GarthBox

The gap between mediocre service and remarkable service isn’t that wide.

You can make a significant leap simply by showing interest in the person you’re working with.

That requires asking more questions (oft unrelated to the thing they contacted you about), expressing your excitement in their endeavor (“wow, that’s special” goes a very long way), and following up after an exchange (even if it’s just a “hope everything is smooth sailing from here”).

This applies to sales, customer service, organizational communication and, you know what, just about any interaction.

And if you’re worried about the interest coming off as fake because you don’t actually care, carry on and fake it anyway. You’ll be surprised to find that fake interest begets real interest.

Stay Positive & Enjoy Improving All Your Relationships

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Control is mainly a story we construct up to make us feel okay when things are tough or make us feel better when things are going well.

After all, that award we got? We earned that! And that time someone else was selected to have their work on display and not ours? We had no control over it.

The problem isn’t that we’re wrong with either, it’s that we give each too much weight. We didn’t just earn that award, it was our effort combined with good timing, the right people evaluating the work, and a dozen other variables that one could argue are out of our control.

And that time someone else was picked over us? Sure we didn’t have control on the selection process, but we did have control over the quality of work we submitted.

Going forward, it’s in our best interest to use stories of control in a way that helps us be more generous and create better work. The truth is that we’ll always be in control, to a degree. What matters is what we do with the control we do have. Can we shape it to include others? And about that control we don’t have… can we shape it to better ourselves first?

Stay Positive & Lean Into Control Appropriately

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There’s no shortage of small businesses trying to market like big ones.

No shortage of medium ones still marketing themselves in the same way a small would.

A handful of large businesses market themselves in the same way they did when they were half their size.

The best agencies and CMOs might still document the marketing tactics and strategies they’d like to do if they were larger than they are, but they don’t devote budget and energy to it. Not yet anyway.

Stay Positive & Plan Accordingly

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You’re not actually killing anyone when you kill them with kindness.

Instead, you’re changing their trajectory, refilling their tank, giving them a second chance to have a new attitude in their day.

There’s so much more that happens after we swallow our frustration, switch it out with some empathy and then offer abundant kindness.

Stay Positive & Be The First Domino

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There’s a broad understanding of what it means to be firing on all cylinders.

It’s a feeling of, course.

And it’s asking yourself if you are.

If you’re a manager, it’s worth asking others if they are too.

Sometimes they don’t need direction, they need realization.

That starts with a simple question.

Are you firing on all cylinders?

Stay Positive & If Not, How Can I Help?

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People don’t like it when you take time away from them.

They do, however, love it when you give it to them.

It’s something to consider the next time you give someone a task. Do you do it in a way that they feel like time is stripped from their day? That they have more important things to do? That the things they could be doing matter more?

Alas, this isn’t about not delegating or assigning tasks, but rather 1. the way in which we do and 2. whether or not we gut check ourselves.

Breaking that down for a moment…

1. People feel like they are given time (an opportunity to prove themselves or be part of something bigger than themselves) when we ask someone to do something and we share the meaningful reason behind why the task needs to get done. “Hey can you do X” feels like time is being taken away. “Hey can you do X so we can have a productive meeting tomorrow?” feels like time is given.
2. Ego can often be the enemy, and even more often when we’re giving feedback, which is a cute way to say we’re asking others to do more work. In an effort to feel like we’ve contributed, we often give feedback for someone to do something that at the end of the day, won’t make a difference. Have you heard (or said yourself O_O) “I like it like X, can you make it that way?” <– That’s taking time, not giving it. The flip being, “I know the target is going to love it if you did X.” <– That feels like time is given.

All this to say: be careful. Relationships are built on trust and trust is built on respect for someones time. Time in the work day. Time with family. Time on this earth.

How you ask them to use it matters greatly.

Stay Positive & Time Is More Than Money

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I’ve written about the way to climb a corporate ladder is by doing everything you can that helps someone else. (Of course, this is good practice on or off the ladder.)

At the core, it’s about exceeding expectations.

Whether it’s climbing the corporate ladder or creating a coffee shop that people talk about or designing a tricycle. If you want to stand out, you have to exceed expectations.

Fortunately, the bar is fairly low. There’s a lot of companies in motion to keep the bar average, mediocre, and banal.

When someone goes to your website, walks in your store, fills out your contact form – their expectations are pretty set for the experience. They’ve been to a place like this before, and that’s a good thing because now you have your chance to surprise and delight.

The alternative is to make something so wacky that someone can’t have any expectations because they haven’t experienced anything like it (LingsCars for example…). Alas, it’s noteworthy but it doesn’t exceed expectations, it sets new ones (a topic for a different blog post).

So go ahead and give them something familiar. Use that template. Do something others already do. But don’t forget to figure out how to exceed expectations.

If you need some ideas of things not to mess with, here’s a good read.

p.s. Sell tricycles with baseball cards. Give your best content to someone who fills out a contact form (not a gated content form). Oh, and what if you put a red carpet once they entered the door rather than before they do. Just a few ideas.

Stay Positive & Start Succeeding In Exceeding

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