Rick Lewis
Contributing Writer
Break A Rule
Surprisingly, most of what you need to know to operate a successful business revolves around people truths, not business truths. The truth about people is that we’ve all been trained to follow some unconscious social rules that cause us to fall far short of our personal, professional, or organizational potential. If you can break these hidden cultural rules consistently, you’ll achieve a high level of customer and employee engagement, and in turn strengthen the very foundations of your business.
Here are 7 Rules we are unconsciously trained to follow and that your customers and employees want you to break.
Breaking the Rule – Pretend You Don’t Matter
Before you leave for work you’ve already checked your voicemail, email, social media channels, the traffic report, world news, local news, and the weather report. Our obsession with gathering information isn’t all that terrible, except that underlying our external search for data is a whole literal body of data that we miss and that’s most important of all: our own instincts and the natural intelligence of our own bodies. From the tension in your chest, the knot in your stomach, and the lump in your throat—to the warmth in your heart, the tears in your eyes, and the bounce in your step. The body knows when to go back and talk to a customer, when to confront a supplier or fellow tradesman, when to take some time with a staff member who is feeling down, when to leave a note or give a kind word, when to clean up extra well or make a timely exit. The willingness to stay in contact with the information that is nearest and most accessible to us takes practice because our cultural training leads us away from making time for, listening to, trusting, and acting on this source of information—you!
Breaking the Rule – Be Normal
Simply stated, we’re feeling things all the time. An awareness of our feeling reality, the ability to admit it to ourselves, and to then communicate it effectively and appropriately to others is essential to life success. We’d all say we are proponents of emotional intelligence, yet what we don’t necessarily see are all the ways we’re conditioned to express ourselves that allow us to fit in, to conform, and to promote social safety over authentic communication and expression. Emotional intelligence requires breaking some old, deep habits. Your customers and employees want authenticity more than anything else. Your customers want to talk to and give their business to another human being they can relate to and connect with in an authentic manner.
Breaking the Rule – Avoid Mistakes
We all know that to learn we must try new things. Our kids are great at this, yet as we age, we tend more and more toward the tried and true and venture less and less toward experimentation, discovery, and reasonable risk. Curiosity and experimentation are muscles we have to keep exercising or we lose the ability to innovate. Customers love it when we get creative to find solutions to their unique problems, concerns, and requests. Employees love being empowered to find such solutions and to provide them.
Breaking the Rule – Be Popular
We want our business to be popular with our customers, of course, and so we work to give them what they want. Yet, if in the process of providing the services and products we think others will buy we lose the vision of what we’re passionate about offering, a disconnect ensues that can set up an insurmountable obstacle to long-term success. The most successful businesses find ways to serve the vision of what the organization wants to give while at the same time remaining deeply connected to what its customers want to receive. You’ll earn customer and employee loyalty when you’re standing for your vision over and above just trying to make a buck.
Breaking the Rule – Stay Comfortable
When we actually move, get up and do something, sweat, and make any kind of physical effort on behalf of our vision, a customer, or an employee, we enroll, engage, and inspire. If you’re on a customer service call and you ask, “Can you hold that thought while I get a pen so I can write your comment down?” you communicate a willingness to act that immediately impacts the way your customer feels. Whenever we hear big talk coming from ourselves or others, we can ask, “What are the small actions that convey commitment, relationship, and goodwill?”
Breaking the Rule – Be Independent
It’s the classic small-business owner challenge and dilemma. You’re good at doing stuff and making things happen. What we have to get better at, and continue to improve, is our ability to empower others so they want and are able to do as good a job as we could do. Seeing the hidden potential in others and then nurturing that potential is a leadership art and an empowered staff is the foundation of an exceptional team.
Breaking the Rule – Stay in Control
How often do we stop and ask ourselves the questions, “What don’t I know?” “What could be next that I’m not looking at?” “What is one thing I’ve been ignoring?” As business owners, we’re compelled to focus on our expertise, our knowledge, certainties and our clarity about the way things need to be done. Without question, it is part of our leadership obligation to model such confidence. And yet, without giving ourselves permission to not know, to wonder what could be different, what could be next, or even what the universe is trying to tell us, we can fall into a trap of control that compromises our agility, responsiveness, and evolution as a business. Our employees and our customers are counting on us to delight them, surprise them, and lead the way into an improved future.
In the next issue of ShuBee the Buzz I’ll talk more specifically about how you can practice breaking each of these rules using specific actions of Intelligent MisbehaviorTM. If you just can’t wait to find out what those are, please visit www.breakarule.com, where you can subscribe to our updates.
Rick Lewis is a corporate meeting presenter, trainer, author, and self-proclaimed “professional misbehaver.” He travels extensively throughout North America presenting to Fortune 500 organizations on the topic of leadership, employee and customer engagement, and the development of corporate culture. Rick and his staff offer both live workshops and online training to teach Intelligent MisbehaviorTM to business owners, executives and their staffs. Rick can be reached through his website at www.breakarule.com.