Undercover Boss is one of my favorite new shows. Why? Because we desperately need to encourage upper management to get in touch with what’s really going on inside their companies. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, and it’s harming employees just as much as customers, if not more.

I was introduced to it on an episode of Oprah in which she highlighted the executives in the first two stings of the season. When I first heard the name of the show, I assumed it was about bosses going undercover to discover the negligence of their employees; instead it’s about discovering the negligence of themselves.

The series premiere featured two major corporations: Waste Management and 7-Eleven, both multi-billion dollar annual revenue companies. [Watch full episodes at CBS.com]

Posing as a regular dude, Larry O’Donnell, President and COO of Waste Management, worked alongside his lowest-level employees — sorting through waste, collecting garbage from a landfill, cleaning Porta-Potties — and was even fired for the first time in his life.

The moment that was the most poignant for me was when O’Donnell was on a garbage truck in Rochester, NY, with a female driver named Janice who visits more than 300 homes a day. At one point during their shift, Janice disappears for a bit while Larry was talking to the cameras. As they’re getting back into the truck, Larry notices that Janice is holding a tin can and offers to take it for her (she’s driving). She flinches and says, “No no no, this is my pee-can.” Larry first thinks, “Where I’m from we call it pee-kahn” — but then realizes what it is. Janice goes on to explain that while she enjoys working for the company, they aren’t very female friendly. Her manager hasn’t scheduled enough time for her to use the restroom along her route, and while the men just pull over to the side of the road to go, she can’t exactly do that. Instead she pees in a can that she keeps for the day and empties it out at the end of her shift.

Needless to say, as the President and COO of the company, Larry is devastated to hear this, but tries to keep his cool so not to blow his cover. In his interview with Oprah, he explains how eye-opening it was to realize how little of the process he truly understood. Here he is, running this company, and he doesn’t even think about the fact that someone, somewhere, is driving this truck, and there isn’t any policy in place to allow time for bathroom breaks.

Of course he says on national television that changes are being made, as anyone would. But it got me wondering about the companies I work with, and the antiquated and often inhumane processes that not only harm customers, but more often the employees who are trying to serve them.

All of the discourse around user experience is about the rights of the user — maybe because of what it’s called — but what if instead we focused on the human experience? Might we be able to extend our purview to all of the people affected by the systems we aim to improve?

I was very fortunate to work on a project with Reprise Media last year in which I helped to redesign a piece of software they use internally (I’ll leave it at that for confidentiality purposes). The best part the gig for me was uncovering some significant inefficiencies in the process that surrounded the software, some that even the department’s manager was unaware of. And this guy is very hands on with his staff, and very with it. But he doesn’t shadow them all day every day. He doesn’t sit and ask them about the difficulties they’re facing in getting their jobs done well — and even if he did, they probably wouldn’t answer 100% truthfully because he’s their boss.

It felt really wonderful to help meet the needs of users who are inside the company, many of whom had probably never felt considered before. I’d love the opportunity to do more work like this, but moreso, I’d love for more companies to start thinking of their own employees’ needs with as much gravity as they do their customers’.

The fact is, if your staff isn’t healthy and happy, your customers certainly won’t be. So take a moment to look inside. You might be alarmed at what you find.

• Photo of the day: Bottom loading instructions
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• Strategy Starts with Honesty
• The User Experience Designer’s Anthem
• Jeff Bezos says: obsess over customers

On April 18, 2010, Griffin James Lam Konig was born at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasett, NY, weighing in at 7 lbs 13 oz.

Griffin’s mom Donna is the 39-year-old daughter of my childhood babysitter Theresa (who I’ve always called T-T).

The day after Griffin came home from the hospital, twenty-seven years after Theresa welcomed me home from the hospital, Donna and her husband Bill asked me to be Griffin’s godmother. Theresa’s grandson is my godson.

When he first opened his eyes.

I’m an only child so I’ll never truly know the experience of being an aunt. If I’m lucky I’ll be an aunt to my future husband’s nieces and nephews, and I’m sure that I’ll have friends whose kids consider me an aunt, but I’ll never really be one by blood.

Although I am not related to Theresa by blood, she was my babysitter for the first 9-1/2 years of my life. To be clear, my parents were very present in my childhood, and continue to be amazing, loving, parents, but they own and run a company together, and have an active life away from home. Plain and simple, Theresa was a second mother to me. Her family (which also includes her son David and husband Earl) always felt like family to me, and now, in a way, they actually are.

I never expected that Donna might ask me to be Griffin’s godmother. That she did is one of the greatest gifts I will ever receive. It is an honor of epic proportions — and I also recognize that it is a huge responsibility.

Despite being Jewish (the concept of godparents being of Christian origin), I actually have a godmother of my own, and a wonderful one at that. Bonnie has been my mom’s best friend since they were in the second grade. While I was growing up, she would take me shopping, take me to dinner, stay up-to-date with what was going on in my life, tell me stories of her young adult adventures, and just generally provide me with wisdom and love.

Now that I’ve become a godmother, I felt it was important to do a bit of research to see might be expected of me in this new role. Traditionally, a godparent is meant to ensure the religious education of the child — after all, the term is godparent. But the modern take is to be a spiritual guide, an über-mentor, and a caretaker in the event that the parents are no longer present.

In thinking about what it will mean to help shape Griffin’s spirituality, I couldn’t help but relate it to my role as a user experience designer. At the core of what we do — all of the material artifacts we produce put aside — we transform the value systems of the organizations in which we work. A true user experience designer sees conflict between the internal mechanisms of the company and the external audience it wants to reach, and aims to bring greater truth to the interaction between the two, creating deeper meaning for the business and for the customer.

Is that not the same thing as encouraging spirituality? I see spirituality as the desire to develop your inner self, connecting yourself to the greater universe and finding the inspiration to be the best possible version of yourself you can be. Isn’t that our higher mission as user experience designers? To encourage our companies to be better versions of themselves, to have a stronger connection with the people they serve, to continually self-reflect and readjust their behavior accordingly? I think they’re very much the same.

So while the long road ahead as Griffin’s godmother seems daunting, I feel confident that I have the skills to do the job well, and to have an important impact on not only how the world sees him, but how he sees himself. It’s my first month on a new life-long project, and I can’t wait to get to work.

• Finding Myself in You
• May you be inscribed in the book of life
• In 2008, You Changed Me
• Whose life is this?
• The Stranger Aversion

The words both start with L-E-A, but can leadership really be learned?

As a consultant, I have the pleasure and challenge to work with a variety of different teams. I am a team of one, but I collaborate with agency teams (such as Happy Cog, whom I’m working with on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum project), internal client teams, freelance designers and developers.

Sometimes I’m brought in by an executive on the client side. Sometimes I’m brought in by an agency who has already won the client. Sometimes I’m brought in by a consultant to the client, who is helping them to build a team.

Almost every time, it’s incredibly unclear who’s leading.

I mention Happy Cog above because I fall over myself with excitement every time I get to work with them. Not just because they’re some of the most talented, most professional, most revered people working on the web today — but because everyone’s role is crystal clear, and every team member can point to the project lead in under 3 seconds. Not only that, every team member respects the project lead and follows their lead. It is in NO way a dictatorship, but it is also not a sociocracy — “a system of governance using consent-based decision.” It’s a meritocracy, where the lead becomes the lead because he demonstrates that he can lead, and that he’s willing to.

It’s a deep honor to work with these people, and have the opportunity to do things right, and well. But at the same time, it has made me acutely aware of the leadership problems that I have faced on almost all of my other projects.

Since I am always brought in as a consultant, I am never the true project lead because it is ultimately not my responsibility to implement the solution and integrate it into the business. One day I would very much like it to be, but that’s simply not the case right now. While I do currently get to lead almost all of the user experience phases of these projects, I still have an overall project lead that I report into — and in order for my work to be successful and impactful, the leader has to possess some pretty specific qualities.

My expectations for a leader are:

• To set clear goals, and to continually articulate them in written and verbal form to the team
• To motivate the team to believe in their vision
• To recognize and nurture the expertise that each person on the team brings to the project
• To assign actionable tasks with measurable results
• To express their appreciation for the contribution that each team member makes
• To be decisive and confident
• To ask team members for their input on key issues, but to always take responsibility for making final decisions
• To stay calm
• To ask for help when they need it
• To put the needs of people above the needs of things

I very rarely come across people who possess these qualities, and who take pride in not just what they do, but how they do it. I’ve been spoiled by working with Happy Cog, and I worry that I’ll have a really hard time working with people who don’t meet these expectations.

Part of my responsibility as a consultant is to clearly and respectfully communicate to my clients what I need from them in order to be successful. But I have to ask myself: Can leadership be learned? If it can, do I have the authority and chutzpah to express my expectations to the person who’s supposed to be my leader, or should I simply use this list as a rubric against which I evaluate potential projects and working teams?

I’m sharing my thoughts with you as I’m going through a period of discovery, so not all of this is entirely clear in my mind. I would love your honesty and guidance in helping me thinking through some of these issues.

Thanks in advance for your advice and understanding.

• Do Not Underestimate the Power of a Great PM
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• Happy Cog and Happy Whitney
• Whit Hour – Week 4
• I’m going solo

In Seth Godin’s recent blog post, more, More, MORE!, he makes the unpopular-but-wise assertion that until you fire your worst customers, you’ll never be able to do your best.

I think it applies to clients just as much as consumers. The bottom line: you can’t please everyone, and it’s stupid to try. You’ll end up making no one happy — most of all yourself. Read on.

Some consumers are short-sighted, greedy and selfish.

Extend yourself a little and they’ll want a lot.

Offer a free drink in the restaurant one night and they’re angry that it’s not there the next.

The nuts in first class weren’t warm!

The challenge of winning more than your fair share of the market is that the best available strategy–providing remarkable service and an honest human connection–will be abused by a few people you work with.

You have three choices: put up with the whiners, write off everyone, or, deliberately exclude the ungrateful curs.

Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.

This seems to be the opposite of conventional wisdom to most people. Why not just charge the most difficult clients more money — an aggravation surcharge? Because there is no amount of money that will ever offset the penalty you’re passing on to your better-behaved, more deserving clients by having your time eaten up by one giant monster.

Last summer I met Anthony Casalena at a casual happy hour gathering, and we got to talking about the evolution of Squarespace, the company he founded, from a freemium model to a subscription model. I asked Anthony how he can get away with not offering a free version of his blogging platform. His answer: “I can’t get away with offering one.”

Why? In his first year of business, 90% of the time he spent answering support requests was for — you guessed it — non-paying users. He realized that the people willing to pay for the service are the ones who really believe in what he’s doing, and those are the people worth his time. Since eliminating its permanently free option (not to be confused with its 14-day free trial), Squarespace’s profits have skyrocketed, and today they’re considered one of NY Tech’s greatest success stories. Read more over at Center Networks.

I have had to deal with this in my own business. I’ve had clients whose actions made it very clear that they didn’t respect my work or my time. I convinced myself that I could just work harder and give more of myself to the project, to prove I was up to the challenge, to show that my determination has no bounds. All I really showed was that I had no self-respect. I finally got the wake up call I needed when the check never came.

You can’t win them all. But would you rather the defeat be on your terms or someone else’s? Always be conscious of who’s treating you with the graciousness you deserve, and who isn’t. When insolence is staring you in the face, it’s best to cut your losses early, and make the space in your life for those who really matter: your fans.

• Your target market cannot be everyone
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: Lane Becker’s “Customer Service is the New Marketing”
• Whit Hour – Week 4
• I admit it: I’m always five minutes late. And it stops now.
• Marketing e-mails that actually help customers