Deep Dives
This Deep Dive draws from one of the Areas of Competence in the Career Development Manager/Leader Competency Framework. Through reflection, real-world analysis, and practical activities, you’ll explore how this part of the framework shapes your leadership practice.
The career and employment sector operates largely through organizations that secure government contracts to deliver employment-related services. These contracts are term-specific, which makes continuity from year to year difficult—winning one often means rapid hiring, while losing one can lead to staff reductions. Contracts typically define outcomes and processes, leaving little flexibility and minimal provision for overhead or staff development.
This environment creates pressure to meet contractual requirements with limited resources. The vision of high-quality service imagined at the proposal stage can fade as operational realities take hold: new staff juggle data entry alongside client support, clients present more barriers than anticipated, and employers tighten budgets.
Yet the sector remains committed to helping people move forward. Each new contract brings an opportunity to innovate, strengthen partnerships, and advocate for approaches that balance efficiency with impact. While experienced voices note the field’s growing complexity since the 1990s, that drive to create meaningful change continues to inspire those who choose this work.
You’re likely reading this because you see that the only way things get better for clients is if you make them better—and that recognition of ownership is Step 1. Whether resources are readily available or not, you can and need to effect change; a genuine, focused effort on service will actually save time in all other areas.
Think culture change rather than procedure change, and bring your staff along with you. Sustainable service enhancement is more likely when staff are co-creators of the change, supported in aligning their values and interests with the goals of the organization—because, as the saying goes, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
Culture change doesn’t have to be a heavy lift—often it’s simply about allowing, supporting, and encouraging staff to do what they already know is right. Your staff are in this field because they want to support people; if service currently needs work, it’s usually because of past organizational messages that there wasn’t time for real client relationships, that service was a luxury the budget couldn’t afford, or that efficiency and service were somehow at odds. Undoing that messaging is the first step toward the sustained service improvement this resource is built to support.
Work through these six steps to move your team toward ongoing service enhancement.
John G. Miller’s idea of QBQ™ is usefully applied to this step. QBQ™ stands for the “question behind the question”—the question people should ask themselves when they catch themselves asking complaint-oriented questions. Instead of “Why does my team provide poor service?” or “Why doesn’t the funder give us enough money to support our clients well?”, ask “How can I help my team provide better service?” or “How can we support clients well in the absence of extra resources?” The question behind the question is all about your role in addressing a concern—it moves your thinking from helpless pawn to agent; powerless to powerful; negative to positive; and from moving away from something to moving toward something.
You probably already have the QBQ™ concept in your psyche, perhaps with different labelling. It’s raised here because service enhancement isn’t only up to you taking an active role—it’s up to each team member taking an active role too (see Step 2). For example, a complaint-oriented question like “Why won’t staff take a couple of minutes to build rapport before the intake questions?” has a question behind it: “What have I pressed staff to do that inadvertently led them to rush critical processes?” or “What can I do to help staff interact well with clients and enter data later?”
Before going to Step 2, consider your role in your team’s service behaviours in the worksheets below.
Record up to five complaint-oriented questions you ask yourself about your team’s service levels. Then, for each, record one or two questions about your role in the problem or its solution.
Work through this table to get clarity on the values, intentions, and goals behind your desire to enhance service—what you’ll say when you meet with the team.
Identify the boundaries of time, resources, actions, and commitments. Try to be as clear as possible about the inner edge (just barely acceptable) and the outer edge (just over the line) of each boundary.
Where Step 1 has you own your role in service enhancement, Step 2 centres on encouraging and supporting team members to own their respective roles by:
If you’re familiar with Dennis C. Kinlaw’s model of employee commitment, you’ll recognize his four pillars in these statements: clarity, competence, influence, and appreciation.
Clarity is needed to ensure team members know the boundaries within which they are providing service, the intentions and values underlying the desire for service enhancement, and any specific goals to be achieved. Having clarity creates a safe working space for employees; they then can make decisions knowing what’s “in” and what’s “out.”
Competence is needed for the employee to perform well and therefore not waste mental and emotional energy worrying about whether they are doing the right thing or doing the right thing well. The confidence ensuing from competence frees up cognitive bandwidth, bandwidth that is needed to pay attention to service enhancements. This confidence also diverts emotional energy away from inward-focused worry and anxiety about performance and toward outward-focused concern for clients and their needs.
Influence is the lynchpin of ownership. Team members’ commitment to processes, goals, measures, and more is heightened when team members have had a say in creating the processes, goals, measures, and more. Employees are simply more likely to back decisions they have made rather than decisions someone else has made.
Appreciation Appreciation is both the simplest and the most complicated pillar. At one level, employees are more committed when they feel seen, heard, and valued as people first, not just as employees—simple, right? Where it gets complicated is that every employee responds to appreciation differently. One person wants public recognition; another would be mortified by it. And it’s not just about style: an employee who trusts their manager takes a “thank you” at face value and feels recognized, while a teammate who doesn’t trust the manager hears that same “thank you” as lame and empty.
The components interact with each other. Increased competence can lead employees to want—and be able to offer—better ideas. Listening to those ideas and implementing them (influence) reads as an acknowledgment of their value (appreciation). Feeling appreciated may motivate someone to seek more guidance about what’s possible (clarity), which can even reshape the goals of the initiative. What starts as a manager-led effort can soon become a team-led one.
Unless your team is extremely skeptical about your motives or ability to support them, you’ll have already heard ideas about what could be done after the first meeting. Respond to these reasonably quickly and, hopefully, positively.
You won’t be able to fill every need or permit every idea. Get ready to respond to suggestions that aren’t viable in a way that:
There’s no worksheet for Step 3—you’ll be improvising, as will employees. But be ready to make mental and actual notes about what you learn: what employees know about the organization and how they view it; where their strengths are and aren’t; what motivates them; and where they see their career going. This information is golden and often hard to obtain directly.
It is very likely a team member will have already suggested the idea of measuring changes due to enhanced service. If so, Step 4 will have been merged with Step 3 and the team will have taken on the task of creating the system.
If evaluation has not been proposed, it would be good to get the team thinking about evaluation sooner than later. Evaluation enhances clarity regarding intentions and aims as well as effectiveness. Evaluation can point to competence gaps as well.
Ideally, evaluation should be employee-driven, with your role being the convenor of meetings about it and possibly bringing in some outside expertise to help.
Even though team input, influence, and involvement have been emphasized here, do not infer that you shouldn’t contribute to improvement efforts. Once the team is engaged in the service enhancement process, start doing what they’re doing – generating service enhancement ideas. These can come in various forms, described below.
Questions for the team. You’re well-positioned to see things that apply to the whole team and to see them from a different perspective. Ask interesting questions the team hasn’t considered: Where are we wasting the client’s time (e.g., waiting for an appointment), and how could we reduce or repurpose it? What do we ask the client to do that’s repetitive (e.g., giving their address to two people)? What do clients say about our service to their partners or friends?
Different perspectives. Stimulate the team by offering different viewpoints: shift from changing the client to changing the environment; from holding beliefs because they’re true to holding beliefs because they’re useful (e.g., “the customer is always right” is a useful belief even if not literally correct); from staff’s view of the client to the actual client experience (have staff watch “Undercover Boss” or be a client for a day); and from employment to other businesses (share instances of exceptional customer service elsewhere).
Provide your own suggestions. You may see low-hanging fruit—simple changes that make things better for clients, or two staff members communicating better. Once you’re convinced the team is thinking about service more than you are, don’t hold these back. As the team becomes increasingly engaged, members can facilitate these discussions so you can participate too.
The last step is to monitor staff’s energy around service enhancement and find ways to re-invigorate it when it lags. Or, have the staff focus their energies elsewhere that is new and exciting, knowing they will bring back what they do to the act of service. Your staff want to do good work and be seen as doing good work. Occasionally, they will need prompts, reminders, and nudges to remember that they want this. They will also need your help in removing the barriers that prevent them from doing what they see to be “good work.” Don’t forget your regular one-on-one meetings; you can check in with employees individually, recognizing their efforts, checking in on their energy and hearing their concerns. The more you get to know them through initiatives like service enhancement, the easier that will be.
