership and management we see a clear difference between the two. Leaders concern themselves with high-level strategy, scanning the horizon and keeping an eye on the next big thing and what the competitors are doing. They also have a huge role to play in getting the right people in the right place, removing obstacles in their way so they can deliver results and feel good about doing so.

Managers concern themselves with operational planning, objectives, delivery and creating a motivational environment for people to release their potential, achieve and grow. They need to understand and know the people they work with to get the best out of them and use their skills for the benefit of all.

There are, of course, crossovers.  Sometimes leaders need to manage and managers must lead when the situation demands but broadly speaking if each layer can do what they need to do most of the time the organisation gains huge advantages.

We work with organisations that have worked really hard to strengthen the individual teams of senior leaders and middle managers. Then they bring the two together to agree boundaries, cross-team project work and the exchange of information vital to their success. Leaders know things middle managers do not and vice versa so together they get the whole picture and success emerges.

Another list for you, this time one that highlights the advantages of the gap being closed at the top:

Are you bridging the gap or falling into it?

In our September newsletter, we explored one subject we love to present on, when we speak at conferences.  And we promised a second theme so here it is.  Something key, that is making our audiences sit up and listen.

This one is about leadership and our thoughts on what leaders need to grasp to thrive in changing times.  Our thoughts are many, so here are just a few.

  1. Learn to think big and small – often at the same time.  We call it “head in the strategy, hands in the kitchen sink.”  It’s the ability to know when to look up and think ahead and when to look down and embrace the detail.  You may go out and do some ground-breaking work for your organisation to lead it in to the next phase, but you still need to deal with some mundane but necessary tasks when you get back.  The art of leadership is knowing when to do what.
  2. Get your head around 21st century motivation.  This is the battle of the extrinsic and the intrinsic and it is a battle that has kept the motivation theorists theorising since the 1950s.  Here’s the bottom line.  The extrinsic motivators are front of mind when they’re wrong.  So just get them off the table.  This means you pay people properly, have decent benefits, a workplace fit for purpose and managers who know how to manage well.  Once you’ve dealt with all that, you leave the way clear for the intrinsic motivators.  They’re so much more valuable to you as a leader, because they’re about having fulfilling work,  a sense of achievement, growth, purpose and accountability.  Create an environment full of those where people can motivate themselves and you’ll have something worth putting your leadership energy into.
  3. Let them bite at your ankles. Leaders should be thinking about succession, often and in a positive way.  That doesn’t mean that everyone has to get or even want your job.  It means you should be thinking about how everyone can grow in their role and beyond.  Expose them to new challenges, involve them on projects, and stretch their thinking.  Do it now, don’t wait until you need it.  Ask yourself what you want former team members to say about their time with you.  That you were a great example and role model (good).  Or that you enabled them and propelled them to greater things (better).

Whether you’re a leader already or aspiring to be one, there are always new thoughts on leadership.  To sit up and really listen though, you have to get your head out of the kitchen sink.

The beach towels are folded and stored, the suitcases are back in the loft and we’re panicking about work we didn’t finish before escaping to the sun – it must be autumn.  This is a time of high activity at work, no more excuses and a chance to shine.  And for us it’s conference season.

So what are the hot topics making people sit up and listen? Resilience, wellbeing at work and managing the next generation have been big this year but there are two subjects that never go out of fashion.  And one of them is about the dark art of creating a team from a group.

Some teams aren’t teams at all, they are just a group of people who happen to report to the same manager and come together for meetings and updates.  Just because you call yourselves a team it doesn’t mean you are one.  Members have to work to become a truly cohesive; effective joint force and certain conditions need to be in place for this to happen.  High performance teams create magic (and get rather fantastic results) so if you’re the team’s leader, it is your job to identify what that magic is and how you work it on your team. 

You may be coming to hear us speak on the subject this year, and if so, we’ll be revealing our top tips for team transformation.  If not, here is a sneaky peak – our top three.

  1. Craft a team mind-set.  No amount of skill, knowledge and experience will paper over the cracks of people whose heads are in the wrong place.  So work on developing a team attitude that values support and good relationships, alongside challenge and a focus on results.
  2. Value differences but find some common ground. Some teams attract people who are similar in work style, some are a bit wider ranging.  Either can work really well if you have the same sense of commitment and focus on the end shared goal.  But you do need to agree some communal ways of behaving.  It helps you co-exist and know what to expect from each other.  It also helps those outside of the team to have a consistent experience of you and recognise how someone from your team operates and contributes.
  3. Develop a taste for change.  High performance team working is all about adaptability.  If you crave stability and sameness in all things, change is going to hurt.  So, encourage each other to see change as energising.  We’re so used to telling ourselves and each other that no one likes change, we’ve lost sight of the fact that lots of us love it.  And if you’re not one of those people, you can still learn to love it, but making change a part of your way of working.  High performance teams do just that.

So whatever this season has in store for you, everything works better when groups become teams.  What of the other conference subject in making people sit up and listen?  Too much on the autumn “to do” list for now, so more on that next time.

Complaints are a reality of working life.  Whether they come from a customer, a colleague, a supporter or any other key contact, we are never going to get it right every time.  If the thought of a less than delighted email, a stroppy phone call, or a furrowed brow face-to-face meeting leaves you less than excited, it’s worth remembering that a complaint made shows a modicum of care.  People who complain to us do so because they want to see a wrong (perceived or otherwise) put right, so normal service can resume.  Be brave and treat it as an invitation to improve services and relationships.

Sometimes the only thing that sets you apart from your competitors is the way you deal with people and issues when they go wrong.  There’s a balance to be struck here.  If you’ve made a bit of a mess, you need to admit the error and put it right, but without becoming subservient or rolling in the dirt.  If you didn’t get it wrong, something still happened to trigger the complaint so equally you need to act to restore or rebuild relationships

Here are 5 tips to help you find the right balance when dealing with complaints:

  1. Respond quickly to acknowledge the complaint, by email or telephone.  You are not acting at this stage, just acknowledging receipt.  It shows respect and avoids escalation.  It’s like the waiter who shows you he knows you want the bill even if he can’t get over to you yet, versus the one who studiously avoids your eyes and gestures.  Let people know you’ll be back to them very soon but allow yourself some thinking time.
  2. Once in conversation, work hard to really listen and not second guess.  Conversations (even email ones) involving conflict are stressful and the temptation is to be thinking about what you are going to say in response, which means you risk missing the main points.  Try to stay calm, slow it down and really take in what is being said to you.
  3. Separate content and tone.  People who complain are never happy, and the tone is likely to reflect this.  Getting hung up on the tone will only distract you from the content.  Ask yourself “What are they actually saying here?” and separate that from how it is being said.
  4. Acknowledge what has been said in a genuine way.  This is otherwise known as “rolling with the punch”.  It is what you say to form a bridge between the complaint and what happens next.  They need to see that you can put yourself in their position and see it their way even if your position is different.  Wording is everything here.  Irritants like “I hear what you say” are usually said by people who clearly haven’t and they only serve to inflame.  “I see what you mean” or “I can appreciate how frustrating this was” or “Thank you for getting in touch about this” may be better.
  5. We need to deal with the “s word”.  So terrorised are we by court action, we have lost the ability to say sorry.  Unless you have been advised against it, saying sorry when you’ve got it wrong is genuine and powerful.  Even if you’re not to blame, it’s reasonable to say sorry that upset has been caused.  It’s also important to say sorry without blame.  If the mistake is an organisational or departmental one, you are the one dealing with it, you should be the one saying sorry on behalf of others.  It follows the thinking that everyone is a marketeer and how you deal with this situation paves the way for others.  And a final word on saying sorry.  You need to do it right.  Stating anything that begins with the words “I’m sorry that you feel we have….” Is not saying sorry!  It’s a veiled way of saying – the problem is yours.

After that it is all about moving forward.  Give reasons why something happened if you’re able.  Reasons aren’t excuses – they’re explanations and they can help.  Then move to put things right.  What would they be happy with?  What would you be happy with?  What will be done and how will you stay in touch?  Consider your own experiences as a consumer.  Some of our best relationships develop out of a wrong being put right in a way that exceeded our expectations.  If a complaint is handled well, it’s an opportunity to win over a tricky colleague, turn a client in to one of your greatest advocates and enhance your reputation through others telling people how well you dealt with a difficulty.

At Sharpstone Skinner we work with teams and individuals on assertive and positive ways to maintain good customer and colleague relations and provide expert help on dealing with situations that may involve conflict. 

It may not be happiest part of your day, but if handled well a complaint can lead to better ways of working and turn foes in to fans.  If nothing else, it’s preferable in the long run that they’re saying it to you rather than about you.