How many times have you done exactly what the rule book said, only to be undermined by a manager? We’ve all been there. “These are the rules unless someone pushes back even a little. Then I’ll come in and save the day and you’ll look like a fool.” This is, the WORST management style. Yes sometimes you may bend the rules for specific situations but undercutting your staff and giving a customer exactly what they want when you have policies that prohibit it is a great way to demoralize your team and lose good people. This is why having your customer’s journey planned is so important. Having a road map means that you and your team are all on the same page and your clients can take or leave your product. This concept works both for service jobs like restaurants all the way to high level project managing. We’ll talk about a couple examples.
First, we'll go with a restaurant. You hopefully have repeat customers but more than likely, you’re treating your guests as though they haven’t been in before. So when they walk in the door, you probably want someone to greet them. Ideally in the first few seconds of them coming in they hear a “Hello welcome to <restaurant> we’ll be right with you.” This means you have to staff someone to always be near the front. You can’t be shouting across the room of course. Next, they get seated. Who takes their drink orders? Is it the host? If it is, you better have more than one, because what if another guest comes in while they’re getting drinks? Now, your servers have a rough script including specials, ways to upsell, etc. You have also probably told them to check in X number of times during the meal, roughly every Y minutes. They have notes on what to ask for customizations etc. So what if someone asks for something that can’t be customized? Maybe they want pasta salad without tomatoes but the pasta salad was made this morning with tomatoes. Your policies state that you won’t pick food out of a dish to serve to a guest (because that’s gross). The client throws a fit. It’s really easy to tell yourself, oh it’s just this once. I just want this client to be quiet and stop making a scene. So you do it. You’ve now just told the client that what the server says doesn’t matter, and you’ve told your server that it’s OK with you if they get shouted at and told off by clients. That client is going to come in and pull this every single time (if you give an inch they’ll take a mile) and your employee isn’t going to trust that you will back them up which means they’ll let other policies slide because they don’t matter.
This process works the same no matter the company. It’s true in my company all the way up to fortune 500s. Surprisingly, larger corporations tend to be better at enforcing rules because there are so many people working for them it’s even more important that they all have uniform instructions. Almost everyone has a story like this. What’s yours?