As I step up onto my soap box, disgusted with the way some folks are running their business, I look to the future of our world where we support the companies who are growing our community and we avoid like the plague businesses just out to make money.
I’ve never been to Mexico until two weeks ago. I noticed something peculiar about the restaurants we ate at. They always gave you something to start with. Be it bread, oil, and vinegar, or nachos and salsa or chips and guacamole. We rarely ate a meal where we we’re “given” something to start with. I’m a foody, a fatty at heart, I LOVE that stuff! Making people happy through food, I love it.
Even breakfast at our hotel they would give you toast to start. It was like every place knew how to treat people and they new how to make your experience just a little bit better. I don’t like great service, I LOVE great service!
Character is doing the right thing when nobody is looking. Character is about treating people like a friend of family even when they are a complete stranger. To me, few things in life are more important than building your own personal character.
10 years ago I was at my first conference (I attended 13) in University, it was at the DeGroote School of Business in Hamilton, Ontario. 100+ students were at a pub in Hamilton and they shut down the bar because the guest speaker was about to take the stage.
I was a second year University student, you don’t close the bar on a second year University student! I was raising my voice and being a jerk to the bartender when an angel appeared (well that’s an exaggeration but Cam gave me a beer). Cam Heaps was our guest speaker that night and I got to talk to him before he talked to the group. He was one of the original partners in Steam Whistle, he was down to earth and just a fun guy who you’d think came from Saskatchewan.
In his talk he made me standup and introduce myself to the audience and then we exchanged belt buckles for some odd reason. After the talk the group from Regina was talking to him and he offered to give a personal tour on Sunday if we were interested. We were very interested!
The tour was amazing, when you tour a brewery with an owner it has it’s perks. 😉 We received Steam Whistle clothing and some collectibles and beer to bring home of course. After the tour was over we still had time to kill before our cross Canada flight. He opened up his house to go hot-tubbing before our flight, we went, it was awesome, and I learned a very important lesson.
Cam did not know us and by all accounts we were nobody’s from a little ol’ place called Regina. I think Steam Whistle grew to be an international beer sensation because of their attitude towards people. They acted like a little guy while growing into being one of the big guys.
If you’re like me this is one of the worst phrases to hear in the English language. What they’re actually saying is “would you like me to tell you how I actually feel about you? And oh yeah, if it was good we would have already told you so it’s almost guaranteed to be negative.”
The extent of your management career will largely be based on the amount of feedback you’re willing to take.
I’ve said to Brandon many times that we will get as far as the feedback we’re willing to take.
I still love the Tim Sanders analogy of “how” to process feedback. He says it’s like eating an almond. Not all of the feedback is valuable, find the nut at the middle (the learning moment) and discard everything else. Rarely do we receive 100% true feedback.
1. If you currently think “my team loves me though, I don’t need their feedback to know that”. You need to ask for feedback soon, you’re worse off than you think. It’s always those managers who “think” their staff can give honest feedback but don’t. Instead there ends up being a revolving door for staff, lots of turnover and no long term employees.
2. It underhandedly shows your team that you care, that you aren’t a know-it-all, and that you’re not too egotistical to change. You don’t have to listen to everything you hear but you do have to make yourself available to hear people when they want to give some feedback. Listen to people shows you care, even if you know you aren’t getting the best feedback, listen, don’t talk, don’t interrupt, just listen. You’ll be amazed at what you find.
3. The teams that communicate up the hierarchy just as efficiently as down the hierarchy will be the most sought after and in turn the most effective.
If your team doesn’t have a feedback strategy soon, your competitors will. They’ll be able to turn on a dime, adjusting to feedback they’re receiving. Today it is relatively simple to setup a feedback strategy, 10 years ago a lot more difficult. 5 years from now it will be baked into the strategy of the high performing teams, and I’m sure it’ll get easier and easier to track, manage and act upon the information acquired.
We had this argument the other night.
My theory goes, at a gas station your job is very transactional. You want to pump gas, pay, and get the hell out of there as fast as possible. Making the working life of a gas station attendant one very lonely job where no one really wants to talk to you (not that it’s your fault).
At a fast food restaurant, McDonald’s till worker for argument sake, you have to interact with customers all day long. You can make people smile, make people laugh and also piss people off. But that’s a great lesson to learn at a young age, how to read and react to people.
It’s not just reading people and reacting to what they say and do, it’s being self-aware in those situations to know when to step out of what’s expected and do the unexpected. To provide a higher level of customer service is an incredibly valuable skill to learn. A skill that is highly underrated in our world.
It’s hard to over deliver at a gas station, unless you can pump the gas like 8 times as fast, then, ummm yup! You’re on to something big! How else could you over deliver at a gas station though? This is my justification that working at a service based job at a young age teaches you so much more than simple mathematics, punching buttons on a till and saying thank you, come again (not that there’s anything wrong with a friendly salutation).
Everyday we all have the chance to over deliver on something, to make someone smile, to make someone’s day. The easier your job allows you to help other people, the happier you’re going to be working for that company.
What do you think? What is a better job, working at a gas station or working at McDonald’s?
Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last from 99U on Vimeo.
I think Leaders Eat Last is one of the best books on leadership that has ever been written. Just the concept, putting others before yourself, is such a simple yet powerful principle to live by. Yet the majority of the worlds most inspiring leaders don’t see it as service, they see is as their destiny, they see it as what they were meant to do. Some people were meant to serve.
If you were born to lead that means you were born to serve others.
1. A core attitude change
You need a set of core values. A set of guiding principles you can fall back on when times get tough. Sometimes it’s just a phrase, usually the simpler the better. The more simple the new attitude is to take on, the better chance of by-in.
Without a new attitude (which starts at your core) you’ll never create the change you need to, to be a proactive leader in customer service. Austin Texas has one of the most vibrant business communities in the United States and some of the coolest nightlife I’ve ever experienced. When you talk to locals they always mention how Austin is much different than most of Texas cities. They have a different attitude. I’m not sure what they had first, the coolest marketing slogan for a city or the coolest city to create a marketing slogan for. Either way, they get it, and the entire city rally’s around keeping Austin weird.
On September 16, 2013 the wonderful staff at the Globe Theatre in Regina and I shared a laugh or three. It was a lot of fun. It was on the five keys to customer service in 2013 and beyond.
***Important*** On the slides that show a website, click the website in the slide, it links to the actual website.
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers get it. They’ve been around the business world long enough to know what’s important to business. I like their approach to the internet and social media. You can’t stop it so you may as well try to understand it better and ensure you’re as transparent as possible. Read more
The scene was a sultry June evening in Regina’s third favourite frozen yogurt (froyo, or “FROYO” to which my my phone has grown accustomed to autocorrecting it) shop. After making plans to bike to TCBY, which is short for The Country’s (self-proclaimed) Best Yogurt, I’d ditched the idea at the last minute in order to take my car and get there five minutes earlier to avoid the awkward the-entire-staff-hates-me-for-walking-in-right-at-close scenario.
Success. I arrived at exactly 10:50pm.