Promoting Principles

Wednesday, December 20, 2006 9:36 AM

I've been promoting principles with our staff. But what good are principles if the specific habits that support those principles aren't understood, accepted and adopted? Today, I'm giving my staff a list of specific habits that are built around the principles of building emotional equity with customers and coworkers. It's like a bank account, making daily deposits and being careful not to make withdraws.

When I was young, I attended a lot of seminars with high powered, highly paid sales trainers, who taught all the tricky closing techniques and phrases, quick fix formulas and instant gratification crap. They're still teaching the same garbage they taught 40+ years ago. It's no darn wonder 9 out of 10 new businesses fail when they learn and practice that psychological bull.

Emotional equity is something we need to work for; we earn it a little bit at a time, making small deposits every day. There are no quick fix formulas. I'm going to discuss a half dozen specific habits that can help the bank account grow.

• The Habit of Common Courtesy

Practicing simple, every day respectful courtesies like saying, "Hello, how's your day going?" Or simply saying, thank you, please and your welcome is all no brainer stuff. Okay, but if it's all no brainer stuff, then why isn't it common practice? The answer is, they must first become habit, resulting in an instinctive response.

• The Habit of Honesty

Developing the habit of honesty is paramount in building the emotional bank account. Cover ups, dishonesty, deceit and even omission of the truth all create huge withdraws. Case in point, (Thank God) even Presidents are deposed because of cover-ups.

• The Habit of Roles and Goals

Almost as important as the habit of honesty is the habit of always clearly understanding each others' reasoning and objectives. To prevent misunderstandings, we must clearly communicate to each other our roles and goals. It is incumbent upon everyone to make sure that everyone else has a clear understanding. So you never have to hear things like:

That's not what you said!
But you told me...!
I never said anything like that!
Why do you always...!
I thought you said...!

You get the point I'm trying to make. These things will put the emotional bank account into bankruptcy.

• The Habit of Keeping Promises

Committing to our word by always doing what we say we're going to do. Our word should be as good as an oath, promise or contract. A huge emotional withdraw is to say one thing then do another.

• The Habit of Loyalty

Be loyal to those who are not in our presence. When someone comes to us complaining about another person, don't fuel the fire. If we do, it sets a precedence of how we will react if someone else is talking about them to us when they're not present. But rather say, "The three of us should sit down and talk about this." This approach will almost always automatically defuse the situation. The last thing the complainer wants is to be confronted when their motive was only to complain. It is important to be liked but the value of being trusted and respected can far exceed the that of being liked.

• The Habit of Forgiveness

The most important one is when we screw up on any one of the above, we must truly have a contrite heart and say we are sorry. If the apology is strictly mechanical, it will show up on our next statement as a big emotional withdraw.

These habits are all interrelated and interdependent.

If you're still with me at this point and thinking, what does this have to do with hair? Sorry, I feel it has everything to do with hair.

Have a terrific hair day (and Happy Holidays!),

Bill