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.