Rules, courage and customer satisfaction
Having just got off the phone to my Bank and feeling very stressed. As a self-employed professional (albeit through a fully owned company), I don’t fit into their rules very easily. So I was trying to get them to accept that I am happy with my financial situation, that recent rules they have introduced (on the ‘recommendation’ of the regulatory body) shouldn’t apply to me and that as a fully functioning, responsible adult (in a legal sense only I can assure you) I don’t need protecting from myself.
Obviously, I failed – “only following the rules Mr Ellis” and it’s “for your own protection Mr Ellis”. So now I have to send off a whole bunch of information and I’ve spent the afternoon looking at competitors.
I get rules. Rules are designed to provide clarity, set expectations, help large groups of people to manage processes, set minimum levels of standards. Good rules protect all parties.
But why does it feel like so many rules are only there to protect one party – in this case the bank? Somewhere at some time someone got blamed for being irresponsible and rather than recognise that mistakes happen and circumstances change, a new rule was introduced.
How many times does this happen in organisations? Someone has a good idea and so they decide to create a rule. A good idea but for a variety of reasons – it’s not thought through, it’s a compromise, circumstances change – the rule stops employees thinking for themselves and for the customer.
And the customer becomes upset and leaves.
Why can’t employees say no?
Why can’t the organization create a means (or a rule!) that allows employees to question silly rules? Maybe for one morning once a month everyone has to say ‘why’ at least twice, or there’s a specific IT tool that allows anonymous feedback on ‘stupid’ rules.
Organizations – encouraging employees to be courageous, giving them the tools and the means to question ‘the way things are done around here’ makes good business sense. At least if you want to stop customer dissatisfaction.
“Life is about courage and going into the unknown.”
This is a quote by Kristen Wiig in the film ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’.
In the film, Walter Mitty (Ben Stiller) dreams of achieving big challenges but his reality is the opposite – a ‘normal’ guy who struggles to win the girl of his dreams and finds it hard to recall anything of note about his life. However, when faced with a real-life test, he is capable of achieving and exceeding anything even he could have dreamed of.
Courage is often portrayed like this. Normal people placed in extra-ordinary circumstances and coping beyond their expectations. Whether it is the dignity and calmness shown by 9/11 workers as they trouped out of their burning buildings, bystanders who plunge into a raging river to rescue a drowning person or passers-by who confront gun welding murders; these are situations that most individuals will never expect to see in their lifetime.
Most of us will never face these types of opportunities to see whether we’re capable of being just as courageous. However, we all face daily opportunities to be courageous – crossing the road, offering an opinion and trying new food all involve a degree of risk that most of us accept as a part of living our lives. In fact, without courage we would never learn to walk, to love, to start new jobs, to travel and to develop as human beings.
Courage does not have an off or on switch. All of us are courageous, we simply have different levels of risk that we are prepared to take.
Next time you’re confronted with a situation where the best action to take makes you feel uncomfortable, rather than seeing it as a one-off event, recognise it as a point on the line between those risks that you’re happy to take and those that you’re not.
And then step into the unknown.