Important lessons in personnel management

Learned few very important lessons today in the first 4 hours at office.

Get their monkeys off your back. If your people have a problem and they need a solution don’t just jump into the ring and provide a magic solution that fixes everything. That is the worst thing you can do. Sit back, frame the problem statement and give it to your people asking them to solve it and come back with the solution. Then discuss the merits and demerits of the solution and make them select the solution you want to implement.

Reason: If you provide the solution, they won’t implement the solution whole-heartedly. Even if you give the whole perfect solution, they are going to find faults in it. But if it’s their own solution, they will make it work.



I asked the supervisor if he would like to use a visual training board. He said yes. But if I do the whole work and give the finished product, he will not use it as much as if he creates the board himself. Now I must ask him to create a list of all the operations and make him do the rough draft.



On the assembly table, I did the biggest mistake in trying to help them. I did all the homework, identified problems, worked through every problem, and designed the end table. I may have done all the engineering stuff right, but I did the biggest blunder in personnel management. “ I designed the whole table, which they should use.” Their ideas are different. What I should have done is ask them to come up with what their problems are and their potential solutions, help them out and make it their design. That is Lesson 101 in a manufacturing plant.



You don’t need to show how smart an engineer you are by reeling out perfect solutions, instead focus on a solution that is going to be implemented. It is going to be implemented only if it’s their solution. Just give them the problem and ask them to come up with a solution.

The way a customer centric business should be run

This morning, as I was going through my daily list of must read blogs, I stopped upon this wonderful article of how an ideal customer service oriented company should run.

Saishunkan is a Japanese cosmetic company. You’ve got to read this article and open your minds to what true customer service is?

The hierarchy looks like something right out of a fairy tale book… so fictitious and dreamy…

One question that pipes me is that how can one transform an existing company into such an ideal place? Is it even feasible.

Some of the decisions that they have taken is straight out of the gut feeling, you feel it should be done like this and you do it. Your other half of the brain may reason that it has never been done like this and it may be foolish but you got to refer back to you gut feeling again and follow it.

The old adage supports, “If you want something that you never have, you should do something that you never did.”

Read the post on Saishunkan here… http://www.evolvingexcellence.com/blog/2008/10/jke-day-2-saishunken-cosmetics---customer-care-trumps-a-factory.html