reflection – Join the Dots

Metamorphosis

November 13, 2022November 13, 2022 by mark.drechsler

It’s hard to know where to start in explaining the eleven months since my last post. For now I think I’ll leave it as saying I’ve had a career change, and I’m now working where I probably should have been a long time ago – in a motorcycle dealership. There’s of course plenty more to it than that, but to write about it isn’t something I can do just yet – there are too many tangled threads to pull together into a post that wouldn’t help me as the narrator or you as the reader to gain anything from it. Perhaps my brain, which had for so long worked to wrap structured models around complex scenarios, has finally accepted defeat in a war that it was never going to win anyway.

Enough crypticism.

Empathy, empowerment and expectation in customer service culture

August 28, 2019April 30, 2018 by mark.drechsler

I left my Local Bike Shop (LBS) today.

It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the right one, even after having bought my previous three bikes from there (the first back in 2010) as well as one for my Dad and two for my partner, as well as having them do plenty of servicing and repair work for me over the years. I’ll leave out the reasons I left my former LBS other than to say that a recent interaction left me feeling very dissatisfied as a long-term customer.

Don’t shove things into your spokes people, nobody wins

What I do want to focus on though is why I chose my new one out of two potential options, and why this is important for service organisations in an increasingly depersonalised world. It was all to do with the willingness to think beyond an initial problem and work out a creative solution, to use empathy, and to try and think of things that could be done rather than things that couldn’t.

In short, it was all about empathy, empowerment and expectation.

My writer’s block (aka Life at Flinders – three years on)

August 28, 2019April 18, 2018 by mark.drechsler

I’ve really struggled to write for the last six months. Whilst looking at my blog from an outsiders perspective there’s a big gap between this post and the last one way back in September, what you don’t see is the handful of post ‘stubs’ that will probably forever remain unpublished that sit in my WordPress drafts, nor do you see the flickers of ideas that have popped into my head that have never even made it that far. This post attempts to understand why – and how it relates to my third year at Flinders.

How to nail a job interview… using ESP

August 28, 2019September 8, 2017 by mark.drechsler

There are countless job interview sites out there aimed at helping prospective employees put their best foot forward in an interview situation. Most offer quite similar advice: Research the company and role. Arrive early. Know how to respond to behavioural questions using the CAR method. Dress to impress (whatever that means). Be prepared on how to answer some common questions.

It’s this last one that frustrates me. Not because it is bad advice (it is always a good idea to be able to answer ‘what is your greatest weakness’ with something a little more interesting than ‘I’m a perfectionist’), but because it is incomplete. Think of this advice as the equivalent of advising a student to prepare solely for an exam by rote learning the answers to the exams from the last couple of years, rather than getting them to focus on understanding the subject matter.

What I want to share is a quick technique which provides a more robust way of being prepared to respond to interview questions, and it is something I’ve picked up from watching, of all people, politicians.

Developing leaders – when good enough is actually better

August 28, 2019August 31, 2017 by mark.drechsler

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about leadership and succession planning lately, particularly in relation to the well-worn Tom Peters adage that:

Leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders

But as a leader, what are some of the important things you need to do in order to achieve just this? The one I want to touch on today specifically relates to the second dot point in this Forbes article: giving team members the right experience.

What do we mean by the ‘right experience’? Giving them tasks that are challenging but achievable, and then supporting to do those tasks to a standard which is ‘good enough’.