Transformational Leadership And Innovation
Innovative organizations focus more on engaging their staff and coming up with novel approaches to distinguish them from their competitors while recovering from the dwindling economy. The experience of the customer – this is just one of the effective measurements of the quality service in the organization. This is the best time to do organizational change through involving employees and enhancing leadership effectiveness and developing transformational leadership styles.
The best tip is to look at the feedback that customers give and study what they most like about a company – in banking it might be that they like how convenient banking options are, how approachable and friendly employees are or how great the branch looks. This being the case then one should think how to offer more than what the competition might be offering, and this could be something to do with location and not about the hours dedicated to work. When it comes to friendliness and your employees – just how much do they know about the customers, and have they ever tried being in the customers shoes? When it comes to how great a branch may look, do the employees get the chance to help out in the dcor and the improvement of facilities by suggesting certain things that they think customers may like?
It’s pretty obvious that if you want to improve service through team dynamics you will need to ask employees to be a part of the design of that culture. So how do you do this without spending too much money and getting a maximum response? One way is to make sure that there are teams formed at all levels of organization with different leadership styles, people who can get together and suggest certain things that can improve the service culture. Through this you can learn from the employees knowledge what they think the customer wants, what they think themselves, what complaints they have heard, and you can get information not just through customer satisfaction surveys but through what employees have to say because of the experiences they have had with the organization and with the customers. Taking this advice, dividing it up into sections, trying it out, evaluating the results and implementing the good suggestions and rewarding the people for it means that you are really helping to create customer-based culture and service that is not about going to work to simply perform a task.
Organizational change happens when certain practices are in place to support that change. Many organizations have tried different approaches, here are the things that you need to enforce so that you get maximum output:
1. That managers and team leaders have specific accountabilities in encouraging new ideas from their teams and understand the concept of communities.
2. That a process is developed on how to decide which ideas to improve the customer experience can be implemented as a pilot.
3. Evaluation must be based on results of the business and on the success of the ideas that are put in action.
4. Employees are rewarded for those innovative ideas that customers truly value – the reward system may not be about money – it might be about dinner with the Executive team – therefore again reinforcing the culture of having access to people who make the final decisions and that innovation in customer service is valued.
5. Finally the communication strategy needs to focus on the success of the program and continually reinforce the positive impact on the customer experience and business outcomes.
So a question to ask yourself is, “Are you engaging your employees through leadership communication and are you encouraging a positive environment focused on a culture of service that your customers will experience”?
