In today’s interpersonal world, extraordinary service and relationships are the keys to earning repeat business and attracting new customers. A dissatisfied customer may not only cost your business revenue, but also damage your reputation as well.
Here are some great reminders on how to keep your customers happy and coming back:
Keep your word. Your ability to deliver on your promises to a customer speaks highly to your character and credibility. This is something customers look for and appreciate.
Be honest. If you misrepresent yourself to a customer, your credibility will suffer. Create a reputation based on honesty and trust with customers.
Show up on time. Punctuality is a reflection of your organizational skills and dedication. Being late will reflect poorly on customers or potential clients. If you can’t be on time, be early.
Acknowledge your mistakes. Clients will generally be flexible and forgiving if you quickly acknowledge an error and work to fix it. Attempting to cover up a personal mistake will never work out in your favor. Also, don’t make excuses or blame others. Take responsibility and find a solution to make your customers happy.
Handle conflicts gracefully. If a client or employee tests your patience, criticizes or questions your authority, do not react with hostility. Keep you disposition under control and remain on topic – stick to facts.
Don’t burn bridges. Never respond emotionally or hostility if your business is threatened. Instead, remove yourself from the situation and return to the conversation when you are calm. You never know when you may need someone that will be hard to reach if you have burned bridges.
Ever feel overwhelmed with an overflowing inbox? Do you spend more time navigating a cluttered inbox than you should be? Have you ever considered that it may be YOUR fault? Don’t worry, there are some easy tips you can follow to take control of your inbox and no longer feel it is controlling you.
“Reply to All” does not apply to all situations. Be careful to use this feature only when it is absolutely necessary. Replying to all can create lengthy email chains that are not always needed. This can contribute to an overflowing inbox.
Make sure you address each question in an email reply. The way you respond to emails can also affect the size of your inbox. If you diligently respond to each question asked in an email, you prevent further emails asking the very same things.
Share your calendar! Sharing your calendar with your team is another effective way of communication and planning. By sharing your calendar, your team members are able to check your availability and use meeting requests instead of emails to plan meetings or conference calls. This feature removes these types of requests from your, already cluttered, inbox.
Set parameters with your team.By this simple task of designating tasks within your team, members will know whom to “cc” on which emails.
Have a good email signature. Your email signature is a very important feature. It should contain all of your contact information so no one will have to ask for you phone number, email, website, mailing address, etc. This information should be presented in a clear and concise way and be easy to copy/paste.
Use subject lines wisely. By using specific subject lines that directly reflect the content of your email, the recipient’s attention can be obtained sooner. This allows for a quick response to emails and helps when you are searching through your inbox for a particular set of information.
Many leaders come about the role and title by accident. Due to good technical skills, a great work ethic, seniority, or the unexpected exit of a former leader, a new leader is promoted. Without warning, and often without support or development, the new leader goes from “one of us” to “one of them.”….and oftentimes results in poor team dynamics.
It begins with you – take control of your path. Three steps to developing yourself, becoming the leader you want to be.
Step 1: Define your leadership.
Step 2: Make friends with reality.
Step 3: Build a plan to close the gap.
Step 1: Define your leadership
This first step is the fun part. Decide who you want to be as a leader. Here are seven (7) simple questions to help you start defining your new vision:
What are your top two or three values?
In order to lead by your stated values what is required of you?
What tough decisions might you have to make in order to set a good example?
How do you handle poor performance?
What do you do to manage your anger and frustration?
How do you speak?
How do you inspire others?
After you answer these questions on paper – You are the creator of this experience. There’s no one stopping you from developing a vision of who you want to be, how you want to be perceived, how you want to feel, and how you perform your role.
Step 2: Make friends with reality
Telling the truth is the difficult part. This step is second in the process for a reason. If you start with facing reality before you define your vision you may get discouraged. Telling yourself the truth about where you are takes courage, maturity, and a certain amount of character. As you look at what you want to create, where are in in comparison? Do you tend to allow bad behavior from your employees? Do you lose your temper? Do you make promises you can’t keep? Are you a poor planner? Now that you have completed step two, you probably have a big gap between where you are and where you want to be. In short, you have a lot of work to do.
Step 3: Build a plan to close the gap
As a leader you need to be a good planner. There’s no better way to test and train your planning abilities than to start with yourself. Your plan includes shoring up your weaknesses, developing new skills and building empowering habits. Start thinking more like an entrepreneur — hire your own coach or go to a conference.
Conclusion
It’s great when your company invests in your growth and development, but why wait or rely only on that avenue? You have choices because you are a creator. You were chosen to lead because of your character, your initiative, your work ethic or other wonderful qualities. Don’t let any company determine your worth or your ability to elevate your leadership—embrace an entrepreneurial mindset and commit to your own leadership journey. No matter how much you invest in yourself, that investment is never wasted, and always gives you a return on investment.
One of the most painful mistakes of leadership is choosing the wrong leaders. The difference between success and failure begins with choosing the right leaders. (And ejecting the wrong.)
It’s foolish to define leadership as getting things done. The focus of leadership is people. You earn leadership opportunities by getting things done. You become a leader when you get things done through others. When someone steps into leadership they leverage the talent of others:
How do they make people feel?
How do they maximize the skills and talents of others?
How are they instilling a sense of mission?
How are they developing others?
How are their values, not urgencies, guiding decisions?
10 Questions to Ask and Answer…
What is their definition of leadership?
How are they expressing curiosity?
Where do they fall on the scale of optimistic vs. pessimistic?
How are their values?
How do they appreciate the impact of their behaviors on others?
What makes you believe they can focus on “what” needs to be done without getting lost in “how” things get done?
How are they able to see the world through the lens of others?
How are they including others in decision-making?
How do they respond to failure or correction?
How do they respond to authority?
Bonus: Do they aspire to lead?
Exploring the answers to these questions, will provide you insight if you are choosing the right leader of people (and not a ‘boss’).
“What is your number one secret to productivity?” Kevin Kruse, NY Times Bestselling Author, Entrepreneur has asked this question of over 200 ultra-successful people, including 7 billionaires, 13 Olympians, and a host of accomplished entrepreneurs, yielding some fascinating suggestions. What follows are some favorites from Kevin’s findings.
They focus on minutes, not hours. Most people default to hour and half-hour blocks on their calendar; highly successful people know that there are 1,440 minutes in every day and that there is nothing more valuable than time.
They focus on only one thing. Ultra-productive people know what their “Most Important Task” is and work on it for one to two hours each morning, without interruptions. What task will have the biggest impact on reaching your goals.
They don’t use to-do lists. What task will have the biggest impact on reaching your goals? Instead schedule everything on your calendar and live by that calendar. It turns out that only 41% of items on to-do lists get done.
They delegate almost everything. Ultra-productive people don’t ask, “How can I do this task?” Instead, they ask, “How can this task get done?” They take the ‘I’ out of it as much as possible, eliminating the control issues, and they are not micro-managers.
They make it home for dinner. Intel’s Andy Grove, who said, “There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.” Highly successful people know what they value in life. Yes, work, also life outside of it.
They use a notebook. Richard Branson has said he wouldn’t have been able to build Virgin without a simple notebook – he takes it with him everywhere. Free your mind by writing everything down as the thoughts come to you.
They process e-mails only a few times a day. Schedule time to process emails quickly and efficiently, versus checking often throughout the day.
They touch things only once. How many times have you opened a piece of regular mail or even email —only to deal with it again later? Highly successful people try to “touch it once.”
They practice a consistent morning routine. Most of these highly-successful people nurtured their bodies with water, a healthy breakfast, and light exercise; they nurtured their minds with meditation or prayer, inspirational reading, or journaling.
Energy is everything. You can’t make more minutes in the day, but you can increase your energy to increase your attention, focus, and productivity. Food is viewed as fuel, sleep as recovery, and breaks as opportunities to recharge in order to get even more done.
You might not be an entrepreneur, an Olympian, or a billionaire, yet their secrets may help you to get more done in less time and help eliminate that feeling we can get of being overworked and overwhelmed. What do you do to stay productive?
Excerpt from Dr. Travis Bradberry, TalentSmart, April 2016
Certain aspects of thinking and behaving like a good leader can be tough for many leaders. The best leaders who grasp concepts like influence, vision, listening, and delegating with relative ease arrive there through hard work and practice and taking responsibility to own up to “our stuff” when “our stuff” is at fault. Remember the old saying, “for every finger you point, there’s three pointing back at you”?
How a leader thinks and acts can no doubt impact a team for better or worse. Better = high-functioning leadership fostered by mutual trust and accountability. Worse = dysfunctional leadership hampered by poor decision making and weak social/emotional intelligence.
How to think and act as a leader is as much about what you should do, as much as what you should not do. Our goal is intentional leadership – Being conscious and intentional about how you lead others and yourself.
These 10 common thought patterns hold leaders back, destroy their self-esteem, and damage relationships in the workplace. Do you see yourself? Being aware is the first step to change.
Being very…
Extreme – seeing things in black and white, and blowing things out of proportion.
Broad – generalizing from a specific; labeling people rather than their behaviors.
Negative – seeing the glass as half empty and dwelling on the worst possible outcome.
Demanding – wanting things their way and having expectations that cloud a sense of reality.
Judgmental – condemning others for their shortcomings and being unable to forgive.
Obsessed – getting on a track of being unable to budge or view things differently.
Confused – having pictures in their heads that do not match the “real world”; feeling that they don’t get what they think they’re “supposed to” get.
Intolerant – having a need to have things the way they “should be”; finding it difficult to have patience and tolerance for differences that don’t fit their needs and expectations.
Perfectionist – having a need to be “right” and not make mistakes.
“Shoulding” on Self and Others – placing expectations of how one “should” be, thereby limiting their ability to accept self and others without judgment, leading to negativity and tendency to criticize.
Which of the above resonates with you as a leader? What may be the hardest distorted thinking pattern to overcome? Or even accept that it’s dysfunctional? Which may be the easiest to overcome? We would love to hear from you – aha@ahaleadership.com
Reference: Article Lead Change Group, March 18, 2016
Many leaders come about the role and title by accident. Due to good technical skills, a great work ethic, seniority, or the unexpected exit of a former leader, a new leader is promoted. Without warning, and often without support or development, the new leader goes from “one of us” to “one of them.”….and oftentimes results in poor team dynamics.