Giving and Reciprocity

There are just a few more days left until Christmas. Those people with kids especially know the joys of Christmas morning under the tree. Watching those little faces light up like the Christmas tree over their heads, they are excited, happy and thankful.

Getting gifts is great. Kids love it. But parents don't give their kids gifts with an expectation of getting something in return. Kids have no money and rarely have the presence of mind to think beyond what "Santa" is going to bring them. A parent who would give a child a gift only under the condition that the child reciprocate in return would be considered an a**hole by most people. But sadly, that is the same expectation people place on other people when they give. If you are willing to give to your children freely without expectation of return, what's with the expectation placed upon people other than your own kids?

Simply giving a gift without any expectation of return feels good. I mean, if there were an expectation of return every time you gave a gift, after you dropped a couple of dollars in the Salvation Army kettle would you expect to have it returned to you by a homeless person outside the mall doors? Let's be realistic. So why do you place expectations on other people outside of the gift-giving season?

If you serve your customers and clients, do you "expect" them to serve you back? When you go over and above what is expected for your co-workers, do you "expect" them to drop everything they are doing just to do something nice for you? Just because your customers may not fully comprehend how much you go out of your way for them, should you hold back your best effort until you get a little reciprocation coming back your way?

Giving is giving. It's why they call it "giving." There's is no taking when you're giving. There is no expectation when you are giving. If the only reason you give is so that someone else is going to owe you for it later, then you are a sad example of giving without expectation of reciprocity. Giving is supposed to be unconditional.

Sure, some people could offer more of a heartfelt "thanks" when they receive one of your gifts. Sure a client could pass on a referral about you and your service. Sure, you could be considered for that service award if someone would just recognize your hard work and nominate you. But they don't. And they don't because with every little extra effort you might think you're giving, you are also exuding some sort of "expectation" energy around you. People think there must be a catch when you do something nice - because deep down, you need to be reciprocated.

People may want to do nice things for you but not out of obligation. So, if the only reason you're doing something nice is to get something back, then you're not doing something nice - you're doing something selfish. The point of giving is to make it about other people, not yourself. Remember that fact this Christmas - and beyond.

Make a New Year's resolution to do one nice thing everyday - for your spouse, your kids, a co-worker, a customer or a stranger. Change your Attitude of Service to include "giving" as a strategy. You will find that your results in life will tend to change for the better the faster you let go of making people feel like they owe you something.
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Managers Responsible For Poor Employee Engagement

Have you made a decision to improve your corporate culture in 2010? Look, you can't keep putting it off. 2010 is going to be the year of mass exodus of employees to new jobs. You are going to lose some good people unless you stop digging in your heels and get with the program.

Right Management's survey results last month says it all: 60% of employees say they will move to a new job in 2010 and another 21% are actively networking right now to see what's out there. That's 81% of the workforce on the hunt for new work because during this recession, you let your people develop fears and feelings of uncertainty. You abandoned them when they needed you most. You took away their training, their perks and the things they looked forward to just to hang on to a few lousy dollars. They feel abandoned now and they have as much loyalty for you as they felt you had for them.

Employees don't leave an employer - they leave their managers and their culture - specifically managers who make your corporate culture hard to swallow.

Now before you hire the Employee Engagement consultants as a knee-jerk attempt to fix the problem, let me clue you in on what the real problem is and why employees don't engage. It's not because there aren't enough perks. It's not because the work isn't rewarding. It's not because the cubicle is too small. It's, most times, because the supervisor is a jerk who under-appreciates them, who treats them like a number, who plays favorites and who has little or no compassion or soft-skills as a decent human being.

Can you honestly say that each and every manager in your group could muster up the courage to have a heart-to-heart with an employee about a sick child at home or to be truly thankful and grateful for the work of their employees? Do your managers, in addition to being taught how to manage, have the ability to communicate feelings or just to bark orders?

You may have been able to get away with that when you had a full complement of Baby Boomers working for you but the numbers are turning and by late next year, Gen Y's will outnumber Boomers in the workplace. Your workers want only a few things and they will actively engage themselves:

• a decent work environment - not a funky new office but a place where they feel like they matter, are told so and are asked their opinions and ideas on company initiatives.
• a rewarding career - not just a job but something that they can become more than just proficient in and be encouraged to become considered one of the best in their field.
• a manager who is as much a coach and mentor as they are a boss - someone who can find the drive, the spark and the magic in every single employee and find ways to inspire those employees to reach for the next level daily.
• a senior management that doesn't just pay lip-service to the softer side of doing business - but a senior management team that actually encourages it and if a manager is incapable of coaching and inspiring, they fire his ass to save their good people.

If you've got a manager or two who refuse to accept that business is run by people, for people and to serve people then I encourage you to pay the legal bills to remove that manager instead of having to pay the recruiting, re-training and recurring bills of getting a constant parade of new employees up to speed.

If you want your employees to engage, you had better engage your managers. If you've got high attrition numbers in one or two departments, it's because of your managers. Stop buying the department manager's excuses and remove them. Your managers are costing your company good people and a lot of money.
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Leadership Fad Has Created A Culture Crisis

Too many people want to be perceived as being at the forefront of their niche so they will use the word leadership to describe just about anything that will help them make a few bucks. It's sad really, that the word leadership has been sold out. Authentic leadership, servant leadership, reflective leadership, thought leadership, absolute leadership and transitional leadership are nothing more than vacuous terminologies of self-importance in a desperate attempt to carve out a money-making identity that no one else has yet exploited.

Truthfully, this preoccupation with the leadership fad is so last year. It is time to get your head out of the clouds because it's about to rain - hard. Corporate North America is headed toward a corporate culture crisis in 2010 because, in spite of all of the leadership books and all of the courses available, no one has actually been leading.

The truth is, you don't become a leader in a few days or weeks in exchange for money. (If you need proof, go find out which leadership course Winston Churchill, JFK, The Dalai Llama and Ghandi enrolled in and also find out their passing grades.) So while marginal managers have been off trying to re-shape their personal brands from dolt-manager to leader-of-minions, they have been forgetting (or ignoring) their work: managing. And now because of it, workplace culture is crumbling.

Right Management's recent survey results show that 60% of North American workers will be actively seeking new jobs in 2010. Another 21% are actively networking to see what's out there before they decide to update the resume. That's a total of 81% of North American workers who are not happy with their workplaces. Why aren't they? Because while the economy was crumbling, managers weren't managing and weren't responding to the very real concerns of their people. They were too busy pretending to be visionaries who were above that icky business of managing.

That's what happens when no one pays attention to the very people who make the whole business of business work. When people feel let down, culture follows. And people will quickly exit a crumbling culture. And who was supposed to be looking after the culture? The same people who were trying to getting a passing grade in leadership courses.

North American organizations are about to suffer the largest workplace exodus in decades due largely to, you guessed it, a lack of real leadership.

Your need to be seen as a "leader" has been overshadowed by your inability to lead during tough times. You may have passed the course but you have failed the test. 
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Financial Worries Create A Hazardous Workplace

Did you realize that the average North American worker spends about twenty hours per month worrying about finances? This statistic is concerning. That's, on average, an hour a day.

What happens when you're worrying about money? You are focused on your worries and not the task at hand. That means you are not fully present in the performance of your job; whether it be office work, driving, construction, serving your customers or attending a learning session. If you are preoccupied with your worries you are not fully aware of your surroundings. And when you're preoccupied, accidents happen.

In this still uncertain time in our economy, people are worried about finances. So much so, that they may be making decisions that could adversely affect their personal safety and security.

Here's a simple example of what happens when people start making their decisions based on a perceived lack of funds. Because money might be tight, an employee working in wintry conditions might choose to forgo purchasing winter tires this year and take a chance on the all-season radials despite the facts that all-seasons have no grip, no traction and no stopping power in temperatures below zero degrees Celsius. Add a young child in the back seat and, well, you get the picture.

There are some employees who actually have "win the lottery" as a financial strategy. I am dead serious. They believe that a windfall of money will solve all of their problems. Not true. If an employee has difficulty with the small amounts of money, they will never handle the big amounts of money. It's the reason why there are so many broke lottery winners just a year after their windfall. I will bet most of your employees are just not good with money.

So, here are five ideas to help employers get their employee's financial worries in check and get them focused back on the job:

1. Offer them the use of a financial planner. In fact, go ahead and work with a financial planning company to prepare a one-two hour session for the general staff. Then give them each an hour of work time over the next few days to meet privately with the financial planner to get started on a financial plan that will help remove some of the worry over the long-term.
2. Contract with a tire shop to provide your employees with a volume discount and offer your employees an hour or so off of work to go and get winter tires installed on their vehicles. People who feel secure driving to and from work will take that feeling of safety into the workplace.
3. Create a staff emergency fund with a maximum of whatever you feel comfortable with to help your staff with unforseen emergency funding. The emergency fund is a repayable loan over a short term. Most employees would never use it but to know that there is a safety net would reduce worry.
4. Offer to subsidize monthly passes to use public transit. Even $10 per employee helps a little but means a lot coming from their employer.
5. Create an inviting common area and encourage your people to bring their brown-bag lunches. Offer some lunchtime learning seminars around finances and budgeting and help your people acquire the skills to take control of their finances.

The Attitude of Money, Security and Safety is a necessary attitude in the workplace. Think beyond just safety. Help your people with their finances which helps the employee with developing a sense of security. Once a worker feels secure, he or she is less likely to take chances that would affect their personal safety.

The more you help your people get better with money, the less they will worry about it. What that means is that you could likely get another twenty hours per month productivity from your people by helping them with problems they don't like to talk about. Trust me on this: they will repay you with their loyalty.
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Fire The CEO To Shift Culture

Fritz Henderson is gone as CEO of the "New And Improved" General Motors. He was on the job only nine months. Had he done anything wrong? Not really. His removal was due to one simple reason that far too many companies succumb to: complacent culture.

It's hard not to feel sorry for Mr. Henderson, who had little time to prove himself. But his removal was the right move. He is a GM lifer, and job one at the company is to change a management culture.

Once asked about the culture at GM, Henderson said, "It's fine. In reality, it's the only culture I know." Which was precisely the problem. If you're going to try to be different or going to try to shake things up, then you need someone at the helm who isn't a product of the culture that you're trying to change.

I believe it was Einstein who said that you'll never solve a problem with the same thinking that created the problem.

If you're going to to attempt to shift a culture dramatically, it will rarely happen with the same faces running the place. You can make culture shifts gently keeping the same senior management but to do so effectively requires a shift in the senior management's communication, involvement of lower levels of management and inclusion of front-line workers.

Sorry, but you can't sit in the ivory tower and hope things on the ground are going to shift by decree. If you want to institute a culture shift, you have to first shift the attitudes of the employee. Once you can get a buy-in from the employee, only then will you get lasting changes in your culture.

GM wasn't getting that so Fritz is gone. What about you? Are you near the top thinking everyone else's attitude needs to change except yours? The answer to that question might explain your culture.
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When Workers Hate Their Bosses

When workers hate their bosses, you can't always openly tell. Some have disliked their bosses from Day 1. Others learn to increasingly disrespect their bosses and begin to shut down over time - eventually arriving to that point where they actually, in their minds, resign from the job. They end up doing just enough to not get fired.

Now before you go thinking that as long as they continue to do their jobs all is OK, let me clue you in. The levels of employee motivation have tangible ramifications for your organization:

• Rates of theft will rise.
• Quality of work will drop creating more defective products.
• Work accident numbers rise.
• Turnover and absenteeism both increase.
• Customer service scores drop.
• Profitability of the department drops.

If you've got any of these issues, then you've got a group of workers who have become disillusioned with their immediate boss. People who shut down like this don't have it in for the company (in most instances), they have it in for their immediate manager. It's not the corporate culture that irritates people over time, it's usually an immediate supervisor. Once an employee loses respect for their boss, good luck getting them motivated and engaged again.

Stop buying the excuses of department managers who always have an excuse for why theft is up, safety incidents are up, reports are late, turnover is high or why so many people seem to be sick. They're sick alright - sick of their boss.

Act quickly when you see the signs.
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How to Break the Cycle of Complaining

Complainers are like smokers: most want to banish them to the back-forty and out of the public eye. Smokers know better than anyone what it feels like to be ostracized from polite society. They've been moved away from the public places and entryways and forced to even cross the road to fire up at the airport. And because of the inconvenience of being a smoker and the social implications that come with it, smokers' numbers have dwindled. Smokers also know the health hazards associated with it.

But this is about complainers, not smokers, serial complainers to be precise - not the people who occasionally find a problem that needs a solution.

Whiners and complainers have not been sent packing in the same way as smokers because people fail to see the connection between complaining and their own results in life. There are hazards to complaining just like there are hazards to smoking:

• Complainers are picked last for teams and activities.
• Complainers don't get invited to parties for fear of bringing the event down.
• Complainers are reported to management more than any other personality type.
• Complainers rarely have 'good" friends - mostly just sympathetic ears too afraid to say something.
• Complainers do not get promoted at work. Period.

How many of your bosses got their jobs by complaining their way to the top? Think about it.

Until complaining becomes as socially unacceptable as smoking, it will continue. People need to stand up and say, "If you're about to whine, moan or complain, I'm not interested in hearing it." But most won't do that because people want so desperately to be liked and to not offend. Yet, whining is offensive. People are so afraid to stop a complainer for seeming heartless. They don't want to offend but will endure offensive behavior. I don't get it.

Here's how you break the cycle of complaining: you say something. Until people stand up and say, "if you want to complain, take it outside," not much is going to change. I learned long ago that in order to change a human behavior requires a significant emotional event. Scolding a complainer in a public place (embarrassing them) would qualify as a significant emotional event. Being embarrassed is a huge fear for 90% of the population but no thought is given to how much they embarrass themselves when they complain incessantly. A single public humiliation would begin to change the behavior. If you want to stop a repeat of the same-old same-old, speak up and act immediately before you allow the complainer's complaining to become a habit (like smoking).

In the same way kids follow their parents' model (smoking), so too will they follow in how they look at and complain about the world. Someone has to break the cycle. Say something.
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How To Improve Company Morale

Why is it that I have never heard of a senior manager being dragged to work kicking and screaming and bemoaning their job? I'm not saying it doesn't happen but I've never actually seen it. But how many times do you witness an employee or middle manager moaning about their job? You know exactly who I'm talking about in your office don't you?

Why is the practice of whining about work only reserved for those not in senior management?

Also, while we're at it, why is it that two people working in side-by-side cubicles doing the exact same job can view their jobs so differently? One can choose to complain about the job and the other loves the job. Why the difference? It's obviously not the job or both would be either happy or whining. The key to job satisfaction and company morale is to understand and acknowledge the differing attitudes toward the work. Fix the attitude of the one who dislikes the job and you improve the workplace for two people - the complainer AND the person who has to endure the constant complaining in the next cubicle.

And that's how you change workplace morale; by affecting the prevailing attitudes regardless of position. I urge senior management to demonstrate these traits by example and most do when it comes to complaining about their job. But the truth is that those outside of senior management will always do as they please regardless of the example set, always. This leads me to believe that it's not the job that people dislike - it is the perceived lack of control over the job and their own destiny and/or contribution. And that is an attitude of feeling dominated/controlled by another which can be reversed by addressing the underlying attitudes and opinions.

My point is always, if you're not making your conscious choices about making your own life better, then you're going to get whatever is left over from everyone else. If you are not acting to create the results you want then you are, by default, allowing whatever happens to be your choice. If there are more "good-natured" people going to work, then we end up having more good places to work.

Everything starts with the individual. Take the people out of a building and you don't have a business anymore: you have a building with a lot of stuff. There is no business without people. My mission is to improve the people and let the business improve itself. And I mean everyone - regardless of position.
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81% Looking For New Jobs in 2010

When the recession hit, you abandoned your people in favor of saving a few dollars. And that was a big mistake. I warned you several times over this past year to get back to business-as-normal and keep your people trained, talk to them, assure them that their jobs will be OK and to communicate with them about those you had to let go. But you didn't do it as you should have and now, today, proof positive of exactly what I told you would happen if you didn't heed my warning.

Reuters News Service announced today that 60% of workers will be actively looking for new work in 2010 and another 21% are actively networking to see what's out there. Can you do the math? 81% of the North American workforce are looking for another job, another employer and greener pastures.

That means that your financials are going to be hit hard in the re-training and on-boarding budget areas. The money you saved last year in training is going to be spent by three or four times next year. 2010 is going to be expensive for your organization. For the past two years, you've cut your training budgets just to save a few dollars and now you going to pay handsomely to search out, recruit, on-board and train new employees - which will cost you 1.5 times the annual salary for each lost employee (average cost to replace a lost employee).

Right Management, part of Manpower Inc. conducted the survey. "Employees are clearly expressing their pent-up frustration with how they have been treated through the downturn," said Douglas Matthews, president of Right Management, in a statement. "While employers may have taken the necessary steps to streamline operations to remain viable, it appears many employees may have felt neglected in the process," he said. "The result is a disengaged and disgruntled work force."

The collective Attitudes in the workforce are shaky and disillusioned right now. That is going to hit your corporate culture hard over the next 12 months. What are your plans to keep your good people from actively searching? Right now, it's their Attitudes you need to overcome. Change their Attitudes and you can change how hard you get hit by this wave of mass exodus.

Lousy time for "I told you so" but I did: on March 11, 2009 and again on June 26, 2009.

But it's not too late if you do something right away to turn those Attitudes around. I can still help - if you need it. Or, will you ignore this warning too.
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When Middle Managers Blame Upper Management

Upper management isn't perfect. They are humans just like their middle-management counterparts. Just because upper management doesn't seem do the job as well as they could doesn't mean that middle managers can just give up, throw up their hands and blame upper management for their own sub-par performance. Where is accountability? In spite of what your organization does, if you have personal values and ethics, you're supposed to plow through the difficulties and model to your staff what resilience looks like.

C'mon folks, sure it's never perfect no matter where you work. And if it's so painful being in middle management, then get out of it and go do something else. This blame game does nothing but hurt corporate culture.

Contrary to public opinion, upper management does not create the culture, the workers do. Culture is nothing more than a collection of attitudes. If everyone thinks the job sucks, the culture will suck. Add to that middle-managers who encourage blaming upper management - not by their words but by their actions - only makes the culture worse.

It's so easy to complain about how bad it is in middle management. And it is tiresome that people simply accept the attitude of blaming someone or something else for their own shortcomings. To blame is to choose to be a victim of your circumstances. You know for a fact that you're better than that. So be better. Take a stand. Set a standard. Ask for a heart-to-heart with a decision-maker but stop the blame. It's counter-productive and it is actually disengaging your employees.

Middle-managers are measured by their department's engagement and productivity. Productivity and engagement go up when blame goes down. You have no control over what upper management does so get over it and get on with the work you're here to do. 
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Bad Management Creates Disengaged Employees

Employee engagement is already a big enough challenge. And as many solutions as there may be to fixing the employee (since it is widely believed that it is the employee who needs to be engaged - after all it is called "employee engagement"), I believe that an employee will focus and engage when the external forces are right. That means, if there is poor engagement in one department over another, you likely have a management problem. Your managers are disengaging the very people you want to be engaged.

Here's what I mean. A well-meaning and engaged employee shows up to work each day and is constantly pestered by:

• Unnecessary meetings,
• "can you come into my office?"
• "what are you doing for lunch?"
• too many surveys,
• talking loudly outside the office or cubicle doorway,
• random verbal announcements (can I have your attention for a minute),
• Christmas party planning,
• managers who really take the MBWA (Management By Walking Around) far too literally,
• and more.

Add to that the chatter of co-workers, gossip and useless social planning meetings and you have a recipe for, at best, a four-hour workday of productivity. Each interruption requires an employee to have to collect his or her thoughts and re-focus on the original task.

Look, I'm a man. I understand that we're not the greatest multi-taskers so why are you interrupting? (Yes, I know the ladies are snickering here.)

Interruptive and ego-driven managers cause attrition to rise. Want to find your own company's worst offenders? Check your own company's attrition numbers by department. The highest attrition usually means the worst managers.

People don't abandon a good manager; a great boss. People leave lousy, awful, terrible and inept managers.

So if you want to engage your employees, give them a manager that encourages engagement. If you've got high turnover in one department, stop listening to the excuses from that manager and do your own due diligence, before you lose more good people. Change your attitude and engage yourself in solving a recurring problem.
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Why People Leave Their Jobs

People don't leave the work. They rarely leave the work. Contrary to what you might think or might even hear from the employee who chooses to leave ("this job sucks") it isn't the work that they're leaving most times. They leave the rest of the staff, the managers, the people and the culture - which is largely created by the people. Its almost always a people issue when people leave.

Only 12% of people who leave a job for another job leave for more money. (A survey of managers thought the number was 89%. Oops.) 88% of workers end up leaving because the job was less exciting than advertised, their manager turned out to be a jerk, there were personality conflicts or the culture didn't fit. Everyone of those reasons for leaving is "people" created.

So if you're trying to figure out why your attrition numbers are high and your retention numbers are low, it's because of your people - the rest of your people. They're creating a culture that doesn't work, which gets managers promoted that shouldn't be, which creates personality conflicts and turf-wars which means you have to over-promise your job excitement/reward levels to try to get people to come and work for you. That means that your fibbing will be found out, someone will leave, someone will have to pick up the slack in the short-term, some people will get angry and frustrated because the culture is lousy and they'll end up leaving too.

Are you catching on here yet? It's an Attitude thing. You need to fix it before you lose more people.
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The Answer Is NOT More Tools

I am astounded by the number of organizations who think that by simply throwing generic training at their people will somehow magically get them to do the part of the job they're not doing.

Let me explain. For a salesperson who isn't making sales calls, the answer is not to give them more training in closing the sale. For a manager who won't provide feedback to his people, offering communication training isn't going to change that. For a front-line customer service rep who won't say "thank you" to customers, more training in customer service isn't going to help. For people who won't do the full job, offering more training is not going to fix it. That's like going out and buying a 17-piece power drill set for the husband who won't fix the loose door-handle with a simple Phillips screwdriver. He had the screwdriver all along. He just didn't want to do it.

The same can be said of how organizations try to fix Attitude problems by throwing training at it hoping it fixes itself.

A salesperson who won't make sales calls has an Attitude of being afraid of rejection. That's a confidence problem, not a knowledge problem. You can train people all you want in sales but if they have no confidence to make the calls, they won't. Most sales training doesn't solve the "I might be rejected" problem.

Managers who won't offer their people feedback likely have an Attitude of superiority and have somehow come to believe that offering compliments is for the weak. That's someone's deep-seated belief. Offering more communication strategies doesn't change the Attitude. They know how to to communicate. They just won't. More training simply gives them more useless tools that they won't use because what they believe negates what you're teaching them.

Customer Service reps who won't say "thank you" to a customer probably don't say it to anyone. No matter how well you may train them in the art of serving customers, if you don't affect their underlying Attitudes, you will never have success in training. They won't say "thanks" if they don't believe in saying "thanks."

Sure, one of the answer to all of the issues I've offered is to fire these folks because they're clearly not matched up with their strengths. But I use these illustrations to make a point: giving people more useless tools doesn't address the reason why they're not using the tools they already have. That reason is that their Attitudes are more profoundly ingrained than your band-aid solution of training them more.

Building a house at 125 Maple Street is pointless if the foundation has been poured at 216 Oak Avenue. Your training has to build on where their foundation (attitudes, opinions and beliefs) has already been constructed. Mediocre organizations offer up generic training. Great organizations appeal to their people's deep-seated beliefs first and then build on that.
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Time To Audit Management

Half of all employees don't know if they're doing a good job. A recent survey by Leadership IQ reports 51% of employees don't know if they're doing a good job because they don't receive regular feedback from their managers. 21% actually get regular feedback. 27% have sort of an idea but still aren't really sure.

That means 79% of employees are not totally clear on what they're doing and how they're doing. With all of the management books out there, all of the courses, all of the social networking tools for managers and all of the meetings with other managers, 79% of managers still don't understand that they need to regularly communicate with their people? Really?

Managers are claiming that they don't have the time to sit down with every employee and give feedback. But they do have time to train new employees because of high-turnover rates. They do have time to put out fires because their people don't know what they are doing. They do have time to speak to employees if they make a major mistake. But they have no time to say "good job?"

If you can't find the time to let people know how they're doing, then you're not managing. Your job is to manage and it's people that you manage. There is nothing else to manage. You can't manage the economy, your customer spending habits, the weather, delayed deliveries from suppliers. You manage your people. Period.

Remove all of the people in your company and you don't have a company anymore. You have a building with a lot of stuff in it. Without people, there is no company. The people ARE your job. Let's get that straight right now.

These findings raise the question: what are managers filling their days with if they're not communicating with their people? Senior management needs to audit their middle and front-line managers and find out what they are actually doing if they're not interacting with the very people they're supposed to be managing.
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Separating Greatness From Mediocrity

There is always some Tipping Point (as Malcolm Gladwell would have explained) that separates a mediocre performance from a great performance. That tipping point is usually found in the amount of effort one person makes to be head-and-shoulders better than his or her competitors.

Having an attitude of greatness means that you are willing to practice, learn and be better than anyone else in your field. If you're in sales, it's in how you shut the TV off at night and apply yourself to be better than your competitor by reading a chapter in a book or spending some time doing research on your prospects in preparation for tomorrow's meeting. In management, it's in researching new communication or management strategies that make you better than the other managers. In customer service, it's in spending a little time online learning how your competitors are serving differently than you and doing something about it.

But greatness isn't just for the corporate world. No, greatness can be found anywhere. What separates great from mediocre is going one step beyond what others are willing to do.

This video illustrates greatness in juggling. Now before you poo-poo the whole juggling thing, watch the video. After watching you'll agree, every other juggler seems mediocre next to this German construction worker.

(Note: the guy in the video should have worn a hard hat during this. Safety is an attitude too - one that greatness can also apply to.)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyYRfNoZKcA

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Training - Killing Time or Filling Minds

Professional development courses that play like Kindergarten class having you build newspaper towers, run scavenger hunts or other useless games are not courses you should be paying big money for nor taking them incredibly seriously. It might be fun and the facilitator might have some lame "creativity" excuse but training is not play time - unless you work in a toy store. Professional development is serious. Do you want people who are more adept at the job or someone who is more playful?

The sad truth is that many of these play-date activities have made their way into so-called "leadership" courses - not to mention "team" building. The people in your company are looking to their leaders to lead - not play when the economy tanks or when sales drop or when your competition surpasses you.

Trainers, with little else to offer in the way of substance and learning, are incorrectly teaching you that it's OK to play. Look, I'm all for blowing off a little steam now and then and getting monotony out of the way but why do you have to pay someone to have your people play with blocks or dollar-store novelties or sticky notes or voting each other off of the island?

Just going out on a limb here: do you think that this playtime trend in training has anything to do with recent survey results that show workers waste 2.09 hours a day on the job? I'm just saying.

Let me offer a really solid piece of team-building, corporate attitude and culture strategy: stop making all of the decisions unilaterally. Give your team a real organizational problem or issue that is affecting your organization right now and let them come together and solve it. They will. In fact, you will probably be surprised at how good they are at it.

In the meantime, building paper airplanes or gluing new pictures to a dream-collage are not going to make you or your people any more creative or successful. It will not improve your corporate culture or the ability of your salespeople to sell more, your customer service people to serve better or your managers to manage better. A one-time creativity exercise does not magically unlock the brain's creativity for eternity as it applies to problem-solving in the corporate environment.

The truth is, most of the training involving arts and crafts, hugs, personal drawing, paste or chanting together really may only have about an hour of really solid information spread over a whole day. Never insult your people by treating their training as a play-date - if you want them to take you, the company and the work seriously.
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An Attitude of Ignoring the Obvious

People refuse to state the obvious. So the obvious no longer becomes obvious and this is how we end up with customers having to push nine or 10 different buttons to talk to a real human. At the customer service development meeting, someone had to ignore the obvious and instead, make the decision that they were going to install a phone tree that required a customer to push nine or 10 different buttons before they were allowed to talk to a real human.

In essence, what happened is that everyone followed everyone else. No one stood up and spoke their mind and asked, "isn't this going to be a problem for our customers?" All it would take would be one person to stand up at a meeting and say just that and the phone tree idea never would've moved ahead. But because one company uses the phone tree, all of the other companies started using the phone tree. It was less expensive to have an automated phone system than it was to have actually a human being answering the phone regardless of whether it was convenient for the customer or not.

Why would no one stand up at the meeting, where the original phone tree discussion was taking place and not say, "this is going to really suck for the customers?" How could 20 supposedly brilliant minds sitting around the board room table not see that this was going to suck for the customers? How could those same 20 supposedly brilliant minds not once advocate on behalf of the customer? How could 20 seemingly decent people all end up promoted to senior management and be in charge of the customer service experience without once standing up for their beliefs, their values and their customers?

How could this happen? Because there is a culture of "good enough." And in the post-recession world, "good enough" isn't even close to good enough anymore.

Back to the original thought again: all it would have taken is for one person to stand up and ask, "have we thought of this from the customer's perspective?" All it would've taken is for one person to state the obvious: that this is not good for our customers. But, because of fear of losing their job, no one spoke up and stated the obvious. And, for some reason, the whole phone tree idea caught on even though customers thought it was a horrible system (as do employees and VPs of Customer Service who make calls to other companies).

But businesses refused to do anything about it, because times were good and money was easy and customers would buy regardless of how tough you made it for them to do so. But now times are not so good and money is not so easy and old-school customer service is at the top of the list of must-do's.

Customers choose your organization mostly by your attitude factors: approachability, freindliness, ease of service. Not once have I ever heard a customer exclaim, "Excellent - a phone tree." Not a single one has ever said that. So it's time for you people in Customer Service to spend a little more time on the key component of your department: the customer.

And stop ignoring the obvious.
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Change Is Coming To Corporate Culture

There are a host of changes coming to your corporate Culture as the workplace demographics and dynamics change. Thinking that you can operate in the same way you did ten years is going to get your butt kicked.

Sales & Service
51% of your customers choose to do business with you because of attitude factors: your friendliness, your approachability, your after-sale service, your exchange and return policies and how easy you make it for people to do business with you. But a lesser percentage buy from you because you know your product. In every sales situation, there are two sales being made: 1) you - if you don't do a good job of selling you and offering good reasons why people should do business with you, there is little chance that you will get the chance to make the second sale, which is 2) the product. Train your people in being better people. It's far more important than having facts, figures and ammunition in their heads. I would rather hear a sales rep say, "let me get right back to you with that information," and then get right back to me with it. We like to deal with people with good attitudes and abhor bad attitudes and smarmy "know it all" attitudes. Training of the future is going to need to focus on building better attitudes toward customers and not so much on knowing everything.

Absenteeism
1,000,000 North American workers are home sick today because of "stress." Stress is caused when you don't believe that you can handle what is in front of you today, can't meet deadlines, feel overwhelmed, stretched too thin, etc. All of it is perception. People perceive they have too much to handle and that's why they feel stressed. So their attitude is that work is stressful and they get sick because of an attitude they have developed about work. If you would just help change the attitude, you would lower your absenteeism rate.

Values
A recent survey showed that up to 40% of Gen Y (Millennials) workers are prepared to use lying, cheating, backstabbing and even blackmail to get ahead. They don't see anything wrong with it. Four out of ten new workers think that way. Wake up people. Are you addressing this new worker's attitudes towards getting ahead? Think about it, many have grown up with a steady diet of reality TV and all many of them know about operating in the real world is what they have seen watching the contestants on Survivor backstabbing each other to win the million. In their own real world (which isn't real at all - it's mostly virtual), when they anger a friend, the biggest consequence is being removed as a friend from someone's Facebook page. Values and attitudes in the workplace are changing.

Productivity
Having computers on desks connected to the Internet is a double-edged sword. People need it to do their work but it's just as easy to get sucked into the abyss called YouTube - and be lost there for hours. The average worker today wastes 2.09 hours of productivity doing things like surfing the net or shopping - especially as we get closer to Christmas. Managers knew some time was being wasted and thought it was 0.94 hours. The truth is, workers waste more than twice the amount of time managers thought they were wasting. Why? Two reason: 1) they don't feel they are paid enough (kind of a work-to-rule campaign - I'm only being paid 75% of what I think I'm worth, I'm only going to work 75% of my day), and 2) an attitude of apathy - they just don't care about the job, the work, the responsibility, the customers or the company. They've got an attitude of doing just enough to not get fired.

Management
The future worker does not want to have all of their decisions made unilaterally. The Gen Y worker needs to be involved in the planning and strategy development. Locking them out of the process is only going to dump your corporate culture program on its ear. If you want to engage people in their work, engage them in the decision-making. If employees believe they have a hand in deciding the corporate direction, they are more likely to help you deliver it. Employee engagement's problem is nothing more than a separation of today's Gen Y and Gen X attitudes clashing with old-school, top-down employment hierarchies. Workplaces that have found ways to include their people in critical decisions (not social fluff like Christmas parties) of the day-to-day workings of the organization have a much higher engagement rate because their employees "own" the work. Change your attitude that there is only one person who makes decisions. You have a lot of bright minds working for you. Ignoring that fact is only going to send them someplace else where they will be recognized. 89% of managers think their people leave for another job that pays more money. Truth: only 12% of employees leave for more money. The rest leave because of an attitude of believing management is out of touch with what they want.

Culture
Your corporate culture is changing whether you think you have a handle on it or not. No culture "program" is going to stem that change. Culture is nothing more than the collective attitude of your workplace anyway. If you want to improve your culture, then you must change the prevailing attitudes that are creating your culture right now. Culture is how your employees see your organization. When you see your employees differently, they see the workplace differently and that's when the corporate attitude/culture changes.
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Leadership Is Missing The Point

Leadership is NOT the be-all and end-all of the workplace or of personal development. Contrary to what many of the so-called leadership experts may claim, it is not all there is. You do not need to aspire to achieving leadership nirvana before your life becomes complete. In fact, focusing only on leadership is short-sighted. Here's why: leadership is only one of seven equal components within greatness - becoming something remarkable. Greatness is something that both an individual and an organization might aspire to and achieve - without the need for witnesses.

The whole concept of leadership is focused on the individual - not on those who would be affected outside of the individual. It's why you regularly hear about "bad leadership" or "an absence of leadership ability" - things which can not be measured without including those who might be affected by their very existence.

Leadership's major flaw, unfortunately, is that its very nature is self-focused: the purposeful improving of only oneself. One can not be in a position to influence others without focusing all of their improvement attention on themselves first.

Greatness, however, is outward-focused. It is not only about improving oneself but it is also about subsequently improving the world and benefitting those that greatness touches.

Leadership is simply measured by success while greatness is measured by significance. You may want to read that last sentence again so as to not miss its importance.

You can not lead if they will not follow. But you can be great regardless if they are petty, mean or obstinate. Greatness requires no involvement from others. Leadership, by its very definition, requires followers for without followers, there can be no leader. In the same way as a tree falling in the forest, without those to lead, is there a need for leadership?

Greatness requires no one or thing to be present in order to be great. In fact, one can still be great, do great things and leave a legacy or a mark which might only be discovered years later. Greatness is focused on making a difference regardless of whether someone is there or not to witness the act.

Leadership, therefore, is an attitude which, combined with six other attitudes can lead both an individual and an organization to greatness. Greatness is the willingness to act, to improve and to be significant regardless of whether others are involved or not.

Leadership is about the little picture. Greatness is about how one can improve the big picture. One works with the other but unfortunately, once most achieve that leadership nirvana, they stop thinking about how their actions affect the big picture. It's why so many so-called "leaders" will never be great and how leadership almost always misses the point.
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Fix Morale - Improve Culture

Workplace morale and productivity are very closely tied together. Low morale typically results in reduced productivity. Further, once morale has taken a downwards turn, turning things around can be a slow and expensive process. So, morale needs to be addressed right now.

You improve morale by working on the Attitude of Resilience of the employees - that ability to bounce back when things get tough. This is not just positive thinking stuff. This is deep-in-the-gut, true-belief perseverance that allows people to feel safe in knowing that they can handle whatever is in front of them today.

Because morale is created not by management, but by the reactions of the employees to the things that happen in their environment.  Management has little control over how people react to downsizing, threats of job-loss, stress and unease. In the same way that I can't control how you would feel at the prospect of having your car stolen, no one has control over the individual employees.

So, if you want to change morale (also known as one of the critical components to corporate culture) you have to change the prevailing attitudes within the building that are creating the morale (or lack thereof).

So, how does senior management help morale? By being open and honest with their people during this time of uncertainty, by providing support to those who are feeling overwhelmed and by not losing their heads and spending money on useless programs just for the optics of looking like they are doing something.

Don't offer team-building when you are downsizing members of your team. Sales training won't get your customers to let go of their money any faster. Don't start Corporate Social Responsibility programs as a distraction to what's really going on.

All you need to do right now is support your people in helping them take control of their own attitudes, fears and uncertainty. Help make things certain. Address their fears directly. Help them develop an Attitude of Resilience.

When this all shakes out, the people you showed your loyalty to will show their loyalty to you. When both sides have an attitude of loyalty to each other, morale jumps up and corporate culture improves dramatically. 
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One Way To Stop Being Mediocre

Most training delivers only temporary motivational highs, so what should training companies do differently?

It's not the training companies that are the problem although sometimes the problem IS a bad trainer/speaker. Most times though, the problem is the people who hire the trainers and speakers.

Companies keep hiring the wrong trainers/speakers because they are trying to fix what they THINK is the problem. Most training addresses usually only the symptom and not the root-cause. Example: poor time-management is a symptom of poor self-discipline and an attitude of mediocrity (good enough). A time-management course will not solve the underlying issue and so, for a few days, there will me a motivational high which will dissipate over time and you will be right back to having the same issue in a few weeks or months.

The same can be said of communication skills, change, leadership, motivation, productivity, stress and team building: all useless training until you address the underlying values and attitudes. Besides, if these really were the problems, you would have solved the problem years ago. They already have been given the skills so why isn't it working?

If sales are down and you have a well-trained sales department, throwing more sales training seems wasteful. They have already been trained and were doing well up to now. Something else is going on. Sales managers, look past the numbers and see what's really going on. Maybe this recession has your sales team scared. Scared sales people do NOT perform well. Address the root-cause, not the symptom.

You can't expect brain-based training (courses and trainers who only know how to appeal to the brain), you have to get past the brain to that place where all of the reasons, excuses and justifiers for not wanting to be better are: attitude. "How to" is great if you have addressed the "why" people do the the things they do. Without the "why" (the underlying attitudes), your training will fall flat and end up in a pile of mediocrity - just like every other organization before you.

When you read the testimonials from trainers and speakers, read them. If they have a lot of "You were great" testimonials, then they will deliver a temporary motivational high. What you want to look for in testimonials is how an organization is different/better after training. Or better yet, an evaluation NOT filled out in the session - but filled out 3 months after.

Speakers/trainers take the stage for one of three reasons:
1) for the applause (ego stroke)
2) catharsis (working out their own problems using your group as therapy)
3) to make a difference regardless of applause or evaluation scores

Most trainers/speakers (80%) could fit easily into the first two choices. Only 20% actually do what they do to make a difference and without need to manipulate your people into getting high evaluation scores and standing ovations. (Any speaker/trainer who quotes evaluation scores needs to be liked. Attendees rarely score a trainer low who they like.)

If you want lasting results, you want training that makes your people a bit uncomfortable, makes them squirm and makes them voluntarily want to have better than mediocre results. Address the root-cause, not the symptom. But, if your people just want to have fun, hire a clown but don't call it training.

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Psych Minors and Leadership

Years ago I enrolled in a college Psychology course in the hopes of getting a little bit more information on how the brain processes information. I had no intention of becoming a Psychologist. I just wanted the introductory course information on the mechanics of the brain.

While attending the course, there was a great notion passed around: there is nothing scarier than a Psych minor. Yep. Bang on. Being lumped in with a bunch of other first year Psych students made for some interesting discussions: especially from those who, in their first year, already fancied themselves a Psychologist. Nothing scarier than a Psych minor - except maybe a weekend Leadership grad.

Companies who send their middle managers off to weekend leadership courses need to be open and transparent about why they are sending a middle manager to the course. Is it because you think that a particular middle manager lacks some basic people skills and could use some of the personal development skills found in the course? Or are you actually sending your middle manager to leadership school because you believe that either he or she has the potential to do great things with themselves, to be a great leader of others and potentially achieve top spot in senior management?

No really. Be honest. Tell the truth.

Because if you let a middle manager believe that the reason they are going to leadership school is because they have a shot at becoming CEO one day, then that middle manager could return to work Monday morning and with an ego trip as big as the second coming of the messiah. You will have created the perfect recipe for a staff revolt - putting further distance between management and employee.

Here's why. Just like the notion that there is nothing scarier than a Psych minor, the same is true about many first-time leadership-course grads. If you are not clear why you wish someone to attend the course, they may perceive themselves to be higher up the food chain than they actually are - which means they return full of self-importance. Because that is how they would have attended the course, what they got out of it may not be what you wanted them to learn. They might be thinking themselves a future senior manager. You might be seeing them as a last chance to improve some basic skills or be fired. So be honest.  

If you don't think that your middle manager has some basic people skills then don't send them to leadership school to get it. If you do, make sure you are completely forthright in discussing why they are going: to get some basic people skills to be a better person - not because they are being considered for promotion.

Better yet, consider sending your people who lack basic people skills to a personal development course. Save leadership for those who would one day lead. But remember, you don't become a leader overnight in exchange for money no matter what the course-offering claim might be. That leadership course is simply a starting point to a life-long commitment to self-improvement. If you think you can buy your way into leadership then you, after three whole days, still don't understand the Attitude of Leadership - and you wasted your money.

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Connectedness Attitude And The Environment

I'm as environmentally conscious as the next guy. Uh no, let me take that back. Most people are so average that they don't think about the environment until someone tells them to think about it. So no, I guess not. I am not like the next guy. I think for myself which leads me to my thought here today: why would an organization launch an environmental initiative when their corporate culture is stagnating, their mediocre service sucks and their apathetic staff turnover rate is high?

I mean, before you clean up an ocean, wouldn't you want to first clean the beach?

Organizations are focusing on environmental policies and bringing eco-speakers into their organizations. Now, I don't have a problem with protecting the environment. In fact, I applaud it. But if you are going to tackle the environment, shouldn't you make sure you've cleaned up your environment first; your work environment - your corporate culture?

Aren't there a whole lot of more important issues that need addressing during an economic downturn? Have your people been reassured about their future? Have you halted the waning morale eroding your corporate culture? How about stopping your high-turnover or helping management find a direction? What about your incredibly ordinary customer service? Shouldn't you be developing a sense of greatness that changes people's lives (both your employees and your customers) before you attempt to change the world?

Come on, focus on the crucial things first: making sure there are jobs to go to tomorrow so that you are able to lend a hand to the environment. Make sure you are operating from a position of strength with your eco-program so that you don't have to slash the eco-program budget later because you were focused on the wrong things for survival.

This could end up as a colossal resource waster: trying to pursue an eco-friendly direction for a company with a bad attitude - people who bring plastic water bottles to work each day and still toss them out instead of recycling but don't care that they do it. You've got to change the unworkable attitudes inside the building before you can convert them to eco-evangelists. Don't get ahead of yourself. Make your people "service evangelists" first. Clean up problem areas before you create new ones. Fix the attitudes that will undermine your eco-program before you try to establish an environmental Attitude of Connectedness.

I agree all should be on-board the environmental bandwagon. But if your organization is achieving mediocre results, shouldn't your focus be on becoming an organization of greatness first - an organization whose example others will follow? Face it, if the culture stinks, you'll end up with an eco-program of mediocre results too.

Launching an eco-program while your people fear for their future makes you look completely out of touch with what your people want and need. That's not a message you want to send if you want to attract and keep good people, increase your customer base and become an organization of greatness.

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Think For Yourself

Soloman Asch, a Polish-born social psychologist, was one of the first to show that people blindly follow others in order to fit in. In fact, the findings from this experiement from the 1950's would probably be even worse today.

Asch chose some 123 unwitting test subjects to, one at a time, sit amongst 8-10 other so-called "test subjects." The 8-10 other were not actually test subjects. They were "plants," planted into the experiment with full knowledge of the details.

Each test subject was shown these test cards below and each was asked to identify the line that looked closest to the Reference line and to voice their choice out loud. The actual test subject would voice his or her choice last.

The 8-10 plants all gave a wrong answer forcing the test subject to either go along with the majority or stick to his or her guns and voice what he or she thought was the right answer. 75% of the test subjects gave into peer pressure and knowingly gave a wrong answer. When asked to explain why they chose the wrong answer, the subjects blamed their poor vision or said, "There were so many against me that I thought I must be wrong."

You know the right thing to do at work. You know how to treat a customer with respect. You know how to show up on time and do your real work during the day. You know how to not take advantage of your employer by checking out early or surfing the Net because you're bored. You know that the customer is the lifeblood of your organization. You know that stealing paper and paper clips is still theft. You know that talking about co-workers behind their backs is petty and mean. You know that whining and complaining about the job affects your co-worker's productivity.

So when you see your co-workers doing the opposite of what you know to be right, how come you sit back and say nothing? Because you are part of the 75%. You will give up what you know to be right so that people will like you. You don't want to cause problems for your co-workers even when they are blatantly doing the wrong thing, treating customers with disrespect, stealing office supplies or backstabbing.

Grow a spine. If you don't speak up you then you, by default, give your blessing to this kind of behaviour. Not speaking up only fosters more of this behaviour. And if you're worried about someone losing their job because you said something, then let me ask you this: are you OK with working with morally bankrupt, disrespectful, backstabbing thieves?

Where's your Attitude of Leadership? Think for yourself. Set a standard. If you don't stand for something you will fall for anything.
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A Thanksgiving Attitude of Gratitude

This is the Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. I'm not sure why Canadians celebrate 6 weeks earlier than the US (actually, the first celebration of Thanksgiving was actually celebrated in Canada in 1578...43 years before the pilgrims arrived in Plymouth). Perhaps the pilgrims hung out here for our Thanksgiving and then spent some time devising a plan for what theirs would look like when they landed (could have happened.) Maybe they took a little sabbatical in Canada after the arduous journey across the Atlantic - you know, kind of a long, long-weekend to get rested up before they made history just south of Boston. Anyway, this is the weekend that Canadians give thanks.

You don't need to actually have a special day to give thanks. You are allowed to be thankful all of the time. Thanksgiving day is simply to remind you of what you should be doing the other 364 days of the year - being thankful for what you've got.

This year, during the toasts at the dinner table, more people will probably be giving thanks for having a job. There will also be a higher number of people who are giving thanks for their families, their health and their roof over their heads despite being jobless. I guess as Canadians, we could be thankful for the how quickly the economy has turned around. We are one of the first G8 countries to emerge from recession. We still have a ways to go but we are on our way. Things will be better soon.

An Attitude of Gratitude is needed to weather the tough economic storms. Finding your internal gratitude for all of the things that life throws at you not only makes you stronger, but actually increases your chances of success.

• Gratitude helps you attract more opportunity and better relationships.
• Gratitude generates far more success than does a sense of entitlement.
• Gratitude allows people to sleep better at night with less worry.
• Gratitude makes people happier, less stressed and overall better workers.
• And finally, people who possess an Attitude of Gratitude are chosen as leaders, are promoted more and are chosen for job positions more often than those who choose not to show their gratitude.

If ever there was a case to be made to give thanks for whatever it is life has handed you so far, that last point is the one that matters. Give thanks for all of it.
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Passion Is Useless On The Job

You don't need passion to be good at what you do. Believing that you need to be passionate is a load of rubbish. That's old-school thinking. It may have once been a commonly held belief but it doesn't hold water anymore.

Your level of focus and engagement on the job has nothing to do with your passion for the work. And your passion for the work should not be the lone factor in determining your ability to do the work. You can be passionate about something and totally suck at doing it. Should that take away your passion? No. But you need skills and ability before you are going to be able to do the job well. Passion without ability is dangerous. Therefore, passion really is useless and means nothing when it comes to the performance of your duties.

In fact, I might be passionate about basketball, but come on, at 5' 6" I suck at the game. I might not be passionate about cooking but I could have become a chef - I'm that good at it. I like to cook but I wouldn't say I'm passionate about it. For me, cooking is more of a relaxation exercise and a creative expression. It's my right-brain release. It's not my passion. I can enjoy it just as much when someone else cooks too.

Passion has nothing to do with your ability to be the best. If you have passion, well, good for you. But it's not necessary to do the job. You don't even have to like what you do to be exceptional at it. The attitude toward your work ethic is MORE important in developing excellence than is your passion. Your attitude toward doing the job with greatness has nothing to do with passion.

Anyone who says you have to be passionate in order to be the best is probably an old-school motivational speaker whose belt and shoes still match. What was believed 20 years ago doesn't work today.

Today, your attitude toward your results is what matters. You can like the work, be exceptional at the work, be the best at your work without being passionate about it. You simply have to be focused and engaged - not passionate.

I, instead, would counsel organizations to hire someone who is passionate about their spouse and who is also exceptionally skilled at their job. Take that passion home and use it on your spouse. People in strong relationships perform better at work anyway. People in rocky relationships are more likely to be distracted. When there's balance in life, people tend to make better decisions and get better results.

Focus, engagement and attitude - for the job. Passion - for the bedroom.
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Take Your Seat At The "Big" Table

This weekend marks Thanksgiving in Canada. Apparently, we Canadians say "Thank you" first ... just in case it's a competition.

I remember being a kid at Thanksgiving and sharing the fold-out card table with the other kids while the grown-ups sat at the big table for turkey dinner. I remember the first time I got my chance to take MY seat at the big table and what a great feeling it was to be recognized as a grown-up. But I had to ensure I conducted myself as an adult for fear of losing my place at the big table.

At your job, do you sit at the big table or the fold-out card table? Simple question. Profound answer. Are you in the big strategy meetings or just the social planning (play) meetings? I think it's incumbent upon every single employee to shoot for sitting at the big table. I think that by your employ, you are required to earn your place at the big table.

You are not just an employee. Likely, you are a customer as well, or your family members or neighbors are customers. You have a certain influence that they, outside of the company, do not have. This is especially true of people who work for phone companies, utilities, grocery stores, banks, government, oil companies or any company or organization whose products or services you purchase.

It could be argued that if you left the organization tomorrow, you would probably still be a customer - so technically you are a customer first and an employee second. So take your place at the big table and advocate on behalf of your fellow customers. Force those who have also seated themselves around the table to see that they too are customers first and employees second.

Stop the me-me-me mentality of cutting services to make bigger and more obscene profits at the expense of your revenue stream (your customers). Explain to your co-workers that when you focus on customer satisfaction levels first, your quarterly financial statements improve.

An Attitude of Service must prevail. An Instigational® Attitude will start the discussion. An Attitude of Gratitude will cause you to be thankful for not only your customers continuing to do business with you but your ability to take your seat at the table of influence and do something great on behalf of your customers.

You, by your employ, have an influence within your organization that those outside of the organization do not have. Don't squander your opportunity. Force your organization to rise above mediocrity and into greatness. Greatness, after all, is just one step beyond mediocrity. All it takes is one idea or suggestion to rise above the other ordinary, boring organizations who wallow in their mediocrity. You can do something great here.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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How To Be A "Great" Customer

My car is in the shop. The garage promised it would take just one full day. So, when the dealership garage called just after lunch asking to keep the car a second day, I asked why?

"One technician is off sick today so we're a little backed up," they offered.

So now their problem has become my problem. I'm sure that this is not the first time a technician has ever been sick. Does your business grind to a screeching halt because one person called in sick? Wouldn't you have a backup plan? Wouldn't you do your best to keep your promise to your customers without excuses?

I scheduled my appointments around my car being out of commission for one day, not two. That means that if I leave my car with them for another day, I have to reschedule all of my appointments. That means my business and several other businesses are affected by one guy calling in sick. Would you expect your customers to have to endure your internal staffing problems?

Why should it be the customer's job to solve the garage's problem? It's real easy for the garage if the customer is willing to lower their standard of service expectation and simply lay down and take whatever they give you. But that would make you a lousy customer. A "great" customer is not a pushover when it comes to service. A "pushover" customer does not inspire business to get better. It creates an environment where service actually gets worse. A "great" customer, on the other hand, is the customer that challenges business to get better at delivering service. So, here's how you become a "great" customer: you say no. You refuse to accept mediocrity and challenge it. You simply force them to be better.

"Great" customers (customers of greatness) don't let mediocrity reign supreme. Great customers set a standard and expect the people they deal with to rise to it. Great customers make businesses keep their promises and their word. And if those same businesses try to slide, great customers will make them pay. 

I suggested a rental car. They hummed and hawed and reluctantly agreed. Had they been the first to offer a rental car I would have been over the moon with a excitement and would have professed my undying gratitude for a "wow" service experience. But, sadly, that's not how it went. 

An Attitude of Service isn't just for business. Every customer should have one too. Become a "great" customer. Stop being a pushover. Don't lie down and just take whatever they hand you. Stand up and ask for what you want. The answer is always "no" to the questions you never ask and the standards you never set. When it starts costing businesses money because they don't keep their promises, then and only then will service start to improve.

It's easy to complain about how bad service is. But what are you doing to help improve it?

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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Mediocre Wanna-be Experts Can Do Damage

This question showed up on one of the networking boards from a "professional" speaker: "I've been asked to write an article on Cultural Competency as it relates to one's speaking skills. Can anyone help me define this term more clearly?"

Did someone just admit that they have no clue about the subject matter on which they are writing a contracted article? Will this article appear in a publication in which the writer will be seen as an authority on the subject? Will there be a disclaimer at the top of the page which reads: The author of this article is not an authority on the subject of Cultural Competency and, in fact, had no prior knowledge of the subject prior to this article. Please read this article for your amusement only as the author writes it from neither a depth of knowledge or a depth of experience on the subject? No it won't.


Some unsuspecting reader will probably ask the author to facilitate a workshop on the subject - a subject the author has neither knowledge nor experience in - just because they wrote an article. Asking a (un)professional speaker to speak on a subject not within his or her realm of expertise is like asking a car salesman to sell yellow-cake uranium to a foreign country. But sales is sales right? How about selling a photocopier to a person who wants to buy a postage machine? Both make imprints on paper - close enough.

Unfortunately, many (un)professional speakers will take the work and the money and they will be, at the very best, incredibly mediocre. At the very worst, they may actually do damage to your organization.

You may think that speaking is speaking right? Change that attitude. Think of it as professional training where people's minds, hearts and livelihood depend on the person at the front of the room speaking from either a depth of knowledge or a depth of experience.

Change your attitude on professional speakers being experts in everything. They are not. Do not allow these amateurs to mess with your people's minds. If the speaker you're looking at has more than 3 different areas they claim to be an "expert" in, keep searching. If you're expecting to make your organization better, get a real expert. Pay the money and do it right. Don't "cheap out" when it comes to your people. You can't afford it.

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Attitude of Soliciting Advice, Expertise and Wisdom

Once upon a time, we asked our questions of people with experience and we called them "mentors" or "advisers." Either way, we looked up to them. They were hard to find because they didn't advertise their advice for a fee. You had to know someone who knew someone and had to make an appointment to get an hour or so - which was as valuable as any treasure. Wisdom was (and still is) rare.

Today though, coaching schools are turning out coaches who have no experience in the areas they claim to have expertise. Not all are like this but there are many. Here are just a few examples:

• There are divorced relationship coaches.
• There are broke financial coaches.
• There are wellness coaches who smoke.
• There are leadership coaches who have never led anything.
• There are management coaches who have never managed.
• There are sales coaches who were mediocre sales performers at best.
• There are business coaches who have never owned a business.
• There are life coaches who are 24 years old.

Huh?

But then there are coaches who ARE experts in their areas of expertise. There are people who have done it. These are the people/coaches/mentors we should be asking for advice and willingly paying for.

The experience and expertise (wisdom) in some heads is worth paying for. Others, not so much.

Wisdom over schooling always. Choose wisely. 
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The Ethical Attitude of Consulting

Do you know the difference between "ethics" and "work-ethic?" I'm sure that in your head you know the difference but probably a little harder to put into words. So let me help you. Simply put, "ethics" are the internal gauge of what makes something right or wrong for a person. "Work-ethic" is the level of intensity that someone has for their job or whatever task they might be working on. That's a simplification but apt.

So, if someone were to solicit advice to help them improve work-ethic, would you be likely to offer some long diatribe on "ethics" in the workplace or would you offer some solutions to perhaps help make people more engaged in their work?

A question was asked on the LinkedIn business networking site recently that addressed "work-ethic." A Leadership Development Consultant, a Management Consultant, a Director of Franchise Sales and others didn't pay attention and gave long answers about how important "ethics" are in the workplace while offering not one word that addressed the question. The Consultants got it wrong: one who addresses "Leadership" and the other "Management."

Consultants are contracted by companies to help better their workplaces and are paid handsome funds to improve them. But, you can't help if you don't stop talking long enough to listen to the question. (Even after two other members offered clarification on the question - "work-ethic" not "ethics" - people still answered it wrong.)

They were sloppy. They gave opinion without reading the question. They assumed. Now, they look like an opinionated, loud-talking, look-how-smart-I-am, smarmy amateurs. And they did it in front of millions of readers.

There are more people talking than there are listening. You know that. You probably work with some. People don't think before they go off half-cocked, shooting off their mouths. Some of them call themselves Consultants and are too quick to offer answers to questions that they themselves don't fully understand.

People who willingly take on contracts that they are clearly underskilled for may have a good work-ethic but not good "ethics." If it's not your area of expertise, you can't offer expertise - just mediocrity. If it's not your area of expertise then, before you do damage to an organization, do the "ethical" thing: pass.

Oh, and try to understand the question before you start talking. You look much smarter when you do. Details.
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Support, Follow-Up and Service Attitude

51% of consumers choose the companies they will do long-term business with by "Attitude" factors: approachability of staff, friendliness, exchange and return policies, after-sale service, support and troubleshooting and how easy it is to talk to someone. A smaller number, 44% of consumers choose "product knowledge" as their main purchasing decision (so why companies only train in product knowledge and not Attitude factors is a complete freakin' mystery to me).

More people are using the Internet to research before they buy. They get product information as well as reviews from users and customers before they set foot in a business. Yet businesses still train their people primarily in product knowledge. What they don't do (and they should) is train people how to smile and enjoy what they are doing. 

Customers are "revenue" and you, the employee, are "expense." Let's be clear on the respective roles in business.

So how is it possible that some supposedly-smart, well-educated and experienced VP of Customer Service could make the intentional decision to remove direct contact between their customers and the service/support centers. Who could possibly think that an automated phone tree that requires you to press six or seven menu choices, talk to a voice robot, submit a service ticket or wait on hold for a half-hour is GOOD service? How could anyone with that attitude even be remotely considered for promotion to VP of Customer Service? Whoever made that decision is an idiot.

You may have spent an extra two years of your life getting your MBA, Mr. VP, but your customers have spent a lifetime developing their expertise as a customer. Their experience trumps your schooling. Try not to be so book-smart and common-sense stupid. If your attitude in Customer Service isn't focused on your making it easier for your customers to interact with you then your attitude sucks.

This isn't the 2007 drunken orgy of economic delights anymore. People aren't throwing their money around madly buying anything they can get their hands on. This isn't a time when customer service doesn't matter anymore. This is 2009 and we're in an economic time when families and business alike have pushed their "reset' buttons. They want value. They want quality. They are willing to pay a fair price. And most of all, customers want service - to feel like their business means something.

The "un-service" attitude you took in 2005-2007 when you installed your automated responses, phone-tree-like systems and help-desk tickets need to be re-thought. Customers want to communicate with you and buy from you because you can be reached. Making it harder for them to do so will only annoy them.

In a time of social networking, when communication and connection is supposed to be improving, why is service getting worse? Why is it that a customer can communicate with a CEO on Twitter but can't get anyone in that same company's customer service department to return their calls? How can people speak directly with Presidents, public figures and celebrities around the world but have to wait on hold for a half-hour and before finally speaking to someone in a South Asian country, thousands of miles from the people who sold them the product? How is that possible? Because apparently the companies could care less. If they cared more, they would do more. But by their inaction, their corporate culture and corporate attitude says, "good enough." Their corporate attitude is that everyone has come to expect that level of service. They believe that they don't have to do any better than their mediocre competitors.

The truth is, the more barriers you put between you and your customers increases the likelihood that your customers will view your company unfavorably and at the first opportunity will take their business someplace else.

And stop lying to your customers. You know that framed Mission Statement in your lobby claiming you offer superior customer service? Well that's a lie. You force your customers to jump through hoops to be able to talk to a real person when they need help so you are NOT offering superior service. You offer mediocre service. Superior customer service is doing what the others refuse to do.

Shut down the voice mail trees, the too-many-choices phone menus, the 24-72 hour response to emails and half-hour wait times on hold. Instead, give your customers Live Chat online in real time, comprehensive FAQ sections on your web site that offer real solutions to everyday problems and give them "how-to" videos online so that they can use your product correctly and even fix it themselves if they have a problem. Most of all, let a real person answer the phone in a timely manner - even if they are in another country. Just give customers a human to talk to that your customers don't have to wait a half-hour or more to speak to.

You're not the only ones who are busy. Your customers are too. Customers vote with their dollars. Don't make them jump through hoops. That attitude sucks and, when the time comes that someone else is willing to treat your customers better than you, your customers will spank you financially for treating them like they don't matter to you.

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