Roger Simpson

As an entrepreneur active listening is the absolute key to successfully communicating with anyone. My recommendation is to ask lots of questions, in fact be curious about everything and this will provide so much valuable information. Richard Branson is the best example of this as everywhere he goes he takes a notebook and asks lots of questions. Active listening requires focus and being in the moment to really take on board what is being said. Body language such as eye contact and nodding shows the communicator that you are actively listening. Repeating back in summary form shows you have not only listened but understood and is a powerful way to build trust. As leaders, we need to focus more on questions rather than providing answers!

Training is never the silver bullet, it is very much the first step, so ongoing follow up is essential. Once a team member understands the what and the why of the expectations and has been trained to achieve or exceed these, they need ongoing support. This follow up is best done on the job via observation. This requires team leaders to be working alongside their team and observing if the team member puts in place the required new behaviours. If so they need to receive praise to keep them motivated and wanting to continue. If they are not putting in place the new behaviours they need feedback to help them. This could be on the spot feedback to improve, re-training, or the team leader leading by example. Ongoing follow up never stops.

Providing training so your team can meet and exceed the set expectations is critical. The danger is assuming that your team will know what to do, when this may not be the case. Some tasks require no training, such as in customer service expectations, where it's a requirement to smile and verbally greet customers on their arrival. Smiling is something that cannot be trained, a person either does this naturally or not, so it's important to hire for this particular behaviour. Many other areas do need training, such as product knowledge. This training is best done in a number of bite sized ways, via online, self teaching, team member catch ups, buddy training etc. The key is to keep it short and simple to provide maximum effectiveness.

Often this is the area that is not communicated well and clearly enough. From my experience, business leaders do set expectations, which is the what the team need to do, however the why is too often left out. When your team are just told what to do and not told why, or even better asked for their opinion on why that expectation is important, it creates far less buy in. This often leads to team members following instructions with less care as they don't know where the task fits in with their overall work and the importance of the task. Explaining the steps of a task and asking why each step is important, or providing the explanation, is key to setting clear expectations that your team are much more likely to follow and continue to do so.

Having run many face to face workshops for large groups, it is imperative that activities are used during the session to ensure participation. However, these activities need to relate back to the content and learning objectives and not just be activities to get people up and about. The more you can also get your participants to practise the skills they have learnt the better. Not only will this ensure involvement it also helps with the learning and locking in of new skills. Once again these practise sessions need to be relevant based on the content. Ensure you also plan discussion sessions where small groups can discuss specific questions or content and provide answers. Slotting these activities in at key times is the secret to success.

I often find that the best exponents of great customer service often have no prior experience in that role. They have a passion for service, yet may not have worked in the customer service industry. A number of the skills required for great service can't really be taught, such as smiling, eye contact, upbeat tone of voice. These characteristics can't really be trained so if they come naturally, then the rest can be trained, such as product knowledge, how to use a point of sale etc. Another way to train great service, is to identify what that actually looks like. Finding out how your customers want to be served and then training your team to meet and exceed these expectations is the way to go. This way your team knows what great looks like.