Leadership

Continuing Mystery Gets Me Chocolate

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Okay, some updates on recent posts!

I posted about the state furloughing teachers 17 Fridays over the next year. I was happy to see a local theatre immediately jumped on the opportunity to offer a Furlough Fridays program teaching kids about musical theatre. One of the things I liked was that they require you to attend all the classes emphasizing that student commitment to their classes was just as important as commitment to the classes they were missing.

Parents have actually started a movement to pay the teachers themselves on the furlough days. This raises a number of issues about the use of the school facilities, workman’s comp coverage and insurance. It also raises the question about why people are resistant to having their taxes raised a little bit to support the schools for the whole year but okay with paying a lot more to have their children taught on a few days out of the year. Is this going to reveal the gap between the haves and the have nots if parents in more affluent neighborhoods are able to pay to have their kids taught while the schools in poorer neighborhoods stay empty on those days for lack of the same funds?

One of the biggest impediments actually is a decade old ethics rule that prevents teachers from being paid privately to teach their students. The rule was enacted to prevent basic concerns like whether a teacher skimped on the instruction during the day in order to guarantee the need for additional instruction after hours.

The other update I have is to the situation I covered in my entry titled The No Sell Sales Pitch. Recent events, I am afraid, have done nothing but renew my curiosity about the approach being employed by the two dancers who visited in late August. Today I received a package with a 1 lb bar of Trader Joe’s Belgian Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds, a bag of Trader Joe’s Trek Mix and a tea candle in a blue holder. There was a card thanking me for meeting with them, praising the work we are doing and hoping our paths will cross again. Still no material about their company which I am assured by others does indeed exist.

Maybe they just aren’t that into my theatre.

The No Sell Sales Pitch?

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There were some dancers who were vacationing in the area who contacted me via a local dance critic to set up a meeting for this morning. I was hoping it wasn’t going to be a hard sell about why we should book their company. What actually transpired I don’t even know if I can label a soft sell because we really didn’t talk about their company or what it did at all. In fact, the name of the company was only mentioned once at the beginning of the meeting in response to my assistant theatre manager’s query. But for his memory, I would have no way to check out their work because they didn’t leave any print or video materials.

You might assume from that description of the meeting that they were unprepared to promote themselves and advance their interests. Promoting their company and work didn’t seem to be their intention. Instead they talked to me about the local arts environment and made notes. They talked about some of the other geographic places they hoped to have performances and promised to submit a proposal for the sort of work they hoped to do.

I was somewhat bemused by their whole approach and pretty much let them determine the direction of the conversation. The whole situation intrigued me enough to give their proposal full consideration when it arrives.

I don’t know if the proceedings were part of some business model they had in mind. It is pretty labor and time intensive to visit and discuss things one on one with different performing arts venues so this will never be viable large scale. They said they want to move beyond operating in Los Angeles. It appears as if they have chosen geographic locales where they would like to work on the Pacific and Rocky Mountain regions and set out to develop relationships with venues in those places.

The benefit will be having a deep understanding of the needs of each venue so they can create performances and residency activities suited for those places. They mentioned they would have a home season too, so they probably aren’t looking for these partnerships to provide all their support.

Sales professionals will likely find a lot wrong with how they conducted our meeting, especially those from the always be closing school. It was all wildly inefficient and they have no more inkling as to whether I am interested in presenting their group than they did before calling to set up the meeting.

What really appealed to me about the portion of their approach I have seen thus far, whether they intended it or not, is that it places them in a more active decision making role. Instead of making a shotgun solicitation of people to present their work, they are choosing where they would like to work and approaching those places. I still have a great deal of decision making power, but if I do decide to accept their proposal, our relationship will be a more equal one because we both know we choose to work with each other.

Neither Carrot Nor Stick Does Creativity Make

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A couple links as complement to my entry yesterday on motivation, customer service and volunteers.

First, Americans for the Arts, hearing President Obama’s call for Americans to volunteer more has created a website at which people can share their stories, pictures and videos – United We Serve.

A newly posted video on TED.com has Dan Pink talking about motivation. He provides some interesting findings about motivation, namely that when it comes to performing creative tasks conditional rewards (if you complete X by Y, you will receive Z bonus) are not as effective as intrinsic rewards in obtaining results. The conditional rewards actually get in the way of creative thinking. This may explain why arts people are able to create in the absence of monetary reward.

I wouldn’t let this get around lest people insist that paying you more may rob you of your creativity.

He makes a link to our current financial difficulties saying that there is a disconnects between what science has known for over 40 years and what businesses does, which is essentially the carrot and stick approach.

Pink says the new operating model should be based on:
“Autonomy- Urge to Direct Our Own Lives
Mastery- Desire to get better and better at something that matters, and
Purpose- The Yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”

Sounds a lot like the way arts organization and non-profits have been running things for awhile. If the next wave of economy is indeed going to be Creative, then perhaps non-profits and those who work for them will have something of increasing value to offer. We just need to understand what we do, how to do it well and how to teach/model it for others.

A Folding Table, A Jug of Water and Thou Sweating In The Parking Lot

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I am reading a book about customer service right now. My intention is to report some observations on the text as a whole at some point. However, I saw an illustration of one of the points made in an early chapter today. The book had noted the veracity of “time flies when you are having fun” pointing out that a well designed wait that is 30 minutes long can actually seem shorter than a poorly designed wait that is only a third as long. Because human perception is involved, you can ruin a relationship with a customer in the latter situation even though you significantly reduced their wait time.

Our campus is in a situation with many strikes against it. Budgets have been cut so staffing is down but enrollment is up adding an additional 1500 student to our commuter campus. Alas, the heretofore un(der) used overflow parking is now inaccessible due to long delayed construction projects.

There wasn’t much to be done about the parking unfortunately, but someone got organized this year and had information tables distributed about the campus with all sorts of hand outs and big coolers of water. There were also large color campus maps that someone slapped up on the sides of buildings so people didn’t have to seek out kiosks to figure out where they were.

I looked around wondering why no one had thought to do this before. People had always volunteered to serve an hour or so on the welcome committee but it was never this organized or welcoming. People stood around smiling, answering questions and engaging people who looked lost. Now there is a table identifiable as a source of information from a distance that is stocked with information—and most importantly after trekking in from that parking space in the hinterlands you stalked for 30 minutes–water to drink.

While I walked around comparing what I was seeing to previous years, I realized that tweaking your customer service up a level or two doesn’t just help your relationship with those you serve. It also sends a message to other employees about the commitment of the organization. Memos about improving service are useful and identify areas for improvement. In this case, there were no memos that went out about how things were going to be done better—it was just done.

I am obviously someone whose business it is to think about improving customer interactions so I notice such things. But I have to believe that others noticed the improvement, how it fit in the context of other recent changes and what it all says about the direction of the organization.

I also had some insight into the issue of providing volunteers with opportunities to feel they are doing important work. I have never really had much desire to volunteer for welcoming slots before. Today when I witnessed the increased effort at hospitality, I had a desire to participate next time around. (Just have to remember not to schedule sending the brochure to the printer, interviewing a ticket office clerk and starting internet sales on this day next time.) In previous years, my impression of the job was that it provided a pleasant first impression of the institution and directions to buildings. With the addition of tables, maps and water jugs, suddenly it seems like an important contribution to relieving anxious new arrivals.

We are planning a volunteer luncheon/training in a few weeks so perhaps I am in a receptive mindset on the subject. We have been thinking about how to design the volunteering experience so people have a greater feeling of doing something of value. We have been discussing increasing volunteers’ scope of responsibility and authority. I believe we also have to consider if these duties will allow them to feel they are providing a service patrons find valuable. Though certainly, people volunteer for different reasons and more authority may be a bigger motivator than being useful.