18 Second Management

What is the number one source of evidence about your customer’s issues?

Your customer.

How long from the time you greet your customer until you diagnose and triage your customers?

18 seconds?

Are you listening to your clients, employees? Are you making assumptions?

Tom Peters argues that the single most strategic strength you can have as an organization is listening – with the intent to understand.

I’ve written previously about listening to understand. So often, we focus on trying to craft an answer, to be expedient.

That isn’t how you build relationships. Sometimes relationships are inherently UN-expedient (if I may make up a word).

Relationships – in business, in your family, take time. Sure there are tools we can use to shorten a timeline (social media, for example), but there’s still a process to creating that relationship, and if we try to circumvent the process, pull out our statisical analyses and find the shortest route to building a relationship, something gets lost in the translation.

What are you losing in the translation? The rich rewards, and sometimes the awkward moments of building a strong relationship! Some might argue that the relationship can’t be all that strong if you haven’t had to weather the storms of awkwardness, strife, complaint, etc. At some point, every relationship hits a wall. That’s the real test of that relationship.

It’s easy to assume people understand us. It’s even easier to assume we understand them, because we base that assumption on our own experiences. We triage, instead of connect. There are times when triage may be necessary, but it’s rarely needed in a relationship building opportunity – and usually, it’s detrimental.

How do you connect with your tribe (at home or in business)? What messages are you sending, or assumptions are you making? What can you do today to make the most of each interaction WITHOUT making assumptions?

The answers may surprise you.