Tomorrow, I’ll be breaking my comfortable telecommuting routine in order to dress like a grown-up and drive the hour+ to my office for the day. The reason? For the big, exciting launch of our new CustomerFirst initiative.
See, as a customer service department, someone up the managerial chain needed to come up with the justification-of-their-existence du jour – this is the result. The latest in a loooong string of utter bullshit initiatives that will inspire no one, help nothing and be forgotten, gone, dead and buried in six months. At which time I’ll be called into the office for the next new innovation in our company practices. Can’t wait.
I’m happy to talk about my work. But not give four canned sentences of a sales pitch. At a sales meeting or trade show or “industry function”, I can see the value of it. But that’s not what my company wants.
In a social situation, you judge whether the person cares or if they’re just asking a time-filler questions until the bean-dip gets refreshed. If they care, you toss out a sentence or two about what you, do in particular (not what your company does) and then ask them what they do. A conversation, in other words.
If they’re just waiting for the next bowl of bean-dip and standing around killing time with a un-dipped frito and just making polite noise to you, another bean-dip anticipator, then you give them a generic sentence (“I’m in the “Wickets” field”) ask them what they do and if the bean-dip hasn’t arrived by then, you’ve probably moved on to chatting about the weather or sports. Again, it’s a social situation–it’s unbelievably rude (and possibly illegal) for me to make a sales-pitch.
Again, that should be done conversationally. You’re not gonna impress a date by spewing four canned sentences designed to wow 'em at the next convention.
Look–I see how this could be useful in some contexts like a trade show or something, but the “use it in social functions” thing that msmith is advocating or accost strangers on the street thing that my company wants is just unspeakably obnoxious. I mean…I’m kinda cringing inside at the thought of being around someone who’d go up to a stranger at a friend’s dinner party to make a sales pitch? Who raised these people? Who taught them manners? What’s next: going to funerals, putting our business cards under people’s windshields and giving the gosh-wow 4 sentence speech to the bereaved as part of the eulogy?
That’s what I thought too, originally. But if you read the thread, you’ll see that he is instructed to give his pitch 3 times a day, with no regard as to whether the recipient gives a crap. Elevator speeches are good; being ordered to give them to anyone who doesn’t run away fast enough is stupid. And it doesn’t sound like he has clients - or gets commissions.
Ooh! Realized I had a good, stoopid fad to share that our plant manager picked up from Og knows where.
He’s fining people $1 for using the words “hope”, “feel”, or… some other one I can’t recall at the moment. The idea being that we’re all engineers and scientists and we shouldn’t hope something is going to occur or feel we should do something – we should know for certain.
However, in effect, he’s punishing people for hoping or feeling. Yay.
I can see telling people that they are not supposed to “feel that the results are good”, but are they also not supposed to “feel a bit under the weather”?
I know you’re joking, but that’s a terrible elevator speech. It does nothing to pique my interest in what you’re doing or why. A better one would be “Hi, I work for xxx car company where I’m helping to design a new engine that gets a thousand mpg (highway, not city).”
I missed that part, but is it a stupid idea just because it’s annoying? Everyone is talking about letting people just “do their job”. The problem is that companies (and individual jobs) need to change and evolve if they are going to survive. The worst sort of company is one that is a rigid hierarchy where the workers drone on doing their tasks while management issues directives from their ivory tower. Often those other workers have no idea what each other does. If they did, they might find opportunities to share ideas or processes that would help them and the company be better.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea that has been perverted, but it sounds like a band-aid solution to what is fundamentally a cultural issue. Like issuing a directive “be more proactive”. It’s meaningless.
The main problem with these management type fads is that they fundamentally break the social contract between middle managers and people who do actual work for a living.
See, we are more than happy to let them be “in charge” and to latch on to companies like parasitic remora. In return they should let the people that are doing stuff get on with the business of doing stuff. That is the deal. You get to feel important and do nothing, we get to be left alone to do stuff.
Some little time ago I worked in a call center. This company had 2 call centers, one at the corporate HQ and the other at a satellite office. At some point the middle managers decided that we had to all go to a daylong work shop to improve customer service.
The main qualification of the presenter, as far as I can tell, was that he was a successful car salesman. I mean that literally, they hired a car salesman to do this. He had us putting on hats with the word “customer” on them, doing all sorts of roll playing. The works.
The problem here, beyond the obvious, was that the office with the customer service problem was the main HQ. Customers would call and specifically demand to be put through to the satellite office, and be willing to wait stupid amounts of time in the queue for the privilege. They knew that if they got us they would get the right answer the first time and be treated with professional courtesy. We would get crazy amounts of treats sent to us during the holidays. You get the idea.
So why fuck with and annoy the people that are already doing it right? Moreover, why not just see what they are doing and then do that in the office with the problem?
And is anyone really fooled by middle managers? Do the executives above they really think that they add value to anything?
Of course you are right - this thread is a vivid illustration of how “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
The intention is good: If everybody in an organization can both a) summarize what their company does; and b) summarize how their role contributes to (a), then the whole team is likely to work together more effectively.
But there is a difference between tackling that head on and talking it through vs. putting everyone through the motions with no reflection on whether the underlying intent is being served…
I agree the root cause seems to be culture, from the other stuff said about this company. But not being annoying is important. Fitting in a good elevator pitch naturally (like when someone asks what you do) is good. Using it when someone asks for the time isn’t.
I’m all for flexibility, having gone totally beyond my official responsibilities many times in 30 years. But there are possible downsides. I’m the Marketing Chair of a conference this year, and I talk to real Marketing and PR people, and I understand the need for staying on message. 500 different elevator pitches will at best have no impact and at worst give the wrong impression (or maybe the right one, but not the intended one.) I’ve also watched good salesmen work, and I appreciate that making everyone a salesman is a terrible idea. It just shows desperation. There can and should be lots of degrees of freedom in a job, but that is different from asking someone to do n jobs, n-1 of them badly.
I was chatting with the head of the facilities team in our building. Please note that they are an outsourced vendor. IE: They are a separate company hired by us to do facilities and security (not reception–this will be important).
He asked me what the point of this “idiotic exercise in futility” was supposed to be. Apparently, my earlier snark aside, they really are asking the janitors, groundskeepers, security guys, etc. to go give elevator speeches to random people on behalf of our company too. With tongue firmly in cheek, he asked who his mostly Spanish-speaking night-crew was supposed to go out and give their speeches to at 1:00 am. And would the company accept liability for anyone who gets mugged?