One of the blogs that I follow with interest is Becky Carroll's Customers Rock! As a thank you to regular readers she has published an e-book with the title "Customers Rock!™ - How Businesses Can Make Sure Their Customer Experiences Rock".

The eBook is a compilation of five of Becky's favorite blog posts from the last 12 months.  she has also included the comments along with each post so readers can continue to follow the conversation; many of these were quite enlightening!

Topics include:

• Taking care of existing customers
• Customer or client?
• Tips for listening to customers
• Stories and the personal touch
• Measuring customer relationships

On the topic of "How to Take Care of Existing Customers", for example, she writes "We have to focus on two main areas when it comes to our customers: bringing new customers in and taking care of existing customers. The old idiom, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” comes to mind here.

"I like this definition from the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Third Edition, 2002).

The things we already have are more valuable than the things we only hope to get."

This handy little book has some gems that are useful to any small business and is worth a read.  As the book is freely available for distribution you can download your own copy by clicking here.

Life can be very painful at times, especially when legal rights and defences are concerned.  For want of documentary evidence a right or a defence can fail, often with painful monetary consequences.

In the last year I have had to assist several businesses to defend themselves against claims where they had kept insufficient or inadequate documentation to support their argument or position.  It becomes very difficult to construct a defense when the evidence is largely anecdotal and verbal. 

Often the person or organisation prosecuting a case can support their argument with written contracts, meeting notes, correspondence, diary entries etc, and even though the moral ground may strongly be in favour of the defense, their argument can fail through lack of documentary proof.  Procecution lawyers and revenue authorities thrive on these situations.

The fundemental tenet here, and one that business people need to adhere to at all times is "if its not written, its not real". 

Its the same with business systems.  If you want want the people in your organisation to perform key tasks in the same way every time to achieve the same results every time, your systems need to be written down.  Some benefits of written systems are:

1. There can be now doubt about what is required to be done
2. Routine tasks can be dealt with quickly and easily
3. Performance measures can be easily understood by all
4. Performance can be measured against written standards
5. Documented systems form part of position agreements
6. There is transparency about what is required.

There is a moral here.  Next time you don't get the results you expect or have to defend your position in a complaint or action against you, look for the written documentation to support your point of view.  Whereever you find a gap, remedy it, especially if a material consequence could arise from its omission. Without written evidence your life will inevitably become more difficult.

If ever there was a part of management that that has the potential to cause frustration, it is delegation.  So often the manager who delgates tasks to others complains of disappointment about results produces by delegatees that one wonders about what went wrong.

For some managers, delegation is an opportunity to pass work off to others that dont want to do themselves, in other words, to pass the buck to someone else and walk away from the problem.  This can be called abdication, and it inevitably leads to problems sooner or later.

This is not true delegation in any sense of the word.

The fundemental problem here is lack of responsibility on the part of the manager, and abdication from accountability for ensuring that the task is completed properly, within time, with the correct resources, and with a proper feedback mechanism in place.

A recent posting on the Slow Leadership Blog is headed "Delegation is Art and Science" defines delegation as:

"the act of assigning responsibility and resources for a task, holding or process to a subordinate".

This is followed by the statement "In effect, you sublet your work. Because they remain your subordinate, the task ultimately remains your responsibility. Since you chose to delegate this to them, you proactively decided they could handle the situation".

Now that's a whole different situation from the abdication example given above and it requires a whole lot more work on the part of the manager. This work can be summarised in three brief steps:

1. Communicate the task or responsibility.
2. Give the resources needed to accomplish the task.
3. Compare results to expectations then adjust.

Those three steps involve a lot of skills from the manager, both in terms of supervision and also in personal relationship between the manager and the delegatee.  The dynamics change over time as the delegatee grows their own level of skill and gains increased confidence in completing the tasks.

So, delegation is one of the key tools in the kit that forms the art and scince of management. If it is used badly, the results will be poor.  When used properly and with skill, the business gains and the parties to the delegation gain also.

I recomend that you read the full article on the Slow Leadership Blog as it expands on the comments above and provides some further context to the art and science of delegation.