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CHAPTER FIVE
MANAGING FOR EMOTIONAL AUTHENTICITY

Twenty-five years ago, in his book Bureaucracy and the Modern World, Victor Alexander Thompson described a phenomenon most people instinctively recognize as the major challenge for the service/experience economy: “synthetic compassion can be more offensive than none at all.”¹ Authentic exchanges are noticeably different from synthetic communications. Authenticity has to be felt and driven internally, and unless one is a very, very good actor, faked attempts at authentic communication are quite obvious.² This raises an obvious question: How do organizations get their service providers to deliver authentic customer service when they can’t command it?

Senior-level managers who are reading this book know this task is not easy. In fact, it is so amorphous, so difficult to measure, that many do not consider it at all. They also are aware that coaching “authentic” service workers necessitates a revised set of supervisory skills. Yet some do look at these challenges. An AT&T executive describes the emotionally competent 84supervisor’s role in the new economy as essentially absorbing uncertainty for staff, something that most of us are not very good at.³ Author and president of Edventure Holdings, Esther Dyson, underscores the point that emotional skills are even more critical for today’s leaders than ever before:

Harvard Professors Leonard A. Schlesinger and James L. Heskett put it in even stronger terms:

Fortune magazine goes so far as to say that the prosperity of the entire United States economy depends upon how well managers manage their frontline staff.⁶

We recommend two broad managerial approaches for implementing emotional competence as a service model. First, enable staff to see that managing emotions in the best manner possible not only is a critical part of job requirements but also is to everyone’s personal benefit. Second, systematically teach staff to understand feelings and to recognize the importance of the emotions behind customers’ behaviors.

Service work must not be viewed as “selling out” one’s authentic self. Emotionally sophisticated staff can maintain contact with their feelings while managing customer experiences in a positive way. Obviously, this doesn’t happen automatically, and 85some people are better at this than others. Managers must staff, train, and then coach their service providers on an ongoing basis to make sure their staff know what to do emotionally and then are supported in their choices. A strong, supportive human resource function is necessary as well.⁷

The management team itself must also be committed to a customer focus. Managers must know that they are taking the entire company to an intangible goal: We are committed to adding emotional value in order to develop long-term customer relationships. The intangible goal, if properly planned and executed, can lead to the tangible goal of profits realized from repeat business.

Managers also have to ensure that business policies and practices do not compromise staff positions. The experience economy will not allow managers to engage in shady business practices and then expect frontline staff to “fix” impossible situations. We know one communications company that makes it virtually impossible for customers to pay their bills on time, so a late fee is invariably attached to the next billing period. It’s a small amount, so most customers say nothing or perhaps don’t even notice the extra charge. But for the hundreds that do notice and care about the fee, frontline staff have to put up with vicious monthly attacks. When the issue was brought to the attention of senior management, the decision was made to retain the practice because of the sizeable revenue stream it creates. Expectations of adding emotional value by even the most emotionally competent frontline staff are unreasonable under these circumstances. Attention to the ethical behavior of an organization becomes essential in the experience economy. An entire book could be written on this critical topic alone.

Unethical practices create cynical customers who become increasingly difficult for each subsequent service provider to handle. Many consumers fear being taken advantage of or being swindled. They wonder if the salesclerk is being honest in saying that a product is a great buy or looks wonderful on them. Today’s customers find it challenging to make the 86best buying decisions, especially for big-ticket items, because so many choices are available. As a result, customers become even more dependent upon salespeople. Consumers may be suspicious that they are being encouraged to buy items that are not selling well or items for which the clerk earns a larger commission. Consumers also wonder if the repairs they are asked to pay for are really necessary or are just excessive. And some even suspect that food that has fallen to the floor is sometimes picked up, brushed off, and served to diners.

Focusing on emotions is the obvious next step for service organizations that want to transition to the experience economy. To do this, everyone in the organization has to come to grips with the reality of emotions in business. The organization’s total service system must focus on emotional value for staff and external customers.

The following sections outline six strategies for implementing emotional competency as a service model.

• Fostering Positive Interdependency
• Dealing with the “Always Right” Customer
• Hiring for Emotional Competence
• Defining the Emotional Requirements of Service Jobs
• Understanding the Necessity of Ongoing Education
• Encouraging Staff Autonomy and Emotional Competence

Let us re-emphasize, however, that both tangible and intangible approaches must be utilized. We have seen too many instances of limited success when organizations attempt to “fix” service providers while continuing to make unrealistic marketing promises to the public, set grueling work schedules for their staff, and refuse to invest in technical upgrades. As we continue to reiterate, emotional competence by itself will take you only so far.

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Fostering Positive Interdependency

We live in a world of interdependence within our families, cities, work teams, organizations, national government institutions, and global community. Most people spend the bulk of their time in interdependent commercial and organizational relationships. As we plunge into the new millennium, all this time spent leads to a consequential question: What should the best commercial and organizational relationships look like? Maureen O’Hara, champion of emotional competency, provides an answer. She says that if we do not reach for the level at which two human beings are connected in a system of mutual honoring and respect, we become people who spend most of their lives simply performing tasks for each other—outside the context of relating.

If clerks and customers do not reach for a level of human connectedness, customers are “people who mess up the merchandise,” and clerks are “people who are never around when you need help.” If technologists and customers do not reach for a level of human connectedness, people are “stupid users who never read their manuals,” and technologists are “arrogant nerds who always start off by asking, Is your computer turned on?” If flight attendants and passengers do not reach for this level of human connectedness, passengers are “job tasks” to flight attendants, and flight attendants are “the people who bring coffee” to passengers. There is little that is satisfying in these types of relationships. And certainly there is not much pull for customers to return to such relationships or for staff to bring enthusiasm to their work.

Leonard L. Berry, who introduced the term “relationship marketing” in the 1980s, pointed out that organizations benefit when “customers form… relationships with people rather than goods.”⁸ Yet it is interesting that we still use economic models based primarily on exchange theory—monetary value is based on scarcity and value of the product or service as determined by consumers—which in turn emerges from the concept of rational consumption. We undoubtedly need new models that take emotional factors into consideration, models that Frederick 88Webster suggests “focus on the relationships themselves, not just on the market exchanges.”⁹ Most people acknowledge that business relationships include emotional components, but this value is neither well understood nor easily measured. As a result, most businesses focus on “reciprocity” or tangible exchanges. It is easier to measure something concrete, such as how quickly the telephone is answered, than to account for the emotionally driven behavior of consumers.¹⁰

Marketing Professor Barbara Stern at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, points out, “Emotionally-driven consumption is the polar opposite of economic rationality.” She even goes so far as to state that some service situations are “so influenced by emotional forces that rational ones barely come into play.”¹¹ This is particularly true in the entertainment industry.

Task-Oriented versus Emotional Relationships

Talk with Maureen O’Hara for more than a few minutes and you quickly view relationships as a matter of being. And once you move into a “being” world, then it is possible to achieve relationships that last only moments and yet are as authentic as any we experience. It is these moments of experience that most people remember as the poignant memories of their past. In fact, we hunger for them.

Some would argue that it is too much to ask for happenstance, commercial relationships to be anything more than task oriented. We disagree. Most customers prefer some level of relationship even in their brief encounters. We want to feel that we are interacting with a human being and not just a service robot. Since we live in a world where more and more services are being delivered as brief encounters, the challenge is how to transmute these encounters into experiences that take on some of the attributes of relationships, instead of relegating them to commodities. Transformation of commercial relationships into personal relationships requires a full understanding of the dimension of experience—within the power of the transaction moment.

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O’Hara points out that we live in a society of affirmation deficit, leaving people hungry for connectedness. Most of us don’t have enough feelings of worth, which today are primarily achieved from a narrow set of socially defined signs of accomplishment: money, status, and power. If people do not have enough of these, then they begin to search for other sources of respect and affirmation. We all like to see someone’s eyes light up when we walk into a room. It is one of the reasons that people hunger for relationships with their small children. It does not matter how much success you have in the world, a small child will love his or her parents unconditionally, just because they exist.

This is why some customers will go to a place where they are affirmed, even if these encounters are transitory. And service providers, if they enter into these relationships with an open mind, can also get affirmation from their customers. It doesn’t take a lot of time for someone to be disparaged by another; likewise, affirmation can be achieved in split seconds. It’s a question of how managers envision the service experience and then communicate this vision internally so it is displayed by staff to customers. Managers are directors of the “experience” product.

Value Exists in Connections

O’Hara sees the service provider–customer relationship as complementary. It is win-win in her estimation. Both customer and service provider can be affirmed by the other. They can get value from each other, as in martial arts, where both participants honor the other’s attempt to win as an opportunity to get better. Service providers and customers need each other to be excellent; we need each other to be of value. In fact, O’Hara says that we are of value primarily in our connections. This need for affirmation, for valuing from other people, is so fundamental, according to O’Hara, that to say, “it is exploitative to attend to it, is to say that is like exploiting someone’s hunger when you feed them.”¹²

Richard Farson, leadership expert, tells “people connection” stories he has collected by asking people about their most significant memories 90of childhood. He makes the point that people almost always remember small shared emotional experiences of connectedness with other members of their community or family—and not major events. For example, he tells the story of a young girl in a family of extremely limited means. Her mother invited relatives who were much better off financially over for dinner. To stretch their meager resources, she told her children that when the chicken was served, they were to say, “No, thank you. I don’t want any,” thereby saving the costly and rarely served chicken for the guests. All went according to plan. However, when it came time for dessert, the mother scolded her children, “Since you didn’t eat your chicken, you don’t get any dessert.” The children hadn’t been told about this. The woman relating this story of her childhood said in that moment her mother looked at her across the dinner table. In those few seconds of shared nonverbal communication, she understood what her mother was forced to do to maintain family pride and what this had cost her emotionally. She said she never felt closer to her mother than at that moment.

Forming Relationships Is the New Competency

O’Hara says knowing what relationships mean is part of the new emotional competence required in today’s world. Depth is not the only measure, but neither is time nor blood relatedness nor who is paying. These are all dimensions, but no one is the overriding dimension. In our experience world, we negotiate these dimensions all the time. You can say a relationship with a salesclerk, a toll taker, a nurse, a teacher, a bank clerk, or a flight attendant, for that instant, is all there is. You can see it either as an exploitative experience or as a deeply human moment. It is your choice. Managers have to prepare all their representatives to make this choice.

One question we frequently hear is, Can we spend our time dealing with issues like this and still be economically viable? Certainly, avoiding these issues doesn’t guarantee economic viability. Paco Underhill, who has literally invented the “science of shopping” field, points out that the 91amount of time a shopper spends in a store is perhaps the single most important variable in determining how much will be purchased. And shoppers leave when they are uncomfortable. Furthermore, the more contact there is between shoppers and employees, the greater the likelihood of a sale.¹³ Research also suggests that changes in a salesperson’s customer-respect orientation help to increase sales.¹⁴ Ultimately, every organization chooses whether it will tend to these issues.

Many companies are beginning to find that if they do not pay attention to forming relationships, do not build these competencies into their corporate cultures, they lose their best workers. Successful companies aim to be listed on Fortune magazine’s “best companies to work for” list. When the economy is strong, staff will literally walk out the door if they are treated badly or placed in emotionally untenable situations. And the best employees will always be able to get employment elsewhere. If an organization needs the best staff to be competitive, then it has to create the same positive moods for staff that it uses to develop long-term customer relationships.

Unisys Corporation has made its primary service goal to become the preferred employer in its line of business. Company leaders figure that if they can get that right, everything else will fall into place. Over the past five years, the authors have personally experienced the difference this has made to Unisys, and they have watched a growth in Unisys’s stock value as well.

There is a call today for all of us to be more sophisticated about our inner worlds than we have ever needed to be in the past. To accomplish this goal, managers need to encourage staff to understand and feel comfortable talking about their strengths and their weaknesses and then encourage support of each other. It has nothing to do with exploitation. Few staff “own” customers these days. It’s more of a team effort, and people on teams have to learn how to help each other. No one gets along best with every customer. If we can create this context, then staff are not paid to endure but to do what they are good at and what 92they love to do. Managers have to understand that emotional sophistication and competence is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

How do managers get staff to this level of emotional sophistication? First, they have to change current staff’s emotional frames of references. And the necessity of emotional competency must be accepted by staff when they join an organization. New hires must understand that they are going to be trained not only with technical skills but also with emotional and social skills. If people are to see contextually what is required in service positions, this starts from having a different mind-set toward how they feel about the people they are relating with—customers, teammates, and managers.

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Application

Building an Attitude of Positive Interdependency. Changing attitudes within organizations is never easy. Here are five procedural steps organizations can take to better achieve positive interdependency.

1. Identify a team of organizational leaders and champions for the idea of positive interdependency. Ask the team to carefully define positive interdependency as it relates to your organization’s mission statement and customer service goals. For example, some companies define it as “seamless service.”
2. Empower the team to prepare general staff to adopt this attitude and shift in behavior. This could include training, education, information sharing, and any other ideas the team can conceptualize.
3. Set success scores that will tell you when you are achieving your goals. Share these scores with staff on a regular basis. Success scores can include formal feedback systems or customer- and staff-retention statistics.93
4. Collect and share anecdotes of events that happen as a result of implemented changes. Sometimes a strong anecdote can be more powerful than a whole raft of statistics.
5. Celebrate your successes. Then set new emotional competency challenges and new positive interdependency standards.

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Dealing with the “Always Right” Customer

The phrase “The customer is always right” is used a lot. It is one of those phrases that demands discussion because, of course, the customer isn’t always right. Sometimes customers make mistakes, get confused, and forget things. They misread documents, or they don’t read the instructions at all. They even misinterpret what they have been told. One Toronto-based consulting company specializing in customer satisfaction measurement systems found that as high as 40 percent of the time, customer dissatisfaction is caused by problems customers create themselves.¹⁵

So what exactly does the phrase “The customer is always right” mean? In part, it acknowledges an organization’s financial dependency on customers. Ultimately, however, it’s a phrase that every company has to interpret for itself. Here’s how one restaurant owner put it: “When we say the guest is never wrong, we mean the server should never question a guest’s judgment and perception.”¹⁶ “The customer is always right” does not advocate that staff put up with unacceptable behavior. There are limits to what customers can do in their exalted role of “always being right.” They can’t show up naked. We’d cover them up and send them away. They can’t steal our goods. Thieves are charged with shoplifting. They certainly have no right to become physically abusive. Laws and security systems protect us from attack. Drunk customers can be asked to leave. Some restaurants require certain dress. It is their right to do so, and it limits the number of customers they will get. At the same time, it may encourage the very diners a restaurant has decided are its target market.

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Some organizations have standards about the type of language customers can use. Swearing at staff is forbidden if you want to use their services. We do not necessarily recommend getting rid of customers because they swear, primarily because swearing is so much a part of modern culture that many people have no idea they are using offensive language. It is just part of their expressional style. Again, each organization has to make decisions about limits on customer behavior.

Contrary to Hochschild’s assertion that “it is often part of an individual’s job to accept uneven exchanges, to be treated with disrespect or anger,” we believe that adding emotional value does not require a subservient “the customer is always right” attitude. In fact, most customers would find that distasteful. They generally prefer an exchange between peers. Social transactions that result in wins for both customers and providers are mutually advantageous. Again, it is up to managers to coach for this attitude and to teach staff how to handle customers who become heavy handed. One of the most important emotional competencies for service providers is how to help customers through bouts of strong negative emotions. They need to do it without being debased in the process, taking the burden of those emotions on themselves, or attacking the customers.

Our own experience is that service providers who sincerely reassure their customers they will do everything possible to help them are able to get most customers to settle down. Customers hope that service providers are not their enemies. In fact, they want to believe this. Customers do not enjoy going to a place of business walking in with a cynical attitude or anticipating a fight. And when they do get upset, and perhaps pull “the customer is always right” rank, most appreciate being helped to positively change that attitude.

Service workers need to learn to use language such as “I need you to… “ instead of “You have to… .” or “I’ll be able to help you better, if… “ instead of “I’m not going to help you if you don’t… .” Getting heavy handed with customers almost never works. So it’s not a good idea 95to order customers around unless someone’s life is at risk or you want to lose customers.

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Application

What Are We Telling Our Customers? Gather a group of people in your organization and make a list of the different ways you phrase requests to your customers. Can you find alternative ways of speaking with customers to respect the role they play, while at the same time gaining their cooperation?

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Service providers are not asked to manage hostile, overbearing, always-right customers eight hours a day, five shifts a week. It is instructive for staff to remember that most customer interactions are neutral or lean toward the positive. Many customers will even go out of their way to help other customers or their service providers. For those who spend much time on airplanes, it is truly amazing how frequently one sees passengers being civil to each other—especially after spending five hours crammed together in a sold-out coach-class section on a U.S. East to West Coast flight at the end of the day. Customers often pitch in to help improve a tricky situation. We have watched men help female passengers with their overhead luggage. We recently saw a passenger be very gracious when she was was bumped from her first-class seat because the airline made a mistake. The passenger helped console the flight attendants. All left that situation with smiles on their faces, including the other passengers who were onlookers.¹⁷

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Application

The Customer Is Always Right. Discuss in groups the phrase “The customer is always right.” Managers should explain their philosophy about the phrase and then listen to team members’ interpretations as well. They should also invite analysis of specific customer service 96experiences in which customers were abusive. Once managers have had this initial discussion with staff, it will become safer for staff and managers to discuss difficult customer interactions. It will also be easier for managers to handle staff interventions when customers complain about rude treatment they have received from service providers.

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Hiring for Emotional Competence

Even though few people would agree that everyone is suited for the emotional demands of service work, the service industry is renowned for hiring “warm bodies” to fill vacancies. “Just get coverage,” seems to be the norm for many service organizations. In many areas of the United States, finding and retaining staff can be more taxing than finding customers. According to the late 1990s Michigan Retail Index survey, 36 percent of Michigan retailers said hiring and keeping staff was their biggest concern. In contrast, only 18 percent said attracting and keeping customers was their number one concern.¹⁸ These “warm bodies” hired to simply “fill” a position must surely find the burden of emotional labor onerous. Not all adults make good parents, even if they can procreate. And not everyone is suited for the emotional demands of service work, though just about anyone can get hired to these positions. Most can learn how to better develop their emotional skills, but it will be a struggle for some.

Nordstrom recognizes this. As one of its interviewers says, “We’re selective, and a lot don’t make it. You prove yourself at every level, or you leave.”¹⁹ Oren Harari, professor at the University of San Francisco and customer service expert, states the lesson in very strong terms: “Employees, unionized or nonunionized, must understand that their job is not to simply perform a set of tasks but to act in such a way as to create value for the customer. Nobody’s entitled to a job anymore.”²⁰

Creating value for the customer in the service environment and experience economy is quite different from creating value in the manufacturing 97environment.²¹ In the service industry, the service provider is always part of the product and in many cases is the bulk of the product. This is even more true in the experience economy. And frequently, it is the emotional part of the service encounter that creates the greatest amount of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.²² As indicated earlier, the University of Michigan’s Customer Satisfaction Index reveals a basic rule of thumb: service industries that have the most contact with customers (Federal Express being the one exception) tend to have the lowest satisfaction ratings.²³

A shipping company’s employees would be removed from positions requiring repetitive heavy lifting if their back muscles were unable to withstand the strain. So, too, should organizations consider the reasonableness of not allowing people to continue in service positions when their emotional “muscles” do not enable them to authentically express desired emotions.²⁴ If the expressive behavior that the organization wants displayed is carefully defined, then staff who match these requirements can be hired and then trained and coached to further improve skills.

Some companies are beginning to hire based on relatively simple personality profiling tests. One such consulting group based in Colorado has worked with 5,000 companies around the world administering profiling tests. The group’s founder, Bruce Hubby, believes that people should be placed in positions that build on their strengths and where their personalities match the emotional and behavioral requirements of the job.²⁵ Some organizations might argue this is a luxury they cannot afford; we would suggest it is a necessity that no organization can afford to ignore.

Southwest Airlines, recognized for both its profitability and its customer service, spends what many other companies would consider an inordinate amount of time finding the right people for its positions. It once interviewed thirty-four people for a single ramp agent position. 98The airline uses its own “model” employees and its frequent flyers to help make final hiring decisions. CEO Herb Kelleher describes the process:

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Application

Hiring Staff to Fill Required Emotional Skill Sets. Your hiring functions may need a complete overhaul if they are to be emotionally upgraded. If you are lucky, perhaps all they need is a fine-tuning. One way to determine this is to list all the emotions you want your customers to experience while doing business with you. Then describe the emotional abilities your staff will need to encourage these customer emotions. Now assess your hiring procedures to see if they are likely to identify staff who meet these criteria. If not, devise simple tests that will let you know if potential staff have these capacities. For example, if you hire for telephone positions, at a minimum, spend time talking with potential staff on the phone! Listen to the emotional tone of their voices and the messages they convey on a nonverbal level.

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Defining the Emotional Requirements of Service Jobs

Emotional competencies for service jobs need to be delineated with as much detail and care as technical competencies. For example, airplane pilots have to have near-perfect vision; waiters must be able to take food orders accurately; fire fighters need to be able to physically pull and lift 99heavy equipment; stockbrokers and floor traders must be able to concentrate in the midst of chaos.

We are only just beginning to precisely define the emotional characteristics required of service people. Among these characteristics are, to use O’Hara’s term, “higher-order mental skills.” These aptitudes include the ability to read body language, communication flexibility, the ability to stay involved in situations of high emotionality, empathy, and the capacity to establish rapport. If these competencies are defined and people are hired with these abilities, then emotional requirements will more likely be perceived as a challenge, rather than a burden.

Service positions require varying levels of emotional labor. Experiences of short duration generally do not require as much sophistication as longer customer relationships. In fact, short-duration customer encounters can be scripted to a limited degree. A position that involves greeting customers and directing them to a specific location does not call for a great deal of psychological competency. A position that requires detailed knowledge of someone’s finances, however, such as a loan processor, would mandate additional skills, including managing upset, anxious, or aggressive customers. The factors listed in the following chart, depending on their strength and frequency, determine the amount of emotional content in the service experience.²⁷

This scale can help rank the relative emotional demands of service positions. Positions with higher numbers need staff with more developed emotional competencies. For example, the position of an organizational trainer who offers customer service courses would have extremely high numbers, suggesting less scripting is possible. The job of order taker in a fast-food restaurant chain would have lower ratings, requiring less empathy. Job turnover in positions with higher emotional content is more costly to organizations. Staff who handle high emotional content positions well are a genuine loss to an organization when they take employment elsewhere.

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This chart can also be a guideline for suggesting strategies for increasing the emotional content of customer interactions. For example, smaller spatial distances between staff and customers can be built into the layout of a shop, thereby encouraging more contact between customers and staff. And organizations can design a more expressive style into their product offerings, such as Disney does in its parks and Southwest Airlines does on its flights.

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Application

How High Is the Emotional Content of My Job? The above scale can be used in a variety of ways. Human resources departments can map service positions based on these standards. Individuals can map their own positions, perhaps using the scale for different aspects of 101their work. Some parts of a job may have lower emotional content and other parts of the same job, higher. As a team-building exercise, ask individuals to fill out the scale about themselves, and then have everyone score everyone else’s job as well. In this way, individuals can see how teammates assess the emotional content of their work.

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Understanding the Necessity of Ongoing Education

Some organizations do not provide emotional training and coaching for their frontline staff. Instead, they fire when staff don’t perform. “You can’t get good staff anymore” is the way we have heard managers default on their responsibility to hire and then train appropriately. We believe it is the responsibility of management not only to support staff in difficult service situations and to honor the significance of their work but also to properly educate for the emotional challenges service staff will face.²⁸ Many high-tech companies are diligent in educating about complicated computer technology, but they haven’t been as committed at bringing staff along on the emotional side.

The most common reason we hear for inadequate training is lack of time. When organizations use this excuse, in effect they say it is less damaging to continue with the same problems they have with their staff so they can ensure coverage than it is to factor in training time as part of the cost of retaining customers. We know one company that spends multimillions on technical training but balks at emotional competency service programs that will cost it less than 1 percent of its total training budget.

Training programs must be based on both the technical demands and the emotional demands of each service position, some requiring more instruction than others. Some service staff must learn how to contain emotional viruses and become adept at crafting connections with customers. Others need innate “emotional capacity” and require additional training to develop their emotional muscles.

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We know of individuals who, in their desperation to get employment, feed into this competency gap by lying in their job interviews. “I love people,” many will say—until they have to start serving them or dealing with upset customers. This misfit must be at the root of the frequently heard phrase “Hey, what do you expect! I just work here.” Sandi Mann in her latest book, Hiding What We Feel, Faking What We Don’t, devotes an entire chapter to providing tips for faking emotions so people can get one of these emotionally draining jobs they don’t want in the first place.²⁹

The Emotional Competence Gap

Nordstrom seems to grasp that the level of emotional maturity required to function in an emotionally upgraded business environment is higher than most people have, and perhaps even higher than many people will ever have. Almost half of Nordstrom new hires are gone after one year.³⁰ Maureen O’Hara says examples of this type are evidence of an “emotional competence gap,” though she sees the gap as not a matter of simply lacking interactional skills. Rather, she says people haven’t fully developed emotionally. Most adults recognize this about themselves. We know that our emotional maturity in our forties is definitely different from that achieved in our thirties. In our sixties, we are more developed than in our fifties.

Robert Kegan, in his book In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life, talks about the need for continuing development: “It may still remain for us to discover that adulthood itself is not an end state but a vast evolutionary expanse encompassing a variety of capacities of mind.”³¹ In short, when we reach the age of twenty-one, we aren’t finished developing mentally or emotionally. Development is a lifelong process, and this has consequences for the field of service.

Kegan writes about the challenge of getting adolescents to change behavior, saying, “When it comes to sexuality and adolescents it may be that the way we will ‘get them to change’ their behavior tomorrow will depend on our changing the way we think today.”³² Let us reword Kegan’s statement to make it applicable to the field of service. “When it 103comes to providing emotionally sensitive service, it may be that the way managers will get service providers to change their behavior tomorrow will depend on managers changing the way they think today.” The challenge may be more in the way managers approach the emotional competence gap than in the actual lack of emotional competence.

If this gap isn’t in some way bridged, then staff will experience anxiety in their jobs because what is demanded of them emotionally is more than they can deliver—at their stage of development. This gap represents learning challenges, and if they are managed well, managers can help staff take their next development steps. A big question is whether managers can speed up this learning process. We have noted in our complaint-handling classes that most participants find complaint handling much easier as they age. However, we think it is possible to, in effect, “age” entry-level staff by teaching awareness sensitivity and specific skills about effective complaint handling.

One of the highlights of teaching emotional competence is that at some point, seminar participants comprehend that they are being given a skill that is for them, that it can never be taken away, and that they can use it in all aspects of their lives. In fact, we maintain that unless people apply these emotional competencies throughout their lives, they will rarely be used with customers. Once seminar participants recognize the global applicability of emotional competency skills, enthusiasm and commitment dramatically increase. We have a corporate client that recognizes the importance of this, in part measuring the efficacy of our training programs by the number of comments it sees on feedback forms that read “Great program. I can use it at home as well!”

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Application

Developing an Inclusive Customer Service Style. If your business consists primarily of brief encounters with customers, staff should be aware that they probably unconsciously engage in behaviors 104preventing customers from feeling like partners. When stranger after stranger enters a place of business, it is easy for staff to develop an “in group” and “out group” set of feelings. By discussing this reality with staff, you can help them avoid acting out the natural dynamics of encounter exchanges.

Help your staff relish the relationships they form with repeat customers, even if the exchanges are brief. Regularly ask staff whether individual customers have been in lately, even if you don’t know their names. Ask staff how they can acknowledge remembered relationships. Customers remember the last time they were in a restaurant, for example, and at some level are disappointed that service providers don’t recall them from their last visit. Identify ways staff can greet customers so there is a feeling of being welcomed back, even when the service provider doesn’t remember the individual. At the Mandarin Oriental Hotels in Manila, doormen are told who is arriving in hotel cars from the airport. This way they can deliver the emotionally engaging message, accompanied with a gracious smile, “Welcome back, Dr. Barlow. Welcome home to the Mandarin.” It’s a very powerful greeting for creating loyalty!

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Encouraging Staff Autonomy and Emotional Competence

A growing body of research suggests that when service providers are given greater freedom in determining the nature of their relationships with customers, they experience less conflict between the emotions they display and the emotions they feel.³³ The greater the dissonance between felt and displayed emotions,³⁴ the more likely employees will experience the worst aspects of emotional labor.³⁵

This is particularly important when customers behave inappropriately toward staff, such as when they make unwelcome sexual advances. Some staff find it easy to engage in friendly banter with inappropriate customers and at the same time establish firm limits. Other staff need supervisorial help.³⁶ Therefore, an additional task of management is not only to hire and train appropriately for service positions but also to 105 ensure that staff have adequate control over or support for their reactions to customers.³⁷

In an attempt to address control issues, some companies give staff very simple instructions, leaving it up to individuals to determine how to carry them out. TMI Systems Design, a small but highly successful North Dakota cabinet manufacturer, has only one policy instruction to its employees: “Do what any caring person would do.”³⁸ Jerre Stead tells a similar story of simplification while at Square D, an industrial control products maker. Stead says, “These rules [in thick policy books], aimed at 1 percent of employees, handcuff the other 99 percent. Nobody can do all that stuff in the book, so people end up following just one unofficial objective: Keep the boss happy.”³⁹ He disposed of two thick policy books and replaced them with eleven rules designed to take the focus off management and place it on the customer.

Some organizations have simplified empowerment because their customers expect it. Ritz-Carlton Hotels empower to very high levels because customers who pay several hundred dollars a night for a room expect that everyone they deal with will be able to solve their problems. It is important to note that Ritz-Carlton doesn’t use empowerment as a stand-alone technique. “They have service sewn into their inseam,” is how one competing and admiring hotelier put it. Empowerment is but one piece of Ritz-Carlton’s total service approach.

Other companies carefully monitor almost every employee interaction with customers. At the turn of the millennium, several articles have been written about Safeway grocery stores, with their strong California presence. Safeway staff are required to stop what they are doing and escort customers who ask where food items are; they are not allowed to just tell the customer where to go. They are also required to use the customers’ names at the checkout stands. If customers are members of the Safeway Club, their names are printed out on their receipts. Checkers 106glance at the receipts and thank the customers by name for having shopped with Safeway.

Janelle, living in California and shopping in Safeway stores, has had a chance to study their impact. When the practices were first instituted, not all Safeway employees were comfortable with their execution. When clerks used customers’ names at checkout stands, at times it felt forced and uncomfortable. But a year or so later, it is part of the routine, and most Safeway staff have integrated the practice so it feels normal and friendly. The practice of escorting customers to the food location is very helpful. Telling customers that some item is on Aisle 3 is not all that useful when there are hundreds of items on Aisle 3.

Sometimes careful monitoring of expected practices can backfire. We are acquainted with a telecommunications company that aims for a twenty-second completion rate with customers who call for directory assistance. Not all telephone numbers are so quickly found. In an effort to please managers, staff watch the monitor clocks carefully, and if they can’t find the number in twenty seconds, they pass the customer off to a colleague, where the clock starts again. Staff at this company tell us that they sometimes pass customers around four or five times, each new operator starting over with the customer, but they beat the twenty-second clock. Management hasn’t a clue that its monitoring is resulting in worse service, say the staff. And we would agree because we had the opportunity to talk with the “management” of this telecommunications company, who insisted nothing like this was happening.

Excessive supervision of service providers can also create an oppressive atmosphere. Some companies monitor the number of computer keystrokes per minute or the number of phone calls per hour or time away from the computer in call centers. Many employees report a strong negative emotional reaction to this kind of Big Brother supervision. Here’s how one employee described the feeling of oversupervision: “The monitoring makes you feel like less than a child, less than a thinking human being.… You have to stop and think from time to time that your ancestors did not cross the ocean in steerage and come through Ellis Island to be treated like this.”⁴⁰

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Federal Express has made a conscious decision that excessive monitoring is bad for business. It has developed a “people first” approach, instead of a “measurements first” methodology.According to Fed Ex, this change in emphasis has resulted in higher worker productivity and performance than when workers were closely monitored.⁴¹

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Application

Empowering Staff with Emotional Competency. Empowerment, or focused freedom as it is at times called, rests on four legs.

To adequately empower staff, all four legs must be addressed, or empowerment runs the risk of backfiring. First, staff need certain skills. Second, in order to make communication easy, they and everyone else in the organization need to know what particular positions are empowered to do. Third, staff need self-confidence in their ability to take appropriate action. This confidence comes from practice and adequate skill development. Finally, managers must support the empowerment with the necessary tools to do the job. Otherwise, staff will think that managers are using empowerment primarily to delegate problems down the line.

Choose two positions in your organization and list possibilities for empowering these positions. List what needs to be changed to ensure the four empowerment pillars are in place and sturdy.

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ASSESSING YOUR ORGANIZATION’S SERVICE PHILOSOPHY

Answer the following questions:

1. Do all people in your organization know what emotional skills are required for their positions?
2. How many of your customer interactions are “customer encounters,” as compared to “customer relationships”? Have you analyzed your “encounter” experiences to see if they meet the relationship needs of your customers?
3. What measurements could you put in place to let you know whether customers are excited about doing business with you?
4. Has your organization defined its customer service goals? Can you state what they are? Can all staff do this?
5. What is your organization’s approach for handling situations when customers say one thing about how they were treated and service providers claim something else happened? How can the handling of these situations be improved?
6. If your organization were truly committed to being staffed with emotionally competent staff, what changes would have to be made in your hiring process?
7. Do training programs in your organization always cover aspects of emotional competence—regardless of the subject matter? For example, when a new telephone system is being introduced, are staff encouraged to discuss how they and customers will react to the changes?
8. How much autonomy is allowed for your frontline positions? Is autonomy considered as important a variable in equipping staff as making sure they have the necessary tangible tools to handle the demands of their jobs?