Category: Analytics Leadership

Sustaining Excellence

Still super happy over the Golden State Warriors going the NBA Finals the past two years. Winning a title, setting the records for wins… The way they did it, was a marvel to watch.

They lead their division from the beginning and never looked back. That take a special group to be consistent day in and day out.

They won with a first year head coach. That’s saying something that things were set up so well, that a new leader was able to step in and excel.

They beat the team with the best player in the world. Role players stepped up and made a difference. They wore LeBron out in a way that he never saw coming.

Now can they be a dynasty? Can they repeat this success or was it just a one-time thing? We will find out this year with the much hoped for Warriors-Cavs Round 3.

When you look across the San Francisco Bay, you see a team that is a true dynasty. The San Francisco Giants have one 3 World Series titles in 5 years. They made the playoffs again last year and are always in the hunt.

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Besides having many of the same characteristics of the Warriors, the Giants have been able to take things to the next level.

Like the Warriors, they have a lot of home grown talent. That’s a proven way to go in any medium.

The Giants also have true starts who are not as well-known as the stars on the team they have beaten. They are hard workers who give it their all time and again.

There are a lot of lesson business leaders can learn from watching the way these team succeed… perhaps a future blog post on that.

But for now, as a huge fan of both teams… as I celebrate once again… I can only hope that the Warriors can sustain excellence like the Giants have.

It’s a great time to be a sports fan in the Bay Area. Truly a home of excellence!

How do you measure excellence in your business?

Do you have a way to know what your “win-loss” record is?

Do you know where you stack up against the competition?

If you don’t, then you need analytics. The Warriors and the Giants have two of the biggest analytics teams in professional sports. They invest and it pays off.

How about you?

We can show you how to set up your analytics which will translate to a level of excellence you have never know before.

DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

PATIENCE AND FAITH ARE OUR BEST FRIENDS

I wish i could remember where i found this, but it definitely speaks to me so I wanted to share it again.

“No one can determine the final destination of our life’s journey. Therefore, the next best thing to do is to keep our cool and have faith in ourselves. Whenever I feel I am detouring from my destiny, I try to remind myself that my journey is my path. It’s a journey full of peaks and valleys, sunshine, and rain. This faith allows me to explore unchartered territory with confidence. I am at ease to fail forward. Because even when we fail, we do not lose it all—we can learn valuable lessons, and build the foundation for our next chapter.”

Keeping a can-do attitude helps us to never give up on ourselves. It allows us to recharge, reinvest, and reinvent ourselves by melting down our fear.

And that’s how I will start 2017!

jobspicture2Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

 

em·pa·thy > the ability to understand and share the feelings of another

From Our Recent Customer Care Empathy Training for the DMAIPH team

em·pa·thy > the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Per Webster’s… Empathy is

…the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Per Wikpedia…

Empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s frame of reference, i.e., the capacity to place oneself in another’s shoes.

So any way you slice it, empathy is about feeling the pain of another in a way that helps ease some of that pain.

Empathy training is sorely lacking across the call center industry as this kind of soft skills training is taught like a technical skill. You can’t just lecture of empathy. You have to role play and write open ended scripts and practice it until its second nature.

If DMAI is to succeed, we need to have better the average empathy training. If we want to be a great company then we need to have best in class empathy training to make sure we are there for our customers.

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Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

The Tension of Now > Do More Now, Do More Later

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/06/the-tension-of-now.html

Sharing Seth’s latest blog…

The tension of now

Later is the easiest way to relieve the tension that accompanies now.

But later rarely leads to the action we seek and the change we need.

When you encounter the tension of now, caused by the urgency of action, veer toward more tension, not less now.

This is one of those things we know logically, but people are generally illogical so they go against it.

Most people will delay dealing with problems, hoping the problems will iust go away… which rarely happens.

They then end up spending extra time on energy on the bigger problem and have no time for dealing with new problems.

The wise man deals with problems now and frees himself up to handle new problems tomorrow.

Common sense can he in such short supply because of the general fear of tension.

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Building An Employee Engagement Road Map

My good friend and BPO colleague, Martin Conboy’s most recent blog is pretty awesome and well timed for my leadership meeting on Monday.

http://theoutsourcing-guide.com/strong-employee-engagement-exceptional-customer-experience/

Here are a few of his key points:

“Employee engagement is a workplace methodology designed to ensure that employees are committed to their organization’s goals and values, inspired to contribute to organizational success, and are able at the same time to enhance their own sense of well being.”

When I think about all the places I have worked over the years from scooping ice cream, filing library books, teaching, customer service, business analytics to setting up call centers, I often reflect on the cultural lessons I gained from those experiences.

As Martin says, engagement is a direct result of the methods  used to drive a business… its how people are bossed, managed and/or lead. That impacts how people feel about and treat each other. Most people generally look at their job as just a job, but they look at their co workers as friends or even family.

When companies are able to get people to think of their job with the same level of interest they think of their co-workers, then you have an indicator of engaged employees, That is far from the only one, but its an easy to see indicator.  They go to lunch together, but do they work together to solve problems for the customer?

“Creating exceptional customer experiences and engagement requires understanding and mapping the customer’s journey. Likewise employee engagement is dependent on creating exceptional experiences based on understanding and mapping the employee’s journey.”

Mapping the journey… from pre-hire, to job offer, to onboardinng, to training, to production, to coaching, to mentoring, to career development. Is it all mapped out? If not its hard to have good employee engagement. Are there leaders within the organization that help others read the map? If not then most employees are going to get lost. The journey will not likely be a success without the map and people who know how to both read the map and teach others how to read it.

Thanks Martin for the inspiration.

HR & Recruitment Analytics – The recruitment and retention of top talent is the biggest challenge facing just about every organization. DMAIPH is a leading expert in empowering HR & Recruitment teams with analytics techniques to optimize their talent acquisition and management processes. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to learn how to get more analytics in your HR & Recruitment process so you can rise to the top in the ever quickening demand for top talent.

A Few More Thoughts On Leadership

Most of my blog posts the past few weeks have been focused on leadership.

As my company grew from 6 to almost 100 in just 18 months we were forced to make a lot of quick decisions that have not always turned out to be the best long term solutions. So now I reflect on those lessons. How to move away from making snap judgments based and move more into data-driven decision making. That’s always been the goal.

Here are so of my favorite quotes on leadership and how I plan to wrap them into my leadership meeting next week.

Jack Welch said that, “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” I firmly believe this and have tried hard to instill this sense of purpose in my leaders. However, we have a lot more work to do before we have an organization full of people looking out for the success of others before looking out for their own success first.

A big part of this is to constantly be pushing the organization to evolve and to never rest. Peter Drucker said that “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” That’s my point exactly. We look at the data, analyze our performance and determine what to improve next.

From our recent survey, we know our team members crave feeling valued and being appreciated more than they depend on being paid well. We need to focus on this and build a recognition program that show value and share appreciation. Sam Walton once said, “Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.” For us to reach the next level of success as a company this sense of empowerment needs to permeate through the ranks.

I hate when I have to manage people because things aren’t being done they way I expect them to get done. Part of that comes from my own failures in instilling this lesson in others. “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”  from General Dwight Eisenhower. We do too much bossing and not enough uplifting others to dream the same dream we do.

And finally, from John Quincy Adams, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” To me that is the most important measurement for us to look at. Everything else comes next.

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Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

Excellent Leaders Are Constantly Pursuing Excellence

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nature-authentic-leadership-ben-stewart

Here is an excellent conclusion to a blog post about the nature of authentic leadership…

‘Effective leadership can be an elusive goal with no clear path to direct success.  There are, however, many techniques and practices that are consistently utilized to reach this goal.  It begins with personal responsibility and leadership of oneself.  Before anyone has a chance at leading others,  he or she must take ownership of their thoughts, actions, and beliefs.

Possessing a keen insight into human behavior and thought is also critical.  This includes motivating, retaining, and resolving conflicts among the team.  It is unfortunate today that so many leaders become consumed with the ends that they forget the means.  While the bottom line is most often analyzed and how a leader is judged by superiors, it is the responsibility of the leader to ensure that the team respects its members and is passionate for pursuing excellence.  Neglecting this will bring discouragement and cause a serious threat to whatever goal is being pursued.

Leaders must always incorporate the human aspect into their decisions.  In its essence, leadership is about influence.  For a leader to maximize and improve whatever situation they encounter, requires going beyond spreadsheets and routines.  Taking a genuine interest for the team will include a common respect and appreciation for every individual.  Although this is a cumbersome and lengthy process, leadership will prove abundantly more effective.”

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The need for personal responsibility is most important when times are tough. If you are under pressure, its hard to lead others if your are not comfortable leading yourself.

Knowing how people think, and why they do what they do is a key point of success. Leaders who often try to spend time in their subordinates shoes are much more successful.

Pursing excellence needs to be a top motivator for any leader in DMAIPH. To be effective when it comes to working with me you need to understand the power of your influence and comprehend how it is perceived… so that you can get everyone else to follow along on that pursuit to excellence.

Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization. Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders.

Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

Leading vs. Managing vs. Bossing

The definition of Leading is exercising leadership by providing direction or guidance.

The definition of Managing is to direct or supervise employees or other staff by exerting control.

The definition of Bossing is to give orders to, especially in an arrogant or domineering manner.

Leaders generally try and empower, educate and uplift people working under them in an organization. At times they many need to manage employees who have gone off track, but generally only use this to optimize short term results. Although sometimes managing and bossing can feel the same to the employee, good leaders never have to result to bossing.

Managers generally try to motivate employees to meet business needs. At times the pressure for results will force managers to exert control over their employees to get results. This can generally fee like bossing. Employees that feel like they are constant being directed to do things that are unclear to them how and/or why they are doing it never feel like they are being lead.

People who are in positions of authority who are always bossing are not well liked by their employees. Employees do not feel valued or appreciated when they are constantly being bossed. Bosses use fear and intimidation to drive results, which generally fall short of business goals.

The ironic thing about these definitions is Bosses don’t generally realize they are Bosses. They think they are good managers and even good leaders. Managers generally know they are not Bosses, which is good, but they generally are not in a situation where they can be good leaders.

On the other hand, Good Leaders are always cautious of trying not to fall into the traps of managing people or being the boss.  They constantly appreciate feedback to help themselves improve and see their own style of running a business as always evolving.

For a business to be successful you need leaders who can occasionally manage and once in a while be a boss, but most of their time is spent trying take the business to a higher level. That’s my dream for DMAIPH.

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Analytics Leadership – DMAIPH is a founding member of the Analytics Council of the Philippines and specializes in arming the Data-Driven Leader with the tools and techniques they need to build and empower an analytics centric organization.

Analytics leadership requires a mastery of not just analytics skill, but also of nurturing an analytics culture. We have guided thousands of Filipino professionals to become better analytics leaders. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to discuss a uniquely tailored strategy to ensure you are the top of your game when it comes to Analytics Leadership.

To Strive For Operational Excellence

Analytics is key for any organization to be able to strive for operational excellence and succeed.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/operational-excellence-manifesto-joseph-paris

Came across this blog post on LinkedIn talking about operational excellence. The author provided 5 pieces in the flow of a continual cycle of operational excellence:

  1. Strategic Clarity – Clarify the business model and sources of competitive advantage for each business line
  2. Culture of Excellence – Instill a philosophy of relentless passion for operational improvement
  3. Advantaged Architecture & Process – Design operational architecture, processes and production system to create competitive advantage
  4. Well-Orchestrated Journey – Disaggregate journey into a sequence of digestible pieces driven by real change leaders
  5. Superior Alignment & Execution – Align organization with objectives and reinforce with superior execution

Looking at how we put these ideas into action, here is what I hope the DMAI team can do.

We can continue to look at each business line to make sure its running optimally. Often we focus our energy just on what’s broken, and rarely focus on what’s working. We lost track of the fact that just because its working, doesn’t mean it’s optimal.

We can demand more from people. Allowing mediocrity to become the norm is a sure sign we have lost our passion to improve ourselves and our business.

We can document more. We can share the documentation more. We can use the documentation as a living, evolving part of the business that will keep things innovative and forward looking.

We can set tactical goals. We can reward ourselves to celebrate these successes. And we can use these successes to springboard us to the next tactical goal as we string together success after success towards out ultimate strategic goal. Be the name brand in analytics here in the Philippines.

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We can constantly promote, motivate and empower each other to strive towards operational excellence and never accept operational mediocrity.

We can all get behind the core values of the company, behind our strategic vision and more in unison in our never ending pursuit of operational excellence.

Analytics is the application of using data and analysis to discover patterns in data. DMAIPH specializes in empowering and enabling leaders, managers, professionals and students with a mastery of analytics fundamentals. Contact DMAIPH now at analytics@dmaiph.com or connect with me directly to find out what we can do to help you acquire the analytics mastery you and your organization need to be successful in today’s data-driven global marketplace.

Upping Our Game When It Comes To Retention!

I have been putting a lot of thought into DMAI’s team member retention efforts lately. I came across a few articles on one of the HR blogs I follow, http://www.hrinasia.com

“Talent retention is part of the bigger ecosystem of talent management. To solve the challenge of talent management, it takes more than a one-sided solution, but a holistic approach. Hopefully, employers are enlightened to see the bigger picture, and realize the first step to solving talent management challenges begins with themselves.”

Here are some of the high points:

  1. You get three lifelines. Employee engagement, culture, and leadership are lifeline issues. The separation between healthy and successful companies and unhealthy and failing companies always come down to these lifeline issues.
  2. It’s A New World for HR. Human Resources as a function is at a crossroads and must reinvent itself. Technology has forever changed the way we recruit, hire, train, retain and reward our people.
  3. Data Doesn’t Lie. Data is now integral to all decisions HR must make. I can talk all day about the value of analytics in an organization.
  4. Brand Matters. Employees showing the strong link between good company image and talent retention – the better the company image and reputation, the more likely talent is retained.
  5. Remote workers are often happier and more productive. The benefits of having a remote team to the business healthy growth of a company cannot be underestimated. In fact, in majority of cases the advantages outweigh the disadvantages especially when it comes to engagement.

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With this in mind, we conducted a recent survey and found the feeling Valued and Appreciated were more important to more DMAI team members then being Paid Well.

This is not news to me, but it does validate what I thought to be true. We have a lot of work to do to up our game when it comes to retaining our people.