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Five Steps to Create Customer Support to Match Your Hyper-Convenient Service
We have all come to rely on many new services which we find hyper-convenient. For example, we rely on: Video and audio recording and streaming services like TiVo, Roku, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, and Spotify. We find them hyper-convenient to watch and listen to what we want, when and where we want. Paying for parking with a…
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Creating the Best Solution Requires Both Seekers and Finders – Which Are You?
Finders don’t hunt for something, they try to figure out where it is and go there to find it. They narrow down the possibilities through careful analysis. Not surprisingly, they are good at finding things that are lost. They like mysteries and puzzles as long as they have answers. They employ the deductive reasoning of…
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Five Secrets to Getting the Credit You Deserve and the Appreciation You Want
1. Become an expert appreciator yourself. Give others the credit they deserve. Catch them doing even small things that help the team. If your appreciation is genuine and timely, it will increase the frequency of the “appreciated behaviors” and at the same time demonstrate “appreciating people” as an important skill in itself. Appreciating useful contributions…
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Top Ten Tip-Offs That Someone Is About to Cut Your Budget
Keeping with the spirit of the season (by which we mean the end of the fiscal year, not the holidays), here is a list of phrases you will want to watch out for as your organization starts talking about the budget for 2014. Any of these may mean someone is about to cut your budget.…
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Experiment This Week With the Power of an Observant Thank You.
Here in the US, it’s Thanksgiving this week as well at the beginning of Hanukkah. Many folks will take time off from work to be with family. So instead of my usual Thursday post on Strategies (th)at Work, I’m doing a special short post early this week about saying thank you. First, I want to…
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The Secret To Keeping Your Balance When Your Job Becomes A High-Wire Act
Do you feel like you are walking a tightrope at work? Maybe you have been promoted recently to a position of leadership and you are finding the politics even more complicated than you imagined. Or maybe you are finding it impossible to balance work and the rest of your life. Or maybe you are managing…
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No Teamwork? Or Is There Is No Work for Teams?
A common refrain in the business world is that “we need more teamwork.” I am not so sure. Sports analogies are probably the most common source of metaphors in the business language. Think about it: he struck out, do we have our bases covered, it’s a whole new ball game, that came out of left field, you’re…
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Touch the Rope
An occupational hazard of being a management and business coach used to be that I was asked to provide or participate in team building exercises with teams I was coaching. For a while, the fad was team building in the wilderness on a “ropes course” where the team would be confronted by various challenges. You’ve…