Leadership and Customer Service - Key strategies for the business of parks and recreation

    "Government should be run more like a business," is a line I've often heard, and is mentioned in the article, Comparing Business to Government, by Arnie Biondo (from the February 2012 issue of Parks and Rec Business magazine).  I've struggled with what this means, but Biondo's article does a very good job laying out the differences between business and local government, as well as detailing some strategies professionals and agencies can do that are, as Biondo states, "more business-like practices." 

    The first strategy mentioned is the delivery of excellent customer service, which is something we strive to provide at the West Sacramento Parks & Recreation department.  Just to say you have great customer service isn't enough, and it can't be inconsistent (great by one staff member, but poor by another).  It has to be a cultural norm, but it can only be the norm if the leaders are working on setting the tone and nurturing the culture to help it grow and mature.  I'm pleased to say that just this past Saturday I spent some time with some of our recreation center front-line staff (front desk, lifeguards and child care staff) as they participated in another leadership/management/customer service training.

    William Davidow and Bro Uttal, in their best-selling book, Total Customer Service: The Ultimate Weapon*, provide a list of three (3) principles that they say leaders of customer service oriented companies do:  

1.      Foster a service oriented culture. Leaders help create and nurture cultures by communicating use. They put values into action by treating employees exactly as they want employees to treat customers.

2.      Make customer service everybody's business. Unless every employee assumes responsibility for the customer’s experience, service dies.

 

3.   Declare war on bureaucracy. To produce effective, efficient Customer service, leaders keep policies, procedures, and other formal control mechanisms to a minimum, relying instead on cultural control.

    As I go down this list of strategies, I find that we are applying these business strategies.  Leadership is key (and we are fortunate to have a department director and City Council who provide solid leadership) and having and implementing a thoughtful and deliberate customer service strategy is critical if parks and recreation agencies are to deliver on their vision and mission and not run like stereo-typical government.

*This is a great book, but was published in 1989.  While some of the examples given are antiquated, the definition and strategies are still very relevant. 

Sir . . put the iPhone down and step away

It needed to happen.  I think I started to feel it was becoming an issue over the summer, but it finally came to a head on Christmas Day.  "You're always on your phone or tablet when we're together," my wife told me.  She was right.  If not for Alene speaking her mind (not something she has trouble doing by the way) I don't think I would have made the decision.  And while her words did sting a little, I decided to turn this issue into a positive.  I would make a decision that shows her that I respect her feelings, while trying to strike a balance in my life.  This knuckle-dragger may evolve a tad!

Social media, personal and work email, videos, a few games, news, and blogs - it had become a problem and she was right to point it out.  Having a smartphone, tablet, laptop, and a PC at both home and work have made it very easy to be online almost every waking moment where I am sitting down, standing around, and, occasionally, while walking.  I had become one of them . . . one of the people who had become too connected . . . one of the people I hear others comment about.  I see this behavior lampooned in Facebook posts . . .

as well as the old fashioned way - the comic strips . . .

So, the day after Christmas I developed a strategy to not only minimize using my devices when around my wife, but I developed four (4) simple guidelines for how I want to use technology out and about during my day, as well as while I'm at home.  I want to make sure I strike a balance and don't go to the other extreme or set rules that will result in my failure.  While I suspect this list will be modified over time and possibly grow, it's a start .  Check it out and let me know if you think I missed something or if you think something should be tweaked a bit.

• Be present for them (even though they may not be). When with the wife or family don't be checking your smartphone or tablet for emails, texts or social media. Save that for when everyone's gone to bed, especially your wife.  Exception:  if asked by a family member to take a picture with my smartphone or to check something on Facebook, do so, but then put the device down when finished - don't continue to stay on checking statuses or emails.
• Place books you want to read (in most cases this means books you mean to finish) in places where you sit around the house.  Time spent checking Facebook posts or emails could be spent reading some books you've wanted to finish and finally start some books you'd really like to get into.  You could also practice guitar more . . . which you enjoy and really need to do.
• Challenge yourself to not check your smartphone when you are meeting with other people.  Wait until you have time to yourself afterwards or are back in your office.
• It's so easy to check your smartphone when standing in a line, walking around, as a passenger in a car, in between sessions at a conference or during baseball or football games.  Challenge yourself to not do so because you've got nothing else to do or are bored.  Exception: you like taking pictures and using filters (often times for work purposes) - as this is one of those great features of your smartphone continue to do so, but be sensitive that you are not missing something or are a distraction for others who are trying to enjoy the moment or your company.

Mobile devices are fantastic, but like watching too much television, mobile devices, I believe, can have an adverse affect on my ability to engage in daily living and take away from my quality of life.  But the pendulum does not need to swing all the way to the other side.  I can find that balance.  I do not want to be dependent on mobile technology or social media.  Instead I want these things to serve my interests and enhance my life.  

It needed to happen.  Using these guidelines to shape my own behavior will be a challenge, but making these changes may help me be more engaged with others, give me time to read more books, and practice guitar more.  Who knows . . . by this time next year playing an F7 may be a piece of cake, and both China Grove and Sweet home Alabama may actually sound like music.

Make No Mistake . . . Work Should Be Fun and Passion-driven

    As 2012 starts to wind down, so too does the semester at Sacramento State, where I've had the privilege of teaching a graduate course on the advanced administration of parks, recreation and tourism.  I taught this course once before 6 or 7 years ago and focused on management, but this time I took a different approach.  This semester the areas of focus were on leadership and customer service.  While it is fun to teach this class (and I believe I have the experience and qualifications to do so) I find that I am as much a student during the semester as any of the dozen graduate students I have.  The course is billed as a 'workshop', and it is very much an open forum during class and we supplement discussions using our class Circle on Google+.  Using social media to further our discussions and share new information and experiences has really added value to this course - so much so that I will use Google+ in all my classes in the future.

    One shared post that really hit home with me was called the 9 Crippling Mistakes CEO's Make (thank you Jen Smith).  For me it was affirmation on my leadership and management beliefs and practices, but it also made me think that it is some of these very points that may keep me from ever becoming a parks and recreation director.  

    I see a trend in our profession that concerns me: director and administrator positions being filled with people who may have a strong business or finance background, but lack a true understanding of, and passion for, parks and recreation.  While I would agree that it makes sense to apply smart business practices to what we do, we are not the same as a small business, a large corporation, a non-profit or just about any other department found in local government.  Leading a parks and recreation department around by the budget as a means to make it perform (a.k.a. - avoid going over budget), isn't how a leisure service agency is going to excel.  Squelching the creativity of people whose jobs are to create opportunities for their customers (residents) and whose jobs are to help foster positive emotional connections within the community is a sure way to under-perform.  The role of parks and recreation is to help improve the quality of life for the people living within that community. Do that and your customers are likely to talk about how much they love their community and others will want to make that community their community.  That's how you grow and maintain a healthy bottom-line.  I've seen this happen.  It's has happened in the community where I work (West Sacramento) because of the vision, talent and love my staff have for the community and work we do.
  

Whether it's celebrating Stars Wars Day (May the 4th), Talk Like a Pirate Day, or some other reasons to play with our customers, community and staff, setting the tone for a fun work place yields positive business results.

   And it's not just my department.  The other department's in our organization are similar in their passion for their work and commitment to serving the community. Beyond that there has been the political-will to take West Sacramento in a positive direction.  It really is a wonderful place to live, work and play!

   So back to my point.  Our department - Parks & Recreation - is successful because we follow our mission and strive to deliver exceptional customer service.  Item #3 in the linked article is You ignore the importance of company culture.  I'm big on company culture and feel one of the main roles of a leader is to help set the tone, then get out of the way and let your talented staff do their jobs.  You foster an atmosphere where people want to work because it's fun and challenging and the customer feels it.  Make the customer 'part of the show', and they become a partner in your success.  Not sure about that?  Look at Disney theme parks.  Need I say more?

    Item #4 is You focus too much on the numbers; I review our budget once a month to see how we're doing on expenses and revenue, and I see purchase orders almost daily - that's about it.   Unless I see something that's not trending as it has the past couple of years, or see expenses higher than normal, or revenue lagging lower than projected, I don't worry about it.  My staff know what they have to spend and they know their revenue targets.  It is working because once again we came in under budget and exceeded revenue projections (we did have a rough few years due to budget cuts, but the City has managed this challenge very well).   Here's my thinking about managing a budget.  It's a tool (as my Director likes to say) to help me do my job.  That means the budget is not my job, but a means to help me do the business of parks and recreation.  

The last point in this article is the most powerful: #9 You forget the noble purpose.  Why did we get into parks and recreation in the first place?  Why do we put so much time and effort into programs and events?  Why do we design, build, and maintain parks and facilities for people to use?  The answer is passion.  I've heard colleagues describe their career in parks and recreation as 'a calling'.  Like me, they can't see themselves doing anything else.   It makes us happy.

How about you?  Are you passionate about what you do?  If you're a leader in your organization, work group, or team, do you see yourself as a successful leader or are you hindered by some of the 9 Crippling Mistakes CEO's Make?

The Future is Here and the Future is Mobile

By now you may have heard that most people access the Internet, especially social media, via their mobile devices. You may also have heard that Smart phones have more computing power than NASA had during the entire Apollo manned space program. Huge rooms filled with huge computers that were so limited back then, but for nerds like me the world of the USS Enterprise made communication technology better, faster and smaller.  As a kid watching Star Trek reruns on weekday afternoons, I couldn't wait for the future to get here and start using things like the communicator and the tri-corder We now live in the age of the Star Trek communicator . . . only better.

It's not hard to understand how so many people have moved away from the desktop and have exchanged it for a more mobile means of electronic communication, at least when it comes to their personal lives. The power of the desktop computer is right in your hand and just happens to be a phone, a camera, a calculator, and a game console, et al. It stores your music, your pictures . . . everything that is of value to you that can be stored electronically can be kept on your Smart phone.

With all this in mind, it makes sense that the people at Facebook have developed a strategy that puts mobile first.  The savvy iPhone or Android device user knows all this. We download music, pictures, and apps like crazy. One app I absolutely love is AppsGoneFree (thank me later). There are thousands of apps, perhaps tens of thousands. I'm not really sure how many, but I do know this, the future of electronic communication is the handheld device - and the future is now.

For people in the parks and recreation profession who see the importance of social media and have developed their agency Facebook account, start thinking about how you can put mobile first, because that's what Facebook is doing, because that's what our society is doing.

By the way, this post was done from my iPhone using Siri.

21st Century reality vs. 23rd Century fantasy.

The Science of Service

I'm always encouraging my full-time staff to ask part-time staff for their opinions on how programs are running and how facilities are operating, and I encourage all staff (full and part-time) to be asking our customers questions.  What do they like, what would they like to see different?  What do we do well and what are we missing that would make their experiences better?  Studying our customers is what Disney calls Guestology.  They define guestology as the study of the people for whom we provide service.  Of course, they have it down to a science (see diagram).

For Disney, identifying the amenities, services, and experiences that satisfy and dissatisfy their guests is what helps them understand their guests' wants and needs, and helps them meet and exceed guest expectations.  If it works for a multi-billion dollar company like Disney (for over 60 years I might add), it can work for little West Sacramento Parks.

We will always know what we want and need, but finding out what customers want and need takes time and effort.  Focus groups, public hearings, electronic surveys - these are all ways we can gather input to better understand customer needs and wants, but nothing beats that impromptu, on the spot chat with a customer.  We all find ourselves in conversations with customers when we're visiting programs or on-site at a facility.  We need to add the questions, 'how are we doing, what do you like, what would you like to see different, and how could we make this a better experience for you and your family?' to our conversations.  I'm always surprised by what I hear (and often pleased, too).  Come up with your own questions and begin the study of your customers.

"You don't build it for yourself.  You know what the people want and you build it for them." - Walt Disney

Want to know more about Disney's approach to customer service?  Check out 'understanding your customers using guestology' and add their blog to your reading list.

Wanted: Expereinces and Memories

JULY 22:  It's 6:35 am on a Sunday and I'm on a plane about halfway between Sacramento and Phoenix. I'm traveling on business and will spend the next 5 days as a member of a visitation team to another parks and recreation agency.  It's for a re-accreditation visit where we will evaluate the evidence and report our findings.  We are the eyes and ears of a commission that will determine if the agency we are visiting remains in compliance with standards our industry has identified as best practices.   But that's not why I'm writing this.

In the late 1990's, I let it be known that I wanted to travel and see the United States. When I was a kid in the late 1960's and thoughout the 70's, our family took several family vacations by car and motorhome to places throughout the West - Arizona, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, etc.  We saw Yellowstone,  The Grand Canyon, and Disneyland.  We rafted down the Snake and Salmon Rivers, toured Butchart Gardens, the Olympia Brewery and the old Shipwreck Aquarium.  We saw lots of things, but once high school ended, my travels ended.  For about 20 years I stayed close to home.  College and work were, for the most part, limited to Northern California.  I'm not complaining.  I met my beautiful wife here, got my college degrees here, have family here.  Sacramento and the north state are home for me.  But I always felt I was missing out on seeing other parts of the country, other adventures.

So here's the point of this post - I made it known that I wanted to travel to other parts of the country.  I once heard a person say 'let the universe know what you want and it will . . . . something, something'. I honestly don't remember how the rest of the saying went, but I interpreted it as this: if you want to do something in your life, you have to let others know.  I don't think of this as rubbing a magic lamp or praying, but rather as sharing with others your desires as a means of setting your own will in motion.

Example:  I never had the opportunity to play organized baseball.  I love the sport, but it was not something my parents considered for me when I was young.  In my mid-forties I shared with a buddy my regret over having never played and told him that I would love to play in a camp just to see if I could handle it.  I had played in a few softball leagues, but it just wasn't baseball.   For my birthday (I think it was my 44th) he gave me a garbage bag with about 50 baseballs in it - discarded baseballs from games he had officiated.  The very next year he told me about a fantasy baseball camp that was starting up in a nearby town.  So I had put it out there - I wanted to play baseball - and the opportunity presented itself .

Okay, so I'm romanticizing this whole process (I could just as easily searched the Internet for baseball camps and probably found something), but this wasn't the same as searching for songs on iTunes.  It wasn't a thing I wanted or a place I wished to visit.  It was an experience. More than that, it was an experience I felt I needed in order to: 1) say I had done it, 2) know if I was both physically and mentally capable of handling it, 3) know if it was an experience I would look back on and ,'I'm so glad I did that' or 'well, now I know I don't want to do it again'.  I felt I needed this experience in order to be a better person.  Honestly, I don't know if it has done that, but it's nice to say I've done it (especially at middle age) and I've made some great friends through that experience.  Plus, I got to play ball with my son!

Travel was the same way.  It's hard to afford travel when you have family and all the financial obligations that go with paying for kids' sports, college tuitions, music lessons, mortgage, cars payments, and on and on.  But the universe seems to have responded to my need and brought both the people and opportunities into my life that have made traveling possible.  Not a lot of travel, but enough to take me to places like Canton, MI, Grove City, OH, and Bellevue, WA - places I might not ever think of going, but have had the pleasure of visiting.  Getting to see really cool museums in Kansas City and Atlanta, the campuses of Ohio State and University of Michigan, and to have an office for 4 days in the first ever office of NASA in Houston were all pretty cool experiences.  Walt Disney World, Fenway Park, New York's Central Park, and Gettysburg are all places I wanted to see and fate has taken me there (for those of you who have travelled extensively, this may seem mundane, but not for me).  In fact, as I think of it, my limited travels have given me some pretty unique experiences, such as meeting a former president in Houston and catching a Home Run Derby ball in Seattle during the 2001 All Star Game event.

My point here is that if there is something you really want - a heart's desire - make it known.  Keeping those wants and needs to yourself is simply denying the universe the chance to bring the people and opportunities into your life that can 'align the stars'.  And perhaps the universe is simply waiting, waiting, waiting . . . . for you to ask.

One other thing about sharing what it is you really want - putting your money where your mouth is.  I've learned that if I say I want something and then opportunities come along, I have to act on them.  Sometimes this means some work on you part.  For me this meant taking on additional responsibilities - responsibilities I did not have to take on.  It also meant getting certified, which meant studying and passing an exam.  And it means overcoming fear - fear that you might have to go it alone with no familiar faces in sight.  It's risky, but no more risky than starting a new job or going to a new school.  You just gotta put yourself out there!

That's it for now.  Gotta get ready for this bird to land in Austin, Texas.  Glad I said something, paid attention, and took advantage of the opportunities life brought my way.

        “I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done.” - Lucille Ball

        "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Stay hungry. Stay foolish." - Steve Jobs

 

        "For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been'."  - John Greenleaf Whittier

 

        "Take a chance!  All life is chance.  The person who goes furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare." - Dale Carnegie 

Autonomy and Flexibility: the freedom to fail and succeed

My career in recreation has been as a programmer and a manager.  With my current employer I am fortunate to have a lot of autonomy and flexibility in my work schedule.  With my first full-time parks and recreation job I inherited a lot of well established programs and spent the first couple of years learning about these programs and running them.  After a year or two I wanted to try a few new things.  The gift of autonomy allowed me to try new program ideas, make changes that I thought were for the best and try to take the program to a new level.  Sometimes it worked out great, but other times it was a failure . . . and some were absolute flops.  I was lucky to have a director who supported my efforts (despite there being a few people in the community who wanted me fired after a change I implemented).  In John Perrin’s  blog article, Happy First Failure, he talks about why failure is valuable and how an individual can benefit from taking ownership of the failure and how a team can be better from the lessons learned.

This same message can be found in these simple quotes:

• “You've got to go out on a limb sometimes because that's where the fruit is.” - Will Rogers
• “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” - Albert Einstein
• “Ever tried? Ever Failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Becket
• “I have failed over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan
• “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.” - Thomas J. Watson

I’m proud that in my department we take risks and try new things.  We get lucky a lot with programming and the facilities we’ve built, as a majority of them are a success, but we will fail now and then – and we must be tolerant of failure.  Playing it safe is boring and will not help us get to our goal of ’being the department that all other professionals want to work for’.  In short . . . now and then you need to 'go big or go home'.

Another factor about my job that I love is my ability to set my own hours.  I value having flexible work hours.  Typically, I work from 8 am to 5 or 6 pm, but not always.  I workout 3 to 4 times a week during lunch and usually spend an hour-and-a-half playing basketball or tennis, or swimming.  In fact, this has become such a major part of my daily routine that I look forward to because I know I'll get play-time in the middle of the work day.  I still put in my 8 hours, but it might mean working a little later or in the evening at home or over the weekend, which I have no problem doing.  Truth is, I'm a better, more motivated employee because of this.  I probably put in greater effort and work longer than I would if I had to clock-in and clock-out every day.  Jeff James, Vice President of the Disney Institute, wrote a short piece titled, 'What Do Employees Want?'  In it he talks about the things that can make the work experience so enjoyable.  I can honestly say I enjoy all of the points listed in James' article and, in turn, try to do the same for the people who work for me.

It's important to note that these factors are not unique to me in my department - they are part of the department's culture.  Now and then I do have to skip my noon workout because of a project, a meeting, or a deadline, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.  I have the responsibility to get my work done, but am given the autonomy and respect to manage my time and schedule - and it goes an awfully long way towards my job satisfaction.