Posts

Posted on

Smooth Shave

For Christmas, our son received a single-blade razor subscription from his longtime girlfriend’s father. When he told me how much he liked it, I had a chuckle… reflecting back on watching my oldest brother – who was born in 1946 – shave some 50 years ago with a similar version Gillette abandoned for ever increasing multi-blades.

Kyle took the time one recent Saturday to send an email to the company, sharing his positive experience with their product. He also asked a couple questions about possible future innovations, one of which was: “When will you produce a smaller-sized shaving lotion that meets airline travel restrictions?” Within minutes a senior product leader responded with gratitude and addressed both of his inquiries.

Feedback is an overlooked and underappreciated gift. Whenever someone takes the time to provide it – whether affirmation of behaviors to be repeated or redirection on ones that need improving – the only thing to say in response is ‘thank you.’ It’s a numbers game: the more feedback you receive the better you become. So openly encourage it from your team.

Of course, you’ll make a great impression on the giver to check your emails on the weekend and reply right away.

Posted on

The Voices

A good friend of mine just finished writing his first book. Actually, he wrote most of it 20+ years ago for his doctoral dissertation; however, it took him until now to turn his ideas into 200 pages of bound print.

Anthony Rogers, PhD – working with Holly Davis – designed a model for skilled dialogue: whenever we engage with others there is an exchange of four possible voices: Authority, Transparency, Curiosity and Empathy.

Authority is about setting direction with the goal of creating alignment and action. It’s the voice where you show someone the way: “I expect…,” “We will…,” “Let’s go….”

Transparency involves revealing context and developing trust. It’s how you share your intent: “I think…,” “I feel…,” “I don’t know….”

Empathy helps clarify meaning and generates a connection with the other person. It lets him/her know you are listening to understand: “I hear that…,” “I imagine that…,” “I appreciate that….”

Curiosity leads to uncovering options and releasing creativity by exploring the other person’s view more deeply: “What’s going on?” “What’s on your mind?” “I wonder if…?”

Everyone has a dominant voice and at least one that is underutilized. My ‘power voice’ is transparency, followed closely by curiosity. On the flip side, I rarely lead with authority and seldom openly express empathy.

Understanding the four voices leads to better communication, especially when – with practice – you master the art of being intentional about the voice you are using at any given time. A good starting point is to think about your most and least used voices. What are yours?

Posted on

Terrific Attitudes

Part III of III –

It took me about 15 seconds of pondering to ask: “Would it be possible to refund the Office 365 charges, and I’ll buy it directly from Microsoft? That way we’ll figure out how to make it work without involving Go Daddy.” He said, yes, and the credit was immediately applied.

So back to Apple I went… and less than an hour later – for $100 per year – everything worked perfectly. Well, except for one small challenge. In the transition, somehow Kathy lost all of her saved emails. That wasn’t the most enjoyable news I ever delivered; however, she handled it well.

Through all the drama, I was amazed at the professionalism and courtesy of everyone who helped me. I spoke to at least eight different people and everyone was well-trained, polite and came across as truly wanting to resolve the issues.

When I reflected on this lengthy experience, I thought about those folks, based in the U.S., Ireland and India, spending eight hours every day dealing with frustrated customers… and how they treated me. That’s something I’ll remember the next time I have an issue with a company – or someone has an issue with me.

Empathy and patience are gifts to be shared.

Posted on

Time Wasters

Part II of III –

I called Go Daddy – waiting on hold for less than a minute. After asking a few questions and looking at our account, the customer service rep suggested upgrading our outdated POP email server to an Exchange one. He diligently walked me through setting everything up on our iMac, two iPhones and my iPad… and it all worked great. Only costing $155 for three years.

During our conversation I mentioned my next move was to add Office 365 from Microsoft. “I can do it for you right now, saving you $100 over three years,” he said. I always like a good deal, so I said yes. The process took about a half hour… and, after $190 more, I was off and running.

For our iMac, Kathy and I are both ‘Users’ – which means we log-in separately and the screen flips to our individual account. I proudly called Kathy in and showed her how much better Office 365 is than our old 2008 version. Then she went to her account… and discovered she could only Read documents, not Edit them.

I’ll speed through the story at this point to share the order and length of calls: 1) Go Daddy – 30 minutes with Microsoft Support on the line to determine everything should work fine; 2) Apple – two hours before deciding it’s an Office 365 issue; 3) Microsoft – one hour and 20 minutes, concluding since we purchased through Go Daddy, it was back to them to resolve; 4) Go Daddy – one hour to discover we needed to upgrade Kathy’s email to a higher level at an additional $10 per month.

Next: Finally… resolution.

Posted on

Techno Challenges

Part I of III –

When Kathy and I created our 2018 business plan a few months ago, we listed five key initiatives. One of them a much-needed enhancement of technology. Having an eight-year-old iMac with an operating system at least four generations behind, it was clear we needed to upgrade.

Since I know little about this, there were several articles to read and a couple YouTube videos to watch. The first thing I learned is it’s essential to clone our hard drive… just in case anything goes wrong during the transition. Thus, the first purchase was a Seagate Backup Plus Slim portable storage device from Amazon for about $80. Then I downloaded a free third-party cloning software and pushed Start.

The estimated time to clone our half-filled TB hard drive was nine hours. All went well for the first 235 GB, as I checked on progress every hour. Unfortunately, up popped an Error message with a note to contact Seagate. The good news is I was only on hold about two minutes. The bad news is they determined my new hard drive ‘failed out of the box’ and I would need to request a ‘return and replace’ through Amazon.

That was an easy process as I took the preprinted address labels to the UPS Store and purchased a padded envelope. Two days later a replacement drive arrived – and, after, upgrading to the $40 paid version of the cloning software, began the effort again. Ten hours later, I placed the clone safely in a desk drawer.

Amazingly, the upgrade to Apple’s High Sierra operating system was flawless – and free. After all these years, our computer was like new. Then three days later, I couldn’t send e-mail…

Next: The troubles begin.