Dysfunctional-ism Sucks, Unfortunately We Are Afflicted.

Dysfunction, Dysfunction...What A Challenge!

If you share a sales counter with co-workers and some sales tools and catalogs are stored under and near that sales counter, finding them where they belong when you go to get them is a real challenge.  Scissors do not always get returned properly.  A popular special order catalog is always hard to find when you need to show it to another customer.  A measuring tape seems to always disappear.  The sales invoicing on the computer needs to be logged back on because someone logged out to go online to check out a special order price and forgot to return the sales invoice back to its operational format.  The keys to the warehouse are not hanging on the key hook in the cabinet by the desk.  Someone used them and forgot to return them.  The customer loading carts used to help carry heavy products out to customer vehicles are not in the warehouse where they belong when you go to get one to help a customer load up some sold products into their car.  Working with dysfunctional people is like going on a daily Easter egg hunt.  Nothing is placed where it should be located.  A common five minute customer service step takes fifteen minutes to complete when nothing is where it is supposed to be and hunting for necessary sales aids becomes part of the service process because dysfunctional employees cannot remember to return items back to their proper storage place.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.

Unfortunately, we are all afflicted to some degree.  Doing two steps to complete one is a trying and expensive human energy process.  The worse the affliction, the greater the company energy therms cost.  The labor cost to do double work is quietly killing the needed efficiency business models need to practice right now in this rotten economy.  Dysfunctional attributes are expensive to tolerate and protect.  Lost customer special order forms and bid proposals are the worst.  Sometimes they are found in the piles littered on a persons desk, even though their is a place set aside on the sales counter for those forms to be filed.  When a customer bid gets misplaced like this, a sale gets lost, customers become dissatisfied and revenues suffer.  Dysfunctional motions are expensive to tolerate and protect.  Keys get lost.  Orders get misplaced.  Sale items cannot be found when a live customer is on the premises to check them out but cannot find them to view.  Someone forgot to return the sale items back to the sale rack for others to view.  Only to find them four hours later placed in the wrong area well after the interested customer has left the premises.  A possible sale, simple and new revenues, was lost.  We blame the economy.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.

I have never been able to total what the real cost has been to the multiple ways a dysfunctional error has occurred.  I have watched many of them kill a legitimate sale or kill the potential for helping a company service process increase the odds for a customer to return later.  When a customer witnesses a poorly handled sales process during the effort to secure the potential ability to special order some products of interest, they see the dysfunctional potential right before their very own eyes and immediately lose interest in agreeing to special order something from this kind of process.  Sales are lost before they ever can occur.  Consumers already lack confidence in the marketplace, why add more fear to the buying process with a dysfunctional approach?  Consumers need to remove the fear.  A dysfunctional sales approach will not contribute to that need.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.

Unfortunately, those who practice this process with too much dysfunctional efforts do not consider their lack of organization a revenue and sales restriction.  Those who are dysfunctional have spent a lifetime excusing away their lack of discipline as being something funny to possess and normal to do.  They believe it is part and parcel of how they are basically designed as a person.  They do not believe they need to correct this affliction.  They become expensive employees with a high cost of general maintenance.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.  It is quietly expensive, too.

What's worse, some of the worst offenders are the boss!  How do you help the leader who has this affliction?  How many times do you witness how much it hurts the bottom line?  What do you do when a flatbed truck traveled a long distance to pick up some heavy products and is pressed for time to return those sold items to his customer when you go to get your company forklift and it is not parked where it belongs?  What do you do to help that driver hurry up and make his deadline?  You go back into the showroom to find out who last drove the forklift and see where they parked it.  Everyone tells you it was the boss who last had it and he left with his customer to go to lunch.  You then walk the 4 acres of the business property to see where he left the loading equipment.  When that failed, you go next to the showroom to see if he was getting the forklift fueled at the card-lock station.  Not there either.  In the meantime, your new customer who has a tight time schedule is impatiently waiting for you to serve his sale.  The products he purchased for his boss are too heavy to individually load onto the flatbed he is driving.  You need to find the forklift.  Fifteen minutes later you find it.  It is parked out on the street behind a large display rack of some products you store for highway traffic to see.  The forklift is out of sight from the sales property.  It is found by walking the perimeter of the company lot to see if you can find any tracks of it leaving the company location.  You have already interrupted three other employees to solicit their help.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.  Did I mention it was expensive in labor cost, too?  Did I mention it was a great way to discourage customer support, too?

How do you help the leader who has this affliction?  You mention this bad customer experience to your boss when they return from lunch.  That is what you do.  What do you do when they think it was funny and laugh?  You learn how to tolerate such inefficiencies.  That is what you do.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.  Unfortunately, we are all afflicted.  When your business model has this affliction, everyone has it.  Everyone is afflicted by the inefficiencies.  Everyone becomes part of the expensive increase in labor cost.  Everyone becomes part of the dissatisfaction they deliver to the consumers who must endure such silly procedures.  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.

A Misplaced Message Is Like Having No Message At All!

Having a dysfunctional business environment is no big deal until a $32,000 sales bid gets lost and the follow-up steps were ignored because they were not placed in the correct pattern to be completed properly.  Now the tolerance for the dysfunctional ways are beginning to sting a little bit.  It must be the economy?  The economy is slow, right?  No.  The organization has some poor levels of operational respect.  This is a problem.  If you are the leader of that kind of organization and you are contributing to this dysfunctional way of doing business, you are losing money left and right.  Losing this kind of money is your fault.  Your tolerance for this type of operational dysfunction is a troubling piece of your organizational leadership.  Go get some help.  Start squeezing how things need to be done.  Start requiring the employees to clean up the disorganized efforts at work.  Make sure you, as the leader, are not contributing to the dysfunctional process.  Attack the silent thief of the valuable money your business needs.  Attack the dysfunctional ways your business is performing.  Remove this silent loss.

I sold a set of cheater glasses to a young man the other day.  They were six dollars.  He came in quickly, in a hurry to get to the next place where he was supposed to be.  We had a display rack of cheater glasses placed right next to the sales counter.  He came in like he was on three Red Bull lifts running his body engine at about 200 miles per hour.  He tried to interrupt me while I was serving another customer at the sales counter to find out if we had cheater glasses in stock.  He did not want to wait his turn.  I told him they were right at the end of the sales counter.  His attitude was too rushed to listen to my answer so he walked right past the sales counter and headed into the showroom floor.

After he walked around the showroom for a little bit he came back to me and asked again, this time more agitated than at first.  This time I stepped next to the end of the sales counter and reached out to touch the cheater glasses display rack.  At the same time I stepped towards the end of the sales counter, I repeated what I said the first time, "They are at the end of the sales counter."  He said, "Oh!"

As he spun the display rack around to searched for some 'cheaters' try on he seemed in a bigger hurry than before.  He would put one of them on and look into the mirror to see how they looked on him.  While he was trying them on, he mentioned that he was tired of his partner using his 'cheaters' and forgetting to return them to the dash of his rig.  After trying a few on, he selected a pair to purchase.  He brought them to the other end of the sales counter and waited impatiently in line.  He asked how much they cost while I was serving the next customer in line.  He had two customers in front of him.  I said five ninety nine.  He left six dollars on the counter and as he walked past everyone to exit the store, he said, "I don't need the receipt...thanks!"

My customers noticed his impatience.  I could see it in their faces.  I said, "I got it...Thanks, man!"  He left.

As the door closed behind him I asked the two customers in line if they noticed his old pair of cheater glasses on his head, laying over his baseball cap?  They immediately looked out to where he was walking and noticed the new pair in his hand with his old pair on his head.  They turned back to me and got a little giggle.  I slid the two bills closer to me that he laid on the counter to pay for the 'cheaters' he just purchased.  Both bills were 5 dollar bills, not a one and a five as he had thought he laid down.  I immediately excused myself from my two regular customers and took the two fives as I ran around the counter and caught him in the parking lot.  I returned to the sales counter with the new glasses in my hand.  The first customer asked, "Did you tell him?"  I answered, "I did."  The second customer said, "I would have taken his two fives and laughed all the way to the bank."  Dysfunctional-ism sucks.  It can become expensive to tolerate, too.

If you own a business model, it is no laughing matter when your organization becomes disorganized.  It is a very expensive way to operate.  Stop tolerating dysfunctional methods.  They may easily be eating up your hard earned profits.  It is not funny.  It should not be tolerated.  It is expensive and demoralizing.  Slow down, put things away properly and relax.  It will save you more money than you ever expect in the long run.
Get it corrected immediately.  Kill dysfunctional-ism.

In the case of the guy with the lost cheater glasses, his dysfunctional ways became our affliction, too.  It always spills over to the others in your organization.  Do not tolerate it if you have it.  Work on correcting what can be corrected.  Slow down, get it together.  Just remember this, however, even when the young guy looked into the mirror he could not see he was the one with the affliction as he still blamed his partner for stealing what he misplaced.  Unfortunately, we are all afflicted.  We are all, dysfunctional.

Until next time...