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This Land of Strangers - Robert E Hall

This Land of Strangers

"..the most important book of the decade." — Richard Boyatzis, co-author of best seller Primal Leadership

Relationships, in all their varied forms, have been the lifetime study of Robert Hall. He brings a rare combination of experience as a researcher, consultant, writer, teacher and CEO in dealing with the real-world relationship challenges of modern organizations. When coupled with a decade of hands-on experience in the gritty world of inner-city homeless families it translates into a tapestry of vivid stories, well-researched and oft startling facts, and strategic insights that weave together the yet untold narrative of society's gravest risk and most stellar opportunity.

Personalizing Relationships: Designing for Productivity, the Brand and Revenue

… employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more productive, too. – Adam Grant, Management Professor, Wharton

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Over the past 25 years, the effort to design more productive organizations has been dominated by the math of task efficiency that has mostly ignored the math of relational engagement and effectiveness. The race to scale by creating larger, more specialized, centralized functions has moved much of our work further from the employees or customers impacted by it. This widening chasm that separates the worker and the beneficiary has occurred in business, in government and in every other type of organization. The result is organizations where workers have lost emotional connection retarding their empathy and responsiveness to the end user of their toils. And, it has greatly diminished their motivation. In the quest for efficiency, our organizations have become designed for separation and estrangement. This loss now saps their productivity, the brand and organic revenue growth.

What would a marketplace overfilled with organizational estrangement – one running empty on relational effectiveness – look like? Look around and you will see. Trust of large institutions has plummeted. Employee and customer loyalty is in decline. Brand loyalty becomes more difficult to build each day. We are a society gripped by a difficult struggle: we keep succeeding in removing cost from our transactions and failing in claiming the revenue potential of our relationships. The cost gain is trumped by the revenue loss. Sure enough, the larger, more bureaucratic institutions keep winning the costs race and the smaller, more relationally connected institutions keep winning the organic revenue growth game.

We have fallen in love with what we can easily measure and incent. On the cost side we have become masters of understanding the cost of transacting. On the revenue side, we have relied again on our math skills to quantify the cost and reward of financial incentives – and have perhaps gotten carried away with enticing self-interest to maximize results. Sure enough our recent financial meltdown reflects what happens in a system designed with too much focus on short-term, personal financial gain and not enough focus on enduring personal relationships, serving others and the greater good.

The motivation to do great work comes from many sources. It turns out that connecting the workers more closely to the beneficiaries of the work has a powerful impact on their performance. Adam Grant, management professor at Wharton (Knowledge@Wharton February 17, 2010), has devoted a significant portion of his career to examining what motivates workers in settings that range from call centers to swimming pool lifeguards. He has been able to quantify just how powerful this non-compensation motivator can be. In one experiment he studied paid workers at a public university call center charged with phoning potential donors to solicit funds. As usual this was challenging outbound solicitation work with heavy doses of rejection and relatively low levels of pay. Like most call center operations turnover was high and morale low.

All of this raised the question: How to motivate workers to stay on the phone and bring in the donations? They arranged for one group of call center workers to interact with scholarship students who were the recipients of the school’s fundraising. It was not a long meeting; in fact, it was only about five minutes. But it allowed workers to ask the recipient about his or her studies and that brief chat made a big difference. For the workers who had interacted with a scholarship student spent more than twice as many minutes on the phone, and brought in vastly more money: a weekly average of $502.22, up from $185.94. Grant and his fellow researchers wrote in their paper: “Even minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain their motivation.”

His research points to a larger question: In our quest for ever larger, more routine-ized and efficient work, how have we unwittingly lowered commitment, accountability and effectiveness? So much of what we have done has separated, isolated and disengaged workers and work from the beneficiaries – especially the customers – by barriers such as physical distance, faceless technology, and organizational hierarchy.

We have all seen the research: engaged relationships contribute to revenue. According to Gallup, local business units that score above the median on both employee and customer engagement are on average 3.4 times more effective financially that those that rank in the bottom half. Emotionally connected shoppers spend 46 percent more than shoppers satisfied but lacking an emotional bond. The author of Customers Are People reports that 70 percent of customer decision-making in competitive industries is based on how they are treated and only 30 percent on the product.

We need a relationship impact index to understand how our relational design influences productivity, the brand and revenue. It would factor in and track how relational proximity alters commitment, responsiveness, turnover, brand and revenue. Hard math will elevate our low expectations of so-called soft relationships.

(Column appeared originally in ABA Bank Marketing magazine – April 2010)

By ROBERT E. HALL

Not to be reproduced without written permission. All rights reserved. © Copyright Robert E. Hall 2010

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