WhatcJazv ideas is management thinking about now?

Have you ever sat in a management or staff meeting and listened to the latest and greatest initiative, then rolled your eyes and wondered, what the heck were they thinking?

Did you recently hear about the large airline that was considering charging callers for talking to a live human being-and if the one you spoke with was in India, it would cost less than if you talked to an agent here in the U.S.? Can you imagine the voicemail tree? If you really must speak to someone and bother us, press I for India, fee $2. Press 2 for the U.5., fee $20. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when that one was presented. I can just see it now-the PowerPoint presentation, fl ip charts up the wazoo, the cost versus benefits study, and no doubt everyone applauding! No wonder that airline is going down the tubes, and no wonder the upstarts are gaining market share.

In any company today of any size, they will talk about their mission statement, their slogans and buzz words, and goals that some highly paid con- sulting firm has done study after study on. Yet when this bill of goods has been sold, you wander into their stores or you deal with their telemarketing group or customer service. and you wait on hold for hours. Or you cannot find a salesperson and when you do, the service does not seem to go with the image portrayed of Service Leaders and Caring for Customers.

Why? The truth of the matter is that 807o of all spending on training is wasted. Today there is a mental gap of what goes on in the boardroom and what happens on the floor, and I suspect the gap is getting wider each year. There is no doubt that if you can get everyone on the same page, great things can happen in an organization. But the reality is that perhaps two out of three do not understand what is expected of them, have no clue, or do not identify with the goals of their company.

The main reason for this is a disconnect between the company's goals and how the business actually operates day to day. You can have all the buzz-

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words, slogans, button days and crafted presentations you want, but unless the average worker understands how those goals and targets impact his or her job, the initiatives go down the proverbial chute. Even great ideas are given short shrift if the company fails to practice what it preaches, communicate the mission, set goals all the way down the hierarchy, offer rewards both financial and non-financial for achieving pigeon steps, recruit and train the right people to implement the mission, and get rid of the wrong people. The goal must be to find the talent to both implement and build on the plan, and match the behavior with the expectation.

There are companies that have been extraordinary successful in creating an environment of genuine customer appreciation. It always amazes me, for example, how some hotel personnel remember your name and how genuinely pleased they seem to be to see you or welcome you back. I had one harrowing experience at a hotel a few months ago, which was dealt with by inviting me back as a guest and giving me instant gratification of an expensive brunch on the house for eight of us. But that treatment seems a rare exception today.

Unless your company daily practices and, more importantly, reinforces the goals and mission, you cannot be successful. A tree of goals should be built from the top down, layer by layer, based on the goals immediately above your layer. Every employee should have not only a set of company, division, department and supervisor goals, they should have a set of personal goals that tie in with the overall objectives.

The problem in corporate life is that in today's stop/start environment, initiatives come and go and become meaningless. But if you can get employees to identify with the mission, they are vastly more likely to outperform expectations not only internally, but with your customers. Now patch me throush to Delhi!

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