#000221 Managing Employees And Customers

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There are many books written and lessons taught on how to manage your employees and customers, but the real school in this area is experience.  By Timothy Kitonga, Nairobi Kenya Africa #000221

 

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Managing Employees And Customers

By Timothy Kitonga

This text is in Extreme Rough draft and will be edited in the near future.

My name is Timothy Katonga, I’m the team leader of Keystone Group a company that deals with design, branding, and digital marketing. So I began with one guy, who was a graphic designer, but I realized over time that having one person, because of the workload that we had, it was quite a challenge. So I decided to get another graphics person. Now, managing the two was quite hard because I didn’t have the right background. But, I was trying to talk to people who have excelled in that industry, the creative industry, on how they’ve managed to make sure that the people worked well in such a small environment. It wasn’t easy as well because they were giving me advice from the traditional mode of advertising, and I needed a modern way on how we could push and go to the next level. So I decided now to start reading books on leadership, reading books on marketing, reading books on motivation, on how I could make sure that my team could be at their best, because I knew giving them a good story won’t help that much. These guys really need to have a good working environment, they need to have good machines that they need to work with, these guys also need to be self-motivated so that they could give the company 100%. Now, first I decided now it is high time that I talk to these guys every morning on whatever I expect of them to do. Secondly, I also introduced them to the clientele and made sure that they know whatever the client expects them to do, and this way they could buy into the vision that ahead of making this company deliver the best out there in whatever we do and offer the best services possible. Now from there I decided okay, this is the best time not to introduce these people to some of the clients that are quite strict, and make sure that they are going to handle them from the beginning. That is the strategy to the implementation and guide them on the different processes that I involved. I realize over time one designer could even handle up to five accounts. I said, okay this is the high time now I get an accountant who could maybe monitor whatever is coming in, whatever is going out, and also someone to help us whenever we are working, that is now the office assistant. Overtime I realized that okay this is not easy as I thought it would be, I need now to talk to someone who has lead a team in before on how to manage young guys especially, and how they can help me go to the next level. So they told me now first you need to understand the reason as to why they have decided to come to work. Two, you need to understand what drives them. Three, you need to understand what is their self motivating factor. And once I realized that, it became easier for me even to handle different personalities from different backgrounds within a very short time and from there I realized okay now I have the product, I have the team, but I need to implement the processes. Now from the processes part, it wasn’t even easy for me to work alone, I needed to work with these guys. What do you expect a creative agency to have? What things that you help do, do you expect a company like ours that is still growing that we haven’t yet reached the level of big corporates, what do what do you expect them to offer to you? So through talking to them and giving me the ideas, I managed to know okay this is what this team expects, especially the young generation and I realized giving them good machinery, giving them good salary, giving them a good environment won’t help that much. They even need to go out there and interact with the people of like-minded. Once they do that on a maybe weekly basis, it becomes easier for them to understand that we are not in this industry alone. We have competition, and we have to give our all to make sure that we are either in business tomorrow or we are going to be driven out of business and through that we’ve managed to have clients who have been with us for the last three years, others will come on board and they will even ask me okay, where were you guys before because some of the things that you, or else some of the work that you’ve managed to do for them, it has been top-notch, it has been the best that they could ever wish to have. So about my team, I have always made sure that we always work together, teamwork is key. Secondly, we need to have the right product at the marketplace and you need to have the best processes. We’ve even decided to have someone who can even train us on how we can best provide the best customer experience out there, because there are people who have got more experience than us and it’s our desire to even one day to offer the best to the top corporates. So that’s part of my experience with working with a young generational team, and I believe whatever I have shared with you, it is going to impact to you. Thank you.

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