Crisis can be averted with proper planning, with Marc Haine

Can I ask you something? Does it seem like you and your team are always in crisis? One thing happens and it cascades to the point that your team is struggling, engagement is low, and you are apologizing to a lot of your customers. Crisis, especially if it's foreseeable, is a real drain on your business and your business operations. And that's what we're going to discuss today on Experience Leadership.

Welcome to Experience Leadership, a podcast that challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs just like you to dare to be the exception. Join our host, customer experience expert Marc Haine, as he uncovers relevant and timely content to help you Drift and direct your business and teams to create jaw-dropping experiences your customers and staff deserve. Here is the host of Experience Leadership, author of Lights! Camera! Action!, customer experience expert Marc Haine.

Welcome to this episode. This is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the jaw-dropping, show-stopping experience that their customers and of course, their employees deserve. My name is Marc Haine. I am your Service Expert, Master of Experiences, and of course, your host. And today, I'd like to discuss the constant turmoil of crisis in your business. Today, I will put a spotlight on 4 key steps that you can take to move yourself from the distraction of crisis to what I call effective proactivity. So stick with me because it's going to be a really good show. My whole thing today is all about crisis, and so I think I'm just living today's exercise. So I would like to jump into today's question of the day. Do you have any recurring frustrations? You know, crises that keep happening time and time again. You know, that you pull your hair out and keep thinking, why does this keep on happening? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Why don't you go ahead and share this episode on your favorite platform and hashtag it #ExperienceLeadership and put your comments down with it. I'd love for you to be part of this conversation. Let's face it. Murphy's Law is a universal constant. Benjamin Franklin said, there's nothing, nothing is certain except death and taxes. And as much as those things are true, we need to amend the saying to include that nothing is certain. Death, taxes, change, and Murphy and his darn law. In my 35 years of running and consulting with businesses, I've noticed that many business operators and managers struggle with getting out of crisis. Their days are filled going really from one crisis to another. And you end up going through your whole day Getting to the end of the day and realizing that you've not even made a dent in the list that you started off with that day. The crisis of our days become a dominating factor that really we show up to work every day, we have an intention of what we want our day to be like, but then crisis kind of distracts us from everything. So I'd like to take you back to the early morning of June 10th, 2018. It was early Sunday morning. Sous chef Richard just arrived to start the very busy day at 3:30 in the morning when he realized that when he walked into his restaurant, he went to the walk-in cooler and he realized that the walk-in cooler that had all the raw and prepped items was warm. It was a balmy 28 degrees. For those of you in my south of the border, that's 82 degrees Fahrenheit. 24 degrees warmer than is safe to store food. While it was fully stocked with all the food prepped days before for this day's breakfast, lunch, and supper service, for the cooler to get that warm, it would have had to have been down for most of the previous day with people going in and out all day long. In a panic, he now had to scramble his team and his resources to compensate and get ready for the day's food service. for 250 people. I mean, he had to do 200— all these different meals, right? And especially, I mean, he's there at 3:30, breakfast service was at 7:00 AM. And so, he had such a short amount of time to get all that food out. The challenge here is that failure for him is not an option. You can't go to customers afterwards and say, I'm terribly sorry, I have no food. In 3 hours, people would be coming down to start their conference day needing breakfast.

Right.

As the very first order of business, then having to prep for mid-afternoon snacks and lunch and then afternoon snacks and supper. You know, all the pre-prep that was done was gone. And there's so much work and hands that need to go into to pull this off successfully. And like all crisis, this one crisis leads to a myriad of other crisis. He needs stock. He needs hands to do the work. He needs, oh, he needs time. But all of this was avoidable. There was no way that Richard or his chef could go to the conference attendees and say, I'm terribly sorry, we're not serving you breakfast today. Terribly sorry, you're gonna have to go somewhere else. Likewise for you, can you afford not to deliver the product or service you promised to your clients? Can you afford the extra manpower and cost, the production costs and the reputation cost Of not being able to deliver on time. The brilliant chef, sous chef, and cooks pulled it off that day. They had to scramble, and I mean more than just the eggs. They had to reach out to their resources and they had to do what was necessary to get the job done. The stress was incredible. People had to pull double, even triple shifts. But they had to do it and they did do it. But it cost them a packet. By 11 PM that evening, as they wrapped up the daily operations, Richard and the chef were determined that this would be the very last time they would ever be caught like this. They knew something had to be done. They realized they had to stop being ruled by the crisis of the day. I was brought in to create a strategy with them because, hey, that's what I do. So, what I want to do today with you is I'd like to delve into kind of the 4 steps that you can do to Get control of crisis before the crisis ever happens. And we'll get to that right after this. When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business a star with a new book, Lights! Camera! Action!, Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theater by Marc Haine. Marc uses his business and acting experience to help you see your business like a live show so you can create a Performance your customers will never forget.

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today at your favorite online retailer or directly at marchaine.com. Welcome back! You know, there are so many ways to become proactive with crisis. But one step that we need to take is we have to know that we are actually in crisis and we have to be willing to do something about it. I've worked in businesses and worked with business operators where crisis keeps on happening. People just don't know how to contend with it. They just say, oh, it's just a fact of business, or it's a fact of life. And the unfortunate side to that is the stress that it creates on the managers, on the team, and of course, for the customers can be really insurmountable sometimes. Sometimes you just can't overcome it. And you'll see that there's some key indicators that there is a problem. For the chef and Richard, the first order for them to overcome this was to do what I like to call the 3P risk assessment. To get started doing this risk assessment, I think is step number one. I think it's really important that we understand where our liabilities are and what we do every day. We do risk assessments for every single process and foreseeable situation. If you've ever done anything around like occupational health and safety, doing their audits, the process is identical except that instead of just looking for health and safety infractions, what we're looking for is we're looking for risks that cause crisis, not just the safety conditions, even though we would include the safety conditions as well in our process. But for every aspect of the business, we have to be able to rate the situation's effect on the business, the probability it will occur, and break it down into 4 different categories. This risk assessment, being able to kind of clarify what the category is, what is the rate or the detriment to the business, and then how likely is it to happen. Being able to rate that, you're able to put things and color code them into aspects of what you need to deal with and prioritize what you need to do with first, second, third, and fourth. But the 4 categories that we would classify them in would be The first one would be out of scope, meaning that there are no preventative measures really for them. So things that come to mind as you see these extreme weather conditions, you know, people getting floods, power outages, earthquakes, COVID, who could see that coming? There are certain things that you just can't help. You know, acts, people would call them acts of God or acts of nature. The out-of-scope risks to our business, we really have to contend on a play-by-play and a time-by-time. There are some things that we can do to protect some of our assets. So for instance, like one of the things with computers and data, right? They say that one of the things that you do is you get a hard drive and you back up your data and you store your data offsite so that you don't lose everything. And again, now cybersecurity is a big one that's popping up. We have some aspects that we're able to do for that. Being able to do out of scope and be able to put a policy together later on, and we'll get to One of the other categories in a minute, but being able to put a process together of what happens when these out-of-scope situations happen, I think is absolutely essential, even though chances are we might not be in the middle of an earthquake or a flood or something else depending where we live. The other category is props. I use the word props because of my theater background, but this is basically all the pieces of equipment that we use. Anything that we use in our business, in our department, that we use in production and delivery of products and services, I call a prop. Just recently, one of my colleagues, Marc Gordon, just did a recent post where he was in a restaurant. It was a Starbucks or a coffee shop. I shouldn't say a brand name. But it was a coffee shop where he was standing in line and somebody ahead of him had paid for something. But because the receipt didn't print out, the customer wasn't sure if the transaction went through or not. And he started arguing with the server. About the fact that he doesn't want to put his credit card in again because he doesn't want to get billed twice. And Gordon was talking about how this customer interaction with the clerk just held up everything so long that he actually ended up walking out because it was taking too long for the clerk to deal with this one customer that he didn't want to wait anymore. So, the effect that that has. And I wrote back to him and I said, well, you know, there is a process With the debit machines that you can do a very quick reading. You can tell if something goes through very, very quickly. But here's a situation where the prop, which was the debit machine, didn't respond or didn't work the way it was supposed to work. And because of that, the server was handicapped. She was stuck. She was looking at it and not figuring out in this high-pressure situation with an irate customer, not being able to be able to problem solve that. And so, one of the things that we want to do is we want to be able to look at our props and say, what can we do with our props when they fail? Another category is process. We look at how each job is being done. We outline objectives, expectations, and assumptions that gets us to the end result. And that for us, it could be our product or our service. In many circumstances, a lot of operational issues are a result of lacking or bad processes. Whether it's an equipment malfunction, a lost or misplaced tools, a lack of inventory, or even miscommunications with staff or customers. Not having processes in place is usually the root cause of our, and of course our customers' frustration. People is another category that we want to be able to put on our risk assessment. Of the 3, people problems are probably the most challenging, the most Unpredictable and the most pervasive. In spite of the constant preparations and trainings and rehearsals, human beings don't always do or think or react in the way that we need them to do. In every interaction and every transaction, we and other people have a set of expectations as to what the outcome will be. And in any one of those transactions, we have a set of expectations as to how the other person will behave in the relationship with us. Our frustration happens when other people's behavior does not live up to our expectations. And by the other people, we could be talking about co-workers. We could be talking about employees. We could be talking about our customers. We have to be able to mitigate how other people will behave around us when they don't live up to our expectations. So that's the first step is to categorize and take this 3P risk assessment, break them into these 4 categories. Again, the 4 categories are out of scope, props, processes, and people. And so that's why it's called 3P. Once we can go through and do the risk assessment, in the risk assessment, we're going to say, we're going to take a look at each situation that we do. And I strongly recommend that if you're going to do something like this, that you do it with your team. Number one, it'll get them involved. It'll also cut your work exponentially if you have more people doing it, especially people who are responsible for their stations or for aspects of your business. They know what they do every single day. They are so able to help feed you all that information so that works well. But the second step is what I call checklisting. The biggest issue with the tools and equipment, what I'm calling the props, that we are required to use in our jobs, we use without even thinking about their value. We don't recognize the value of our computers or our cell phones or our equipment until they stop working. We're so used to working with them that once they break down, we are absolutely lost. I mentioned the debit machine and in the transaction for that one clerk. You know, one of the things that I've done in virtually every property I've ever done when we're putting together any kind of mitigation for crisis is I'll go and I'll go and get the old paper copy machines. I don't know if you remember them where you put the credit card machine in and you have a paper receipt and you have to rub it and it goes click, click, right? And I'll make sure that we always have one of those in store So that when the debit machines inevitably will go down, because they will go down, it's technology, that we could at least still process credit cards manually. And then once we have the receipt and the customer has a paper copy of the receipt, we now have the ability to punch in the numbers afterwards once the debit machine comes back up. Or worst case scenario, go to the bank with the receipts and say, deposit my money. But I don't even know if they have the ability to do that anymore. But the mere fact that you're gonna have the paper copy, With a signature. It's a contract. It's just a little mini contract. It gives us the ability to then continue on serving our clients without having to put up a sign, terribly sorry, we're accepting only cash today. And if you remember a few months ago in Canada, we had one of the telecommunications companies broke down, and for 3 days we had— they had no cell coverage or no internet coverage for all the different businesses. And just that just weaked Absolute havoc, except for those people who were prepared. In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recounts a story of a lumberjack. He's under time constraints to get the trees cut down, and he's getting so frustrated by how hard the job is and how long it's taking. And somebody passing by suggested to him that he sharpens the saw, and the lumberjack responds that he has no time to sharpen the saw. He's got to get these trees cut down. And so when it comes to our props, we must take time to sharpen the saw. If we don't service our props, clean our props, and take care of our props, they will cause us more trouble and fail when we need them the most. So being able to create a checklist and measure devices is the solution. I— we want to be able to Put in a definition of what proper operating procedures look like and put in a measuring device to be able to say this is good or this is not good. Had Richard and his sous chef, if they had had a temperature log for their walk-in cooler, they could have spotted the problem so much faster. I mean, it could have been 2 days earlier. They could have seen that their fridge was losing its refrigeration. In order for them to do that, what we did was we instigated 4 temperature checks throughout the day. They had to do a temperature check. So we gave them the little zapper gun and a clipboard with the time, the temperature, right? And a signature. So some— or an initial. So whoever's doing it can go into the room, they can zap the room, read the temperature, write it on the log, and then repost the log. And they did it on opening, they did it at lunch, at supper, and before they left at the end of the day. The clipboard and the thermometer were attached to the wall, so it was easy for anybody who walked by to be able to see it being done or not done. And it was the kitchen's rule, whoever came by it, so anybody at lunchtime had to go in and zap it. They did the temperature check and they wrote it down on the sheet. So you could see from one, every few hours you would have a reading in the fridge so you could tell if anything was happening. For props, we need to have a defined measure of effectiveness, right? If it's a computer, right, it's— you— or for the internet, you can do a bandwidth search every single day. You can come on, open up your computer, go to fast.com, and check to make sure that your bandwidth is there. If it isn't first thing in the morning, maybe before everybody gets there, we need to reboot the routers so that everybody has the optimum speed on their computers. For people who are using debit machines or point-of-sale machines, the paper rolls will always turn red as it approaches the end of the roll. That tells you as it gets to that red spot, it tells you that it's time to change the paper. But a checklist, an opening checklist, checklist that includes a survey of all the receipt printers at the beginning of the shift will give you an indication of how much time you have left in those rolls. And the checklist will even tell you if you have a replacement ready to go. So you go through the checklist, you check all the printers, and you see that, oh, okay, I need printer number 2 needs more paper. You go to where you store the paper and you're just making sure that you have paper ready to go so that if it does run out during the shift, it's a question of just picking it up from wherever it's stored, replacing it, and you're going. It's no longer a crisis as opposed to one of operation where they ran out in the middle of the shift, the cash register ran out of paper, and then they held up the whole line of people as they went running around looking for paper rolls to put into this cash register. So, it was a challenge. So, as you go through your 3P risk assessment, one of the things we want to look at is we want to look at what things can we use to create a checklist for that can become a constant ongoing habit of doing an opening checklist, a midday checklist, a closing checklist, whatever that might look like for your business. And then, the third step is to create standard operating procedures. For every process, a standard operating procedure needs to be established. Anytime that a human being has to do something, you have to be able to set the standard operating procedure down. It establishes a baseline for how we do things. The one company that I have a ton of respect for, when I was 17 years old and was working for McDonald's, they are brilliant in the way that they have kind of these standard operating procedures. And it is absolutely brilliant. And if you ever watch the movie The Founder with Michael Keaton, talks about Ray Kroc and it talks about the launch in the early days of McDonald's. You'll see that one of the McDonald brothers is in one of the scenes is checking french fries. And he's got a clipboard and he's got a stopwatch. And he's measuring how long it takes to cook the fries and the temperature of the fries. And he's monitoring them. This is their way of being able to establish the baseline to be able to create a standard operating procedure. And everything that they did with their electronic timers, everything happened in order to facilitate and be able to live up to the standard operating procedure. The reason why SOPs or standard operating procedures are so valuable is because as human beings, we are always looking for shortcuts. We're always looking to make things, especially repetitive tasks, easier on us. And as things evolve, procedures will change. A standard operating procedure helps us establish a standard by which we work. And if you have a culture that understands that the standard operating procedure is there, this is how we operate. The end results should always be really consistent. However, we have to get the stakeholders, the people who are responsible for executing the standard operating procedures. We should always get them to review the standard operating procedure at least once a year to make sure that the conditions, the objectives, or the processes haven't changed. Or maybe they do need to be changed. And then, we need a deeper execution or deeper analysis of the standard operating procedure. So, that's the first 3. I'd like to get into number 4 and we'll do that right after this.

Attention meeting and event planners! Is your company or association planning a live or virtual conference, seminar, or staff retreat? Are you looking for a fresh, energetic perspective on what it takes to put on a jaw-dropping experience for your customers or staff? Book Customer experience expert Mark Haine for your next group event. Past participants have said, "Mark kept us in stitches while teaching us how important and powerful actually designing our customer experience can be." Read more testimonials and find out how Mark can serve you and your group at markhaine.com. That's M-A-R-C-H-A-I-N-E dot com.

Welcome back! I hope that you are finding value in today's episode. As you can tell, I'm super passionate about today's topic. And if you belong to an organization or an association that is planning a conference or a leadership retreat and you think that I might be able to bring value to your group, I'd love it if you would connect me with your planning committee or the person responsible for planning your conference. It would be my absolute pleasure to serve. So, we've covered the first 3 best practice steps for effectively— putting the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable— for effectively and proactively dealing with crisis. The 4th best practice step is training. I have to say, training, I've been a big proponent. If you ever watch any of the other episodes, I talk about training quite a bit. The need to bring people into the loop is essential. In my book, Lights! Camera! Action!, I talk about this idea of rehearsals. In a play, we cannot execute a play without having the actors rehearse. It would be fair to say it doesn't matter how talented the actors are. It doesn't matter how many productions they've been in before. When it comes down to executing a script and putting on a show, We need to have rehearsals. So if you're watching the replay of this and you think that that's not right, that we shouldn't need rehearsals, I'd love you to put no in the comment box. Honestly, it would be impossible for us to be able to effectively put on a stage production if we didn't know where people needed to be, what people needed to be doing, and the words that they're going to be using. And so training becomes the one aspect that we have so much control over. And of course, there is that old adage, you know, oh Marc, what happens if I train my people and they leave? And then the flip side to that is, oh, but what happens if you don't train your people and they stay? So, that's always the challenge. In this 4-step process, managers need training on how to lead, how to delegate, and how to follow up. We've talked at length and a lot of episodes are focused around this idea that some of our best performers, some of the best people in our businesses get recognized and they get promoted into leadership roles. But then we don't give them the tools to be effective. We don't turn them in. We don't teach them how to become coaches. We don't teach them how to delegate effectively. We don't give them the skills to be able to talk to people and communicate in a way that's transparent and authentic and objective-based. Managers need to be trained. Staff need training. They need information and a constant review as to what are the expectations, what are the outcomes that we expect, and anything that pertains to their performance of their jobs. People need to understand what your expectations are of them. And turning around and going, eh, it's just common sense, is not good enough. Especially when we do the first batch, the first 4 things in our 4-step process, we have to be able to train them. We have to be able to train people and to be able to help us with the 3P risk assessment. We have to teach people what it takes, what is the optimum condition of a particular prop or how a particular piece of equipment should be working. We have to teach people what a standard operating procedure is. What are the expectations? How do they follow a standard operating— where do they find a standard operating procedure? Procedure if they needed to be reminded, right? All these different things that need to be trained into the workplace. And these can be in the form of team-wide trainings where you bring somebody like me in to train a certain capacity or skills or even a process such as training customer experience, training leadership, training on dealing with difficult people, whatever it is you need me to do because of course, that's what I do. Training is reinforced daily with things like standup or miniature debrief meetings where the team comes together at the beginning of a shift to discuss changing conditions, changing expectations, or anything within the day that pertains to having a super, super great day. These are integral parts of running any business. And for the people who don't think that communication is really important, to making sure that their team is up to speed with anything that's going on. You need to look at that because I bet you when you look back at the crisis that's happening, somebody's going to turn around and go, well, I didn't know, or I thought. I love the word I thought. Whenever anybody— I have a kind of model that whenever somebody comes to me and said, oh, I thought, they're wrong. They come in and go, I thought the stock came. Well, you're wrong because it's not here. I thought You know, my shift was yesterday. Well, yeah, right. Every time somebody comes to you and uses I thought as part of the excuse, they're wrong. So, to recap, the best practices are tied to the 3P risk assessment, checklisting, the standard operating procedures, and training. So, what happened with Richard and his chef? I can say, That I was invited to their New Year celebration. And in the early morning of January 1st, 2019, at 1:00 AM, Richard and the chef called all the kitchen team together in the office. This is 1:00 AM. The chef handed out glasses of champagne to each member of the kitchen staff. They had just wrapped up their duties for the New Year's Eve celebration. And as the party continued in the main hall and the bar, Their day was done. The kitchen was shut down. All the people got together, all the team members got together, and they got to celebrate a little bit of their end of year. I have to tell you that they marveled and toasted to their success for the year because the chef took the time to thank the team for supporting and contributing to the changes that they made within the last 6 months. Keep in mind, we had this in June. Their big crisis happened in June. And now, they're January 1st. The changes ensured that Richard and the chef would never have to panic like they did 6 months before. I won't lie. The process to be that intentional and to work through this project is really daunting. But the chef and Richard involved the whole team. And because of that, they had complete buy-in for everybody who was on board. It made their lives easier. It made the management's lives easier. It made the customer the number one priority. And had they not invested the time and the resources to do the work, they would continue to be driven by crisis. They'd be frustrated with the level of work, and the people would continue to have crisis, and it would continue to mount and escalate. They would always be under pressure to deliver in the throes of crisis of the moment, whether that's being short-staffed, short-stocked, whatever. I know personally that until I speak with you, I don't know what your place of business is like. But if you don't have these practices in place and you are constantly struggling with having to put out fires, then you too are probably being driven by crisis. You're probably surrounded by frustration. Frustration in yourself, your employees, even your customers. And you and your business are not reaping the reward, making the money that you deserve. Can you imagine what it'd be like to not have to wonder, okay, what's the next disaster going to be? Right? Every time something bad goes on, it all comes in threes. What's the next one? Right? Imagine what it would be like that you can wake up every day and know that you have things covered, that people are in place happily doing what they should be doing. Your customers are happy. You can sleep at night. There's really honestly so many different excuses why leaders don't do this work. And a lot of it unfortunately has to boil down to economy that they're worried about how long it takes, how expensive it is. But it really is costing people so much more by not doing the work. It's one of those little things that you realize only after it's done how valuable it is. And that's what I guess makes it rather complicated, because I'm saying do this work and I'm saying it's going to save you money, but until you do the work, you won't realize it till months after it's done. Because months after it's done, you're going to realize that people are happier at work, that you're getting more stuff done, that you have less— you're not taking your time to have to put out those fires. So, here's my challenge to you. I suggest that you start out by doing the 3P Risk Assessment. Just make that as a commitment, right? You and your team can do it together. Give yourself 3 months to complete it. Then from there, you can decide what you'd like to do next. If you decide that you want to take the next steps, then you could start looking at checklisting. What kinds of things do you need a checklist for? If you need a template to get started, drop me a line. My contact is in the show notes. I will send you a Google Sheet with a template for the 3P Risk Assessment just to help you get started with you and your team. As I wrap up, please know that you don't have to live in crisis. There are solutions to the problems that you face day in and day out. There are solutions to it all. The idea is that a mistake or a crisis isn't bad as long as you learn from it and keep it from happening again. My hope for you is that you get to play, be more interactive, innovative. Every day, you get to play at work. But you can only do that if you are not having to put out those fires. Honestly, I hope this has been helpful to you. If you have any questions about our topic today or you'd like to brainstorm some aspect of your business, feel free to click the calendar link in the show notes and book a complimentary 30-minute session with me. Honestly, I live to serve. The link in the show notes is the one that's marked meetwith.marchaine.com. And please, if you enjoyed this episode, feel free to subscribe to this podcast and share the episode within your network. I have a strong philosophy that knowledge is power but only if we share it. The bottom line is if we apply what we learned today, it could be magical for your business. Even bigger, if you apply these concepts to all your stakeholders, that is, you include your employees, your suppliers, anyone you do business with in any capacity, you will rock your world with the most amazing loyal brand ambassadors getting stuff done in a happier, more succinct processed workplace. I want to thank you for joining me today. I know that your time is valuable. And if you got this far with me today, I want to thank you so much for your time and commitment. I do hope that you thought this was value. I look forward to serving you again in upcoming episodes. My name is Marc Haine. I hope that you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. Thanks for joining.

Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for joining us this week on Experience Leadership. Make sure you visit marchaine.com for a full directory of available episodes. While you're at it, if you found today's content valuable, please share it and tell your friends about the show. As Marc says, knowledge is power, but only if you share it. Be sure to tune in each week for the newest episode. Please stay safe, stay healthy, and dare to be the exception.