Going the Extra Mile

Tags

customer service, liking, Motivation, psychology

[How little things can result in huge reputational gains]

It is the middle of July, the Greek summer sun is bearing down on you mercilessly, so you head for your favourite bar on the beach. The barista greets you with a smile. ‘You know that weird cocktail you asked me for yesterday – the one I hadn’t heard of?’ he asks. ‘Well, I looked it up, found the ingredients and prepared it for you. Here it is. On the house’. Wow!

The world of Customer Service is full of little incidents like this one (taken from ‘The Power of Moments’ – p. 55). Imagine for instance being a CEO and flying off somewhere to receive an award in front of 2,000 people. Then at the very last moment you discover you forgot to pack a tie. The hotel manager who happens to be present simply removes his own and gives it to you. Fantastic! (‘The 12 Elements of Great Managing’ – p. 13)

And what about that employee at Nordstrom? A customer walked in saying she had bought something which she needed to give someone as a present, only they had forgotten to gift-wrap it for her. The employee immediately offered to do this for her. Nothing special here – except that the item had not been bought at Nordstrom but at Macy’s! (‘Made to Stick’ – p. 73).

Is there a lesson for us here? Indeed there is. Our students watch us all the time – and they talk about us. Whenever we do something unexpected, something special, whenever we go the extra mile, this registers immediately and can have a huge impact on our reputation.

Imagine for instance a parent calling the school saying that something has come up at home and she cannot pick up her child for at least an hour. Now imagine the teacher driving the child there on her own initiative.

Or imagine a teacher hearing about one of her students winning, say, a sports tournament and throwing a special party at the language school as a special treat.

What message would these actions send? That the teacher cares for her students not only as learners but as human beings as well. Think about how the students and the parents would see her – and what they would say about her. Think about how much more students would learn from a teacher they like. Then think about how these little things would change the teacher herself.

The Moral: YSeek out opportunities to shine.

Birds of a feather – any feather!

Tags

liking, psychology, similarity

[The importance of similarity in liking others]

Whenever I go into a store to buy something and I start chatting with the shop assistant, within seconds it emerges that we share at least 2-3 things in common. Now isn’t this strange?

Back in the 1990s, a young researcher by the name of Donn Byrne wanted to study how similarity affects how much we like others. He started by talking to students and finding out their attitudes and preferences on pretty much everything from religion, to politics, to films, to sports, to premarital sex. He analysed his data and distilled them down to 26 key attributes.

Next, he found some students and asked them to indicate how much they agreed with a number of statements. Some were about serious things like ‘I believe in God’, while others had to do with relatively trivial attitudes, such as ‘I dislike Westerns’. He collected the responses and then a few days later, he showed each person the responses of another individual on the same statements. (Naturally, he had made these up!) Then he asked students how much they liked these other people on the basis of their responses.

Byrne had divided his subjects into four categories. The first group got responses which were practically identical to their own. With the second group it was the other way round. What he discovered was that similarity of views / attitudes mattered enormously. On a scale of liking from 1 – 14, the first group said they loved these other guys (rating: 13 out of 14). The second group all but hated them (rating: 4.41 out of 14). This is a huge difference.

What happened with categories three and four is much more interesting however. Subjects in group three got responses which showed that the other person had similar attitudes in important matters (e.g. religion, politics) but different ones in less important ones (e.g. sports, films). With group four, it was the other way round. Now, you would expect that people in group three would really like these other people, while people in group four would dislike them, right?

Wrong! Incredibly, what Byrne found was that quantity trumps quality! In other words, it does not matter whether we share similar views on important matters, so long as we {“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“df5e4e5d-9285-435c-a4b2-7cae0b216280″],”srcRootClientId”:””}have many trivial things in common. Put another way, it does not matter if we disagree in politics, as long as we share the same name, zodiac sign and shoe-size! (Byrne 1997).

And this is the moral here: do you want your students / your colleagues / your boss / parents etc. to like you? The easiest way to achieve this is to discover as many things as you can that you share in common – however trivial (‘Yes! I too add pepper to my coffee!’). Take a leaf out of the shop assistants’ book.

The Moral: Find and stress similarities between yourself and others.