Understanding different attributes of guest requirements

Guests have a lot of requirements and demands, but those demands don’t carry the same weight; they’re quite different from each other.

Leaders need to realize that:

• There are some things guests demand that they will not go without.
• The quality of some things that guest demands will either make or break the guest experience.
• Guests want a lot of things they don’t even know they want.
• Some of what you do doesn’t impact the average guest in the slightest.

Confusing these different attributes of the guest experience can lead to:

• Eliminating the wrong things from the guest experience.
• Spending too much money on things that don’t matter to guests.
• Failing to differentiate one’s operation from that of a competitor.

Kano Analysis is a tool used to determine which attributes of a product or service are most important to guests. Knowing which are most important will allow you to prioritize the improvement efforts that will result in the highest level of guest satisfaction.

Imagine you’re looking for ways to examine what is important to guests at your resort, specifically in your casual, full-service, Myan-themed restaurant named “Toco’s Myan Grille.”

First, let’s look at the five attributes of customer satisfaction. You need to understand how these are different to apply the tool.

“Must-Bes”

These are the basic requirements of your guests. You don’t get bonus points for having them, but you don’t have a chance without them. When was the last time a guest at your restaurant said, “Finally, a restaurant with chairs!” Of course you have chairs (and tables, for that manner). Adding more tables to the restaurant wouldn’t make the experience any better. Getting tables made out of the world’s most expensive wood wouldn’t provide an appreciable increase in guest satisfaction. Some things, you just need to have.

Other Must-Be (without these at a restaurant, you’re dead): Food, waitstaff, utensils, plates

“Satisfiers”

The more satisfiers you have, the better. Customers generally demand satisfiers—they’ll eat a restaurant with more satisfiers. If your food is good that’s great…if it’s reasonably priced that’s even better. If your waitress is friendly that’s great…if she knows the menu and makes good recommendation and tells some jokes that make your family laugh, all the better. But, it goes both ways. If your food is bland and expensive, and the waitress is boring then your guests will be less satisfied.

Other Satisfiers (make sure you’re doing a good job on these things): wait time, ambiance, comfort, pace of meal, accuracy in preparation, food temperature, proper use of music

“Exciters”

These are the unexpected surprises that meet your guests’ unspoken desires and make their experience great. Imagine you put little umbrellas in the drinks or deliver a birthday cupcake upon overhearing that the family is celebrating Dad’s birthday. The family didn’t ask for a celebratory cupcake—but they did (indirectly) ask for a good time—and you surpassed their expectation. Note that the absence of exciters doesn’t decrease guest satisfaction, since they weren’t expecting anything anyway.

Other Exciters (sprinkle these in and satisfaction improves): anything unexpected that meets a guest’s unspoken desires

“Indifference”

The indifferent elements are those that don’t directly influence your guest’s satisfaction or their decision to do business with you. For example, your guests don’t care about the brand of quarry tile in the kitchen; it doesn’t impact their experience in the slightest. Frankly, they wouldn’t care if you were cooking on a gravel floor.

“Reversers”
These are the extra processes that your guests don’t like. Obviously, you want to keep these to a minimum.

(And remember— Exciters evolve into Satisfiers and Satisfiers evolve into Dissatsfiers. Paying by credit card was once an Exciter—a novelty. It became a Satisfier and is now a Must-Be, especially for the younger generation, as you know if your restaurant doesn’t accept credit cards.)

Now that you understand these different attributes, let’s consider how we would design a customer service survey to determine into which categories guests would place certain aspects of their experience.

(Note: Kano Analysis is complex and goes out of the scope of this blog; we’re going to look at this on a basic, practical level.)

What do MY guests think are Must-Bes, Satifiers, and Delighters?

Good question! You might not know if something is a Must-Be, Satisfier, or Delighter. This is where surveys come in handy.
Imagine your Myan-themed restaurant has Myan-themed live music every night. You’re wondering if this is worthwhile. When designing your survey, you’ll ask the question in the functional (positive) form and the dysfunctional (negative) form:

1.) How do you feel when live musicians are performing at Toco’s Myan Grille?
a) I like it.
b) I expect it.
c) I don’t care.
d) I don’t like it.

1.) How do you feel when live musicians are not performing at Toco’s Myan Grille ?
e) I like it.
f) I expect it.
g) I don’t care.
h) I don’t like it.

You’ll use this chart to see what your guests’ answers mean. I’ll tell you how to read it below.

		Negative Question How do you feel when live musicians are not performing at Toco’s Myan Grille ?
Positive Question How do you feel when live musicians are performing at Toco’s Myan Grille ?		Like it	Expect it	Don’t care	Dislike it
	Like it	?	Exciter	Exciter	Satisfier
	Expect it	Reverse	Indifferent	Indifferent	Must-Be
	Don’t care	Reverse	Indifferent	Indifferent	Must-Be
	Dislike it	Reverse	Reverse	Reverse	?

So what have we learned here? Let’s suppose that guests responded that they expect to have live music and they dislike it when it’s not there. What would you call this? (Look at the chart). It’s a Must-Be. What if guests responded that they like it when the musicians are performing, but they don’t care when there is not live music. This points to an Exciter. In a large-scale survey, you’d setup a table like this and see where most of the results fell. You could even separate the data by age, sex, or other demographics. Certainly, everybody doesn’t see things the same way.

What do I do with these categories?

Great, you understand your guests’ preferences. What’s next? You might start by making a chart that divides elements of the guest experience into their categories. For example:

Element	Requirement Type
Silverware	Must-Be
Live music on evenings	Delighter
Great waitstaff	Satisfier
Clean dining room	Must-Be

Of course, the list would continue…

Now it’s time to design a Voice of the Customer survey that will show how you’ve been doing on these things. Questions would be in the format:

How was the cleanliness of the dining room?
a.) Very Good
b.) Good
c.) Neutral
d.) Poor
e.) Very Pool

If the data were to show that guests are not happy with your dining room’s cleanliness and you know cleanliness is a Must-Be, you’ve identified an area where you might be losing market share. Improving this won’t dramatically grow your business, but it’ll keep you from losing ground. If your waitstaff aren’t friendly, you will know that investing more resources in training your staff will result in increased guest satisfaction, since this is a Satisfier.

Well, that’s a start. I hope you’ve got a better understanding of this powerful tool, or at least a new way of looking at ways to see what your guests are really thinking.

Could your business qualify for the Olympic Games?

Did you watch the U.S. women’s Olympic figure skating qualifying championships last night on NBC? Six skaters were competing for two spots in the Olympic Games. All six have reputations for being amongst the best figure skaters in the country, but last night they weren’t judged on their past—it all came down to executing a flawless performance in this one competition. One single mistake could put an end to a lifelong Olympic dream.

Isn’t that harsh? Even if one skater is better overall than another (won more championships, has more fans, knows more tricks), if she wasn’t perfect last night, her Olympic hopes were over.

Many of your hotels, restaurants and resorts have great reputations in your communities and some have great global reputations; people go home and talk about their positive experiences with your brand, and look forward to returning. But just like a figure skater’s reputation won’t take her to the Olympics, your reputation alone won’t score you any favor with the toughest judges–the people experiencing your brand right now.

You see, a great reputation can take your brand a long way, but it will only carry you so far. Like the figure skaters competing for a spot in the Olympics, businesses need to support their reputation with a once-in-a-lifetime flawless performance every single day.

You can always build upon yesterday’s performance, but your judges—today’s guests—will only judge you by how you perform today.

Your performance today is what really matters; everything else ultimately depends upon it.

In manufacturing, standard work is defined as the “most efficient method to produce a product using the available people, material, and equipment.” By following standard work, each widget is manufactured with the least amount of waste (fewest defects and lowest wait time between steps). In manufacturing, standard work needs to be repeatable, and therein lies the problem in many of the hospitality lines of business—our processes deal with people, and people introduce variation in the process. I think there’s  still a place for standard work in hospitality, and I’d like to introduce a few ideas for how it can play out.

Learn more about standard work in "The Toyota Way Fieldbook".

Suppose you want to create standard work for your operation’s opening and closing procedures. “But we already have a checklist/standard operating procedures”, you say. A checklist in itself isn’t standard work, nor is a step-by-step guide for getting a particular process done. Standard work can’t stand on its own as training document, and it doesn’t go to the detail of an SOP. Most importantly, by definition, standard work is tool for eliminating waste.

According to Minnesota Enterprise Lean, standard work is:

• A simple written description of the safest, highest quality, and most efficient way known to perform a particular process or task.
• The only acceptable way to do the process it describes.
• Expected to be continually improved

There’s a misconception that standard work is about stifling employee originality and creativity, but the opposite is true. Standard work creates a controlled environment for improvement. If we standardize our processes, we can then easily manipulate one thing at a time to see its effect on the final outcome. Remember in school when you mixed baking soda and vinegar to make fizz? Let’s say you mixed baking soda, vinegar, milk, and water together all at the same time. How would you know which two were responsible for the fizzing? The only way to know for sure is to do your experiment by changing only one thing each time. If we make changes to processes that haven’t been standardized to begin with, what are actually accomplishing?

Use the following steps as a guide for creating standard work:

1. Identify the current state. Define the current process, where it begins, and where it ends. What is currently being done during this process? What are the essential elements of the process that need to remain? What can go? You might consider drawing a diagram of the movement of employees during a particular process. If you find the path of travel to look a little like spaghetti, you might begin to consider ways to modify the environment to make the workflow more efficient.
2. Decide what needs to be part of the process, and what will be part of the following set of standard work. Where does this process take place? How much time should it take overall? What is the sequence of the steps?
3. Quality, efficiency, and safety. Above all, standard work should be sure to include the key elements related to maintaining quality, efficiency, and safety.
4. Identify the timing of the various steps. If the standard is that a particular step will take 2 minutes and an employee regularly finds herself spending 10 minutes on it, clearly she hasn’t been trained properly or is missing something. Therein lays the value of standard work: it’s easy to identify when a non-standard event is taking place.
5. Train supervisors and employees in the standard. Be sure to explain WHY the standard has been developed as it has, and that there is an expectation that employees will make suggestions for improving the standard.
6. Display the standard. Standard work for a process should be posted in work areas so it’s easy for employees to find. Remember, standard work is different from your training manual and shouldn’t be done to the same detail. Rather, it should serve as a reminder to employees already trained and familiar with the task.

A few notes:

• If an employee finds himself performing non-standard activity to get something to work, he’s making a mistake somewhere. Therein lays the value of having the standard.
• Each piece of standard work is part of a larger puzzle. A shortcut that saves one employee some time might cause quality or efficiency problems for another employee down the line. This is why we have a standard and make a distinction between controlled improvements and simply allowing individuals to improvise. Again, creativity needs to be encouraged within this framework, but implementation needs to be systematic.

There you go, a place to start. Look into standard work yourself a little more and see where you can see it improving your own processes.

I’m a little concerned hospitality consultants and leaders have been placing too much emphasis on what I’ll call “employee heroism” in their training programs. They tell and retell the stories of employees who have performed heroic acts for guests, going above and beyond the call of duty. Frontline employees are left with the impression that their job is to go out and perform acts of heroism by, for example, working overtime or going out of their way to do something extra special every chance they get.

There is no question that heroic employees create memorable experiences for guests, but our dependence on heroism is simply not sustainable. Two examples:

Scenario 1:

The check-in wait time is inexcusably long, so a front-desk attendant stays an extra hour beyond her shift to help out.

Scenario 2:

The restaurant is out of 1% milk, so the waiter makes a special trip to the local grocery store to pick some up.

We applaud the front-desk attendant and waiter for being “great” and “going above and beyond,” and give them a reward or some kind of recognition. We do this over and over again, and soon the culture becomes one of employee heroism (or maybe not).

But do you see the problem here? We’re using heroism to compensate for process failures. We should have had the milk already. We should have a way of anticipating busy check-in periods, or have a process for speeding-up check-ins on the whole. But instead of documenting the root cause of the service failure for analysis, we simply applaud the heroism and move on.

Employee heroism has its place, there is no doubt, but the truth is that depending upon heroism is expensive, especially if it because of something that should have been done right the first time.

Leaders need to educate their teams in improving processes as much as they educate them in going out of their way to deliver memorable experiences.

The news media is reporting that a single TSA employee was responsible for the security breech at the Newark airport last week, where a man entered the wrong way through security to greet a woman. The incident led to the rescreening of thousands of passengers. Apparently the TSA agent had wandered away from his post, possibly to answer a passenger’s question.

The folks commenting on a CNN article are quick to judge the individual. Some replies to the article:

“It amazes me the idiots they have working for TSA doing the screening. I watch in total frustration when they are talking about their weekend, chatting about their boyfriend / girlfriend, yadda, yadda.”

“Not too bash TSA too much… But, has anyone noticed how inattentive they are at all times? And seriously, to they even have to have a High School Diploma to get hired?”

“I have seen a variety of TSA Employees that as other have mentioned do not take their jobs seriously and are very under trained ands do not take thier professions seriously , they do not comprehend the fact that if they make a mistake it cost lives”

“Overworked and underpaid my $#%…I see these people standing around doing nothing everyday”

You know what these complaints remind me of? They remind me of employees gossiping behind the counter of your the quick service restaurant. The front-desk staff complaining behind the counter of your hotel. The nurses chatting it up in the hallways of your doctor’s office.

Funny thing is, everybody knows bad service when they see it, but when it comes down to it, few of us are able to provide great service ourselves. I don’t think anybody would want to be thought of as a bad employee, and I don’t think their leaders would want to be thought of as bad leaders, but it goes without saying that inattentiveness is common in the service business and it’s a real leadership challenge.

Have you taken time recently to clarify with your employees what their role in the show is? Do they know what happens when they talk about their personal lives in front of guests? Do they know what message it sends when they don’t make eye contact with each guest? It’s YOUR responsibility to make sure they know this.

But there’s a caveat that we don’t talk about in feel-good leadership articles:

Even if you’re perfectly clear, employees are human and they’ll forget from time to time. Personally, I know I’m incapable of being 100% focused for an entire 8 hour shift. (I was checking-in guests a few years ago and a lady said to me, “Why do you keep looking at your watch?” Nervous habit, I guess…she noticed and I had no clue I was doing it.) We’re not robots. We do human things.

I bring this up to lead into something I need to say about employee attentiveness as it pertains to safety and security. It’s clear to me that the TSA incident was a systematic process failure that goes deeper than one inattentive employee.

How can you have a process supposedly affecting the security of thousands of people that depends so heavily upon one person performing flawlessly? How is there not a system of checks-and-balance in place? Human error can be deadly, no doubt—that’s why our cars beep when we don’t fasten our seatbelts and bars come down in front of railroad tracks when the train is approaching. That is why airbags fly when we have an accident in our vehicles. That is why we have alerts that pop-up window our computers that prevent us from accidentally making a change to a reservation that we don’t want to make.  We have processes in place to reduce the chances of damage.

One thing is for sure: the TSA needs to develop a process whereby it is much more difficult for someone to wander into the secured space. We can’t expect humans put in a monotonous job to perform flawlessly. Computers can perform rote tasks flawlessly, we cannot. Most of the time this is okay, but sometimes it isn’t. Systematic process failures like this are an indicator that a better process is needed. Let’s take the pressure off the individual.

As I’ve said before, in your business, “everything speaks”. What kind of messages are the signs around your hotel or restaurant sending to your guests?

Take some time to walk your operation paying attention to the signage in guest areas by focusing specifically on Improving Aesthetics and Eliminating Negative Cues, using the following guidelines:

Aesthetics

1. 8.5 x 11 paper is not allowed. (The sign needs to be cut to a size that doesn’t scream “I ran this off on my printer.”)
2. White office paper is not allowed. (Print on cardstock and/or use textured paper.)
3. Lamination is preferable. Trim the laminate right to the edges of the page so it doesn’t scream, “I laminated this.”
4. All hand-made signs need to go, unless they were done by somebody with exceptional artistic skill.
5. Do the colors and style match the theme of your property?
6. Are you following all corporate graphics standards and using the company logo appropriately?

If you’re part of a franchise, ask your franchising system to create the signs that you need. This way, you’ll be using the company colors and graphics properly. There’s no reason each property should have to reinvent the wheel with an “out of order” sign. (P.S. – Never use that phrase. Read on…)

Eliminate Negative Cues

Chances are if a sign looks good, it reads well too…but not always. You need to eliminate negative cues like, “Out of Order” and “No ______”. Tell your guests what options are available to them, not what they can’t do. This is called “eliminating negative cues” and it’s a way you can speak to your guests’ subconscious.

For example, alternatives include:

• “Out of Order” –>“Temporarily Out of Service”, followed by something about making improvements to the facility, etc.
• “No Parking” –> “Guest Parking Available Ahead”

I want to provide four examples of signs I’ve recently come across in quick-service restaurants. I share no kindness toward poorly-designed signage, as you’ll see:

Figure 1 - Subway restroom sign

The first sign (Figure 1) was posted prominently on each of the restroom doors AND the glass entrance door to a Subway. Is this what you want at eye-level with your guests when they enter your establishment? Is this how you want to welcome them? I’m not a fan of the cheesy static clings from the franchising systems, and certainly not the stickers declaring that you indeed take MasterCard, Visa, and American Express on doors, but this goes to a new level; it is completely irrelevant to your guests’ experience. Remember, anything that doesn’t add something positive to the experience, by definition, takes away from it.

Corrective Measure: Remove this sign, get over yourself, and let people use your bathrooms. Heaven forbid they walk into your restaurant, are greeted properly, smell the fresh baking bread, and decide to buy something. If not, oh well. Your restrooms aren’t that great anyway.

Figure 2 - Subway Restaurant entrance sign

Figure 2 was on a secondary entrance door to the same Subway with the bathroom paranoia. This entrance door is located right across from the bathrooms, so my suspicion is that they locked this door simply so it didn’t provide easy restroom access. The door appeared otherwise completely serviceable. Saying “please” and “thank you” doesn’t make this any better.

Corrective Measure: If the door is broken, call somebody and get it fixed. Until then, call up the franchise and get yourself a decent “entrance temporarily unavailable” sign. If you’re just trying to make it more difficult for people to use your restrooms, again, get over it.

Figure 3 - Schlotzsky's Deli Soup Refills

This clever “No Refills” sign was posted near the soup at a Schlotzsky’s Deli. Obviously there had been some misunderstanding and guests were helping themselves to another bowl of soup, so this sign was posted to keep things under control. Unfortunately, the aesthetics are terrible and this is a negative cue if I ever saw one.

Corrective Measure: Refills should be offered for an additional fee that is lower than the original price. These prices should be posted near the soup using a sign that fits with the restaurant’s theme. Of course, the franchising system should produce these signs, not the manager’s 6 year old daughter and her Crayola marker set….

Figure 4 - Schlotzsky's Deli Beverage

We’re back at the same Schlotzsky’s, with a coffee maker than apparently belongs to the restaurant’s “employee’s”. Aside from the grammar error, this hideous, dirty, and outdated looking coffee brewer shouldn’t have a place in the guest area of a restaurant. It looks like the soup-stealing guests have been messing around with the button on the coffee machine as well, so they decided they’d deter the activity with a piece of paper, a marker, and some packing tape.

Corrective Measure: Dump this coffee machine and find a better way to supply fresh brew to your guests. If a budget deficit prohibits such an extensive capital improvement, at least clean the machine and remove this ridiculous label. The only reason a guest would even consider playing with the machine is if the coffee wasn’t ready when they wanted it, which is an issue to begin with. The real problem here is that this machine is inadequate for a beverage station to begin with.

Now, walk through your own operation and be as merciless as me, paying attention to aesthetics and negative cues… and get this stuff fixed! Remember, “everything speaks”!
Nick

This might be the time of the year everyone is thinking about making resolutions or predications for 2010, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves without first taking a look back at the last month.

The past month has (hopefully) been busy for the hospitality industry, with lots of holiday preparations, Christmas parties, increased occupancy, increased expectations, New Year’s Eve, and the like. Holidays and busy weekends are my favorite time because there’s extra energy and lots of guests to “wow”, but one thing for certain is that all focus is on simply keeping up with the job at hand and not assessing what’s going on.

NOW is the time for hospitality professionals to look back at the last few weeks, ask some questions, consider the following:

• What worked so well that we should do it again?
• What didn’t work that we should not do again?
• What didn’t work, but with some modifications we should try again?
• When was ROI least/greatest? (Was a particular event wasteful? Was a particular event exceptionally successful?)
• What needs to be done in advance of the holidays next time around to make things easier? (Ordering, planning, etc)
• What in-advance training and communication is needed for staff next time to make things go more smoothly?
• Was responsibility distributed in a way that made optimal use of leadership and management talent and experience?
• What information can we gather from our various guest feedback mechanisms? (For example, VOC data, comments made to employees, letters, phone calls, guest service failure logs.)

One thing I’ve learned is that if you don’t start to think about the answers to these questions NOW, you’ll a.) forget what happened the last time and b.) get too busy with the last-minute preparations that you won’t have time for some genuine reflection. It isn’t everyday that the challenges of the holidays come around, so you need to learn from them every chance you get.

As I’ve said before, holidays and busy periods on your property are your greatest opportunity to show how great your business is. Anybody can deliver great service when things are quiet and the demand is light, but to do so when all heck is breaking loose—that is a testament to great training and leadership.

Don’t go too far forward without looking back first.

Happy New Year,

Nick

Does your team remember to keep the main thing the main thing?

I was looking at computers in a retail store recently. A sales associate came over to help me, and once he learned what I was interested in, he began to tell me about the special $70 accessory package they have for someone who buys a new computer. He explained how it was a great value for the mouse, memory stick, and anti-virus software it included.

Excuse me?

This guy tried to upsell me on the accessory package before selling me what I really wanted: a computer.

This is the disadvantage of a commission-based sales approach when used incorrectly. The main thing for me was finding a computer, but the main thing for the sales guy was his commission. Clearly this store’s leadership wasn’t ensuring that the most important thing to the store was the same thing that is most important to the customer.

This doesn’t mean that a business shouldn’t try to turn profits; that’s essential to long-term success. What it means is that business results are just that—the result of great leadership, a productive workplace, and satisfied customers. Try to put business results first and everything will fall apart. Business results need to be built upon a firm foundation.

Great Leadership –> Positive Workplace Environment –> Customer Satisfaction –> Business Results

Keep the main thing for your customers the main thing for your team, and success will follow.

I’m back to blogging after a hiatus; life got busy for awhile but things are back under control. Things always get back under control eventually, even if it may not seem like it sometimes.

During the past two days I’ve been to two restaurants and a number of retail stores, and one thing has remained consistent at all of them:

“You guys.”

As in, “how are you guys doing” or, “can I help you guys?”

I used to say “you guys” regularily, but one day I was told that it wasn’t an appropriate way to address customers/visitors/guests. Now I think it sounds unprofessional and my ears ring every time I hear it.

You guys is prolific in the customer service world, and not just amongst 20-somethings.

The deeper issue here, of course, is a lack of training on how to properly interact with customers. If your employees feel comfortable at work (and they should) they’ll interact with your customers in a way similar to how they would interact with their friends unless you teach them differently.

I really believe that ongoing training needs to focus on no more than one or two big ideas a week. A perfect theme for a week would be eliminating “you guys” once and for all.

A lot of employees think that management wants to “train away” every bit of their individuality and turn them into robots. This is wrong of course, and you’d be doing your company a disservice if this was your goal.

Even great athletes like Brett Favre and Michael Jordan have coaches. The coach is there not to change Brett Favre into somebody else, but to help him see things about himself that he can’t see, and help him use his talents to better contribute to the team.

A leader’s job is to be a great coach.  If you’re not constantly coaching your team—and removing phrases like “you guys” from their vocabulary—you’re doing your company a disservice in the short-term and you’re doing each employee a disservice in the long-term.

Continuously observe what’s going on out on your field. Put together a game plan. Make the right things happen.

When hiring and delegating assignments, you need to find the right person for the job.

In the early 1820s, the British government was contemplating sending an expedition to Burma with the objective of taking Rangoon. The Cabinet sent for the Duke of Wellington to ask which general he would recommend for the expedition.

“Send Lord Combermere,” the Duke replied.

“But we have always understood that your Grace thought Lord Combermere a fool.”

“He is a fool, but he can take Rangoon.”

The Duke of Wellington understood this lesson about finding the right man for the job. This is why they say, “Begin with the end in mind.” Though Lord Combermeme was no military genius, he could follow orders, and that is what was needed for this assignment.

Abraham Lincoln understood this. There were reports that the General U.S. Grant drank too heavily; some felt he might not be the “best” General for the job. But Lincoln liked Grant’s performance, and about his drinking Lincoln had this to say: “Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

Define what needs to be accomplished, and go find the right person for the task, fool or not. We’re tempted to do the opposite: to go to any length to avoid a bad candidate and settling for the “safe” one.  But remember, as Peter Drucker notes in The Effective Executive,

“Whoever tries to place a man or staff an organization to avoid weakness will end up at best with mediocrity. Strong people always have strong weaknesses, too.”