It’s Not Them, It’s You

I just finished a book that resonated strongly with me.  It’s entitled It’s Not Them, It’s You by Laura Sukorokoff.  The book discusses the role of management in employee engagement and I saw immediately how the ideas in Laura’s book would contribute to the success of any service leaders’ efforts to enthusiastically engage their field service teams in proactive business development.

When talking about “proactive business development”, we are referring to getting technicians to take a proactive role in looking for products and services that they can offer to help a customer to be better off.  It might be a product that will improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption or it might be a service that will extend asset life or improve the safety of the operation.  Whatever it is, the key to their proactive efforts is to help customers recognize what they can do to make improvements by bringing the ideas to the customers’ attention.

Our success in getting our techs to enhance the service they provide through these proactive efforts will be largely dependent upon their level of engagement.  A field service professional who is engaged, will be more likely to take these proactive steps more enthusiastically.

Now, there are several things that contribute to level of field team engagement including how the proactive role is described and the processes and systems to support their proactive efforts.  But a critical component, and one that can sometimes be overlooked, is how the manager engages their employees and that is largely dependent upon how the manager is perceived by his or her team.

Which brings me to It’s Not Them, It’s You.  In her book, Laura addresses this issue head on.  Her focus is on what managers can do to build strong, professional and trust-based relationships with their teams to engage them fully and enthusiastically in the business.  She introduces a simple, yet powerful, model that she calls RESPECT.  RESPECT is an acronym for the seven steps she has identified to engage (and retain) employees, namely:

1. Develop a Relationship with the people on your team.
2. Have Empathy for those with whom you work.
3. Support the members of your team
4. Promote the ideas of your team members
5. Empower your team members to be great on their own terms.
6. Have Consideration for their feelings.
7. Trust them, and be trustworthy yourself.

What really impressed me about this book is that it does more than just explain the relationship between RESPECT and employee engagement and retention.  Laura provides solid and practical advice on how to interact with employees to build RESPECT and attain the desired engagement, all the while cognisant of the realities of management. For example, although Laura believes strongly in the importance of having one-on-one meetings with all direct reports, she acknowledges that this is not always practical to do this when you have large numbers reporting to you and provides suggestions on what to do in this case.  This is particularly important when the field team spends most time away from the office and often in remote locations.

If you are interested in learning more about It’s Not Them, It’s You and the work that Laura does in this area, visit https://www.cchangelearning.com