May 2010 – Page 10 – Simon Fowler

rLiving Day 5: Customer Relationships (Continuity)

At work today we were running through a virtual version of Forum‘s program, Achieving Service Excellence, on Adobe Connect Pro. Forum was a pioneer in “customer focus” and organizations still come to us because our deep experience and expertise in the customer experience. For years ASE (and its companion, Managing Service Excellence) has helped fancy ice-cream stores, banks, hotels, gas stations and more improve customer satisfaction, retention and spend. A center-piece of ASE is a simple but powerful ‘customer interaction cycle’ (shown with permission below). The behavioral battle for most people is resisting the temptation to go straight to ‘helping’, and then to keep going to ‘keeping’. But that’s not my point here [end of unpaid commercial]: the model presumes you’re going to see the customer again.

Relational Proximity Dimension #2 is Continuity: our relationship is formed and strengthened by the amount, frequency and span of time we are together. ‘Together’ is a function of directness (Dimension #1), so even if you only have an online relationship with someone Continuity will likely still strengthen the relationship.

I’d argue that if we meet once, we don’t really have a relationship. Not that I would approach you like that, especially if I’m a customer service representative. If I meet you once, but expect to meet you again, and you expect to meet me again, then suddenly it’s as though something is at stake, so trust is required and therefore a relationship is established. You can see how the expectation of a future meeting might change how we treat someone.

Two sets of vendor-client relationships may have met exactly the same number of times but because one set has an expectation of a future there is inevitably more depth and seriousness to the relationship. Historical perspective works the same way; having a sense of common history together means you can think and feel and say, “That was us, you and me! We did that. We went through that together!”.

Or, of course, you could look back and say “you keep screwing me over!”. Continuity, like the other dimensions, is a necessary basis of a good relationship but doesn’t guarantee it.

Whether with a customer or a friend, try recalling your history together, and discuss plans for the short or long-term future. Then actually start meeting regularly! See how that changes your sense of the health and vitality of the relationship.

rLiving Day 4: Corporate Trust (Power)

This tweet just caught my eye, and had me wondering about the relational basis of trust:

The article by Stephen J. Gill, Ph.D includes this quote from Nick Sarillo, the owner of Nick’s Pizza and Pub, describing how performance and employee turnover was wrecked for a time because of a lack of trust:

Managers trained in command and control think it’s their responsibility to tell people what to do,” Sarillo says. “They like having that power. It gives them their sense of self-worth. But when you manage that way, people see it, and they start waiting for you to tell them what to do. You wind up with too much on your plate, and things fall through the cracks. It’s not efficient or effective. We want all the team members to feel responsible for the company’s success.”

Relational Proximity Dimension #4 is “Parity”. The greater the asymmetry of power between me and someone else the greater the potential for difficult and strained relationships. This asymmetry can be real or perceived, and its affect on relationships can be more about the use and misuse of power than the mere existence of power disparity.

The reality is that Sarillo and all his managers have power. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s what makes them managers, empowered to carry out their responsibilities and make decisions. Arguably, it’s their proper exercise of power that enables others to trust them and so get on with their own responsibilities. And command-and-control is not always in opposition to trust. The armed forces rely on it (not absolutely and not in all circumstances, however).

But a pizza company? The misuse of power and/or the identification of power with status – as in the quote above – resulted in gross mistrust. So in thinking about your relationships with others, to what extent does real or perceived power asymmetry make the relationship harder and erode trust? What can someone with power (whether it seniority, physical, monetary etc.) do to build trust without necessarily giving up that power? I’m 6’2″ and my daughter is 3’4″. How do I exercise my power in such a way that produces a flourishing relationship?

Notes:
1) Almost all the dimensions of Relational Proximity are important for trust. I’ll likely touch on other elements in future posts.
2) Neuroscience research is telling us more and more about ‘status’ and I’ll likely blog a lot more about that in the future. In fact, David Rock’s SCARF model reveals a lot of interesting neuroscience that I think confirms the Relational Proximity model.
3) Just a reminder: the Relational Proximity model is not mine, and I’ll say more about its origin and application after the 30 days.
4) For why I’m blogging all this, see the video on www.thirtydayproject.org and what the 30-day rLiving thing is about.

rLiving Day 3: Knowing the poor (Directness)

With a few friends, I’ve run a Sunday class at church for the last 18 months called the Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. We administer it but as far as possible we have the participants be the teachers (more like discussion facilitators with a simple handout as the basis of discussion) from their expertise or interest, to help us all think through the issues in the light of Scripture and then, hopefully, change how we live. But at least change how we think. So far we’ve touched on: Inequality ($$); Disabilities; Music; Myth of a Christian Nation; Giving and Generosity; Relationships and Social Capital; Suffering and Joy; Food; Healthcare (twice); Science and Faith; Inerrancy; Hermeneutics; Education (the “reading wars”), and today we started a series on “poverty”.

“It’s a lot easier to talk about poverty than to talk with someone who is poor.” (Mother Theresa)

“The great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.” (Shane Claiborne)

Relational Proximity Dimension #1 is “Directness”. My relationship with someone is better and healthier the less mediated it is. It can be mediated by technology or other people: these reduce our ability to communicate fully. It can also be mediated, even when face to face, by dishonesty and fakeness: there’s a real me and a real you, any fronts we put up reduces directness.

Our first question was whether anyone had experienced poverty personally, or had encountered ‘it’ anywhere. Among us was a man who’d been homeless for 11 years but apparently by choice. Several of us had encountered poverty in various places such as London (the homeless), inner-city Boston, El Salvador (people living on a garbage dump), Mexico (solvent-addicted street kids), and Paraguay (financially poor but with land, food, water and shelter and no sense of being poor themselves). Then in small groups we discussed causes.

What was immediately obvious was that ‘poor’ has relative and absolute meanings and that the experience of the poor varies enormously. This is why we need to know them, so that we can love them for who they are, as individuals and families. We also need to know them so that we actually do something.

If our (individual) relationship with the poor is mediated, it’s almost inevitable that we’ll fixate on ourselves (with guilt about our riches), we’ll be ignorant about the poor (romanticize them, pity them, judge them), and in the end we’ll do nothing except perhaps pay our indulgence through charity to salve our conscience. Directness – encounter relationships with actually people who are poor – seems to hold so much more promise in creating other-centeredness, compassion and respect, and appropriate action that empowers and liberates.

If you’d like to join the discussion next Sunday in downtown Boston, let me know.