Memories and…Positively great…

Memories and …Checking them

Memory can be a very deceiving skill. As trial lawyers know all too well eyewitnesses are often dead wrong about what they’re dead certain they saw – or more correctly what they think they saw.

Take that new account we took from a competitor recently. His products and lackluster service consistently gave them either streaked glassware, stained coffee cups, spotted and dull flatware – and sometimes all four. It’s why they made the change. We could do our install, straighten up all the errors that supplier left uncorrected, solve all of those bad results and call it good.

But what if three months later those eyewitnesses’ memories begin to fade? Maybe they’re even showing small signs of buyer’s remorse and are perhaps even entertaining the advances of the loser you replaced!

That’s when those samples of all the tableware that you and they selected as representing the conditions that existed when you arrived on the scene can come in handy.

Pulling them out of that plastic bags you stored them in on day one and placing them beside a matching set of today’s results ought to kill any budding thoughts of entertaining his promises of wonderful results, or whatever hollow idea he’s pitching them now.

Positively great…at criticizing?

Rearing kids, raising puppies and training employees. Those three have at least one thing in common and that’s the need to praise the positive. It’s easy to focus on correcting shortfalls rather than finding the small successes – that if encouraged can lead to fewer failures.

Perhaps when it comes to teaching it’s in our DNA to find fault rather than actively looking for those successes. And that includes forgetting to praise a behavior that we want to see become habitual – and not just to be practiced while we’re watching. Or maybe it’s more that our patience (and the lack of it) causes us to be less than supportive of those small but important improvements.

Either way, the good outcomes we want to see become established practice will come a lot faster if we overcome the tendency to focus on the negative. Looking for those small successes and praising them in a sincere way will get us what we want to see both faster and as a lasting performance improvement.

Next up: The steps of training.