The value of story

Human beings love stories, and we’re natural storytellers as well.

And one of the first things a fiction writer learns is “Show, don’t tell.”

Instead of saying “Harry was a busy, impatient man,” it’s more evocative to say “As his wife described her day,  Harry drummed the table with his fingers until she glared at him.” That says a lot about Harry, his wife, and the possible state of their marriage.

            And here’s how stories fit in with work life.

            • Don’t sell the product or service; tell a story. Instead of praising the new capabilities you’ve just invested in, tell the prospect a story about a client who had a particular problem and how your team and this new capability solved the problem.

            • Praise in detail, not generalities of business-speak. Got a great employee? Don’t just say “Susan consistently demonstrates professional skill” but “Susan returns client calls within 24 hours, tries to regularly meet with each and every customer, and endeavors to keep them informed of new trends and technology.”

            • Customers tell stories too. That’s the power of word-of-mouth: free advertising! The best stories anyone could ever tell about your company arises from complaint resolution: “This vendor made a small mistake on our project but when we pointed it out to them, they didn’t get defensive. They thanked us for catching it, made the improvements, and took care of us immediately. I’d recommend them without hesitation. Heck, everyone makes mistakes.” (What could’ve happened: “Oh my God, we caught a mistake they’d made and you would not believe the hassle we experienced trying to get this little error resolved. First, they got huffy and hinted we’d caused the problem. Next they apologized, which somehow didn’t make it better because by then we were desperate to just get it done on time. Hire them with caution!”)

When your brand sucks (and when it doesn’t)

Would you ever do this?

You buy an expensive car and outfit it with luxurious upholstery and fittings. Experts tell you it’s imminently road-worthy and could take you far.

Then you hand the keys over to a randomly selected group of strangers. You don’t explain anything about the condition in which this car should be maintained, figuring “common sense” will guide that. You look away when it’s clear some of these drivers aren’t fit to drive, either from inexperience or irresponsible behavior. When wrecks occur, you expend a great deal of money to repair the car and appease the other injured party, but do little more than a perfunctory rehabilitation of the driver behind the wheel.

Asking the question again: would you ever say this?

“I believe in XYZ for my cell phone and wifi needs. Sure, they’re more expensive than anyone else and they never return my calls, but I figure it’s worth it because of their name. They’re often late for service calls and sometimes they get my bill wrong. When I ask for customer service I’m treated with indifference, sometimes rudeness, but what the heck, they’re a big name.”

Organizations spend huge dollars to create brand identity, but let’s face it: human beings are not loyal to brands but to people. Behind every brand are touchpoints who enliven your identity as an organization. If you, as a leader, are not specific and concrete in your vision of what the brand means, and how the customer should experience it,  then you’re bound to sabotage your own vision.

I drive past three competing groceries to shop at my local Publix. Their brand is based on friendly service and reasonable pricing,  but their credo — “where shopping is a pleasure” — is spelled out in actionable terms for the employee. If a customer asks you where to find a certain product, stop what you’re doing and don’t just point them to the aisle. Escort them there, and show it to them. Even if you can’t spell out every touchpoint, having enough in hand sets the bar to which employees can respond to customer needs.

Final question: What is your customer’s experience of your particular brand, and do your employees know how to make that experience come alive in a positive way?

Why Your Workplace is Not Your Family

You can see how this happens: when human beings experience close bonds and camaraderie at work, they often liken it to the bonds of family.

But is this correct—or even healthy for the organization?

Consider what’s wrong with that statement.

For starters, there are downsides to being in a family as well, because families also experience:

            • Unhealthy competitions and rivalries

            • Adversarial relationships with power and authority

            • Permissiveness and favoritism

            • Tolerance of abusive behaviors like incivility and sabotage

And for everyone who feels important and central to the family group, there’s always someone who feels displaced or excluded.

            This is because employees often use the family analogy as a way to express their experience of workplace culture and values, without realizing a great deal of that perception is based in personal assumptions about how a family should function. And frankly, the two templates—family and work—while separate and equal,  are very different in purpose and operation.

It’s also meant that many managers confuse the activities of managing with parenting—which only makes employees feel patronized.

The bottom line? Family-like interactions at work are fine unless and until they give permission for behaviors that don’t work for work. (Stay tuned: an e-book is being developed on this topic in greater detail).

Freshman Required Courses: Courtesy 101, Empathy 102, or You & Internet Law

(Sorry for the longer than usual post).

           

Maybe this is just me, but any time someone sets up a task force, I figure they’ve either got to appear like something’s happening, or they’re in a rush to get it to happen.

Such was the case at Rutgers University, when the suicide of freshman Tyler Clementi ignited a national—no, global—scrutiny of civility, bullying, and the ethics of the Millennial generation (of which my daughter is a member).

In their response, Rutgers set up their own Civility Project. Several universities have them: P.M. Forni, the guy heading up the Rutgers project, was key to the one at Johns Hopkins.

For about a week I tracked the commentary thread on a particularly inflammatory op-ed piece in Rutgers’ student-run paper, The Daily Targum, and it was anything but a civil discourse, with disagreements devolving to infantile profanity and name-calling (eg, "ur a d*#k"). But in this regard, the now-commonplace phenom of abusing those who disagree with us is not limited to Rutgers students or even Millennials, given how easy it is to fire off venom from the safe anonymity of one’s computer.

This year was interesting for me as a consultant, because more and more I’ve been asked to speak on the value of workplace civility—in one case, to a group with a notorious workplace bully in a position of power.

What does all this mean for the current American workplace?

• Schoolyard bullies generally evolve into workplace bullies. The nature of their victims changes, however. Whereas schoolyard bullies tend to pick on kids who seem vulnerable or different, workplace bullies target personable, competent, popular achievers—and usually drive real talent away from the organization.

• The inability of any generation to hold civil discourse means there’ll be more conflicts—especially at work, where process disagreements are bound to occur. It wasn’t just that the Targum commentary thread got ugly, but that both the comments and the op-ed piece were inarticulate. Aside from spelling and grammatical errors, the sentiments were badly expressed and seemed (un)hinged on the belief that disagreement was a green light for reality-TV-style flying off the handle. There are conflicts that clear the air, strengthen relationships, and fix process bugs: this type of disagreement is not that.

How you handle yourself in conflict is considered part of your skillset. If you can’t articulate yourself in written or spoken words when you have a serious point to make, how can you expect to advance in your profession?

• Very little has been said about the role of the bystander. All week, it’s haunted me that few ever speak up for the victims of bullying—very likely because school administrators and workplace leaders are so passive about addressing it, everyone fears retribution from the bully. And yet some change might begin if only two or three people stood up to the bully on the victim’s behalf and said, “Stop it. Just stop it. This is abuse. We’re colleagues, this is not acceptable, and if it happens again we will do something about it.”

Why do bullying and incivility continue? My gut tells me bullies will always be with us, in every generation, because there will always be weak, frightened, attention-seeking individuals who need that rush of power over someone else.

What can and should be changed are the way we respond to bullying and incivility, and the environmental variables that foster these terrible behaviors. Add in too, the manner and speed with which transgressions are addressed. (At this writing, Rutgers’ Civility Project is a two-year commitment, and a recent Targum poll posed the question, “Should the University implement safeguards against Internet abuse in residence halls?” . . . Hmm. You tell me if these are durable solutions.)

As for civility itself, that white tiger of human values, all I can say is that whether or not you enact a task force to restore it to your workplace, ultimately, inevitably, it boils down to one person and how you choose to respond, especially in the face of conflict and disagreement. And, like the white tiger, it's a beautiful thing when glimpsed and experienced.

Does This Make My “But” Look Big?

           When a customer gets upset, they feel off-balance. Some may even appear vengeful, as if they’re looking for reasons to be unhappy with you and your organization.

            Not so.

            What the customer is looking for are affirmations that (1) their complaint is being taken seriously; and (2) you are prepared to help them to their complete satisfaction.

            Two little words in the English language have powerful charges, and they’re the words “but” and “however.” Why?

            Our ears and minds are conditioned to pay special attention to the message following those two words.

            For example, what would be your take-away if I said, “Gosh, you always look so well-groomed, but today I find you’re somewhat overdressed for this occasion.”

            Or, “I’ll be happy to resolve this problem for you; however, I’ll have to run this by my boss.”

            In the case of the latter, the customer still isn’t hearing a helpful message, because tacitly you’re communicating, “I’m not really going to help you because it depends on what my boss says.”

            Flip it around—same words, different emphasis:

            “I’ll have to run this by my boss; however, I’ll be happy to resolve this problem for you.”

            “You’re somewhat overdressed for this occasion but gosh, you always look so well-groomed.”

            Get it? Always put the positive side of the message behind those two small but powerful words.

Caril and Charlie, Holly and Kit, Ravi and Michelle

Finally on Saturday night I caught a movie I wasn't permitted to see back in 1973 when it first released, which I haven't seen in the years going from 15 to 52. And, as Lauren Bacall once said, any time you see an old movie for the first time, it's really a new movie.

Pretty ironic, to finally watch "Badlands." Martin Sheen is lean and gorgeous, playing a small-town hustler who's so desperate for a sense of importance, he fixates on other men's hats as a way of adding to his own stature. There is foreshadowing of the bad boy Charlie Sheen played later in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," but the character of Kit is neither irreverent nor iconoclastic. This guy's an outright psycho, trigger-happy and self-involved, all the more because it's dressed up with a chilling good-ole boy courtesy—meaning he'll open the door for you after he's shot you in the back and sees you're staggering to get out of the sun.

And then there's Sissy Spacek, ostensibly a small-town good girl, so virginal she grabs her schoolbooks after Kit's shot her father, before she hops into the car to join Kit on a cross-country killing spree. His shootings garner little more than an eye roll, as if she's saying, "Oh, there you go again." She doesn't concern herself with the same social niceties as Kit. On the surface she seems passive, strangely dead-assed, but her voice-over sounds so much like a cheap novel, you realize this kid's got some twisted pathologies as well.

Why so ironic? Because these two are so desensitized and self-absorbed, I couldn't help thinking of Ravi and Michelle, the two Rutgers students who so cruelly outed a fellow classmate, he committed suicide last month rather than face what they'd done to his life. Like their prototypes, Caril Fugate and Charlie Starkweather, Kit and Holly invaded a rich man's home and went through his things.

They relied on a gun, whereas Ravi and Michelle had video cams and the Internet. Back then they put Starkweather in the electric chair, then wrote off the spree killers as a grotesque blip on the social radar. Nobody wanted to contemplate a world routinely populated with Starkweathers, no more than we want to think maybe kids like Ravi and Michelle aren't anomalies but part of a norm — kids who are bright and promising, but utterly lacking in empathy and compassion. Academic excellence with zero character. No one who would say, "Ravi, you're being a first-class jerk. Nothing good will come of this. Stop it now or I'll do something to stop it."

We lament the bullies but don't ask, "Where are the kids who risk social censure to protect the vulnerable and stand up to bullies?" What is done to support them? (Meanwhile prosecutors are muddling, "Is this a hate crime? Is it merely invasion of privacy? What is it, exactly?")

One imagines Ravi finding himself center stage among his mates, a temporary king of comedy. Nothing else could explain the audacity of his Twitter posts. Little is yet known about Michelle Wei, but could she have been a seemingly passive sidekick whose pathologies found a catalyst in Ravi? Did they really think Tyler Clementi would join them later in laughing about it all, like one of Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd" episodes? that he wouldn't mind their invasions? because whether the invasion is done with a gun or a Twitter account, it's still all about violence, and I'm not sure the Ravis and Michelles of our times get that. We still think "real" violence is meted with physical blows, maybe from a gun.