Cohen Miller Consulting

An important lesson I learned from my dog trainer

Emily Cohen — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:01:09 +0000

Recently, I got a new puppy (a 6 month old rescue mutt named Kenya) and she needs quite a bit of “potty” training. Accordingly, I immediately hired a dog trainer to help me with that and many other issues. However, it was not until a couple of weeks later before she was able to work with me. Consequently, I researched as much as I could in the meantime and did my best to train her. On the trainer’s first day, she asked me a million questions, including what I used to clean up after my dog after she went in the house. I said, rather proudly (thinking I was so smart) “ammonia!” Well, the trainer’s shocked face and negative response was quite unexpected and, in retrospect, well deserved. Apparently, I used the very chemical that was already inside my lovely puppy’s urine! I never made the connection. Yet, to my trainer it was an obvious and very stupid mistake. I can even see her telling this story to all her friends and telling them about what a stupid new client she has – cleaning urine with ammonia, what idiot would do that?

This is what I call in my consulting practice the “duh” moment. The “duh” moment is when I give advice that I can not believe people pay me for and which I think is quite obvious. For example, if you are not happy with an employee’s performance, perhaps you need to tell them instead of just being annoyed by it or waiting until their performance review at the end of the year.

Yes, I admit it, I sometimes think some of my clients (or at least their business behaviors) are dumb. But this experience with the trainer made me think more about this and I realized that what may be obvious to me, because of my expertise, is not always to my clients who do not have the same experience or industry insight as I may have. Or they simple are too stressed to see every result of all their actions.

I consider this a great lesson learned. And, Kenya? Well, she is still learning. Wish me luck.

Selling by Service

Emily Cohen — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 02:22:50 +0000

Recently, I enrolled in New Jersey’s Clean Energy Program. The statewide program offers financial incentives, programs, and services for New Jersey residents, business owners, and local governments to help them save energy, money, and the environment. Through this program I received a new central air conditioner, furnace, hot water heater, and attic/air insulation. This certified my home as green and will also save me over 25% or more off my energy bills. In addition to receiving impressive financial incentives, I was exposed to another inspirational customer service-driven company. When I looked into the program initially, I contacted the local service provider recommended by the program, Gold Medal, and was introduced to their sales person, or “Comfort Advisor” (great title, by the way). The salesperson did a wonderful job, as was his role, in selling me his company’s services. What happened next was a great example of the continued role selling and building client relationships should play in the entire customer experience.

Gold Medal then had two heating/cooling experts install the new appliances. They were completely thorough, clean, and efficient. When they had completed their services, they did two things that really impressed me and which aligns with CMC’s own best practices we often recommend to our clients:

At the end of the project the installers reviewed a checklist of what they did for me to make sure I understood and approved of everything they did. In the in-house creative environment this is very similar to what should happen during project approvals and project de-briefs. In obtaining internal approvals, identify who should approve and what they are approving. Give them a checklist! At the end of a project, review how you did and obtain feedback. Conduct a project de-brief. Simple? Obvious? Yet, you would be amazed how few creative teams do this. Approvals and debriefs should be systemized and ingrained in the work-flow-process and will result in stronger ongoing client relationships.
Lastly, after ensuring I was completely happy with their work, the installers (note: not the salesperson) then explained additional services their company can provide for me in the future and gave me a simple one-sheet detailing their various services. It wasn’t a hard sell, but it leveraged my contentment and educated me on additional services I may or may not have known about. Brilliant and, again, obvious. Yet, when do you see a designer do this same thing? Beyond the account and project managers, this is what designers and all those that interact with clients should do. Everyone on the team should be responsible for building client relationships and advocating for the team’s services and values. This can be supported with the development of a simple one sheet that the team can use as a leave-behind.

The lesson? Sales is an inherent role in the entire client-experience, not just something you do at the beginning of a relationship

Team Building

Emily Cohen — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:20:37 +0000

Many in-house creative teams struggle with getting their entire team to work together as a cohesive unit, working toward the same goals and expectations. Usually, there is always one weak team member who impacts the effectiveness and/or reputation of the entire team. In other cases, some well-oiled teams that work well together may have a divisive relationship with their clients or business partners. The overall impact is a lack of a unified corporate team-building strategy and poor customer service. I am always interested in best-in-class strategies focused on team building that can inspire our clients and help them move their team to the next level.

I was therefore excited to read an article in NY Times Sunday Business on the management strategies of Pret A Manger. The turnover rate in the fast-food industry, composed largely of low-paid transient workers, is normally 300 – 400 percent. Yet, this British fast food chain has an impressive industry-low turnover rate of 60%.

Pret A Manager has several approaches to building and motivating teams that have contributed to this low turnover rate. The following outline just a few of those strategies that resonated with me — all of which can be modified to work within a more corporate environment:

Strategy 1 – Gaining team-wide support for new hire
New hires are sent to Pret A Manager shop for a six-hour day, and then the employees there vote to keep them or not. Including employees in the hiring process and, if possible, immersing the hire in a full-day “test”, ensures a tighter cultural fit. Thus the team, as whole, supports the hiring decision and the hire understands that the culture prioritizes team unity.

Strategy 2 – Skin in the game
Pret A Manager awards bonuses based on the performance of the entire team, not individuals. As a result, employees understand that a bad hire will impact their individual financial compensation. Consequently, employees are often more motivated to help the weaker member(s) of their team to improve their performance through internal mentorship and training. Additionally, each individual sees the direct impact they have on others – reinforcing the idea of a team.

Strategy 3 – Mystery shopper
Mystery shoppers are sent to Pret A Manager stores to give employee specific critiques; outstanding scores are rewarded with a small but impactful financial bonus. In our world, employees can be similarly rewarded for great customer service with a bonus or comparable rewards such as comp time or lunch with an important executive.

Strategy 4 – Employees rewarding peers
This is my all time favorite strategy. When Pret A Manager employees are promoted or pass training milestones they receive a financial voucher. However, instead of keeping the reward, the employee must give the money to colleagues that have helped them along the way. I love this as it truly reinforces the idea behind teamwork by proving that no individual can be truly successfully without the support of the greater team.

Pret A Manager’s approach is yet another example of why it is critical to look beyond our own isolated world so that we can learn and grow as an industry. I often look to other companies and industries to uncover new and successful organizational and operational strategies that are outside of the creative/marketing world. I then modify these strategies for my own business and that of my clients, therefore growing and expanding my insight and knowledge and that of others.

Inspiration from the founder of Twitter

Emily Cohen — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:46:49 +0000

Jack Dorsey has two full-time jobs: executive chairman of Twitter and CEO of Square. That is impressive. I have to believe his success in forming and running these two highly successful and innovative companies must be a testament to great time management skills. Recently featured in Fast Company’s March issue highlighting the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, he explained his schedule:

“All my days are themed. Monday is management. Tuesday is product, engineering, and design. Wednesday is marketing, growth, and communications. Thursday is partnerships and developers. Friday is company and culture.” While he knows the idea may sound overly rigid and could be perceived as nuts, he calls it “disciplined.”

As a consultant, I have been recommending this strategy for years to my clients and I was thrilled to hear its success reinforced by a leading executive. I do believe you can manage your time effectively by chunking out your week or days based on clearly defined buckets depending on your role. So, a creative manager’s week may include a similar schedule. Mondays could be focused on organizational strategies and issues, Tuesdays on operational strategies and issues, Wednesdays on team building/management, Thursdays on client/relationships, and Fridays on vendor/partner management. Alternatively, I have also recommended dividing one’s days similarly with mornings possibly devoted to meetings/communications and afternoons focused on actually working, without interruptions, on one large project (or goal).

One portion of Dorsey’s schedule that I found less inspirational is “Sundays are for strategy, and a lot of job interviews.” Perhaps this is necessary for him, managing two companies and all. And, indeed, many of us work weekends anyway. So, if you do (as I do) then dedicating this precious time time for strategy would certainly be a great use of whatever weekend time you do work!

A Call to Action: Information Design for Project Initiation Documentation

Emily Cohen — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:14:22 +0000

Content should be designed to be intuitive and meaningful. That sounds obvious, right? But it is not always obvious for in-house designers that use “content” daily, in some form, to communicate with their internal stakeholders through a variety of process documentation. Particularly when it comes to creative briefs. Throughout our consultations we have reviewed thousands of project initiation documentation, including creative briefs, and are always surprised by how poorly they are “designed.” In fact, they are not designed at all. Rather, the form is generated within the constraints of the studio management software and thus the design of the document itself is never created with thoughtful consideration. We are often hired to “fix” the creative brief process by either (or both) the creative team or the requestor (clients and/or the marketing team). But what they rarely realize is an important contributing factor is how the documentation and content is designed. If it is not designed correctly, the requesters and the creative teams would not be inspired or engaged in the process.

“Information design intention is to not make something look nice so much as to create an entirely different sort of reading experience that encourages critical thought.” Thought being the critical word here. Great information design invites the reader to join in the process of interpretation, and will thus go a long way in improving how the requester and designer values and interprets the content.

Information design is an important trend right now (just look at Good Magazine, Fast Company, NY Times) and one that I think is particularly relevant to improving the effectiveness of internal communications.

My call to action is for in-house designers to use information design in creating important internal documentation, particularly project initiation documentation.

GE Commercial

Emily Cohen — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:52:31 +0000

This morning I saw an inspirational commercial for GE. It documented an event hosted by GE where cancer-survivors visited GE. There they met with the employees responsible for creating the machines that helped save their lives.

I was tremendously inspired by the experience and easily saw how it could be translated to other businesses. The core idea is to reward your employees with experiencing, hearing about, and being immersed in the results of their actions. So if your creative team designs packaging, have them spend a day conducting store-visits to see their work displayed and interacted with. If you design sales materials, have the sales team talk to the sales people about the impact these materials have had on their ability to sell. Face-to-face experiences that focus on the results of our work would be a great motivational experience, especially for the younger Millenials, who need that level of engagement and feedback.

Left vs Right Brain

Emily Cohen — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00:42 +0000

Recently, my 12th Grade daughter, Hunter, was interviewed by an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business as part of her application process. Hunter encountered an interesting situation, one that is all too familiar to my own professional experience – that of a “creative” talking to a more analytical thinker. Hunter is an entrepreneurial, creative thinker and is interested in going to business school to major in marketing. She sees marketing from the more creative-aspects and is very interested in combining her skills as a creative thinker with her more practical, business-minded brain. Unfortunately, the young woman who interviewed her was an engineer-type whose own career path was more traditional. Hunter clearly baffled her. It was as if they spoke two different languages.

When hearing Hunter talk about her creativity, the woman was a bit stymied by why business school was the appropriate choice for Hunter saying “I can totally see you in the fine art department.” She simply did not understand or appreciate the role of creativity in the business world. This type of advice continued throughout the interview, despite my daughter’s attempts to explain why she thought creative thinking was perfectly aligned with her goal to work in the business world. The interviewer, seeing Hunter was committed to business school, tried to switch the conversation to a more traditional business-school major and then asked Hunter why she did not pursue finance, which, in her mind, was the more “popular” and obvious choice of business-school majors. The entire experience made my daughter question her own direction and tarnished her expectations of business school itself; will other students enrolled in the program be similar to that of the young woman who interviewed her?

This whole disconnected experience reminded me of the all to common experience and frustration we have heard from many creative teams and clients. They frequently do not understand or appreciate each other. In fact, they don’t even speak the same language.

The challenge Hunter faces is one we all face: that of bridging the deep divide between the creative and business worlds and their individual ways of thinking. There are many success stories where innovation is leading business thinking but many corporate cultures still struggle with this deep divide and have yet to bridge the gap. While I have done a tremendous amount of research, reading, and consulting on this challenge, I would love to do more. If you have experience in this area I am very interested in hearing about it.

The Problem with Scripted Customer Service!

Emily Cohen — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:11:23 +0000

I am sure you are going to find the following story very familiar as it was to me. The experience is one I have encountered numerous times across many different customer service touch-points. That is, the scripted customer service model.

I recently brought my new Prius into the Toyota dealership for its regular checkup. I was happy to receive a call from my “service agent” telling me, in detail, what they did with the car and how they fixed or responded to my requests. I appreciated that they kept me informed and that I received personal attention. All was good. However, when I picked up the car, the same agent then proceeded to tell me the same information, using the same script, almost word for word. And for an added emphasis he placed a check mark on the receipt confirming that each talking point was again discussed.

This is when I got annoyed. I really did not need to hear the same information twice. The second interaction was not only redundant and a waste of my time, but it made the entire experience feel scripted and far less authentic.

I was also told I would be receiving a call with a short survey about my overall experience. What was perhaps intended as a personalized customer service approach, ultimately seemed less about me and more about them. Ultimately, this approach was initially well intentioned (the call) but in the end, the scripted, redundant experience didn’t benefit me, as the customer. In fact, it did the opposite; it required me to do “work” (participate in a survey).

This reminded me of the function of client management within in-house creative teams. Many creative teams require clients to do much of the legwork (filling out “work orders”, developing schedules, drafting creative briefs, and, even specifying printing specifications). In particular, I’ve seen this “scripted” experience with creative briefs. Creative teams often give clients a templated list of questions and don’t often customize their project initiation for different types of projects and relationships. In this situation, those designers that are managing clients are essentially positioned as reactive paper-pushers (but with better titles) rather than value-added, pro-active consultative account managers. Overall, creative teams do not always customize their interactions for different client experiences or behaviors. This can result in miscommunications and/or frustrations in client experiences. In other words, the creative team’s version of scripted customer service.

Upcoming WebCast: Managing a Cross-Generational Creative Team

Emily Cohen — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:29:21 +0000

Managing a creative team that contains designers of widely varying ages doesn’t have to be a communication nightmare. This webinar focuses on the core qualities of three generations — Baby Boomers, Gen Exers and Millennials (or Gen Y) — and explores the inherent challenges of managing each group. The goal of this session will to explain the context in which your employees respond in the workplace, so that you can improve communications and mitigate potential cross-generational conflicts. You’ll leave this session with information that will teach you:

key characteristics and styles of each generation
cross-generational management skills
tips on effectively communicating with each group

01.26.12 // 3:00-4:00pm
Sponsor: In-House SchoolHOWse Series
Fee: $41.40
to pre-order: mydesignshop.com/product/

5 New Year’s Resolutions for Creative Managers

Emily Cohen — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:15:53 +0000

To kickoff the new year I was inspired to develop a list of the top 5 resolutions I recommend for managers of creative team:

Stop blaming others — during project, staff, or client related “challenges” stop blaming others but, instead, look deeply within your own team to uncover learning and improvement opportunities that will fix the situation or prevent it from happening again.
Say “no” more often — learn the art of saying “no” and identify opportunities to push back on projects or relationships that are unhealthy or do not leverage the value of your team.
Conduct more honest and more frequent performance reviews — evaluate your staff and give productive feedback monthly. Give praise and honest feedback more frequently based on real examples that are fresh in everyone’s mind. Do not wait until it is too late!
Promote and sell your team—be more proactive, less reactive, in developing relationships and promoting your team. Set a goal to meet with one internal colleague, client, mentor, or collaborator at least once a week to discuss big-picture (not project-related) issues.
Read inspirational books and blogs—read one new business-related book or a blog at least once a month. Some recommendations to help kick you off:

Anything written by Malcolm Gladwell (my favorite: The Tipping Point)
Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler
In-HOWse Designer Blog and anything else written or edited by Andy Epstein

Hopefully the above list, along with our weekly posts in 2012 will help you and your team be more productive, profitable, creative, and effective! Here is to a great new year!