gilder group international

Remember a Name: Make Someone’s Day!

By GilderGroupInternational Leave a Comment

By Guest Blog Author, David Reed

I was just watching one of my favorite movies, Pretty Woman. (Don’t laugh) There are a couple of scenes that I wanted to reflect on for a minute. Early in the movie, the hotel manager is finishing a conversation with Edward Lewis (played by Richard Gere) and as Edward turns to walk away the manager mentions that his name is Bernard Thompson. It appears that Edward ignores the manager.

At the end of the movie, there is a scene when Edward is again talking with the hotel manager. Edward asks the manager to return some jewelry for him. The conversation ends with Edward thanking the manager by saying: “Thank you Mr. Thompson.”

You can see the pride in the face of Mr. Thompson. He had thought that the important Mr. Lewis did not know his name, but being called by name made him feel special.

Regardless of who you are and your position in society or within a company, work on remembering the names of people to meet. Calling someone by name is a sign of respect and a great secret to delivering exceptional customer service! Work on it! Develop a method to help you recall someone’s name. You never know when you will make someone’s day by simply calling them by name.

David Reed is President of Customer Centered Consulting Group, Inc. His firm provides speaking, training, and consulting services for a wide variety of clients. Contact David at info@cccginc.com.

Is Your Team High Performing?

By GilderGroupInternational Leave a Comment

Our Building High Performance Teams learning events begin with the question, “Is your team high performing?” Answers range from yes to don’t know. Crystal clear roles – how we design and divide tasks – is one of the six elements of a high performance team, and is one of the top 3 areas that prevents high performance.

To demonstrate the concept of roles we ask participants to think of a high performance automobile and they always choose a make/model of sports car. Each group chooses a part on the sports car they want to represent. Most groups really have fun with this by creating a drawing or even building a model of the represented part. They then discuss the role of the part, how the part contributes to the sports cars’ high performance, and what happens to performance when the part functions as designed and what happens when it doesn’t.

We use the sports car example successfully to facilitate participants understanding of the concept of roles and how crystal clear roles help build a high performance team.

Mastering Leadership question(s): Are your team members crystal clear about their roles? What barriers prevent the high performance of your team?

How to Gain Cooperation, Buy-In, and Ownership

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Our success as leaders, managers, teams, or even in life will ultimately depend on how well we communicate. Communication is the common thread throughout our learning events, performance coaching, process improvement projects, and mediation’s. Leaders, managers, and people of influence typically ask “how do I get cooperation, buy-in, and create ownership on my team or work group?” From our experience in many, many organizations, domestic and international, we have found that one of the three ways to attain cooperation, buy-in, and create ownership is to ask people what they think versus telling what to think or what you think. Asking questions is a powerful communication strategy, because it demonstrates you care enough -about the thoughts and opinions of others- to ask.

Mastering Leadership question(s): How do you get others to cooperate? What do you do to get buy-in on an idea? Is creating ownership important to getting things done on your team or work group?

Finding Common Ground

By GilderGroupInternational Leave a Comment

One way to find common ground is to find common vision, values, and goals. Ask your team members an open ended question with a common goal included such as, “How do you see this succeeding?”

Identify areas where your team members seem interested in helping to find solutions that lead to a common win. An example might be that everyone agree to arrive at work a few minutes early in order to all be ready to start at a common time.

Think about it question(s):

Experiment with asking people their ideas. What generally happens?