How To Deal With Disappointment

Everyone gets disappointed at some point. Moms express their disappointment at the actions of their 6 year-old when they hit another boy. Fathers express their disappointment to teenage daughters in the hopes that the outward expression becomes a lesson to make better choices. Bosses express their disappointment on performance reviews in the hopes of motivating the affected employee. Teachers express their diappointment because they know the student isn't applying him or herself.

These are all expressions of outward disappointment in someone else. But what happens when disappointment is focused inward - when things don't turn out the way we had hoped?

There are some things in life that you just don't have any control over and there are other things that are within your control. Understanding which is which will help you to bounce back quicker from disappointment - to develop a resilience attitude.

Planning for months to visit the Grand Canyon only to be turned back by a snowstorm, a rained out family picnic, a power outage during your wedding reception or a cancelled flight to an important meeting are all things out of your control. You have no control over the weather, the electric company or the airlines. It's fine to feel disappointed for a short while but it isn't the end of your life. You can try again tomorrow.

However, disappointment about how much you get paid, your job-performance review, your golf score, that promotion you really want, your relationships at home and how your money is budgeted are all within your control. Only you determine how valuable you are to the company, how well you do your job, how much you practice at golf, how you self-improve to be the logical choice to be promoted, how hard you work at your relationship and how you spend your money. No one else is to blame for your results.

You have no control over other people, things or events outside of yourself. But you have complete control over your reaction to those things. You also have ALL of the control over every part of your life that involves YOU and your results.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Greatness Is Impossible To Duplicate

A recent walk through Scottsdale, Arizona this week had me shaking my head a little. Scottsdale's famous "Old Town" is a souvenir-hunter's paradise. There have got to be thirty gift shops within a three block area, all virtually carrying the same Red Dirt T-shirts, turquoise jewellery, Navajo blankets, water-ripple globes of the world and leather belts. All the prices are virtually the same. The hours of each store are the same. The parking issues are the same. The decor of each is virtually the same. All in all, each independantly-owned gift shop is a cookie-cutter version of the gift shop next door.

Did the people who opened the 30th gift shop really believe they were bringing anything new to the table by opening the exact same store as the 29 others on the street? And whose idea was it to make sure that every shop carry the same lines, selection and price? Really, there is no reason for the local residents to shop this area. This is a tourist area whose sole means of survival is by volume of tourists. Get enough tourists through and everyone can do OK - not great - just OK.

And while we're at it, as a tourist, why would you save up and plan a vacation for a whole year only to spend your vacation in the same restaurants you have at home? There are no memories made in eating in ordinary restaurants. The best memories are made when you stretch yourself and experience something different. In fact, the best businesses become successful using the exact same philosophy: be different than everyone else.

Greatness is impossible to duplicate. Copying mediocre? Piece of cake.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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When Board Members Don't Pull Their Weight

When you give your commitment to join a board, committee or volunteer organization, is it because you have deep convictions for the project or are you doing it to give the appearance that you are more important than you actually are?

Charitable societies, social projects or community prosperity initiatives all require brain trusts and people to follow through on decisions, ideas and commitments. All too often, we see people who initially show excitement and support for a project only to lag behind and blame their busyness, schedule or various other commitments to other boards, committees and social projects.

People who sit on volunteer boards can be categorized as either heroes or zeros. The heroes make no excuses for their involvement because they find the time to just get things done. Zeros, however, want to give the outward appearance of caring about something but their level of care is evident in their participation. Zeros are aptly named because other than attending the meetings, their output is a zero.

It's one thing to be involved and to make your commitment to the project you choose to be involved with. It's quite another thing to give the illusion of being involved only so you can use the name of the humanitarian effort to advance yourself, not your project.

Volunteer organizations have a culture just like regular business. As volunteers, you are allowed to fire other volunteers who are not advancing your cause. In fact, if a board member is not advancing the cause by claiming to be too busy to do more than attend the meetings, then he or she is dragging down the cause. Separate yourself immediately from laggards who are "using" you to advance themselves. That board member is taking the space of someone who would be willing to do the work. Get rid of the roadblocks. Sometimes that means removing people.

If you're not prepared to participate fully to elevate your cause to one of greatness, then you are standing in the way of a group of people making a difference. And you become the reason why nothing changes.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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What Doctor's Offices Can Learn From Hotels

There are things that some businesses do badly that no other business should adopt as a service strategy:

• help desks that seem to shrug their shoulders on issues, "Yeah, that problem happens on occasion. Oh well. Not much we can do."
• retail stores whose on-line stock check shows there are several items in stock but when you get there, they don't have any.
• automated reminders that it's time for another visit - phone reminders that call you incessantly until you have to lose your temper with them to have your number removed.
• Costco's "everyone's a potential shoplifter" policy that creates lineups at the exit while someone with a highlighter goes through your stuff to make sure you didn't take more than on your receipt.

But then there are some ideas that other businesses should adopt. Hotels, good hotels, have something to teach doctor's offices, dentists, chiropractors, medical labs, etc. I check into a lot of hotels. At the front counter, I simply give my name and the clerk usually finds my reservation within a few seconds. The paperwork has already been done, keys are ready and I can check in quickly. After all, the quicker I get into the hotel, the quicker they have a captive customer spending money.

"Do you have an appointment?" is a question that shows a lack of initiative. Of course I have an appointment. Otherwise I would say that I don't have an appointment and ask if the doctor can see me today? How hard is it to look at a schedule of appointments and match my name with an appointment on or about the same time?


Here's the rub though: if you do have an appointment, it's because you made an appointment (called in and actually spoke to someone), then had the doctor's office call you back a day in advance to re-confirm your appointment asking you to show up a few minutes early and then when you do finally show up for your scheduled appointment, you get asked, "Do you have an appointment?"

Hotels process more guests an a daily basis than the average doctors office, or chiropractor or dentist. So how come they don't ask if I have a reservation? Remember, we're talking about good hotels here - not the ones whose clerks are standing outside the front doors having to butt their smokes when you stand at the front counter. Most people who check into hotels have a reservation otherwise they ask if there are any rooms available. Unless your medical practice is a walk-in clinic, I would suspect most patients have an appointment. Same could be said of dentists. Those without an appointment would probably call ahead in an emergency to see if they could be squeezed in amongst the appointments.

Most people have appointments when they go to see their doctor, dentist, chiropractor, lawyer, accountant, hairdresser and auto mechanic. OK, let me explain that I rarely get asked if I have an appointment when I get to my lawyer, accountant, hairdresser or auto mechanic. They assume that I do or I wouldn't be there. This really just happens in doctor's offices - but there are a lot of organizations who take their lead from treating clients like cattle. They may not necessarily ask if you have an appointment but they do the bare minimum to impress you on your first impression.

Stop thinking of your receptionist as a receptionist. Change your Attitude. That person at the front counter is the Executive Vice President of First Impressions for your company.

Mediocre, apathetic organizations make it difficult to do business and first impressions are lasting impressions. But then, as I've been saying for a while, there's no effort required in being ordinary.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Friday Is Employee Recognition Day

Friday, March 5, 2010 is Employee Recognition Day. Now you might think that a day like this is kind of cute and meant to be lighthearted but it's not a really serious thing. That may be true, but then so is Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. Try not to take those two days seriously and see what happens. You would never dishonor your mother on Mother's Day nor your spouse on Valentine's Day if you want to have peace and harmony at home.

Think of Employee Recognition Day the same way. If the employee knows that it's Employee Recognition Day and no attempt is made by management to recognize them, you might as well have forgotten your spouse on Valentine's Day. You will have created a bigger chasm between employees and management.

Yes, there is the argument that you don't need a special day to recognize your employees and you would be right. But you don't need a special day to recognize your sweetheart or your spouse but it seems to be the only days of  the year that many do honor them. So we have this day to force the laggards to get with the program and show their gratitude. It is a day designated to REMIND managers that they have a staff who do their work without a lot of recognition: managers get so wrapped up in attending endless (and pointless) meetings that there is little time left to say "thanks" to their people.

So this Friday, show your Attitude of Gratitude by springing for pizza for the staff, buying a $25 Starbucks card for each member of your team or giving a heartfelt, handwritten card personally prepared for each member of your team. Do NOT hand out awards that day. Friday is Employee Recognition Day. That means all employees are recognized - not just your superstars.

If you want to build a culture of engagement in your organization, you will recognize your people on Friday. Then, make a decision to make the first Friday of every month, Employee Recognition Day. One simple change in your corporate attitude will spread the word that yours is a great place to work. More people will be lining up to work there - good people - not just the ones who are available.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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A Gold Medal Performance

This is going to be the worst day of their lives for a few people who have an attitude of just doing enough work to not get fired. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if a bunch of slackers phoned in sick today - at the Vancouver International Airport.

After the 2002 Olympics, Salt Lake City airport never thought about planning for the tens of thousands of passengers who would be all flying home the same day. Ticket counters, security screening, food service, janitorial and baggage handlers were grossly understaffed. Consequently, lineups went right outside the doors into the freezing cold and many missed thier flights.

But that won't be the case in Vancouver today.

YVR (Vancouver International Airport) has been planning this day for two years. Expectations are that 40,000 extra passengers will make their way through YVR today. That means that a full complement of ticket agents will be on duty, all security stations will be open, there will be more than enough food service workers on duty. Not to mention washroom attendants, janitorial staff, greeters, hosts, gate staff, baggage handlers and more. This will be the biggest day in YVR's history.

So, back to my original thought. Some people who work at the airport, will try to find a way to dodge the heavy work today. They will whine. They will pass the buck and the heavy lifting on to someone else and some will openly show their frustration in front of a world of passengers. What a horrible last impression to leave people with: that you could care less.

For those who will do their best and keep a smile on their face through this busy day, well done. Be proud of your achievement. You will be able to tell the story of the day that YVR was swamped and how you helped make it better. For them, it will be a gold medal performance. For others, it will be a forgetable performance - as it should be.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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What Do You Make?

It's not a question of money. It's a question of how the world is different because you're here.



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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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McLovin' It

Have you gotten caught up in Olympic fever yet? Watching the thousands and thousands of people on the streets of Vancouver daily, seeing the cheering and flag-waving crowds at the events and even seeing the people wearing Canada clothing in every city across the country makes it difficult not to feel a sense of pride that something special is going on.

At the top of Calgary's Canada Olympic Park, known as COP, where many of the athletes prepared and trained themselves for the Vancouver games flies a lone white flag, the five interlocking Olympic rings.

At the base of COP, the legacy to the '88 Calgary Olympics lies a McDonald's restaurant, the official restaurant of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. But there's nary a sign that the Olympics are being hosted in Canada in the restaurant. There's no signage touting their "official" status even though they look right up the slopes of COP. And on either side of the chalet-style four-sided fireplace on the two thirty-two inch plasma TVs there are no Olympics playing. Just the news from one of the non-Olympic news networks.

There are seven television networks broadcasting the games but not one channel is being shown in the official restaurant of the 2010 Vancouver Games. And until I mentioned it to the manager, no one even seemed to notice that the Olympic spirit had left the building.

For the 2010 Games, McDonalds chose 350 servers from across Canada to work the McDonalds in the athlete's village (which doesn't charge the athletes anything for the food). This is a major promotion for the company and one they take pride in.

By the way, my car dealership had the Olympics on in their customer lounge today. They are not an official sponsor. The electronics store I visited this afternoon had almost 100 televisions all tuned to the Olympics. They are not an Olympic sponsor either. Even the Mongolian restaurant I had supper at had the Olympics on in their lounge. They may have been supporting Team Mongolia if there was one but I don't think so.

Apathy exists even in management. It's missing little details like this that makes it a very mediocre place to work and an even worse place to be a customer.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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No Effort Required In Being Ordinary

I had a quote of mine make its way around Twitter this week. The quote was, "There's no effort required in being ordinary."

Maybe that's the reason why we are overrun with mediocrity, ordinary, sameness. There's no effort required in just being good enough. That's easy. That's why there's so much competition at the mediocre level because almost everyone competes at that level.

The stretch is when an individual or a company makes a decision to move toward "greatness." That's when everything changes. That's when it get s hard. That's when the scrutiny of those who would throw stones (the secretly envious) arises and that's when you hear from the naysayers in your life, all of the reasons why you can't do it.

"You can't increase your business in a recession."

"You can't have a banner sales month in a market downturn."

"You can't risk renovating your house when jobs are tenuous."

"There's no such thing as a perfect relationship."

"Blah. Blah. Blah."

You can do these things and you most certainly will do these things if you have made the decision to stop being ordinary and strive for greatness. The sideline critics are just too lazy to get off their fat asses and do it themselves and they know it. You're embarrassing them and they will complain about it.

There is no effort required in being ordinary. That's why there's so little competition at the "Greatness" level. The people and companies willing to do whatever it takes to be the standard to which every mediocre person and organization will measure himself are very few.

There's hardly been any effort needed to get your results so far, huh? That means you're capable of more but you're not even trying.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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It Sucks To Go Backwards

When a speed skater or skier shaves a full second off of their personal best time - or a football player scores a new high in season touchdowns - or a baseball player has a home-run record season - or a hockey player scores 50+ goals in a season, will any of them be satisfied with a lower performance in future?

What happens when you discover delicious food in non-franchised restaurants or experience a fabulous stay in an outstanding boutique hotel? It's hard to eat at same-old, same-old franchise restaurants or cookie-cutter hotel rooms. Discovering a great bottle of wine or an outstanding beer makes it difficult to buy everyday ordinary brands once you've tasted something so much better.

Once you set a new standard in your life, you realize what you are capable of. This happens too with sales people. Once they hit a great month they set a new standard. And if they don't set the standard themselves, their bosses will do it for them.

If you don't honestly put a great deal of effort into improving your work performance, then you're, at best, an ordinary performer: average, mediocre. You probably complain about your job, make excuses for your results in life and settle for what you get instead of setting a standard for what you could have.

It's people like you who hold your organization back from "greatness." Sorry, but you will never be part of a "great" organization if you're not willing to work for it. Greatness doesn't happen by accident. Greatness is achieved when all members of the organization are pulling their weight. Great organizations get rid of the dead-weight holding them back. It's how they're able to become "great" organizations.

Once you raise your standards, those new standards begin to seep into every other area of your life: relationships, investments, parenting, vacations, etc. It sucks to go backwards. You can never successfully downgrade your standards. Once you get a taste of something great, it's hard to enjoy mediocre ever again.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Are You Open At 2 A.M.?

If you've got teenagers then you know that they're up into the middle of the night chatting on MSN (Windows Live), watching hour after hour of YouTube videos and doing everything possible to avoid actually having personal interactions with their families because virtual interactions require absolutely no focus.

So a college student who is up most of the night, sleeping until 3 pm wouldn't have much time to reach a dentist to make an appointment if the only way to reach the dentist or the doctor or the chiropractor or the massage therapist or the hair stylist or... well, you get the idea ... was during traditional working hours of 9-5. Most businesses close their doors at 5 or 6 pm just when college students or other Gen Ys seem to be getting going. But not just that: people who work a day job can't get to you during day hours because they're working too.

Think of how many people, not just young people, are up between 11 pm and 2 am on the Internet actually buying things. The number of Baby Boomers on-line at this time is growing exponentially.

Discover Small Business' recent survey showed 46% of small businesses don't have a web site. That's about half of the small business market with no way for your clients to reach you unless you force them to call (on the telephone) when it's convenient for you - not for them. Today's young market has more phones than ever but they don't talk on them. They text on them.

There's a great divide of hours between when customers are available and when businesses are open. And it's only getting worse. The numbers of people expecting to be able to interact (simply send an email) to a business is getting larger. The demand is getting higher and you're losing market share to your emerging (and soon to be dominant) market because you won't give them a simple email address or have a simple web site to do business by?

How much money are you LOSING to competitors because they can be reached after hours? You'd better have a way for this up and coming market to reach you or you're going to lose quickly. 

Any mediocre business can shut it all down at 6. But organizations of greatness will find a way to allow their customers and clients to reach them when it's convenient for the client.

Ease and accessibility for clients is another way of separating the ordinary boring businesses from organizations of greatness.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Death To Funerals

A wedding is NOT something you HAVE to do which is why some spend tens of thousands of dollars (and go into deep debt to start their new lives together) on lavish events - because they WANT to. Whereas, a funeral is seen as something not done by choice but by necessity which is why if forced to do it, most will skimp and spend as little money as possible getting it done. Just get it done and forget about it.

How much can people skimp? Costco USA is selling caskets and has been doing so for the past few years. Can you see where the trouble might be for Funeral Directors?

While funeral service market share is shrinking, weddings are becoming more lavish, more expensive and more garish - over the top. Dresses worth thousands, limos, chocolate fountains, decorations, flowers, extended trips, money in envelopes, exotic locations, me, me, me, me, me. Funerals? More "eeeww" than "wheee."

If Funeral Directors want to rebuild their industry, they had better start thinking like Wedding Planners and make the event more of a Celebration of Life than a mourning of death. Funerals need to get to that place where if you buy a Costco casket and spend no time, money or effort on your departed, you should be shamed. Funeral Directors need to shame people for treating their departed loved ones like last week's trash. People who cut corners to keep the balance of money for themselves should be shamed. How we treat people in death is a perfect illustration of how much we cherished them in life. Allowing some distant clergy member to say a few words about someone he didn't know is shameful too. Could you make the whole funeral thing even more impersonal? Not likely.

Weddings you get invitations for. Funerals you read about in the paper. Something as simple as mining the departed's email addresses and sending an invitation to a celebration and memorial event seems so much more appealing than reading about a funeral at a church that the departed never went to, officiated by a clergy member he never met who takes to opportunity of a half-full church to try to convert or save some souls and you have a funeral attended by a fraction of friends because they didn't read the newspaper this week.

No, if the funeral service of today is the best you can do as a Funeral Director, then your industry deserves to be shrinking. Complaining about it won't change that. Doing something about it will. Change your Attitude. Make people see the value. Markets change. You had better be able to respond to it or we're all about to attend the funeral for funerals.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Correcting A Bad Business Cycle

As a boss, when you make a decision that affects the whole organization, are you really clear of the practical and real consequences and fallout on your front-line employees and their families? Really clear?

As a sales rep, are you prepared for the consequences that follow by stretching the truth of your claims just one time too many?

As a customer service rep, are you prepared to accept the fallout that results from you being apathetic in your effort and your job responsibilities?

As a customer, are you prepared to reward lousy quality and poor service by purchasing anyway?

As a future consumer, aren't you upset because the customer before you could have corrected bad service by simply saying something?

As a person of value, are you going to allow the "takers" of the world to butt in line, take more than one parking space, not offer a seat to an elderly lady on the bus or any other event that requires decency?

It's not employees who work for you. It's not prospects you sell to. It's not customers you serve. It's not businesses you buy from. It's not jerks you deal with. It's people. Every single interaction, every single event, every single experience has people at the center of it all.

If you're not "good people" yourself, you'll be an even lousier employee and customer.

The Attitude of Connectedness says we are all connected to other people - all of us. No exceptions.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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How To Excel When Business Is Down

Jeffery Gitomer, perhaps America's top sales trainer, said yesterday, "When business is down, it’s likely morale is down. Invest in attitude training for every member of the team FIRST. The best way to get more sales is by creating more friendly and human interaction. The best way to gain loyalty from existing customers, and get more sales (the surest path to survival and growth), is by making service IMPROVEMENTS, not service cuts."

When business is down, there is greater competition for fewer dollars in the marketplace. My audiences always seem amazed to hear that 51% of buyers buy "Attitude" factors like staff, friendliness, approachability, ease-of-business, after-sale service and follow-up. A smaller percentage buy from you because of product knowledge.  

More people buy your Attitude than your knowledge. Pay attention to that. The companies who will be successful when times are tough are the ones who have the right customer-focused Attitude. A buyer expects you to have product knowledge but the competitive edge goes to organizations that address Attitude factors.

Attitude also happens to be tied for second as most popular criteria on job performance reviews: first, quality of work followed by Attitude and productivity. Attitude finished ahead of teamwork, goals, customer service and skills development. Why then do most organizations spend the majority of their training dollars on teamwork, goals, customer service and skills development if the top three criteria for how you judge your people aren't even in that list? When times are tough, you're wasting your money if you're not addressing Attitude.

45% of workers feel "work" is the biggest source of stress in their lives. That's about half of your staff who hate coming to work because they get stressed. Great Attitude to build a successful organization on.

Your Corporate Culture is nothing more than a collection of prevailing Attitudes in your workplace. You will never, and I mean NEVER, improve your culture without addressing Attitude. Without addressing Attitude, you will be never be more than an ordinary, mediocre organization. To go to a "Greatness" culture requires you to do something that none of your competitors are doing - like, change your attitude about Attitude.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture
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Bad Advice From Old People

"Get a good education. Get a good job. Make sure there is a pension. Retire early if you can."

How many of our parents said something like that to us in high school? Parents thought they had the right advice. But now it turns out that advice like this is what is disengaging employees at work.

Get a good education - more importantly get the right education. A degree in astrophysics is a good education, unless your love is in marketing. Then that astrophysics degree was a huge waste of your time even if you could make more money in astrophysics. People get degrees in great-paying professions but hate the work. That's how you become disengaged from your work. Make sure your education is in something that you will love to do for a lifetime.

Get a good job - no don't. Get a great career. You don't want a "job" - you want a career. When you stop looking at what you do as a job and instead view it as a career that you chose (even temporarily), you engage better and find more reward. A job is just a paycheck. Most could give a fiddler's damn about a job. But a career? You will protect that and keep up with changes and your education. You will be inspired to become the best in your field. But a job? Who cares.

Make sure there is a pension - especially if it just a job. Just showing up at work and doing just enough to not get fired qualifies anyone for a pension. You could be the world's worst school-teacher and you will get the same pension as the best teacher. Pensions are not incentive to perform. Perhaps the whole pension idea should be reformed to become commensurate with effort and engagement during the working years - a lifelong performance bonus, if you will. That would force people to give their best all through their work life and to choose something they would enjoy doing.

Retire early if you can - or not. I'm sure Richard Branson and Donald Trump are just waiting for retirement (Branson is 60 this year and Trump is 64). Bet they can't wait to stop slaving at their jobs each day so they can enjoy their retirement years of doing nothing and collecting their pensions. If you love something, you won't want to retire. And if your company forces you to retire, open your own consulting business to keep active. Why is it that we force those with the most wisdom to leave organizations?

Kids, ignore the "advice" of old people in jobs who do just enough to not get fired, who educated themselves in a discipline that gave them no joy (because they thought it was the right thing to do) and who are counting down the days to retirement so they can collect a pension from a job that they really didn't care much about. Look for the people who went against convention, who chose to rely on their smarts, their hearts and their spirit and who defied what old people told them and made their mark in this world. They're easy to find. They're the old people who are still working because they love what they do that much. Take their advice - not someone who can't wait to check out early.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Relationships That Work

Do you have a customer that you speak ill of behind their backs? Do you have a co-worker who you make sure you say things about out of earshot because the things you say are not very complimentary? How about your spouse - do you complain a little about them when they're not around?

How long do you think a marriage would last if both partners spoke ill of the other behind their backs constantly? That kind of relationship is doomed to fail.

A customer that you can't speak well of should not be your customer. I mean, if you're prepared to accept his money while he looks you in the face but you bad-mouth him and his business when he turns his back means you're, in effect, ruining his business - the same one whose money you gladly accept.

How about that co-worker who is just a pain in your butt and, for the sake of not creating workplace conflict, you swallow your barbs to her face but when she's out of the room, you put her down to your other co-workers. How long is that relationship bound to last? Until you get caught?

Relationships that last are built on a foundation of mutual respect - not disrespect, backstabbing and conflict. If that's what your relationships look like then you're really missing the Attitude of Connectedness in your day to day life. The Attitude of Connectedness simply is the mindset that everyone is connected to everyone else - by business, family, marriage or network. You can't badmouth one person and not expect it to come around. Everyone is connected.

You can't just swallow your words and instead continue to think ill of others. What you're thinking is all over your face. People can see it. A fake smile won't make you successful. You have to feel it. You have to live it. People will think and speak well of you if you think and speak well of others - genuinely. But if you complain about your co-workers, your customers AND your spouse, then it's not everyone else. You are the common denominator in every one of those poor relationships.  

You'll never get to "greatness" by putting others down. Tearing others down does not elevate you.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Just Say NO

Question: How do you say NO with out hurting your relationships? At some point, I realize we have to say no to people who are expecting you to say yes out of obligation. So how do you say no to them without it affecting your relationships?

Answer: The only person who absolutely needs to hear "yes" every single time when they expect something out of obligation is a baby who is expecting to be breastfed. Outside of that, you had better learn to say "no."

If your co-workers are expecting you to nod in agreement and say yes to every request, then you've done a great job of breastfeeding them. You have become the "whipping boy" of your organization saying yes to everyone else's requests and have put them all ahead of your own responsibilities. Are you burnt out yet? You should be.

Say yes too often and you'll eventually find yourself picking up the boss's dry-cleaning during the day and getting your work done at home at night. But say yes too many times and you eventually create a toxic culture, one that has no personal or job boundaries, no respects or any consideration for others.

Most people can't say no because they're afraid that if they do they won't be liked. Who cares if you're not liked? You want to be respected more than you want to be liked.

Develop your Attitude of Leadership and learn to say "no" before you burn out and drop dead of a heart attack. Saying "yes" to everything creates too much weight to carry and trains people to take advantage of you.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Fire Your Bad Clients

Years ago, when I was selling radio advertising to small businesses, I would ask my potential clients to tell me specifically who they wanted to attract as customers. It helped me to identify whether our audience was also their audience.

"Everybody," was the usual reply.

But you can't have everybody. Not everybody is going to buy from you. For example, for the 50% of the population that doesn't play a sport, they would have no use for a sporting goods store and therefore never enter the store. So everybody is not their customer.

Identify your ideal clients and your market segment, to ensure that you aren't just spinning your wheels out in the marketplace. You can't target your potential clients effectively by targeting everybody.

Everybody doesn't see your one billboard. Everybody doesn't see your Yellow Pages ad. Everybody doesn't visit your web site because not everybody has ever heard of you. You don't have the kind of advertising budget to achieve that..

So who is your ideal client? If you don't have a clear idea of who that is, then you will end up aimlessly taking whatever you can get from whoever will give you something. Change your attitude about just taking what you can get and instead start to focus on what you want.

Do you want to do business with people who will beat you up on your prices just to knock you down to mere pennies in profit and then to have those same people complain because they don't value what you do? Be specific about who you want to business with. Don't think everybody wants to do business with you. Not everybody wants you, needs you or even likes you.

The Attitude of Service isn't just an outward attitude. The Attitude of Service isn't just about you serving others. The Attitude of Service also includes an honest study of who deserves what you offer. What is your service worth? Who would most appreciate what you do?

Don't do yourself a disservice by thinking that you must cater to price-hungry, high-maintenance customers who have no loyalty to you because it's all you can get right now. You'll never achieve greatness arguing with penny-pinchers who don't value you, your product and your service and who would never give you a recommendation. It's the wrong crowd. Maybe it's time you served yourself a little better a fired your "headache" customers. Let someone else have them. They're dragging you down anyway.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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A Kinder, Gentler Business Of The Future

This month marked a very important milestone, one that quietly slipped under the radar. The consequences of this milestone are far reaching and it is only going to get bigger and play a far more important role in business in North America.

January officially recognizes that women now comprise OVER 50% of the workforce. Where once women were largely confined to menial jobs, their brain power now outnumbers men in the workforce.

Add to that women dominating in terms of educational performance, volume of university degrees and especially advanced professional degrees and you can see how this can become a tsunami of change down the road.

It's been said that women are better leaders overall than men - largely due to their ability to lead with compassion instead of cutthroat business tactics - and we face a workforce that is about to change. As more women move up the ladder, the old-boys clubs are doomed to go the way of the dodo.

Personally, I welcome a change in the demographics. More women in senior management would mean more women dominating boards of directors as well as shareholders. That means how business gets done is going to change with a heavier emphasis on long-term growth and prosperity for the sake of the employees and loyalty while lessening concentration on jumping into takeover situations, raping and cutting up companies for the sake of profit and not caring about the families that cutthroat business affects.

Maybe by finding a way to be kinder, gentler organizations, we can help employees find loyalty, purpose and pride in their work and the companies they work for.

It couldn't hurt. I can't possibly imagine how much worse employee engagement, diligence and work ethic could get. Maybe we'll see the end of the practice of "company profits first, employee welfare second." Maybe it'll turn into employee welfare AND company success together. After all, you can't have one without the other.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy to Greatness Culture


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Comparing Corporate Culture to Homelessness

How is it possible to fix a corporate culture that is good for employees, clients, customers and shareholders? Why would you fix something that doesn't need fixing - not improving - fixing. You wouldn't fix a culture that is working and giving you the results you want would you? You wouldn't feel the need to fix a culture where employees are productive, happy, service oriented and a culture that attracts the best talent and more customers. In fact, you would encourage more of the same to get more of the same. You would build on what you have to go up to the next level. You would move forward - not backward.

A culture that works is the result of a strategy that works. Culture is not the strategy. Culture is the result of strategy.

So if your culture sucks, don't blame the culture - blame the strategy that gets you the culture. Remember, culture is not the strategy. Culture is the result of the strategy.

Let me illustrate: homelessness is not the problem - it is a result of the problem. People end up homeless through a long-term series of choices and circumstances. You see, no one can have everything going for them on Monday and suddenly wake up homeless on Wednesday. In the same way, you don't have a productive and happy workplace on Monday and suddenly a culture that sucks on Wednesday. Nothing happens overnight.

Can you fix homelessness overnight? Sure. Rent each homeless person an apartment. Problem solved - for now. But over time, many of those same people will end up homeless again because homelessness isn't the problem, it is the result of choices. If you don't address the choices they are likely to repeat. Change the choices and you change the results.

Culture works the same way too. Culture doesn't magically shift overnight. You can fire your entire staff and start over and your culture would no longer suck - for a while. But unless you address the long-term processes, policies, management and attitudes, you will end up with the same sucky culture before long.

In the same way you have sales targets, every organization needs to have culture targets if they want to attract the best talent, retain their good people, lower turnover, raise morale and increase customer spending and numbers of loyal customers. None of it happens by accident. Ignore your culture and it will end up sucking over time. Pay attention to what you want to go right.

If the turnover rates of employees and customers is high, your culture sucks because the underlying attitudes in your workplace suck. Culture never improves by ignoring the contributing factors. Morale never improves because you demand it. It changes because you address the contributing factors.

A culture of greatness is the result of a strategy of greatness. If you don't develop a strategy of greatness then you will, at best, end up as just another mediocre organization whose people could care less about their work and their results. The choice is yours.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE by Kevin Burns - Corporate Attitude/Culture Strategist

Creator of the 90-Day Strategy To Greatness Culture


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Putting The Blame Where It Belongs

As simple as this post may seem, there's a real chance you might miss the profound message - or dismiss it as you do most things in your life with a condescending, "I already know that."

We let me help you understand it better: if others don't see you as the leader you consider yourself to be, if you are not considered the best manager in your organization, if you are not the most requested vendor of any of your competitors or if you think that your workplace could use a little improvement, then you don't know it all. Your results don't lie. They only amplify the truth. So put aside your ego and listen up.

How is it possible to be a genuinely effective leader if you have only ever been a lousy follower? How is it possible to be a good manager if you've only ever been a whiny, self-centered employee? How is it possible to improve your organization if you are no better than the collective average working there? How can you become a vendor of greatness if you have only ever been a customer who accepts sub-standard service?

It's the comparison points that separate the great from the mediocre. You need comparison to achieve anything really great.

You can not be a great leader if you have never been a great follower. You can't know what it is like to follow hence impossible to fully comprehend what it is like to lead.

You can't be a great manager if you view all of your past bosses as morons. Unless you have experience as a model employee you will never know how to be a model manager.

You can not improve your organization if you are not among the best in your organization. Average people have average ideas which bring average results. Exceptional people get exceptional results. If you are not constantly self-improving, then your work is not getting any better which means that your organization is not improving either. Organizations can't possibly improve if the people in those same organizations stay the same.

How can you know what outstanding service is if you have willingly accepted poor service and not voiced your opinions? If you won't set a standard of acceptable service for yourself, how can you serve your customers better? When a customer raises his or her expectations, the selling organization is forced to improve or lose the customer. If you have never helped another organization improve their service then you can not know what better service is exactly. You may have an idea but no proof.

So before you think yourself entitled to be promoted, to be followed, to receive an award or think your organization superior to others, ask yourself, "What have you done lately that makes you a better person, manager, leader or vendor?" If you haven't read a book or attended a seminar that improves you then you are the same delusional person you always were.

Greatness doesn't happen by accident. It requires effort. So how about you change your attitude and admit that you don't know it all and crack open a book for the proof. Blaming the economy, your bosses, your customers and your co-workers isn't going to change your results. You are. The problem isn't everyone else. Never has been.
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How to Break the Cycle of Complaining

Complainers are like smokers: most want to banish them to the back-forty and out of the public eye. Smokers know better than anyone what it feels like to be ostracized from polite society. They've been moved away from the public places and entryways and forced to even cross the road to fire up at the airport. And because of the inconvenience of being a smoker and the social implications that come with it, smokers' numbers have dwindled. Smokers also know the health hazards associated with it.

But this is about complainers, not smokers, serial complainers to be precise - not the people who occasionally find a problem that needs a solution.

Whiners and complainers have not been sent packing in the same way as smokers because people fail to see the connection between complaining and their own results in life. There are hazards to complaining just like there are hazards to smoking:

• Complainers are picked last for teams and activities.
• Complainers don't get invited to parties for fear of bringing the event down.
• Complainers are reported to management more than any other personality type.
• Complainers rarely have 'good" friends - mostly just sympathetic ears too afraid to say something.
• Complainers do not get promoted at work. Period.

How many of your bosses got their jobs by complaining their way to the top? Think about it.

Until complaining becomes as socially unacceptable as smoking, it will continue. People need to stand up and say, "If you're about to whine, moan or complain, I'm not interested in hearing it." But most won't do that because people want so desperately to be liked and to not offend. Yet, whining is offensive. People are so afraid to stop a complainer for seeming heartless. They don't want to offend but will endure offensive behavior. I don't get it.

Here's how you break the cycle of complaining: you say something. Until people stand up and say, "if you want to complain, take it outside," not much is going to change. I learned long ago that in order to change a human behavior requires a significant emotional event. Scolding a complainer in a public place (embarrassing them) would qualify as a significant emotional event. Being embarrassed is a huge fear for 90% of the population but no thought is given to how much they embarrass themselves when they complain incessantly. A single public humiliation would begin to change the behavior. If you want to stop a repeat of the same-old same-old, speak up and act immediately before you allow the complainer's complaining to become a habit (like smoking).

In the same way kids follow their parents' model (smoking), so too will they follow in how they look at and complain about the world. Someone has to break the cycle. Say something.
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How To Improve Company Morale

Why is it that I have never heard of a senior manager being dragged to work kicking and screaming and bemoaning their job? I'm not saying it doesn't happen but I've never actually seen it. But how many times do you witness an employee or middle manager moaning about their job? You know exactly who I'm talking about in your office don't you?

Why is the practice of whining about work only reserved for those not in senior management?

Also, while we're at it, why is it that two people working in side-by-side cubicles doing the exact same job can view their jobs so differently? One can choose to complain about the job and the other loves the job. Why the difference? It's obviously not the job or both would be either happy or whining. The key to job satisfaction and company morale is to understand and acknowledge the differing attitudes toward the work. Fix the attitude of the one who dislikes the job and you improve the workplace for two people - the complainer AND the person who has to endure the constant complaining in the next cubicle.

And that's how you change workplace morale; by affecting the prevailing attitudes regardless of position. I urge senior management to demonstrate these traits by example and most do when it comes to complaining about their job. But the truth is that those outside of senior management will always do as they please regardless of the example set, always. This leads me to believe that it's not the job that people dislike - it is the perceived lack of control over the job and their own destiny and/or contribution. And that is an attitude of feeling dominated/controlled by another which can be reversed by addressing the underlying attitudes and opinions.

My point is always, if you're not making your conscious choices about making your own life better, then you're going to get whatever is left over from everyone else. If you are not acting to create the results you want then you are, by default, allowing whatever happens to be your choice. If there are more "good-natured" people going to work, then we end up having more good places to work.

Everything starts with the individual. Take the people out of a building and you don't have a business anymore: you have a building with a lot of stuff. There is no business without people. My mission is to improve the people and let the business improve itself. And I mean everyone - regardless of position.
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The Answer Is NOT More Tools

I am astounded by the number of organizations who think that by simply throwing generic training at their people will somehow magically get them to do the part of the job they're not doing.

Let me explain. For a salesperson who isn't making sales calls, the answer is not to give them more training in closing the sale. For a manager who won't provide feedback to his people, offering communication training isn't going to change that. For a front-line customer service rep who won't say "thank you" to customers, more training in customer service isn't going to help. For people who won't do the full job, offering more training is not going to fix it. That's like going out and buying a 17-piece power drill set for the husband who won't fix the loose door-handle with a simple Phillips screwdriver. He had the screwdriver all along. He just didn't want to do it.

The same can be said of how organizations try to fix Attitude problems by throwing training at it hoping it fixes itself.

A salesperson who won't make sales calls has an Attitude of being afraid of rejection. That's a confidence problem, not a knowledge problem. You can train people all you want in sales but if they have no confidence to make the calls, they won't. Most sales training doesn't solve the "I might be rejected" problem.

Managers who won't offer their people feedback likely have an Attitude of superiority and have somehow come to believe that offering compliments is for the weak. That's someone's deep-seated belief. Offering more communication strategies doesn't change the Attitude. They know how to to communicate. They just won't. More training simply gives them more useless tools that they won't use because what they believe negates what you're teaching them.

Customer Service reps who won't say "thank you" to a customer probably don't say it to anyone. No matter how well you may train them in the art of serving customers, if you don't affect their underlying Attitudes, you will never have success in training. They won't say "thanks" if they don't believe in saying "thanks."

Sure, one of the answer to all of the issues I've offered is to fire these folks because they're clearly not matched up with their strengths. But I use these illustrations to make a point: giving people more useless tools doesn't address the reason why they're not using the tools they already have. That reason is that their Attitudes are more profoundly ingrained than your band-aid solution of training them more.

Building a house at 125 Maple Street is pointless if the foundation has been poured at 216 Oak Avenue. Your training has to build on where their foundation (attitudes, opinions and beliefs) has already been constructed. Mediocre organizations offer up generic training. Great organizations appeal to their people's deep-seated beliefs first and then build on that.
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Separating Greatness From Mediocrity

There is always some Tipping Point (as Malcolm Gladwell would have explained) that separates a mediocre performance from a great performance. That tipping point is usually found in the amount of effort one person makes to be head-and-shoulders better than his or her competitors.

Having an attitude of greatness means that you are willing to practice, learn and be better than anyone else in your field. If you're in sales, it's in how you shut the TV off at night and apply yourself to be better than your competitor by reading a chapter in a book or spending some time doing research on your prospects in preparation for tomorrow's meeting. In management, it's in researching new communication or management strategies that make you better than the other managers. In customer service, it's in spending a little time online learning how your competitors are serving differently than you and doing something about it.

But greatness isn't just for the corporate world. No, greatness can be found anywhere. What separates great from mediocre is going one step beyond what others are willing to do.

This video illustrates greatness in juggling. Now before you poo-poo the whole juggling thing, watch the video. After watching you'll agree, every other juggler seems mediocre next to this German construction worker.

(Note: the guy in the video should have worn a hard hat during this. Safety is an attitude too - one that greatness can also apply to.)



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyYRfNoZKcA

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An Attitude of Ignoring the Obvious

People refuse to state the obvious. So the obvious no longer becomes obvious and this is how we end up with customers having to push nine or 10 different buttons to talk to a real human. At the customer service development meeting, someone had to ignore the obvious and instead, make the decision that they were going to install a phone tree that required a customer to push nine or 10 different buttons before they were allowed to talk to a real human.

In essence, what happened is that everyone followed everyone else. No one stood up and spoke their mind and asked, "isn't this going to be a problem for our customers?" All it would take would be one person to stand up at a meeting and say just that and the phone tree idea never would've moved ahead. But because one company uses the phone tree, all of the other companies started using the phone tree. It was less expensive to have an automated phone system than it was to have actually a human being answering the phone regardless of whether it was convenient for the customer or not.

Why would no one stand up at the meeting, where the original phone tree discussion was taking place and not say, "this is going to really suck for the customers?" How could 20 supposedly brilliant minds sitting around the board room table not see that this was going to suck for the customers? How could those same 20 supposedly brilliant minds not once advocate on behalf of the customer? How could 20 seemingly decent people all end up promoted to senior management and be in charge of the customer service experience without once standing up for their beliefs, their values and their customers?

How could this happen? Because there is a culture of "good enough." And in the post-recession world, "good enough" isn't even close to good enough anymore.

Back to the original thought again: all it would have taken is for one person to stand up and ask, "have we thought of this from the customer's perspective?" All it would've taken is for one person to state the obvious: that this is not good for our customers. But, because of fear of losing their job, no one spoke up and stated the obvious. And, for some reason, the whole phone tree idea caught on even though customers thought it was a horrible system (as do employees and VPs of Customer Service who make calls to other companies).

But businesses refused to do anything about it, because times were good and money was easy and customers would buy regardless of how tough you made it for them to do so. But now times are not so good and money is not so easy and old-school customer service is at the top of the list of must-do's.

Customers choose your organization mostly by your attitude factors: approachability, freindliness, ease of service. Not once have I ever heard a customer exclaim, "Excellent - a phone tree." Not a single one has ever said that. So it's time for you people in Customer Service to spend a little more time on the key component of your department: the customer.

And stop ignoring the obvious.
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Leadership Is Missing The Point

Leadership is NOT the be-all and end-all of the workplace or of personal development. Contrary to what many of the so-called leadership experts may claim, it is not all there is. You do not need to aspire to achieving leadership nirvana before your life becomes complete. In fact, focusing only on leadership is short-sighted. Here's why: leadership is only one of seven equal components within greatness - becoming something remarkable. Greatness is something that both an individual and an organization might aspire to and achieve - without the need for witnesses.

The whole concept of leadership is focused on the individual - not on those who would be affected outside of the individual. It's why you regularly hear about "bad leadership" or "an absence of leadership ability" - things which can not be measured without including those who might be affected by their very existence.

Leadership's major flaw, unfortunately, is that its very nature is self-focused: the purposeful improving of only oneself. One can not be in a position to influence others without focusing all of their improvement attention on themselves first.

Greatness, however, is outward-focused. It is not only about improving oneself but it is also about subsequently improving the world and benefitting those that greatness touches.

Leadership is simply measured by success while greatness is measured by significance. You may want to read that last sentence again so as to not miss its importance.

You can not lead if they will not follow. But you can be great regardless if they are petty, mean or obstinate. Greatness requires no involvement from others. Leadership, by its very definition, requires followers for without followers, there can be no leader. In the same way as a tree falling in the forest, without those to lead, is there a need for leadership?

Greatness requires no one or thing to be present in order to be great. In fact, one can still be great, do great things and leave a legacy or a mark which might only be discovered years later. Greatness is focused on making a difference regardless of whether someone is there or not to witness the act.

Leadership, therefore, is an attitude which, combined with six other attitudes can lead both an individual and an organization to greatness. Greatness is the willingness to act, to improve and to be significant regardless of whether others are involved or not.

Leadership is about the little picture. Greatness is about how one can improve the big picture. One works with the other but unfortunately, once most achieve that leadership nirvana, they stop thinking about how their actions affect the big picture. It's why so many so-called "leaders" will never be great and how leadership almost always misses the point.
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Passion Is Useless On The Job

You don't need passion to be good at what you do. Believing that you need to be passionate is a load of rubbish. That's old-school thinking. It may have once been a commonly held belief but it doesn't hold water anymore.

Your level of focus and engagement on the job has nothing to do with your passion for the work. And your passion for the work should not be the lone factor in determining your ability to do the work. You can be passionate about something and totally suck at doing it. Should that take away your passion? No. But you need skills and ability before you are going to be able to do the job well. Passion without ability is dangerous. Therefore, passion really is useless and means nothing when it comes to the performance of your duties.

In fact, I might be passionate about basketball, but come on, at 5' 6" I suck at the game. I might not be passionate about cooking but I could have become a chef - I'm that good at it. I like to cook but I wouldn't say I'm passionate about it. For me, cooking is more of a relaxation exercise and a creative expression. It's my right-brain release. It's not my passion. I can enjoy it just as much when someone else cooks too.

Passion has nothing to do with your ability to be the best. If you have passion, well, good for you. But it's not necessary to do the job. You don't even have to like what you do to be exceptional at it. The attitude toward your work ethic is MORE important in developing excellence than is your passion. Your attitude toward doing the job with greatness has nothing to do with passion.

Anyone who says you have to be passionate in order to be the best is probably an old-school motivational speaker whose belt and shoes still match. What was believed 20 years ago doesn't work today.

Today, your attitude toward your results is what matters. You can like the work, be exceptional at the work, be the best at your work without being passionate about it. You simply have to be focused and engaged - not passionate.

I, instead, would counsel organizations to hire someone who is passionate about their spouse and who is also exceptionally skilled at their job. Take that passion home and use it on your spouse. People in strong relationships perform better at work anyway. People in rocky relationships are more likely to be distracted. When there's balance in life, people tend to make better decisions and get better results.

Focus, engagement and attitude - for the job. Passion - for the bedroom.
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How To Be A "Great" Customer

My car is in the shop. The garage promised it would take just one full day. So, when the dealership garage called just after lunch asking to keep the car a second day, I asked why?

"One technician is off sick today so we're a little backed up," they offered.

So now their problem has become my problem. I'm sure that this is not the first time a technician has ever been sick. Does your business grind to a screeching halt because one person called in sick? Wouldn't you have a backup plan? Wouldn't you do your best to keep your promise to your customers without excuses?

I scheduled my appointments around my car being out of commission for one day, not two. That means that if I leave my car with them for another day, I have to reschedule all of my appointments. That means my business and several other businesses are affected by one guy calling in sick. Would you expect your customers to have to endure your internal staffing problems?

Why should it be the customer's job to solve the garage's problem? It's real easy for the garage if the customer is willing to lower their standard of service expectation and simply lay down and take whatever they give you. But that would make you a lousy customer. A "great" customer is not a pushover when it comes to service. A "pushover" customer does not inspire business to get better. It creates an environment where service actually gets worse. A "great" customer, on the other hand, is the customer that challenges business to get better at delivering service. So, here's how you become a "great" customer: you say no. You refuse to accept mediocrity and challenge it. You simply force them to be better.

"Great" customers (customers of greatness) don't let mediocrity reign supreme. Great customers set a standard and expect the people they deal with to rise to it. Great customers make businesses keep their promises and their word. And if those same businesses try to slide, great customers will make them pay. 

I suggested a rental car. They hummed and hawed and reluctantly agreed. Had they been the first to offer a rental car I would have been over the moon with a excitement and would have professed my undying gratitude for a "wow" service experience. But, sadly, that's not how it went. 

An Attitude of Service isn't just for business. Every customer should have one too. Become a "great" customer. Stop being a pushover. Don't lie down and just take whatever they hand you. Stand up and ask for what you want. The answer is always "no" to the questions you never ask and the standards you never set. When it starts costing businesses money because they don't keep their promises, then and only then will service start to improve.

It's easy to complain about how bad service is. But what are you doing to help improve it?

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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Attitude Is A Specialty

People are always free to offer their opinions and most have opinions on things they didn't realize they had opinions on. People who don't work in the area of organizational effectiveness or corporate culture still may have their opinions on how organizations can better their collective attitudes but that doesn't mean we have to take their advice.

I have opinions on a lot of things that are clearly not within my realm of expertise: who should stay and who should go with the NHL's Calgary Flames, which models of car should GM discontinue or which brand of maxi-pads do the best job. Clearly, these are not my areas of expertise. But it doesn't mean I don't have an opinion. I just wouldn't offer it as gospel.

So, when I stumbled onto a question on the LinkedIn bulletin board this morning that was right up my alley, I had an expert opinion. The question being asked was, "does attitude drive behavior or does behavior drive attitude?"

I was the eleventh person to answer the question and, strangely enough, the only person who works in the area of Attitude. Several motivational speakers before me had offered their simple platitudes: attitude is everything, it pays to be positive, a team with a focused attitude can accomplish anything, yadda, yadda, yadda and other motivational drivel that we've heard for years. In virtually every answer though, people equated the word attitude with positive attitude. This is a big mistake and a poor assumption.

My caution to you is to make sure that if you are soliciting advice, that you are asking people in the know. If you needed a wedding catered, you wouldn't ask the hot dog vendor on the corner. Sure, he may have some experience with food but it may not be the experience you require. In the same way, if you're looking for counsel or advice in one particular area of either your life or your business, ask an expert. Get good advice one time so that you don't compound your problem by having to go back and fix it again based on the poor advice of a non-expert.

There is much corporate discussion on "specialists versus generalists." Personally, I don't think there's much room left for generalists anymore. You only have to look to the retail sector to see evidence. Those who were once the behemoth players are slowly having their market share chipped away by specialists -- niche marketers. Even Wal-Mart is a niche marketer -- their niche is price and nothing else.

The speaking industry is no different. There are specialists and generalists. Motivational speakers are the generalists (they say stuff that makes people feel good for a while but nothing really specific) and there are specialists who address problems and issues with surgical precision.

The challenge for generalists in this economy is their inability to address specific problems and challenges with any degree of authority. For example, if your organization was facing growth issues -- either upwards or downwards -- then I would recommend my friend Marty Park. If your organization was facing performance issues than I would recommend my friend, Ken Larson. In the same way, I would hope that if your organization wanted to tweak its corporate culture, which is the corporate attitude, I would hope that you would choose me. After all, Attitude affects culture and the way your organization handles change, communication, customer service, health and safety, leadership, work life balance, management, productivity, problem solving, sales, corporate social responsibility and virtually every department within the organization. Each one of these areas has an effect on bottom-line financials. Improve the attitude and you improve the financials. The proof is that organizations with strong attitudes outperform their competitors financially by four times.


The motivational speaking industry is hurting right now because, in an economy of counting pennies, organizations want something more than platitudes that pump their people up for a few hours. They want real-world solutions that leave an organization different. Experts do just that. Experts know that low motivation in their employees is a symptom of something within the culture. That's why motivational speeches rarely change an organization's culture - because the speech addresses only the symptom and not the root cause.

So, what was my answer to the question that started this discussion? Attitude drives behavior in every single circumstance. Every event in our lives presents a choice. We make our decisions and then we act. Then, the results of our actions go back to either add to or take away from our ingrained attitudes. But every time, it's Attitude first.

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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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The 7 Attitudes to Greatness

There are 7 distinct Attitudes that can bring either an individual or an organization to Greatness. I have built a presentation around the 7 Attitudes and they can be seen in the video below.



If you can't see the video here, click the link to view it on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHCTDRADnL0


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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

Subscribe to Kevin's Attitude with ATTITUDE Blog by Email
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Greatness Is a Choice

I will admit that I am a huge movie buff. In fact, most times, if there isn’t a movie or a hockey game on TV, it’s probably off. I have a few favourite movies that I will re-watch: Sahara (Matthew McConaughey), The Usual Suspects (Kevin Spacey), The Rookie (Dennis Quaid), Finding Forrester (Sean Connery), anything with Gene Hackman and a movie that my friend and mentor Ken Larson turned me onto, The Hunt For Red October (Sean Connery). Ken can recite the dialogue from the movie doing the Sean Connery accent rather well. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”

This weekend, The Replacements with Gene Hackman was on the tube. I’ve seen it many times before but this time, at the end of the movie, Gene Hackman’s character, Coach Jimmy McGinty, narrated a line that I had missed in previous viewings: “Their lives had been changed forever because they had been part of something great. And greatness, no matter how brief, stays with a man.”

That’s a powerful statement. Greatness, no matter how brief, stays with a man. Do something great at some point in your life and you develop a thirst for more or at the very least, you can remember the times when you were great. It does stay with you, either in drive or in memory.

There are two choices that every person faces in life: in their work, their relationships, their pursuit of dreams, their lifestyles, their personalities and their contribution in all they do. Those two choices are 1) greatness, and 2) mediocrity. Everything in life fundamentally comes down to one of those two choices and choosing which side of the equation you will sit on. Will you be great or will you be mediocre? It’s one simple decision really.

Greatness, throughout history, has been fundamentally challenged, violently opposed and systematically dismissed as idiocy by those with mediocre minds - people who don't get it and don't want to get it because when faced with their own mediocrity, it seems as though there is a great deal of work involved in doing something about it. So they attempt to tear down those who would be great in the hopes that by deflating the greatness within someone else, they somehow magically elevate themselves.

In fact, the mediocre have, throughout history, attempted to disparage, discourage and disprove greatness in all forms. So my question here is this: what side are you on? Make your decision right now. You've been, throughout your life, playing for one of two sides. Everyone has the chance to do something great, but you must first decide if you want to be great. If not, save us all a bunch of wasted time and find the door or at the very least, keep it to yourself.

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT: Greatness is not for everyone. If everyone were great, greatness would be considered mediocrity. No, in fact, we need people to be mediocre. Without mediocrity, there would be no comparison point that would allow us to recognize greatness when we see it. No one would ever stand out as a leader. Everybody would be blindly bumping into each other looking for someone to follow. They would just try to get through each day without having to face anything difficult because the thought of facing something difficult paralyzes the mediocre.

The mediocre are so busy keeping up the appearance of being great that they don’t have any time to do something great. In fact, attempting to appear great is far more work than actually doing something great. Reasons and excuses are in the tool chest of the mediocre. Getting things done are in the tool chest of the great.

So the challenge you must face up to today is to simply answer this one question and answer it truthfully: have you, by default, allowed yourself to become mediocre or will you choose to do something great?