In Support of Lead SA

Commenting on the 2010 FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa a month or so ago in a CNBC television programme, Mr Michael Spicer, Chief Executive of Leadership SA noted that the event was a catalist to "energising the human spirit' for South Africa. Yesterday, on August 4, 2010, Highveld Radio and its sister station in Prime Media, in partnership with Independent Newspapers launched one of the potentially greatest initiatives in South Africa, Lead SA.

The ingenuity of this campaign, which encourages everyone of us to take the initiative to do something that would contribute towards changing the world for the better, is that it does not ask us to look towards "our leaders" to show us the way, it asks each of us to take the challenge and lead and no task is too small. The beauty is that each of the"small things" has the potential to contribute towards a groundswell of positiveness that would create the South Africa which we have demonstrated as what we all want, a better country for all.

For the better part of this week, I attended a conference on mine safety organised by the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. The speakers spoke about their initiatives towards "zero harm" to all mine employees in the pursuit of their activities and the focus was on people. Very heart warming. Importantly they spoke about what changes in their own behaviors they had adopted to improve health and safety and not what others should be doing. They took responsibility in the same way that the Lead SA campaign is asking people to do. In essence, the focus was on people and their activities were not taken merely as part of their jobs but they seemed to be motivated by a greater purpose, focusing on people. Encouraging.

A few years ago, I worked with someone who did not seem to pay an adequate attention to his personal hygiene. After mulling over this issue for some time, I found myself being compelled to do or say something. This was a delicate matter for me as I did not want to offend the person but I had to consider the fact that we were in business serving people. More than being offensive to personal senses, the unsavoury underarm odour posed a very serious risk of driving customers out of the door to destinations where their sense of smell would not be as violently assaulted. To deal with the matter, I bought a deodorant and gave it to hom in private with a suggestion that he may want to use it. My nose never detected any more lampses in hygienic conduct from the person in question.

Recently, I was assailed by an unsavoury underarm odour as I walked passed an employee of a restaurant I patronised. The employee was in uniform. I took a decision there and then not to patronise the establishment. The issue here is that management should have paid a little bit of attention to ensure that their employees' smells complimented their cuisine. After all, some of us choose a menu partly because of the smell. One may think that the employee was not employed to cook food, but to be part of a process f serving people.

Forgetting the Objectives of Your Business

I recently received a “service” call from a bank representative who wanted me to switch my account to their particular bank. After going through all the “please note that for quality purposes all our conversations are taped…”, she went on to tell me that should I make the switch, they would give me three months free banking. That was when I realized, and told her accordingly, that the call was not “a service call” after all but a “marketing” one and then suggested that she should convince me why I should make the switch.

Interestingly as we continued talking, I found out that the lady had some background information about my banking history with her specific bank and wanted me to switch back to the bank and in return, they would give me free banking services for three months. I was, naturally, utterly intrigued by the incentive she was offering!! Let me explain, I had an account with this bank for many years until I decided to “switch” to another bank because of the extremely poor service I received from them.

I was intrigued by the fact that she did not express any interest as to why I had switched banks in the first place. Instead she tried to entice me with some waiver of bank charges. Not that it would have made any difference. Had someone called me when I “switched” banks (about a year ago), I might have been fooled that someone cared. To try to entice me with some sweetener almost shocked me. As the bank was paying for the call, I could afford some degree of verbosity in explaining myself to her and this I duly did.

Without using those exact terms, I explained that the reasons why I left the bank in the first place and that while the bank had excellent banking products (which they do) their service sucked (here I used the exact terminology) and until such time that I could be convinced that this had changed, I was not about to move back and forth between banks just because one bank offered cheaper banking costs. I went further than that - expressing my delight that the call was being recorded so that others may get the message - and pointed out that it seemed that the banks were entering into a recruitment campaign following their losses as a consequence of the proverbial GFC (Global Financial Crisis) without having anything better to offer except the old tired “rewards” which were nothing but enticements.

Without charging any consultancy fee, I offered the advice that the bank may consider training its employees to provide good service to its customers first, to be followed by a good banking product mix, and to complement this with good advertising. Good advertising without a good service simply robs the institution of any credibility and you need to bank with people you could trust. I haven’t heard anything from her since. It is possible that I may have cost her valuable recruitment time that could have been put to better use with those looking for “rewards” and therefore help her to meet her targets. That, regrettably, was not my concern.

Why did I go all out to provide this good advice to the banking lady? The reason is that, with the limited number of banks in the country, I will soon run out of options to “switch” to because of bad service. My current bank is the fourth bank that I have switched to and there are only four major banking groups in the country. While the products they offer are excellent, the service is really appalling. The management seem to forget that they are in business not to compete with other banks on product offerings but to provide good banking services to people.

So What About People

I have found myself recently thinking a lot about the amount of time people put into the things they do compared to the impact these have on the people who they do those things for. Here is my thinking, the objective of every human endeavor almost always end up with an impact on people. Whether such endeavor is making a speech, writing a book, designing an automobile or manufacturing widgets (whatever those are), it ultimately has an impact on someone's emotional, spiritual, religious or physical need. Despite this, most dialogue on human activity tends to focus on the thing aspect rather than the human aspect of the activity. I started this blogg because of this frustration.

This last week, we read so much about the effect of the Iceland volcano on the airline industry. We heared quite a lot about how aeroplanes were not able to fly and about how much the airlines were loosing and the financial impact on that industry. Most reports, at least those that I saw, focused on people in as far as using them as props in what was essentially stories about

the inability of airlines to do their business.

My point? I think the airline industry exists to serve its customers, the flying people and their travelling needs. However, most of the complaints were about how these customers found themselves not being informed by the airline companies in this day and age when anyone can publish anything at any time from almost anywhere. Who were the airlines communicating with.

Here is a taste. Yesterday marked 50 days before the World cup kick-off. From my window I witnessed a spectacle of revelry from the people across my building. For the first time in my life, sad to say, I listened to the melody of the vuvuzelas, the kuduzela and, I found out for the first time, the minizelas and the midizelas. What a spectacle!!! Such excitement invoked in me the need to have a cup of coffee at the coffee shop across the road from where I was. I ordered a cuppachino with cream on the side. When it came, it came with cream inside, not on the side. This off course is a minor thing in the large schema of things. However, the whole soccer cup thing is about entertaining people, both in the stadiums and the coffee shops and yet the major focus has been on the beauty of the stadiums and all the infrastructure associated with it and how FIFA is pleased. FIFA,mind you, not the spectators!!! The restaurant and hotel owners have forgotten to train their hostesses how to serve people. For today, I will end here.