how often do you think companies drop the ball when it comes to customer service, despite all the talk about improving the customer experience?

One was to conduct an exercise we called “Start, Stop, Continue” in our team meetings. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they’re doing really well and should keep doing.

If you don’t ask questions, you won’t get answers.”

We want to treat one another well, and we think that means making one another feel good. But this desire to make people feel good is often as much a desire to make ourselves feel good as to do the right thing.

data can be used as an accountability shield, deflecting responsibility for a judgment call. People are more comfortable making decisions based on hard data in part because they can fall back on that data if the decision turns out to be wrong.

I often say to executives, “Have an opinion; take a stand; be right most of the time.” Opinions aren’t helpful unless the people who hold them are willing to take a stand in their defense by making a fact-based case.

In product development, if something doesn’t work, you get rid of it. I realized we could apply that same principle to managing people.

If you stop any employee, at any level of the company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and,

The most important thing about giving feedback is that it must be about behavior, rather than some essentializing characterization of a person, like “You’re unfocused.” It also must be actionable.