The Stuff No One Talks About

This week’s topic is “ Teamwork ”. Wow! Imagine that, another topic I’m totally passionate about 😊 . This one starts early for me as I got into team sports starting in 3 rd grade. Not unusual these days, but back then to get into something like football was a big commitment from your parents. There was equipment to purchase and getting to/from practice. As a kid, I road my bike everywhere around town, but not at 8 years old. That freedom didn’t come until 11-12 timeframe. That meant my dad would take me to practice and home again. The team I was involved with started practicing together a year before we were old enough to join the league. The coaches were all about teaching form and technique to us. We did drills for what seemed like hours each practice. They did a great job teaching us the basics of the game and how to win at each position. We learned plays and had playbooks we took home to study. It was a phenomenal way to get early learning on preparation, teamwork and winning. In...

This week’s topic is “ Listening ”. Now I’m not talking about how people learn (as depicted in the chart below). I’m talking about communication and listening to people. A topic that almost everyone thinks they are good at (96% according to surveys). However, many issues in life are related to communication – either not communicating thoughts well enough so someone can understand or not active listening to show that you do or do not understand. I’ve found there are some pretty common reasons why we don’t listen as good as we should. Among these are:   We’re moving too fast . We’re hearing or reading what’s being communicated, but we’re taking it at face value or not thinking about the full implications as we’re simply going too fast. We’re busy on so many things and it’s hard to get to everything. This leads to skimming and making assumptions or jumping to quick conclusions before hearing the whole story.   We’re multitasking / dist...

This week’s topic is “ Service ”. This is a passionate topic for me and Chris (my wife). We’ve always felt that great customer service is crucial to bringing customers back. Not surprising since Chris did run a Disney Store the last year+ of her retail career. You can imagine the training she went through (on-site at Disneyland in CA for multiple weeks) and the training and reinforcement she continually provided to her team.  Although they have “guests” and not “customers”. Words matter in setting a tone. It’s why I like to say we have clients.   To me, great customer service is providing the “ WOW factor ”. Whether this is an internal coworker, a partner, job candidate, or client. It doesn’t matter. Providing and continuing to improve upon world-class service should be part of our DNA. What does this mean to you? It’s a question I like to ask audiences all the time as it varies from person to person. However, you can usually see patterns that develop:   They c...