Sales or Service - A Genius's Perspective

There's an interview with two Apple Geniuses that I read recently at Yahoo.com

As most of you probably know, Genius is Apple's name for the support guys ​in the Apple Store who help customers with problems that they are having with their devices.

The whole interview is interesting, but there were a couple of things that really caught my attention:

Tim: When you are a Genius, you are sent out to Apple corporate for three weeks of training. The first week is basic troubleshooting. The second week is all customer interactions, how you should talk to them and listen to them. I think that’s the most important part. The third week is when you fix devices.

Greg: Training is much more focused on how to position information and ask questions. There’s lots of asking permission, being empathetic, and trying to align with people. So, you’re not just saying, “This is broken. It costs this much to repair.”​

 ​It is clear that Apple spends a lot of training time emphasizing how the Geniuses talk to customers. I think that's because they understand that while you can look up technical issues in a manual, communicating effectively is something that you have to know how to do. And if you don't Apple teaches you.

The second pair of comments that caught my eye was:

Greg: I find that one of the reasons people tend to like the Genius Bar is that we’re honest. If you don’t need a new OS upgrade, I’ll tell you.

Tim: Your job isn’t meant to make money. Your job is to make sure the customer leaves knowing they can have complete trust in Apple.​

That last one in particular is pretty powerful. It is such a clear statement that the relationship with the customer is worth more than the value of a single transaction.

Leading Means Following

A couple of months before I started working as a CEO, I saw a television interview that was very timely for me. It was on the American news magazine '60 Minutes', with USA's then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen.

Mullen talked about a congratulatory letter that he received when he was promoted to Admiral. In it was a line that had driven his approach to leadership. It said "Congratulations. Just remember, from now on…you'll always eat well, and you'll never hear the truth again."

Mullen's response to that piece of advice was to spend 30% of his time travelling to far flung US military posts, talking directly to the front line troops. I'm sure he knew that the 'truths' that he was hearing from the troops weren't necessarily any less subjective or self-serving than the ones he heard from his Pentagon staff. But they would have been different ones, and would have helped him to form a more complete picture of what was really going on.

Just having face to face conversations with different groups isn't enough though. For this tactic to be effective, the leader has to be careful not to lead the conversation. People react to power by giving it what they think it wants. That's a rational, if often unhelpful, behaviour.

I was lucky enough to have spent a few years working with a CEO who was extraordinarily mindful of this dynamic. Whenever there was a group discussion in the context of a decision to be made, he very consciously held his own views back, and would go around the table asking each person, however junior, what they thought. I remember on a number of occasions being on the spot on a matter about which I didn't have a well-formed view. I felt the way you do in an exam at school when you have exhausted your knowledge about a topic but are still 100 words or so short of the required length.

But the individual's comfort level is secondary (if it's a factor at all). The process more often than not forced people to crystallize and express a view, and with the spotlight on you, the desperation to say something often brought out useful views that would have otherwise remained buried.

This way of operating is a lot harder than it sounds for most CEOs. People who get to leadership positions are often what DISC analysis refers to as 'High Ds'. That's D for Dominant. It's only by consciously fighting that innate tendency to dominate that a leader can maximize value from those around them.

Why Managers Exist

One of the reasons that corporations exist is to benefit from specialization.

An unintended side effect of specialization is that individuals become dissociated from the outcomes of their efforts.

The Manager's role is to design, implement, and maintain systems that re-associate individuals with their outcomes.