As you grow your business, it’s essential you ‘let go’ and pass responsibility to your team members.
Of course, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, because so many things can slip through the cracks.
Oftentimes, this isn’t out of incompetence or neglect … but a result of a flawed system.
For instance, let’s consider a story from Amazon.com
Once Jeff Bezos was performing his mandated Customer Connection training and observed a CS Agent taking a phone call.
Strangely, the CS Agent predicted the exact product that was damaged before receiving the product number from the customer.
As you can guess, this set off alarm bells for the hard-charging CEO and as it turns out, this product is often damaged in shipping due to poor packaging.
Unfortunately, all a CS Agent could do is apologize and offer a refund.
Not a good experience for the customer – and not very good for Amazon’s reputation and bottom line.
Fortunately, Jeff was recently studying Toyota’s Continuous Improvement and ‘borrowed’ their concept of the Andon Cord.
Toyota had a rope positioned above each workstation on their assembly line and if at any time an employee noticed a quality issue, they simply pulled the cord and the assembly line STOPPED!
Then team leaders would rush to the site and investigate why the cord was pulled and then took actions to fix the quality problem and started the process over.
Mr. Bezos had this same process installed in Amazon and at any time, a CS Agent could immediately prevent a product from being ordered by hitting a ‘big red button’ on their screen.
Remember, it’s those on the front lines that deal with your customers and who are often the first to see the little problems BEFORE they evolve into BIG problems.
So doesn’t it make sense to empower them to ‘sound the alarm’ when the problems are still ‘small’ and manageable?