Today I published my first post for the Connection Cafe, Convio’s company blog. I’m hoping it gets some energetic and passionate comments so head over there and start a dialogue.

Connection Cafe is largely written to the nonprofit audience, but if you’re from the corporate world don’t let that scare you off. I’ll be dealing with the same themes there as I do here with Bailey WorkPlay…but more pointed to the NPO crowd.

Here’s a snippet:

But then, I would follow this with something usually less obvious: without an engaged staff, there would be no members wanting to bring their dues, participation, and energetic passion. Too often, professional associations and non-profits expend so much of their focus on what lies outside, they can overlook the very people who make things happen inside every single day (don’t worry, for-profits are not immune either). There’s a reason why many non-profits are not run solely by members or volunteers. It’s because the professional paid staff have the experience, skills, and talents to help members and volunteers achieve great organizational goals.

Go read the whole post…

Here’s a question that I’ve been pondering for a while and it just resurfaced lately. When management makes a person or a department responsible for customer satisfaction as their primary function, does that inadvertently absolve others of that responsibility? It was an issue I always struggled with as a membership development professional in the non-profit world and I also see it playing out in customer service departments in for-profits.

I guess the answer is that it all depends on the culture of the organization and whether that culture emphasizes that each person who enters immediately understands that no matter what their position is…providing a remarkable customer experience is task #1.

Yet, how many organizations can we personally count that have this type of culture? I don’t just mean they have a nice wall plaque stating that everyone is responsible for customer service; I mean actual living, thriving culture where this is acted out every single day. When you move on to the second hand, please let me know because you’ve just won a prize. And if your own organization is present as one of those fingers, you’ve won the grand prize…and I really want to talk to you because you have a story to share.

If you really want to improve the customer experience, start here: make it clear that every single position in the organization is customer-facing and responsible for their satisfaction. From the CEO to the guy who makes sure your IT infrastructure works, regardless of the position within the company everyone may be called on to speak to a customer about their experience, listen to a complaint, or gather their feedback about new ideas.

Think you have it rough in life? Mr. Ken Shabby offers us a view of someone who keeps a stiff upper lip in the face of low-end jobs and accommodations. See, in spite of his janitorial ambitions and having to live with his polecat-raising grandmother, he’s about to move on up into upper-class society. Watch his inspiring story after the brief animated introduction:

The key work lesson here: make sure that you get resources to do your tasks more effectively, promotion or no promotion.

How do I know whether I have a talent?
This is a case not of if you have a talent, but what your talent is. I wholeheartedly believe that we’re all endowed with something unique within us that can be put to use, something that connects us to our own distinct purpose for being. Our primary challenge is figuring out what that is. If you’re still searching – regardless of your age – it’s okay. Some of our talents are well hidden from our view. To help, there are countless assessments and resources out there you can turn to that will help you. Two books to consider are:

Is Your Genius At Work? by Dick Richards. Dick works from a model that we all have one unique genius that is an exceptional power that just comes naturally to us. His book is a wonderful guide for discovering our talent and how to apply it in our life and work.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. Once you complete the web-based assessment, you can return to the book for ideas on how to bring your five strengths into daily action. The real key to the assessment and book is taking the strengths and compiling them into a unique concept of who you are and what you can do that no one else can.

Just don’t fall into the trap of considering each resource the end-all, ultimate source of insight about you and your talent. Instead, take each one and combine them all to form a story. This may take some help from others around you.

Make the most of your talent…practice it.
If you do happen to pick up StrengthsFinder, you’ll discover that Rath uses an equation that ties talents and strengths together:

talent x investment = strength
Talent: a natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving.
Investment: time spent practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base.
Strength: the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance.

When you do figure out your talent, that’s just the first step. The next step is develop and fine-tune it. Here’s an example to help illustrate how this equation works. Say you have a passion for the cello and practice your heart out for years. But no one is going to confuse you for Yo Yo Ma or even a symphony-level performer. There’s nothing wrong with this, but recognize that cello playing will never be a strength regardless of how hard you practice. The reason is that you lack the talent. But let’s say you have incredible talent, but don’t bother to put in the effort to hone it. You’re simply wasting your talent because you don’t make the investment necessary to make it a strength.

In the end, it takes the ability to recognize your talent and invest the time and effort to make it a true strength.

Before diving into the idea of hidden talent, we should take a step back and examine the current understanding of talent. Before 1997, the concept of talent was pretty much exclusive to the entertainment industry. That changed when McKinsey published their seminal study called The War for Talent. Whether or not you buy into whether there’s continues to be a war or not (particularly with our current sensitivities toward actual war), I think we can agree with the central thesis: that a post-industrial era company’s most vital asset is not bricks, widgets, or equipment; it lies in the intangible qualities of the company’s people.

Yet, if that’s true then why do so many organizations typically do a lackluster job at attracting, managing, and engaging talent? The answer lies in the persistent use of old school human resource practices and industrial age thinking about employees.

The Struggle to Attract and Keep Talent
The interesting trend is that recruitment continues to outpace retention when it comes to attention and innovation. But then, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Getting something (or someone) new has always been sexier than trying to keep them. I learned that in a past-life working in nonprofit association membership management. When I compiled my monthly member data reports, my Boards and Executive Directors always asked first about the growth statistics. “How many new members did we get? Which recruitment effort worked the best? Etc, etc, etc.”

However, for all of this attention and innovation, employee recruitment often continues to be disconnected from the issues of retention. Think of the typical sales cycle within most companies: marketing creates a branding image and sales continues to build on this image to close the deal. What happens if this carefully crafted image turns out to be more myth than reality? You have some very pissed off customers on your hands (think: JetBlue, Microsoft Vista, General Motors for some recent examples of unrealistic branding). The very same thing happens in organizations. New talented employees are lured in by slick employer branding only to find that the reality of working there is quite different. Again, pissed off employees who are feeling disenchanted and devalued.

And this feeling isn’t exclusive to newer hires. If organizational changes are made that negatively disrupt that initial branding or a more recent employment experience (think job description changes or management shake ups), then you can expect a similar type of disengagement. The fact is that if left unengaged, your people will be shopping their themselves and their talents even in not so good economic times. Michael Gregoire, President and CEO of Taleo Corporation recently wrote:

Today’s workforce is in control. Employees want to understand how they are connected to the company. They want to know how they can progress. They want to work at a place that fits their lifestyle choices. As employers, we have been placed in the unenviable position of needing to market our companies to our employees each and every day. If we neglect to engage our own employees, those who are frustrated can surf hundreds of job boards to see what other opportunities await.

A Refreshed Look at Talent
While talent is often defined as a natural aptitude or skill, I take a wider view of it. It’s not just about raw intellect or strictly defined as having an Ivy League education. I see a talent as something unique to an individual. I also see it as a gift; a gift given to each of us that we can use in service to others. Some of these talents are immediately evident, particularly those that match up with our job descriptions. But we know that job descriptions, while necessary, can be limiting unless employees are given the room to explore outside of their boundaries. Each of us have been endowed with talents that not only energize us when we use them, they are an organization’s prime source of innovation, passionate enthusiasm, and competitive remarkability. In short, these hidden talents are one of the critical elements in creating a culture of high employee engagement that leads to long-term organizational success.

This week, I’ll be exploring hidden talents, why they are important, how to surface and use them in work, and ways to embed them in organizational culture. I’m looking forward to the rich dialogue we’ll cocreate together.

I’m starting to set aside some time to peruse some of the magazines that have been piling up on my desk. As it turns out, I’m three issues behind in my reading of Harvard Business Review so it’s fairly likely you’ll see a few blogposts in the near future related to HBR articles.

Going back to the May 2008 issue, Michel Anteby wrote a brief article in the Forethoughts section called Working in the Gray Zone. In the article, he brings an interesting perspective to one of my favorite topics – hidden talents. (I define a hidden talent as a unique skill or ability that an employee brings with them to an organization that is not part of their job description.) For Anteby the “gray zone” of the article title refers to using one’ s hidden talents for what may be considered non-essential work activities. He points out the example of a competent, productive newspaper editor who spends time at work writing her novel. I’ve personally experienced managers in the past who would verbally flay this individual if they ever caught wind of this behavior. Yet, other managers might be incredibly supportive knowing that the editor could always be counted on to deliver official work when it needed to be done.

Anteby asks why individuals might be attracted to using company time and resources for personal projects. I like his answer and it adds a nuance to my thinking about hidden talents. While most workers are supplied with a job description, that’s often not enough. Many of us feel a strong pull toward fulfilling our own sense of “occupational identity” that is much more robust and unique to our own particular talents. And more often than not, they are tied to our current work in some way which is why smart managers don’t just tolerate trips to the gray zone, they encourage them.

Anteby writes:

It’s worth thinking about bringing gray zones out into the open by finding official ways for employees to engage their occupational identities…Finding a perfect official match might not always be possible, but employees will be more engaged and productive when their true skills are recognized by their employers.

Next week, I’ll be writing a long-planned series on how to uncover and utilize the hidden talents of your employees. So plan to come on back…I promise you’ll find some answers to how to better engage your people and help them bring more of themselves to their work.

The first time I saw Monty Python’s Flying Circus, I was 12 years old. From the introductory, “It’s…” to the ending credits playing John Philip Sousa’s Liberty Bell, I was a changed young man. My sense of humor was permanently skewed as I started quietly reciting whole sketches in the middle of class and trying to draw some of Terry Gilliam’s bawdy images. Since those salad days of youth, not much as really changed in my adoration of all things Python. Well, that’s not entirely true…as I’ve matured, I’ve realized that Monty Python offers some very pointed lessons for how to navigate work life.

It is with great excitement and zany, madcap glee that I offer what will be a biweekly series called Python Thursdays. For the inaugural Python Thursday, I’m choosing the Confuse-A-Cat sketch. This was from that very first episode I saw of MPFC. The learning is after video…and now for something completely different:

Oh how many times have I found myself suffering from the old stockbrokers syndrome? Balls of string and juicy mice just didn’t perk me up the way they used to. Being in a rut sucks. And you know it’s bad when it can affect even poor domestic kitties. But there are a couple of things you can do when you wake up and realize that you’re stuck in a rut.

Keep your social ties strong. Imagine poor kitty if he didn’t have such wonderful owners bringing him food and milk, calling in a very competent vet, and ordering the services of Confuse-A-Cat Limited.

Confuse yourself. Take a different route to work or the grocery store. Start putting your keys somewhere different. Start with small things. You don’t exactly need a penguin on a pogo-stick chasing a guy in a towel – but it wouldn’t hurt.

And don’t wait until it’s too late. If only more people would call in the nick of time.

Any other learnings we can draw from our newly confused kitty?

I’m always excited when a book on employee engagement comes into my field of vision. It just adds more validity to the principles and practice behind the work I do to help organizations design a remarkable work experience. A fairly recent book added to my library is Sybil Stershic’s Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care. For the most part, it is a thoughtful and useful resource for any organizational manager or executive who wants to build a strong service-oriented culture from the inside-out.

If you’re at all on the fence about about employee engagement’s connection to customer service, here are a few quotes to consider:

Employees influence what customers think about your business and determine whether (or not) they’ll establish and maintain relationships with your company.

It should be no surprise that the way people treat each other within an organization impacts how they ultimately treat external customers…good internal service drives good external customer service.

What You’ll Love About This Book
It’s short and to the point.
The book is just over 100 pages and Sybil lays out exactly what’s inside in the first paragraph:

This is a book about the “care and feeding” of the people who are ultimately responsible for an organization’s success. It’s about internal marketing – a blended approach focused on taking care of employees so they can take care of customers. It is about marketing and human resources, and management, and creating a positive customer-focused culture.

It’s actionable.
Each chapter ends with an Action Plan Starter Notes section to help you take the information of the chapter and rework it into your organization’s unique situation. In the last chapter, Sybil offers worksheets where you can take these notes and put them together to form an Employee-Customer Care Internal Marketing Action Plan.

It’s measurable.
Currently, one of the toughest things to find are statistics to support the impact that employee engagement has on organizational health and customer service. Many executives continue to view some of the key principles of employee engagement like respect and recognition as soft values which is their polite (and misguided) way of invalidating them. Which is why her use of statistics in many cases vital when it comes to making the argument for focusing more on the employee relationship.

It’s not just for corporations.
In a couple of places, Sybil addresses non-profit organizations and offers some ideas to help non-profits relate for-profit terms to their situation. While there could be a little more emphasis in the book for the non-profit sector, I’m impressed that she actually includes it in her thinking…most thinkers and writers in this space focus entirely on the corporate world.

I’d like to invite Sybil to share her thoughts and answers to your questions about how to create a great employee-customer care program. To kick it off, here are a couple of questions:

• If employee-customer care is such a powerful concept (and in many ways a no-brainer), why don’t more organizations realize this and focus more resources on it?
• In what ways can non-profits, particularly professional associations, build staff-member/constituent care programs? Are there any parallels from the for-profit sector that non-profit executives should include? Any differences to watch for?

I’m the third stop on the virtual book tour for Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most. The stops include:
June 1st, Kevin Burns posted a review at Burns Blogs Attitude.
June 3rd, Lisa Rosendahl posted a review at HR Thoughts.
June 4th, You Are Here
June 5th, Toby Bloomberg at Diva Marketing will be posting an interview with Sybil.
June 6th, Becky Carroll at Customers Rock! will be posting a review and interview with Sybil.
June 9th, Paul Hebert will be posting a review on the blog Incentive Intelligence.
June 10th, Phil Gerbyshak will be posting an interview on the blog Slacker Manager.

Check in with these stops throughout the next couple of weeks. More information about this new book is available on the WME Books blog, the book page on the WME online store and at the Quality Service Marketing blog. If you’re interested in buying this book, go directly to the WME online store and enter this discount code – 107VBT – to receive 20% off your purchase.