“Are our lawyers good on the phone?”

One of my legal customers asked me this the other day. He wanted to know how customer focused his people are. So, I called six firms, including his, telling each of them I’d been in a car crash and asking whether they could help me.

Every one of them asked great Lawyer Questions: “Where did it happen?”, “Were there any witnesses?”, “Have you called the police?” And so on.

But do you know what not one of them asked?

“Are you OK?”

They were so focused on following the process that they forgot the #1 output: to make sure the customer was alright.

I thought that was pretty alarming. Even worse, if their manager had been observing them, he could well have said they’d done well, because they’d ticked all the steps on their Observation Forms. This shows the problems with these forms – they’re often:

• Process focused (“Did you follow the steps?”), rather than output-focused (“Did it work?”); and/or
• Too long.

If this sounds like your company, your observations won’t improve things suf­ficiently. After all, since people REspect what you INspect, your forms should focus on your high-priority outputs only. For example, let’s say your colleagues’ presentations are too long, too boring and never achieve the desired result. In this case, your observations might only need cover:

Or, if you currently observe whether your salespeople follow each step of the sales process (1. Did you build rapport? 2. Did you ask good open questions? and so on), better questions might be:

Both examples are very similar to ones I’ve used on countless occasions. Each time, they’ve helped transform behaviours, because they’re focusing on only a few (not many) outputs (not inputs).

Also, did you notice how both ended with:

As you know, people need something to work on, or they won’t work on anything. And, it’s important to give them something manageable, because of how busy they are. Improving their performance by one thing each time will often provide much better results than giving them 15 areas to focus on after every observation.

Let’s end with a quick question: What one improvement will you make to your observations next time?