Mike Hohnen
speaker
65 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2024
last heard Jul 2024
Mike Hohnen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
and my brain shut off i can't really explain what happened everything just went fuzzy and wobbly and i was disoriented and i it was it was i wouldn't wish that on anybody and the short story is i spent a year trying to getting out of that because once you've you've done that you and that's just so let this be a warning to anybody when you start And I started, it took me a year to get out of it.
And during that first period, it was so bad, I couldn't cross the street on my own because my brain was not capable of calculating, you know, the cars coming or not. Are they faster? Is there a space? That's actually a piece of complicated arithmetic our brain performs. And mine just wouldn't do it. It was just, can't do that. And so one really has to, and that was the lesson for me.
What are the warning signs? What was it that, you know, that started telling you, body pains or headaches or whatever, that you were pressing this pedal a little bit hard, too hard. And I think that is so important because once it hits you, then it's no joke anymore. I mean, anybody who's been there will know what I'm talking about. I don't wish that for anybody. It's really, really tough.
This is where I become a broken record player, you know, because Johnny described a hotel visit that wasn't extremely successful. So coming back to the sort of overall framework here, everybody wants customer loyalty. Everybody drives for the, is super interested in their NPS score and all of this good stuff. But few people actually really take the time to reflect on the fact.
So in the services industry, I don't know anything about production, but in the services industries, what is the primary driver of NPS? It's employee engagement. Employee engagement drives your NPS because there is no loyalty in basic satisfaction. Just delivering the right product at the right specification at the right price exactly as on spec and all the rest of it, that gives you 3.5%.
It's on a scale of 1 to 5. It's a 3.5. It's okay. And there's no loyalty in that. So we tend to over-focus on this product specification and improving the product. But we forget that in order to get from basic satisfaction to fantastic loyalty and enthusiasm, it requires...
employee engagement and then we need to ask us and when we look at the engagement figures we all know them from gallup and all the rest of them we know them from all the companies it's a huge headache across the board in general terms most places and engagement levels are very low so i think you can can sardines in portugal and not be particularly engaged in your job but in the services industry
From the customer perspective, there is a world of difference between being served by somebody who has a job and somebody who is actually engaged. It's just two different worlds. There's no comparison. So we don't spend enough time asking ourselves, so what is it? How do we actually get to that point? What is it that drives that engagement? How do we get to there?
And then we get back to my story about the polarities because if you think about it, there is a polarity which we could call tasks versus relationships. The to-do list, all the things we want to do versus spending time building relationships with people, connecting, all of that stuff. And if we lift that polarity 500 feet up, essentially that polarity is also called management versus leadership.
The key problem that we face out there is that the system has a bias towards task orientation. The whole system that we all sort of subscribe to in the sense that We all live in these pyramids. There's somebody on top of us and somebody below us.
And whoever's on top of us, whatever level we are on, has a certain tendency to exercise a pressure on us, downward towards us, which is, you could wrap it up in all sorts of fancy paper, but it's called more productivity. We want to see more output for less input. Please turn it up. which is basically a task orientation. And then there's a pressure from below us.
The people who are below us, they have a different pressure. They are exercising a pressure towards us for a better relationship. They want more attention. They want to be seen. They want us to be involved. They want an emotional connection with us one way or the other. And they try and drive that. The problem is that when we then look at our calendar and all the stuff on the to-do list
What do we give the priority? Well, because the guy upstairs, you know, he has he can be nasty or she. So we keep on then value picking the task versus the relationship problem or the relationship thing that we could be doing. Having that conversation with that person, going for a walk with somebody who we know is in trouble with whatever they're doing.
In that sense, it's built in in the way we think about what do we value in work? What do I as a manager value in the next level below me? I level somebody who gets their stuff done, who delivers on time and all of that stuff. And so in that sense, it has this lopsidedness. And the other thing that's built into that cake is that when we recruit, who do we recruit?
What is the kind of personality that we prefer? Well, in my world, the hospitality world, who is the young, bright waiter who gets promoted to assistant shift manager or something, team leader or whatever? Well, it's that waiter who's really well organized and who gets his stuff done and who ticks off the boxes and clears up in the evening. It was very, very... who's in fact really task-oriented.
And who gets promoted assistant manager? Well, it's the team leader who's really task, yeah, okay? And so suddenly you see that there is a trace all the way through the system where everybody who gets promoted to the next level gets promoted primarily because of their task capabilities. They are really good at getting things done.
And I go crazy in the hospitality business when I see this because it's supposed to be a people business. And somehow we get lost in that. But it gets worse because if you then think about it, when we are pressured, when we are under stress, when the heat is turned up, then we all have a tendency to gravitate towards what we feel comfortable doing.
And so if you've structured your system with people who are most comfortable doing tasks, then the more the heat gets turned up, the more they will take refuge in the tasks instead of getting out of their bloody office and facing the problem, which is having that conversation with that person, helping that person grow through the next level or whatever it is.
So first of all, you have to break the waterfall, as I call it. Even if your boss does this, you have to stop doing it. That's a fundamental mentality. You need to make up your mind that you want to do that. And then when I coach people around this, then they always present this to me as a problem. This is a problem. How do I solve this?
Because my boss is pressurizing me and this is what they want. And I know I should be paying more attention to taking care of the people. But I mean, I still have to deliver. So I have to say to them, it's not a problem. It's a polarity. You need to get better at managing that polarity. And you have to see it as a polarity and not as a problem. Because as a problem, it's not solvable.
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