Eagle has always been a fascination to me. The mother eagle builds her nest in tall trees or high cliffs, taking the utmost care to line it with the softest feathers. When her eggs hatch, she gives the little eaglets her undivided attention. After several weeks of tender loving care, the mother eagle’s behavior suddenly changes. It is time for her eaglets to leave the nest and learn to fly. So, reaching down into the nest, she rips out the feathers, breaks up the twigs and overturns their nice, comfortable home. Gently, she nudges one of them toward the edge of the overturned nest and pushes it out into the air. The little bird, of course, falls like a stone to the ground, squawking with fright, but just as it is about to hit the ground, the mother eagle swoops beneath it, catches it on her broad wings and carries it safely up into the sky. Then she tilts her wings and the bird falls once again, but this time, as it flaps its wings in fright, it discovers it can fly!

Hi! This is Peter Ng. Welcome to my customer service series – Power of Service Empowerment.

Similarly, organizations today need to free their workers to aspire, to move, to want, and to achieve. In turn, new leaders free themselves to be supportive, helpful, and sustaining. The leaders walk side-by-side with those whom they work with in the organization. They facilitate, encourage, empower, capacitate, assist, support and benefit those with whom they work.

But in order to do that, we need to ‘push’ our ‘eaglets’ to ‘fly’, and each time when they made mistakes while trying to provide better services, we need to turn those mistakes into learning experiences. Turning situations into coaching environment, giving confidence, guidance, and with proper encouragement, our employees will extend their own efforts and take responsibility for their own roles.

In today’s service economy, it is not enough to simply promise customer satisfaction. To succeed in this fiercely competitive, consumer-driven economy, every organization must actively embrace and profitably act to provide a concrete plan for delivering optimal value to our customers – through our approach, service, and communications with them.

This can be achieved by empowering our workforce, thus creating positive experience for our customers at every point of interactions, transforming the organization culture towards long-term customers’ relations, and leaving with the customer a great impression to want to do business with our organization again.

We need to encourage our employees to take on the role of a service-professional, to do ‘whatever-it-takes’ to satisfy a customer at that moment. But employees need to get out of their comfortable ‘nest’, build their confidence, be trained in providing empowered service, and discover that they can actually fly!

Involving individuals in company processes takes much more than just authorizing people to take the lead – it requires that they be entrusted.

Leaders must learn to share as much information as possible about how others have previously tried to accomplish a particular task, which avoids wasteful duplication and even total failure. Information about costs, past productivity, and the general attitudes of workers who have successfully completed a project may be useful.

Another good way to entrust employees is to have the person who is assigned to solve a problem to ask coworkers what they would suggest doing to resolve the problem. Workers feel more confident about solving problems when they received support and ideas from colleagues about how to proceed.

Employees can only perform well when they know what is expected of them. They need to know what directions to take to improve things, and in solving problems, workers will be more effective if they understand the bigger picture.

Providing insights, background, and expectations help people perform at their highest levels, provided they have the resources to assist them in doing the work. Workers often simply need a little extra time to make amazing contributions to the success of the organization.

Even eaglets do not fly on its first try. Let’s soar on eagle’s wings!