Outrage: Using It and Defusing It
In my time as a Program Manager / Value Stream Leader, I came to two realizations about outrage: the advantages of having someone in the organization be outraged, and the ways to defuse outrage by a customer.
Using Outrage
When I had been working for my company for around 10 years, a new-ish hire (MF) walked into my office and complained about how poor our on-time delivery was. Our process to get from a customer order to the part starting manufacturing (in-house or at a supplier) seemed to take forever, the lead times at the suppliers were long, or quality issues would crop up (introducing more rework time). And I realized that I didn't notice our on-time delivery anymore. When I first joined the company, I thought our lead times on a report were measured in days (because when I saw "40" for a part that seemed reasonable) and they were actually measured in weeks. When I started I thought that of course we should be able to hit our delivery commitments. After all my time in that business, I'd internalized the excuses and difficulties that come with manufacturing complex structural aerospace components and didn't even realize that I'd stopped noticing.
That's what MF taught me: new hires are critical to any business because we all get complacent. We don't intend to, but after the umpteenth time that we've seen a problem arise and fail to get permanently solved, we start to expect it instead. Maybe we make some dark jokes about the problem: "Do you think the machine shop damaged the part yet?" "Does anyone really NEED a [key structural component]?" "Y'know, anyone can build this assembly if they have all the parts. It takes a real professional to build it when missing a few pieces."
When the new hires come in and express dismay at something that isn't working in your business, take that as a reason to rekindle your own outrage. Why can't we build these parts faster? Why can't we be 100% on-time with 100% first-pass yield? Eventually, the outrage will pass for you and your new hire, but hopefully you'll have made some improvements in the meantime...and set the stage for the next new hire to remind you that you should expect better.
Defusing Outrage
Around the same time as my conversation with MF, I was fielding some serious customer complaints. This isn't surprising since I was a Program Manager (customer-facing) and as above, we deserved some outrage. But I learned that the same exposure therapy that eventually prevents us from working on the business is also a tool in reducing customer outrage.
One customer in particular was angry with me because they didn't check in that often (every 1-2 months), but when they did I'd often have to report another delivery delay. Displeasure was starting to reach higher levels of both my organization and the customer's. So I started frequent (1-2 times / week) phone calls with the customer representative and their direct management, as well as various support functions. The first few meetings were painful for me: lots of venting on the customer side as they took their chance to share the pain that we were causing them by our delivery slips. But then an odd thing happened: the calls got much easier. Some of that was improvement in our performance, but honestly we didn't improve much.
Mostly, the frequent contact had turned me from a faceless email or phone contact into a person that they talked with each week. The frustration didn't have time to build up, it got released weekly. And as the customer had frequent views into our own difficulties, they began to act as beaten-down as we were from banging our heads into the problems again and again to try to solve them. We even got to the point that when the customer's senior management got on the meetings, our regular contacts would turn around and defend our efforts, rattling off the various fixes we'd implemented and trying to convince their own managers that I and my team had a difficult task and we were doing our best.
This is a lesson I've frequently used and passed on to my team members: once a customer (internal or external) starts getting angry with you, ramp up the frequency of contact. It will keep you working on the problem and the customer may be able to help, but at the very least it'll keep your customer less outraged.
If you have any comments, please reach out to me at blog@saprobst.com or this page is cross-posted at LinkedIn and you can leave a comment there.
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