Leadership skills of managers in service organizations can contribute significantly to quality of service. Fortunately there is a fairly easy road to enhancing them. It is based on asking three key questions with great depth of meaning, with every decision. These questions remind of all the leadership considerations that should enter the decision, in addition to the functional ones. The questions are illustrated and analyzed with a relevant, realistic scenario. because training and experience of most managers concentrates primarily on functional issues. Furthermore, short-term job success, at least in the past, often heavily favored functional competence. That, however may be changing as we move further and further away from an industrial to a service economy. These management/leadership decision considerations involve the issues and skills related to: • Appropriate participation in decisionmaking and planning. • What and how to communicate with stakeholders, individually and in groups. • How to set goals for the organization or organizational unit (decide on direction and priorities, including vision), how to organize to achieve them, and how to assign accountability. • How to ensure coordination, and stimulate cooperation, while anticipating, preventing, and managing potentially damaging conflict. • How to ensure that there is at least adequate competence and that most effective use is made of competence strengths of staff members and/or teams. • How to ensure that intangible, as well as tangible, rewards are provided for staff member contributions, and not only for the spectacular ones. • How to ensure an acceptable level of workrelated stress. Sounds as though things got complicated; too many issues for a “fairly easy road.” Let’s look at an illustrative scenario to see whether this is true. ABC Communications – an illustrative example The ABC Communications Company developed, and uses, a very friendly worded telephone recording on its customer service line that expresses empathy with the person who is holding on the line. However, traffic on the line has become very heavy and some customers have to hold on for as long as ten minutes during the busiest times of the day. Meanwhile the recording repeats, frequently, between soothing music interludes, how well the customer service people understand the situation. It explains that a representative will soon pick up, that the company is doing its best to get someone to the customer quickly and that, when that happens, the customer will get the same high quality service as the person being helped at the moment. It even tells the customers, from time to time that they are next even though that is not necessarily true. The recording which had been intended to improve customer relations, understandably began to have a negative impact as more and more customers reached the frustration stage. As the complaints increased, the marketing director concluded that something should be done. He met with the customer service manager and they decided to resolve the obvious problem – the customer service manager would arrange to change the recording. The new recording provided information about the hours when the line was least busy and the wait would be shortest. It also gave the busiest times and informed customers that the wait during those times was up to ten minutes. After that, there were hardly any complaints. A few weeks later, at a management staff conference, the customer service manager and the marketing director congratulated themselves on a job well done. Was it, really? Yes, the number of complaints had decreased dramatically. But, did service improve? Were any deeper problems uncovered that might have existed in staffing, competence, morale, or efficiency, of the customer service function? Were questions raised about who and how the original recording was decided on so that similar problems would be less likely to occur in the future? Did the event lead to another look at the decision making process in the organization and whether it could be improved? These are the leadership considerations that should accompany the functional ones. Sounds like they bring tough questions – questions that are rarely asked by managers focused on the functional considerations, in the wake of a relatively minor technical problem. But they could be. And they would be, if managers were leaders that followed the “fairly easy road”. What then, is that “fairly easy road”? It suggests that managers regularly ask themselves, and the staff members involved in a decision, three simple guideline questions. 155 More effective leadership can bring higher service quality Erwin Rausch Managing Service Quality Volume 9 · Number 3 · 1999 · 154–157