What do a natural disaster, your best friend’s wedding, the death of someone who’s close to you, and the birth of a child have in common?
They’re all situations that inspire us to go out of our way to help others. When significant events both wonderful and terrible occur, people have a way of coming together—of adapting quickly to make an impact.
Every year, as the holiday season approaches, the spirit of charity seems to rise and we feel more generous and obligated to help those less fortunate. Giving comes in many different forms and can range from writing a check to volunteering in a soup kitchen all the way to competing in an extreme sport in support of a cause.
According to the Giving USA Annual Report, in 2015 the average American household gave $2,124 and 71 percent of all donations were made by individuals. Additionally, 24.9 percent of Americans have taken part in a volunteering activity.
But we don’t just like to give—we also want to see the impact of our gifts, even though this bias means our volunteering efforts are not as powerful as they could be. A 2016 Wall Street Journal article titled “The Mistakes We Make When Giving to Charity” points out that people feel that writing a check to a charity is not as meaningful as volunteering in person. According to the authors, the opposite is true; in fact, donating money to a charity often results in a greater impact.
I think this bias presents an untapped opportunity to start making an impact on a larger scale than ever before. What I’m suggesting is a new form of volunteering. While helping the needy in remote locations around the globe is quite important, there are others closer to us who can also benefit from our spirit of charity and generosity—namely, our customers and colleagues. Why is it that people we hardly know command greater attention from us than those who pay us for our services?
In Chapter Four, I revealed one of the most surprising findings from Strativity’s survey on engagement: nothing made employees feel more engaged than giving them the chance to deliver a great experience to customers.
People want to feel they can make a difference. So let’s tap into this universal spirit of generosity and apply it to our everyday activities. Think about the people on the receiving end of all our actions and make a commitment to making their lives better. Why wait for the annual marathon or the holiday season to make a difference? We can elevate our performance today and every day.
Just imagine how many customers and colleagues your work impacts every year. They need you. They need your absolute best. They are counting on you to understand them, solve their problems, and make their lives easier and better. Even if you do not see customers every day, your work has an effect on them.
It is easy to discover your generous spirit when some life-changing event hits. But do we really need some epic disaster to awaken our compassion? I sure hope not. Remember that everyone you come in contact with has some need. How can you unleash the power of your generosity to help them?
Have you ever wondered why we choose not to be generous with the people we work with? After all, they pay our bills. Based on experience with customer-centric transformations, we’ve discovered that many employees think they already are acting generously. Others assume that because there’s an exchange of money, their work is not truly altruistic. Because they view work as a commercial exchange, they withhold their best efforts. Still others suffer from “worst customer syndrome.” They judge all customers based on the few outliers who have hurt them in the past—and aren’t so quick to be generous.
It’s time to leave the excuses behind. The worst customers should not put us in constant defense mode. It is time to reestablish trust with our customers and treat them all with generosity.
If we start measuring the impact we have on people every day and bring our spirit of generosity to every interaction, we will be pleasantly surprised by the end of the year. The person we see when we look in the mirror will be a better, happier person—and, most of all, a person more proud of who they are and what they do.
Change resilience is not Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second 100-meter dash. It’s a lifelong marathon. Running a sprint requires you to focus on the finish as soon as you start running. In a marathon, the finish is less important than your endurance throughout the whole journey.
Remember, change is no longer an event. It is now an integral part of our lives. Treating it as temporary weakens our change resilience and our ability to stay relevant in the world. Living change resilience means constantly training and adapting. In this chapter, I will share strategies for strengthening your change resilience muscles.
It’s not enough to deal with changes as they come along. You also need to stay on top of the trends that are transforming your industry, the economy, and the world. Never stop looking out for the latest challenge or opportunity: a new tool, technology, or customer wish.
Change resilience is about the excitement of the exploration. When you know your cause, it’s easy to understand which opportunities to pursue. You want to achieve results, so you relentlessly seek new, better, faster ways to fulfill your promise. Not only are you no longer reluctant to embrace change, you thrive on it.
We’re all going to experience some bad situations—that’s life. Perhaps we’ll deal with a customer who exploits a loophole to his or her advantage. Maybe a rogue employee will take advantage of the company’s generous vacation policy. Maybe we’ll have a bad experience with a new technology.
The main difference between those with change resilience and those without it is how we respond to such situations.
Our natural reaction may be to prevent anything like that from happening again. We therefore establish restrictive policies that limit what customers and employees can do. Or we close ourselves off to new opportunities.
By doing so, we treat everyone as a potential abuser unless proven otherwise. Unfortunately, such restrictive processes and rigid rules have a way of eroding trust. In the name of thwarting a few abusers, we treat everyone suspiciously and destroy our chance at strengthening our change resilience.
I’ve always found this tendency fascinating, but not in a good way. All it takes is one bad apple for many of us to decide that all apples must be bad. How does that make sense?
Yet we do it every day. On the organizational level, the bean counters and the legal eagles are focused on minimizing and mitigating risk. They do so by creating overgeneralized rules—“just to be safe”—that affect millions of customers and create pain for thousands of employees. Such rules make it more difficult to work with the organization. They make it difficult for the organization to change.
On a personal level, we limit our ability to meet new people, learn new things, and see new places.
What’s the alternative? Recognizing that just because one person acted badly, we do not need to punish everyone. We cannot live life beset by a constant fear of evil. We must put our trust in people if we are to adapt and evolve. We can learn from our experiences with those who took advantage of us—and trust that those experiences were the exceptions, not the rule.
Can you live by the rule “Always do the right thing for all parties involved”? It’s a simple rule, but it asks people to do what they think is best for the customer, their organization, and themselves.
I am sure that such a rule frightens some chief legal and compliance officers. They cannot envision such simplicity. So let me pose the question differently: Have you read your company’s compliance policies? If you’re a manager, how many of your employees know and fully understand the five-inch-thick rule book they’re given when they’re hired? How many people remember any of those rules five minutes after their training ends?
Let’s face it: these rule books are “gotcha” tools. They are there to prove to the employee, in the case of a mistake, that he or she has failed. They are not really guiding anyone and they’re certainly not building trust. If anything, they eliminate trust and turn employees into compliance robots who refuse to think for themselves.
Living with change resilience is about creating simple trust-based guidelines and keeping our options and opportunities open. It’s about refusing to allow bad experiences to close us off to new experiences.
More importantly, change resilience is about drawing strength from our successes, living by the impact we have created, and increasing our change resilience in the process. For every bad experience we have with a customer, we have had several that were inspiring, exciting, rewarding. Why should we allow the bad experiences to define who we are and determine which opportunities we explore in the future?
It seemed like a fun task—at first. During a consulting project, I’d been assigned to help the reception team during the check-in process at a family resort. The resort had changed hands twice during the past four years and was struggling to establish itself as a provider of great customer experiences. By around 1 p.m., the lobby was full of families who’d just driven three hours and were now ready to embark on different types of activities. The only obstacle between them and their long-anticipated vacation was reception—and, as you can imagine, there was impatience in the air.
While the young staff members were checking in the guests, I handed out welcome kits and chatted with the families. I almost immediately noticed that one of the teenage boys in a family of four was in a bad mood. I tried to get him to smile, and his mom said, “Good luck with that.”
I could see in her eyes the helplessness of the parent of a teenager—the same feeling I experienced when my kids were that age. You want to make them happy, but you simply don’t know how. The old tricks do not work anymore. Coming to this resort was her idea of getting the family together in a fun environment. She was hoping that maybe a few smiles might appear on her son’s face.
The employee completing the check-in process was efficient—collecting credit cards and confirming reservations at lightning speed. She had probably issued more room keys than anyone else at the desk. In fact, she was so efficient that she hardly got a chance to look those guests in the eye. She was what I refer to as a “process performer” through and through.
Meanwhile, I eventually achieved my goal. The teenager smiled. Maybe not for a long time—he was definitely doing me a favor by moving his facial muscles, however temporarily. But, hey, you need to set your expectations accordingly when it comes to teenagers. More importantly, I could see his mother was happy.
As I celebrated this small victory, the front-desk employee was completely oblivious to the human drama playing out a few feet away. She was already preparing to process the next family. It was at that moment that I recognized how dangerous it is to be a process performer. It wasn’t this employee’s fault that she couldn’t connect with this family—as a young single person, she had no clue what it meant to be a parent. She could not relate—let alone understand how her core cause connected to serving this family. As a result, she was treating the check-in process as an end goal and not merely as a vehicle to give families a chance to bond and enter into a great vacation experience.
She’d never learned how to connect her core cause to her performance.
As you pursue new and exciting ways to deliver value and connect with people, let your core cause be your guide. Remember, your core cause is what got you here. You are not here randomly, but rather are driven by purpose.
Your core cause is a unique prism through which to evaluate new opportunities to change and evolve. As a tried-and-true intrinsic compass, your core cause will serve several purposes:
1. Guide: Your core cause will help you understand which new opportunities to explore and which ones to abandon. It will show you how the next transformation will help you fulfill your greater purpose.
2. Inspire: We cannot maintain a high energy level at all times. We often have down moments when we need inspiration. In those moments, let your core cause remind you of the beauty of your purpose and the people who need you. Think about your vision of a better world—the world you are attempting to create.
3. Refuel: Allow your past successes in serving your core cause to act as a reminder that you can work through whatever today’s hardship is and emerge triumphant. If you’re part of a team, allow your collective memories to lift you up and overcome the challenging moments.
4. Support: Always review the lessons you’ve learned in pursuit of your core cause—even those you consider failures. Think of them as swings that didn’t result in home runs but that served as important practice.
When Pampers introduced disposable diapers in 1961, the reaction was lukewarm to negative. The product was perceived as distorting the image of the ideal mother: real mothers took care of their children in many ways, one of which was by washing their dirty cloth diapers. This negative reaction slowed the adoption of disposable diapers in the marketplace considerably.
Those who initially opposed Pampers were making a simple mistake. They defined a good mother as a doer of domestic chores, not as a nurturer and educator. It was only when the perception of the mother’s role evolved that people could see how the product liberated them to be better caregivers. Mothers could now focus on nurturing their kids and loving them, rather than toiling at the wash buckets and cleaning up dirty diapers. Children benefited far more from high-quality time with their mothers and extra bedtime stories than they did from their mothers cleaning cloth diapers.
When motherhood was defined in the context of its impact on children, change was much more easily absorbed; as a result, millions of mothers were transformed from human washing machines to nurturing, loving caregivers.
We all have the opportunity to start viewing change as a liberation. Just as a new product can liberate us to rethink societal roles and expectations, new systems can liberate us to take our performance to a totally new level and new technologies can free us up to focus on the human aspect of our work and add a personal and authentic touch to everything we do. After all, no two smiles look exactly the same—and yet, if they are authentic, they’ll all generate tremendous emotional engagement.
So, how do you know if you’re change-resilient?
Well, we all love to complete a challenge. Hit a milestone. Cross a finish line.
Unfortunately, change resilience isn’t a goal. It’s a way of being in the world.
There is, however, one way you can tell you’re on the right track. It will happen when you start looking forward to change. When you embrace change resilience as a mission and not a mandate. When change feels like a desire, not a chore. When we start loving the changed person we have become, we know we have arrived. But we won’t stop there. With our eyes always scanning the horizon for the Next, we will continue the transformation.
A world in which people stop changing is a world without progress. Our job as human beings is not to just accept the world the way it is, but to build it as we want it to be.
I hope you’re as excited about the Next as I am.