Category Archives: Helpful Hints

June 23, 2016 · 10:44 am

Out Of Your Head

I’ve come to the conclusion that many, if not most, of our ills both in business and society are caused by not listening. It’s not that we’re deaf nor that we’re often failing to pay attention. The issue is that as we “listen” we’re focusing on our own thoughts and how we’re going to respond or react rather than on what it is the speaker is saying. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, to give fair consideration to the other speaker’s concerns.

This isn’t a brand new thought, I know. Maybe you’ve heard the term “emphatic listening.” Maybe you’ve heard it labeled “empathetic listening.” This is how Stephen Covey defined it:

When I say empathic listening, I mean listening with intent to understand. I mean seeking first to understand, to really understand. It’s an entirely different paradigm. Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel.

In other words, you need to get out of your head and into theirs.  You need to be quiet and listen.  REALLY listen. Don’t fidget with your phone nor check your computer screen. Give them your undivided attention and don’t judge as they are speaking. It’s also something that is way better if you’re face to face with them so you can read their body language. You ought not to respond immediately to whatever they’re saying as you THEN form your thoughts.  When you do, it’s often helpful to confirm that you’ve really heard them by playing back what they’ve said.

I can tell you from having tried to do this that many people are often quite rattled by it.  Most of us aren’t used to having someone get out of their own heads and listen. I think you’ll be surprised how the nature of conversations change as they become true dialogs.  Let me know, won’t you? I’m listening.

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June 17, 2016 · 11:58 am

Just Nice Isn’t

Foodie Friday, and this week I learned something from going to lunch. I’ve written any number of times about how critical customer service is, both in the food business and everywhere else. I found out from my dining experience this week that there is a lot more to the equation. Let me explain.

I was out for a business lunch. We were seated in a section that wasn’t particularly busy and greeted by our server. Let’s call him Jim. He was as pleasant as could be. He asked about our drink preferences and said he’d be right back with the drinks as well as some water. When he came back 10 minutes later with our two glasses of iced tea, I thought maybe he’d had to serve another table. No water either, but not a big deal. He also left without taking our food order.

Upon his return, he apologized when he saw that he hadn’t delivered the water. He ran to get it. He must have run a 3K because it took another 10 minutes. Jim was still incredibly nice as he took our food order – charming, actually – but I was beginning to realize that his demeanor was much better than his competence. Other tables that had been seated after us we receiving food as we were still ordering.

The rest of the meal went on like this. Smilin’ Jim would interact with us every so often and we would have to wait. The customer service was abysmal, frankly, although it was hard to get really angry about it. That’s the lesson I learned.

Nice isn’t enough. Jim was about as good as it gets with respect to customer interaction but he was a total failure when it came to customer service. It’s not enough to train the people who service our customers to be nice. We must train them to produce results and those results must be customer focused. If I go back to this place (the food was actually quite good once it arrived) I’ll be sure that Jim smiles on someone else.  Service with a smile is great, but remember that “service” comes first in that sentence!

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June 15, 2016 · 11:33 am

You’re Missing 93%

One of the things I find to be both a blessing and a curse in our modern business world is email. As someone who can remember the days of typing (On a typewriter! With carbon paper for copies!) business correspondence and sticking it in an envelope prior to a days-long wait for a response, email’s immediacy is a blessing. Things happen! Stuff gets done! That’s great, but there are a few downsides and they’re worth thinking about.

First, because email is so fast, we tend to send missives off rather quickly. One thing the slow pace of written correspondence used to force was a thorough consideration of each thing we sent. Letters took time to craft and revisions took even longer because until the widespread use of the word processor one had to retype the entire document. Think about what a business partner would think if you were sending snail mail as you do email. Would you send a letter that simply said “OK” or “thanks” or any of the silly little emails we send? Would you send four notes a day, all within an hour of one another? Probably not.

The reality is that you’d probably not send a note at all. You’d pick up the telephone or, if it’s a work colleague, walk down the hall to see them. That’s the real downside of email, and I think it’s a huge problem. Why? I’ll let Psychology Today answer:

If there were ever numbers associated with body language and nonverbal communication, 55, 38, and 7 would be it. People often refer to these numbers as the standard for understanding nonverbal communication and expressing its importance- specifically over the words being spoken…The numbers represent the percentages of importance of varying communication channels have with the belief that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken.

In other words, by using email as our primary form of interaction – with coworkers, with partners, with customers, or with vendors – we’re missing 93% of what they’re saying because they’re saying it either with body language or with their tone of voice.  The telephone helps capture the latter but we’re still missing more than half.

I realize that it’s not always practical to go see someone and you also want many communications to be in writing.  But in addition to the blessing (??) of email, we also have the gift of many video chatting platforms.  Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, and others make interacting with someone a near in-person experience.  More importantly, they can help assure that you’re “hearing” them because you can see all the non-verbal nuances that are NEVER available in email. Make sense?

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