3 Simple Things You Can Do to Change Your Life in 2011

1. Remind your friends, colleagues, and loved ones how much they mean to you, and what you appreciate about them. What makes them unique and irreplaceable? What’s a fond memory you hold of them?

2. Have lunch with someone who’s achieved something you’d like to do. Want to quit smoking? Lose weight? Start your own business? Go back to school? Anything scary and unknown becomes less so when you scope it out with someone who’s been successful with it.

3. Let it go. If you’ve had ongoing negative situations in your life, make the effort to just walk away. This could be a virtual departure: you can eject unproductive dynamics by changing your reactions and level of participation.

New Year resolutions usually fade so start small and take it quarter by quarter, week to week, or day by day—eg, if you want to learn a new language, pick up one of those spiral-bound index card books and jot down a new phrase per day. This time next year, you’ll have over 300 such phrases.

My best to you and yours in 2011.

Happy Holidays to all!

The decade that followed 9/11 has been hard on this nation, but the USA has gone through a lot of hard times, yet we consistently come out stronger, more resilient, and more resolved than ever to beat the odds.

Thank you for reading this blog, and in 2011 I hope the odds will always be in your favor, and that the road will rise to meet you.

Survival of the Fittest: Good Samaritans

            A friend of mine had me laughing until I was hoarse about a “who’s on first?” encounter he had with an elderly man and a flat tire. My friend stepped up to help him change the tire and the old man kept repeating, “I gotta go to the bank and cash a check, to pay you for your kindness.”

            “I gave him three outs,” my friend recounted. “I suggested he pay it forward by donating money to a church, telling someone he was helped by an alumnus from this school [he was wearing a college shirt at the time], or just give some money to the local children’s hospital. If there was a karmic debt, I didn’t have to be the one to receive the payment.”

            The news is filled with stories of cruelty, not just the usual “if it bleeds, it leads” type of crimes, but ones in which insensitivity reigned supreme.

            More than ever this year, I’ve been asked to speak on workplace civility: these are minor, banal cruelties — speaking loudly on cell phones while colleagues are trying to work, not helping one’s team when workloads grow heavy, not returning phone calls or emails, indulging in verbal abuse of subordinates, stealing someone else’s food from the breakroom fridge. In short, putting one’s own needs and interests above another’s.

            How do you convince someone else to be kind, to empathize with others? You can’t. But consider these things:

            • Unless your life has been an abysmal horror, most of us have benefited at one time or another from an act of compassion. If you thought about it, you could probably build a quite a list.

            • People forget names, dates, maybe even faces, but they never forget how they were treated—with cruelty, or with kindness. Survivor stories inevitably include accounts of kindness that border on the heroic.

            • Everyone has a lousy day, or month, or week. The best way to overcome that agitated feeling is to be kind to someone else in need, even if it’s opening a door.

            And, as my friend said, if there is a karmic debt to be paid, you can suggest repayment—but it doesn’t have to come to you. That’s the real gift of kindness.

Key Behaviors of Post-Recession Customers

You may already be dealing with customers who aren’t shy about complaining, but

… better get used to it. Word-of-mouth is going to be more powerful than ever. I’m also adding advisory from (refreshingly blunt) business author Geoff Burch about the various ways we can kill off customer loyalty (in italics).

1. Post-recession customers will be increasingly intolerant of customer service errors. (“To defend your position to the death is a serious mistake. It costs so little put things right with your customer.”)

2. Customers will be more vocal and “activist” in using social networking sites to state their objections and negative experiences. (“Your offer is crap. Live up to the expectations your marketing generates.”)

3. Customers will not be committed to a particular brand but seek “best value” regardless of who’s providing it. It’ll be harder for market researchers to detect a fixed pattern of behavior in understanding these customers, and deeper insights will be required. (“Trying to be everything to everyone is a mistake. Don’t alienate your core customer base by trying to broaden your appeal.”)

4. Ninety-seven percent (97%) of your customers will research products and future purchases online, so your marketing and product support will need to be more targeted to specific customer needs and expectations. (“Don’t be afraid to ask. Where do my customers’ aspirations lie?”)

5.  Multi-channel customers want — and expect — to use a variety of ways to interact with you. (“Data should make selling more human.”)

Beware the Blurts

Good intentions often make us say things we shouldn’t, especially when the pressure’s on and the customer’s complaining. Here are some common mistakes—no, here are some deal killers:

Denying the customer’s right to his experience. A common mistake is to blurt out variations along the lines of, “Oh, that’s not true!”… “I’m sure our employee didn’t mean it that way!” … or “No one’s ever complained about that before!”

• What the customer hears: “You better prove you have a case before I believe you enough to help you.”

• What’s better? Listen. Your job at that moment is to fully understand the customer’s experience of the problem.

Blaming the customer. This can happen subtly, an accusation made via implication or nonverbals, but just because it may be inferred or unspoken does not mean the customer hasn’t picked up on it. “Well, we could’ve gotten this done on time, but we didn’t get your content until a week after it was promised to us.”

            • What the customer hears: “It’s all your fault.”

• What’s better? Alert the customer to budget or timing concerns before they become issues, and remember you’re in the business of providing solutions. You’re not there to ward off imagined litigations by assigning blame.

Typecasting the customer. This happens in the most egregious circumstances, when the workplace culture has become so politicized that an adversarial “us-them” attitude has developed. Customers are outsiders, therefore they’re “idiots”… “crazy” … “ill-informed”….

• What the customer hears: They don’t need to hear anything. Sooner or later, that attitude of condescension or resentment seeps through employee pores and taints interactions with your customers.

• What’s better? Workplace culture attitude adjustment. Better make it quick too.

T. A. S. K. Your E-mails

If you’re like me, you get dozens of e-mails per week about a variety of issues. And a trend I’ve noticed among my clients’ staff is the troubling frequency with which e-mailed instructions are lost through the cracks.

One thing’s for sure: the business world is not going to stop using e-mail. But that doesn’t mean you should let this unwieldy communications tool quash your ability to be efficient and effective. There are a couple simple things you can do to become more productive.

Immediately print out any e-mail that carries a task, an instruction, or time-sensitive info. You can follow the TASK guideline:

T = The email carries info that is time-sensitive.

A = Accuracy is crucial (you may need to use client language verbatim)

S = The info has to be shared with several team members

K = Keep this to document decisions, changes in direction, and for future reference

Why print out hard copies? For example, merely forwarding a client’s instruction to a colleague does not ensure that immediate action will be taken: you may need to walk across the plant to get the colleague’s attention and show the e-mail to underscore its details or urgency.

Also, to prevent duplication of effort, keep a notepad on hand for noting to-do items — eg, a client request like “Will you call me when the samples are ready?” This will reduce the time it takes to retrieve the e-mail a second time in order to extract the task or its deadline.

E-mail’s been around long enough now. Don’t join the ranks of those who constantly make excuses (“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought I sent that back to you!” or “I did see that e-mail but it must’ve been deleted by the system. Can you repeat what you said or re-send?”)

Conflict in Reality

Perfect lives do not create interest. Few movie blockbusters or bestselling novels are based on perfect people who lead perfect lives, free of danger, ill will, or distress. Such stories don’t entertain. There’s no suspense to them.

Just because a TV program’s called a reality show doesn’t mean it honors reality. Most reality shows are loosely scripted—but scripted nonetheless—for friction, elimination, rejection, and confrontation. Consequently, reality show players are volatile, quick to fly off the handle. They confront before they have all the facts and offer up behind-the-back candor. There’s also a great deal of name-calling and cussing, and the sort of behaviors which—if you saw it out in public—would make you cross the street with your kids to avoid it.

The concern, of course, is that this bleeds into everyday life. Human beings are visually inclined and thus visually influenced. Watch enough people flying off the handle, and you come to believe it’s socially acceptable.

Who’d object if you blasted your horn at the driver ahead of you, slow to move after the light turns green? Did a co-worker irritate you? Maybe this person irritates everyone in the office, so what would be so wrong with blowing your stack at her? Maybe you’ve got a customer who’s constantly nagging and complaining, so dealing with him is exhausting. Who would hold it against you for confronting him with your objections to his behavior?

Perhaps we’re living in an age of reactive narcissism: We’ve become so anxious about detecting how we’re being “disrespected,” we’ve forgotten what it is to give respect. Conflict is not a green light for physical, mental, or verbal abuse. As natural and inevitable as it is to experience conflict and anger, don’t give up your right to choose. Your reactions are your choices. Your reactions are within your power to choose.

The role of conflict in reality TV is to drive up ratings. The role of conflict in reality is to tell us, “Something’s wrong here. Something important needs to be worked out.” How you participate in a solution says a lot about who you are, as a professional and a human being. 

When great things happen to good companies (but it all goes bad anyway)….

It’s a mistake to assume organizational complacency is just about smugness and self-congratulation: it’s also chronic passivity — what one writer calls an absence of “premortems,” or failure to thoroughly assess new initiatives before they’re set in motion.

Ironically, the causes come from positives in the organization’s performance history:

•  Management only wants positives. Sure, nobody likes chronic naysayers, but skeptics and devil’s advocates can provide analyses of potential pitfalls and difficulties. What happens? Aside from alienating otherwise engaged employees, it also means management grows accustomed to getting a chipper but incomplete report.

• “I’m the expert and you’re not.” Experts do tend to be right very often, but it’s an illusion to bet they’ll be right all the time. What happens? Specialist inflexibility or disdain for laypeople can be demoralizing for staff—and galling to customers who may also be laypeople.

• Unyielding belief in prior success. The more a routine succeeds, the more likely people are to assume the process is infallible. What happens? The organization grows rigidly attached to its more reliable solutions and becomes risk-averse (no innovation). There’s also an inability to learn and recover from costly mistakes.

• “We have all the best toys!” Technology, however sophisticated, is not infallible, and organizations often make the mistake of investing in IT protocols that make sense only to themselves and their IT guys. What happens? If it doesn’t make sense to your customers (or if it takes too much time to learn and adapt),  they won’t rely on your technology even if self-service options are available 24/7.

• “My folks are right.” Some groups invite debate; others strive for unanimity,  characterizing dissenters as flawed or badly informed. What happens? The tribalism of this can lead to faulty group rationalizations, presumptions of superiority, and miscasting of customers as ignorant outsiders.

The bad news is also the good news: much of the complacency problem lies in human nature, so there’s no known cure. But awareness helps reduce the problems created by complacency, and (I believe) the human mind can overcome any fallibility if the commitment to change is made.

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.

What I Learned Teaching My Kid to Drive

           Nothing—but nothing—will test a parent’s nerves more than riding shotgun with an eager young driver who has yet to feel their own mortality, and sees the family car as the means to escape the confines of the life you have created for them.

            It is possible, however, to derive leadership lessons even as your life is flashing before your middle-aged eyes.

• Screaming doesn’t help. Most intelligent people learn from their mistakes—when they’re permitted to make them. Should you tolerate a repetition of careless mistakes? No, absolutely not; but workplace experiments made in good faith will serve two purposes—one is to manifest process problems, and the other is to create enough pain that errors never get repeated. So screaming at your employees for genuine efforts and making the mistakes natural to that is…irrelevant.

• Give support. Even white-knuckled nervous support is better than nothing. As a leader, you don’t need to man the wheel, and you’re within your rights to say, “This approach makes me a little nervous, but if you think this will work, then let me know what you need to make it happen.” Your employees are looking to you for guidance and perspective. Anything truly ill-advised deserves your wisdom: “This, my friends and colleagues, is not a ditch we’d want to die in.” But once you promise support, you’re “in the car” with them. To the end of the road.

• Leave micromanagement to the amateurs. Most micromanagers believe they’re just being conscientious bosses. Not so. Sooner or later, everyone has to get their own feel for the turn of the wheel, and to navigate in ways that make sense to them. Micromanaging your employees to the last degree not only makes them feel rattled and disempowered, but broadcasts that you don’t understand your own job well enough to maintain a bigger-picture perspective.

Lincoln's 5-Legged Dog (or: What Signals are You Sending?)

Abraham Lincoln once asked some Congressmen, "If you called the tail a leg, then how many legs would a dog have?" When they replied, "Five," Lincoln shook his head and said, "No, the dog still has four legs. Just calling that tail a leg doesn't make it so."

Organizations spend tens of thousands of hours and dollars developing eloquent customer care messages—and then overlook simple details, often in plain sight.

            One of my clients went to visit a new vendor at their offices. She knew it was a small business (but of long history); since they handled high-volume mailing operations, she didn’t expect a plush setting. And, like many businesses, they proudly stated on web site and collaterals that for over 50 years, customers came first.

            But let’s review what she experienced.

            Upon entering, she smiled slightly to see the lobby sign that welcomed her by name. Nice touch—and one she’d seen other vendors use.

            The receptionist, however, stared blankly back at her when she gave her name, and the name of her appointment. (“He’s still out to lunch, but I’ll leave him a voicemail to let him know you’re here.”) ….My client sat down in the lobby and returned calls on her cell. A group of employees came back from lunch and lingered in the lobby, laughing and joking loudly—no one greeted her, asked if she needed help, nor seemed to observe that she was trying to talk on the phone.

            She decided to freshen up in the restroom, which was a little unsettling—an overfilled wastebasket, trash on the floor, empty soap dispenser, and a damp, skimpy roll of toilet paper. She mentioned it to the receptionist, whose response was an indulgent smile — “Oh” — but not much else.

            Her appointment showed up, only a little late, and they had a pleasant meeting.

            Upon leaving, she stepped into the parking lot just in time to see an employee empty a full ashtray of cigarette butts from his car onto the pavement. He gave her a wink and she left.

            A week later, when she and her boss sat down with me to review vendor proposals, her appraisal ran like this: “Yes, they do have a long history in the business and their price isn’t bad, but….” Fortunately, her boss trusted her gut instincts and let her process her thoughts. “I’m not sure their service attitude is companywide. They seemed to think that repeating the customer care motto was evidence enough, but I’m not so sure. Don’t ask me how I came to that, it’s just something I picked up on while I was there.”

How Perception Becomes Reality

           In my recent webcast with Thought Transformation, Linda Bishop made a point that’s often overlooked:

            Whatever you’re thinking about a client and their projects will inevitably seep through in your interactions with them. Clients can and will sense feelings such as (negative) judgment, condescension, cynicism, and resistance.

            How?

            For starters, none of us is that good an actor. Our bodies are geared to disclose emotions with a variety of tiny signals—sometimes called “micro-inequities,” they can be as unsubtle as glancing at your watch while the client’s speaking, to a fleeting duck-and-dodge of eye contact when fibbing.

            Second, most humans are good at detecting those signs. We may be unable to articulate why someone made us uncomfortable, but from the cradle we’re very skilled in picking up non-verbal signals. It’s a facet of our basic survival instinct.

            Third, you can keep your guard up and maintain a good façade some of the time, but when you’re busy and things are hitting the fan, it’s easy to lose control over that. If you think your client’s prone to terrible ideas, even a tiny pause over the phone or a slight crease around the mouth can convey a smirking, “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

            So how do you get this under control? Understand that:

            • Your client’s reality is not your reality. They have their reasons. You’re there to solve problems with them, in which case your best judgment calls should be about the work and process, versus whether or not the customer’s a champion procrastinator.

            • You need to stay away from negative nellies. You know who they are. They’re the people in your workplace who live to complain—about the boss, their co-workers’ shoes, their spouses and children, Congress, the cost of cucumbers, and—inevitably—customers. Such people will deplete your batteries without affording new insights or improvements. Shut it down. You have better things to do.

            • All individuals and systems have some degree of dysfunction. Clients undergo periods of personal and professional crisis, of confusion and difficulty. If you can demonstrate big-hearted support—even for the reasons why they can no longer give you business—you’ll have earned their trust and respect.

Has Compassion Gone Out of Style?

This is an old post I wrote years ago, but it seems more relevant now than in 2003.

I was in my car at a busy intersection, so lost in thought that I sat through the green left turn arrow. Upon realizing my mistake, I raised my hand in a flat wave ("Sorry about that!"). The driver behind me nodded, grinned, and waved his hand in a similar way ("No problem!"). No one beeped in anger or impatience.

Why do I remember such a small moment?

It happened on the afternoon of September 12, 2001. Like most Americans, I was immersed in thoughts about events of the previous day. Most of my generation had grown up in the era of skepticism, of Vietnam and Watergate, and suddenly we were patriots again. While the attacks triggered acts of hatred, they also inspired an unprecedented sense of community. Maybe the driver behind me used that small moment in traffic to express his donation to the solution: he opted to give patience.

Workplaces are more often defined by matters of ambition, goal-setting, strategies, and efficiencies, less by tiny acts of compassion. And yet compassion can fuel all the above. Here's how you can become part of the solution.

You have influence. You do not have to be a manager or CEO to influence others. By your own choice of behaviors, you give tacit permission for positive or negative conduct from others.

Listen, and establish credibility. Others are more likely to listen to us when they feel we are prepared to listen to them, not merely with passive attention but with a silence that acknowledges their words and experiences. And silence does not have to mean agreement. It's far easier to resolve disagreements when you feel you've at least been heard and understood.

Be specific in your thanks. Human beings flourish in the ways they are praised, because they're more likely to repeat and improve those abilities. Next time a co-worker hands you a completed task, give a more concrete, specific word of appreciation. Lift it out of the routine: rather than the usual "Thanks!" why not try, "You're always so quick and organized, I really appreciate that." 

Teamwork and Problem-Solving

Take a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

The matter of how teams learn has been studied for decades, and nowhere does team problem-solving become more important than in customer service.

A customer is unhappy…often they don’t know exactly what’s wrong with a project or process, but they feel something’s not acceptable and they want the problem fixed. Or they’ve diagnosed the issue, pointed out the perceivable causes, and they want the problem fixed.

Setting aside team dysfunctions such as chronic distrust, finger-pointing, and extended grumbling, let’s consider the dynamics of a team that works well together.

Recognizing patterns. The team has solved complex problems before—in fact, it’s learned from those scenarios, and that knowledge has been faithfully stored in the team’s memory or some sort of company database.

Defined roles and quick responses. The team is so expert at problem-solving, everyone knows and does their part—often with a great deal of skill, so not a lot of time is wasted.

A history of team successes. This sort of team is often analyzed for the ingredients of their effectiveness, praised at association conferences, showered with professional rewards. Thus the team knows its knowledge is solid and unbeatable.

The video illustrates “intentional blindness”—made aware of one task, another facet of the picture was missed.

And therein lies the problem—or problems.

1. “You’re only as good as the problems you fix for us.” Service recovery is one of the few opportunities we get to show our customers what we can really do for them. If anything, customers expect a reputable team to fix problems more quickly and skillfully. Pressure’s on.

2. Misdiagnosis. The team is too quick to diagnose the problem (recognizing patterns) and arrive at a solution. Unfortunately, misdiagnosis is easy when time and money are running short, and customer displeasure is high.

3. Failure is a stranger. The team springs into action but when its efforts are not met with success, a great deal of time is wasted in dismay and growing frustration—“But this worked with the XYZ account…why didn’t it work now?”

Complacency may be the biggest disease in corporate life today, creating forms of “intentional blindness.” We often have to detach from not only the problem but also our usual problem-solving dynamics to fully perceive everything that’s happening in the picture. Next time your team is confounded by a problem, bear in mind—keeping your eyes on the ball may not be the only fix.

Please Specify the Rage of Your Choice

I’m not saying flight attendant Steve Slater isn’t a nice guy. When your mom’s terminally ill and you’ve been a well-respected employee in an industry that’s endured many declines since 9/11/01, and you routinely deal with customers who are rude, self-centered, and demanding…well, you’re bound to hit a snapping point.

The same week that Slater grabbed his beers and slid into folk-hero status, there was a news story about a woman in Toledo, Ohio, who pitched a tantrum at a fast-food drive-through window, punching the employee in the mouth before hurling a bottle through the window and driving away.

And you can Google “sideline rage” to get a complete listing of the parents who freaked out at their children’s sports events, attacking coaches, umpires, and other parents because they disagreed with a call. My home city of Atlanta measures 4.15 on the “road rage” Richter scale (with 5 being extreme rage) for having the most incidents, and of course we also have “workplace rage”—after all, what other nation originated the expression “going postal”?

So what’s my point? The air lines are still a branch of the hospitality business. Sports were intended to challenge our kids, and prepare them for healthy competition. Traffic can be infuriating, but it’s a fact of life for many cities; and work enables us to make money and have our lives and careers. And most Americans readily acknowledge that in a world filled with ethnic cleansing, starvation, poverty, and terrible natural disasters, we’re still the fat, educated, well-spoiled kids with the better schools and toys.

So…praise Mr. Slater as you will, but don’t emulate him. When it comes to customer service and your own mental health, cooler heads have to prevail. And if you’re finding it difficult to cool down, then you need to get help—from a sympathetic spouse, colleague, or manager, a professional therapist, a career coach, and/or a longer walk in the evenings. We have to be more strategic than merely pitching a fit.

Adventures in Cold Calling

I've decided the American workplace is increasingly impenetrable: Lawmakers fret our borders are too porous? Well, they should get corporate policymakers to re-engineer border patrol, because then even American citizens would have trouble gaining re-entry.

Assuming you access an organization that — commendably — doesn't use electronic greetings, what you get is that Darwinian holdout of a dying breed: the human receptionist. And, like the dodo, this animal does not understand it's already in God's waiting room.

Today's adventure went like this:

Me, the cold caller: "Hi, I'd like to speak with John CEO." (Name changed to protect blah blah blah).

Receptionist: "Who?"

Me: "John CEO."

Re: "What department's he in?"

Me: "Erm...he's your CEO."

Re: "Oh. OK. Hold on, let me check. Does he work in this building?"

Me: "If you're the corporate headquarters, I would assume so, yes."

(Muzak version of "I Wanna Know What Love Is")

Re: (returning) "OK, hon, I've done some research and it looks like Mr. CEO does work here, but he's out right now. Would you like to speak to one of his assistants?"

Me: (unstated: "I'll speak to Donald Trump if you've got him in fishnet tights")..."Sure. Who would I be speaking with?"

Re: "Hold on, let me check."

(Muzak: "Mandy"...life is cruel)

Re: (returning) "OK, hon, I'm switching you to Delphine Admin. She'll help you."

Me: "Thanks."

Re: "You have a nice (yawn) day."

Me: "Thanks."

Next: (voicemail) "Hello. This is Paul Backwater of the Employee Picnics department. I'm sorry I can't take your call right now, but...."

Me: (ringing again) "Ma'am? I was supposed to connect with your CEO's office but got your Picnics department instead. Can we try again for Delphine Admin?"

Re: "Who?!"

A Legendary Strategy: Celebrating Citizens of the World

Recently I posted something about the forces reshaping our customers’ worlds* and, to illustrate, let’s consider a consumer product that’s penetrated a global market and kept its brand alive on every front.

Think about Moleskines—“the legendary notebook”—now ubiquitous to nearly every bookstore and gift shop, and their online counterparts.

Moleskine offers a good durable product but it’s not the only black notebook on the market, yet it may be to blank books what Kleenex is to tissues.

Moleskine’s publisher Modo & Modo resurrected the black notebook with an internationally flavored mystique, but they didn’t restrict it to an elite. Instead they opened it up to the world so the notebooks can be used by anyone who enjoys keeping a well-bound pile of paper around. Consequently everyone could feel like an artist and adventurer. (Hey, Hemingway and Picasso used Moleskines! Maybe Indiana Jones had one too.)

Then, instead of getting tetchy over the way Moleskine owners altered the black covers with their own designs, they went on to celebrate how citizens of the world use the notebooks—featuring saturated, customer-submitted Moleskines on their web site, blogs, online galleries, and in traveling “Detour” exhibits that go from London across Europe to Tokyo. Life hackers and bloggers routinely show their pages online. Just search keyword “Moleskine” on Flickr and you’ll see how extensive it is.

Moleskine hit all four bull’s eyes: creating international pedigree and appeal, then opening it up to world markets (globalization); diversifying the product line to fit heterogeneous needs (demographics); not merely accepting but celebrating a rich customer base (complexity); and showcasing the unique ways a global village of customers are using the product (customization). Why is this so remarkable?

You could ask for “Moleskine” anywhere in the world and chances are very good the shopkeeper will know exactly what you mean.

* Why It's No Longer Your Daddy's Customer Service

Customer Labels

Customer. Client. Constituent. Donor. Stakeholder. Patient.

As much as labels tell us what is, they also tell us what isn’t—and therein lies the rub, especially in customer relations.

Plenty of organizations make this mistake: they’ll allocate best resources to serve important customers, at the same time forgetting the value of each and every customer. Taking it a step further, for many organizations, their suppliers and employees are also customers. (How often have I seen on consumer complaint web sites, “I may have to work for these bozos, but I’ll never spend my money on their products or services!”)

Here’s another fact of life: organizations who habitually deceive and mistreat their employees suffer the worst customer relations—because degraded, unhappy employees will, consciously or not, spread the misery around.

So what do you do?

First, get in the habit of treating everyone as a customer. Don’t differentiate: close the gap between customer and co-worker (or supplier). Hopefully this will mean a reduction in phony cordialities, and an increase in spreading a habit of trust and respect.

Second, expect to be surprised. Unfailingly, human beings manage to do better in life, so that delivery man coming through your service door may be working his way through school and could one day become a client.

It’s a matter of trust and treatment. Nobody does business with organizations for whom every transaction requires a leap of faith. Without trust, nothing of importance gets done.  And we may forget the things ever said to us, but we never forget the way we were treated.

Do Your Employees Know What to Do?

It’s easy to tell which organizations put a premium on customer service and on their employees by how the latter responds to conflict—particularly conflict with customers.

Case in point: Last week I was somewhat irked by a drive-through bank teller who interrupted my transactions to have a lengthy chat with a customer in another lane. I understood her intentions were good (be friendly), but her chat took up my time, and later I realized she’d made a large mistake in logging a deposit amount (to my disadvantage!). When I returned the next day to have the error fixed, I pointed out this behavior to the bank manager.

Today I drove through again, and the usually friendly teller was noticeably more frosty—which I found interesting.

A well-trained employee would’ve known: (1) not to personalize the complaint; and (2) said something along the lines of, “Good morning, Ms. Ke! Listen, I talked with my manager about last week’s mistake and wanted to thank you for catching it. I’m sorry you had to come back again, but I promise it won’t happen again.”

“Oh puh-lease,” you might say, “she’s human, she clearly has a right to be annoyed with you for complaining to her boss about her.”

Well, sure, but think about the messages being conveyed to the customer. By being curt, she comes off as petty, self-involved, and defensive. (Can such individuals be trusted with customer deposits?) If she’d tried option 2, she’d have radiated professionalism, warmth, and concern for the customer’s time.

I don’t like spending all my time in bank lines, so this individual had become a single point of contact for me where my bank is concerned—to me, she is the bank.

It could be a bank teller, a drycleaning clerk, a receptionist, or a parking booth attendant. When conflict comes up, do your employees know how to react so you don’t wind up alienating customers?