Saturday, July 28, 2012

DON'T BE SO STUBBORN

As you gain expertise and experience in the industry you all of a sudden realize you know quite a bit of "stuff", especially if you have joined BSCAI or ISSA or both. You are becoming an expert in this business and frankly you need to in order to best serve your customers and prospects and to stay even or hopefully ahead of your competition.

The industry is changing so rapidly that it is imperative that you are always learning and studying which goes to the subject of making sure that you have, in fact, joined your professional trade association(s).

What I want to address here is a trap that most all entrepreneurs fall into. That is, we begin to think we know it all and begin doing all the talking and none of the listening when our staff tries to present their point of view on a particular subject. We fall into the habit of saying yeah but, or we tried that before and it didn't work. Sound familiar?

I spent a lot of years working with a person who felt because he was vice-president of the company he should never let anyone know that he might not have the answer to a particular problem they might be having. The problem with that kind of thinking is you are fooling only yourself when you portray that attitude. The people that work with you are perceptive and will pick up on your lack of knowledge very quickly and the word gets around that you don't know what you are talking about.

Let me give you a couple of examples on myself early in my career that taught me to know where to find the answer rather than provide an incorrect one just to protect my ego.

When propane buffers were first introduced to the marketplace, one of the manufacturers asked if my company would test one of their models for them. Since we were cleaning retail stores at the time I saw it as an opportunity to cut some of our labor costs. Plus, it might even impress our customer that we were asked by the manufacturer to be one of their preferred guinea pigs.

When the machine arrived I took it to the store to spend the night with our crew and to "show" them how the boss did floors. When I started the machine up there was some black smoke coming out of the exhaust which one of my employees quickly said he could adjust very easily and in a short amount of time. My answer was that it is a new machine and after I run it awhile it will be fine.

So I started down the aisle and just as I was passing ladies ready to wear, and just as if the machine was give a cue, a trail of black smoke came bellowing out of the machine and created ladies short suits out of what had been ladies polyester pant suits. My employees tried hard not to laugh. I encouraged them to laugh and enjoy the moment and adjust the machine as they had suggested in the first place. I thought it best then to ask someone else to run the machine. They didn't want to.

Try explaining to your customer and to the insurance company this chain of events especially when the insurance adjuster, who was so diplomatic, asked what idiot caused this disaster. I really didn't want to tell him but honesty prevailed and I told him I was the idiot and I really wish he would have used different words to describe my lack of intelligence on operating propane floor machines.

On another occasion I was trying to demonstrate to a crew the correct way to remove spots from a carpet. As I was offering my expertise, the area supervisor, who was there to oversee my lack of intelligence said, "Dick, let me have the spotter" and Marie proceeded to demonstrate the correct way to use the product. Being quick in my thinking I told the crew I just wanted to see if anyone would catch me doing it wrong. Pretty good, huh? This was just another case where the boss should have turned it over to the expert in the first place.

I have never professed to be a real technical expert and these two examples proved it. They taught me a very good lesson early in my career--YOU DON'T HAVE TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING, JUST KNOW THE PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW.

The sooner you learn that lesson the quicker you can move on to leading your company to greater success.

Let me also remind you of the upcoming ISSA trade show and the BSCAI convention in Chicago, October 17-20. You can go to issa.com or bscai.org and get the details and register. It will be some of the best money you will invest.

Till next time. By the way, don't forget our weekly tripodcast at www.tripodcast.com.

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