Heaven only knows the interest our clients have in correcting undesired behavior within their organizations. It’s maddening—especially when people know what to do and fail to do it. Leaders often attribute this to personal slothfulness—seemingly uncommitted people with lackadaisical attitudes.
As prevalent as this problem can be, undesired behavior isn’t always attributable to lackadaisical attitude. Rob Christensen, CEO of Christensen Fasteners, was wise enough to recognize this in his own company.
Rob met our Founder, Bill Wiersma, at an event in which Bill was speaking. After the address Rob approached Bill about an aspect of his business that he was dissatisfied with. Simply put, he thought his equipment repair function was anything but ‘professional’. He knew it, his people (each a tried-and-true professional) knew it.
One of the tools we use at Better Professionals is what we call our “Good, Better, Best” model. We won’t attempt to explain it in detail here, but one of the things it highlights is “Process.” During his address, Bill mentioned that, “process (or lack thereof) can markedly contribute to an environment which doesn’t allow people, even the finest professionals, to put their best foot forward.”
Rob came up to chat with Bill following the presentation and said, “You know, you asked us this question about process and it hit a nerve.” That innocent five minute conversation would prove to be the catalyst for a fruitful, multi-year relationship.
As you might have guessed Christensen sells fasteners for the construction industry. They sell nails for nail guns, super heavy duty staplers, things that fasten other things together. They also have a value-added service of repairing the tools that used the fasteners. If the customer’s nail gun broke, Christensen would fix it for a fee. They did a great job of repairing the tools, but the process associated with managing the overall repair function was less-than-optimal. Clients would call in for a status update and chaos would ensue—no one knew what was going on. Getting an answer, one the client had confidence in, on a date certain for the repair completion was rare.
Frankly, Rob’s salespeople were embarrassed to offer the repair service.
They didn’t speak up about it—clearly undesired behavior. Yet, you can understand why they didn’t ‘push’ the service.
One of the questions that emanates from our model is, “Think about your processes and systems: ‘to what degree does the word, ‘professional’ describe them?’ Rob knew that when it came to his repair function, the answer was ‘no’, ‘professional’ was not a word that aptly described that function. So he took it upon himself to build a process to correct the problem.
A short time later, Bill ran into Rob, who reported, “You’ll never guess what happened.” He went on to relate to Bill how he had built a system so that when somebody calls in for a repair they get coherent answers and Christensen Fasteners looks like they know what they’re doing. His biggest source of pride? Revenue from the repair service was up 30%!”
Rob had developed a process that deservedly could be described as ‘professional’.
Yet, we wanted to see if those results had become sustainable so three months later we followed up with Rob. Sure enough, revenue and productivity for the repair service were both still up 30%. Is the repair function a huge line of business for Christensen Fasteners? No, it’s not. But that really isn’t the point. The improvement was a byproduct of Rob upgrading (think: making the process ‘professional’) the process. And since the change, sales has evolved from being embarrassed to being proud of the repair function. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that sales now regularly ‘talks up’ the repair service.
In this instance, undesired behavior on the part of sales was pretty straight-forward to correct. It was Rob’s desired behavior (desiring for things to get better and taking commensurate action….consistent with Mind-Set Three) that helped correct undesired behavior in others. Rob was modeling what it meant to be a better professional.
As the owner Rob said, “As a professional, I gotta get on top of this.” He did. He was measuring himself as a professional, as a leader. He succeeded. He was also wise enough to know that undesired behavior can be prompted by a number of factors besides simply slothfulness—something that hasn’t been lost on his sales guys.