Naivety

The world of business is savage. It really will chew you up and spit you out if you aren’t very careful.

We know it is a dog eat dog world out there and with that knowledge it is easy to assume that in order to survive we need to be the biggest and meanest dog around. The problem with that strategy is that no one, team members or customers, really wants to work with a big bad mean dog.

We don’t need to be the meanest to survive but we cannot afford to be the most naïve either. It is a case of ‘wise up’ rather ‘toughen up’.

I see a lot of naivety these days particularly in relation to how we deal with people in our business, so I looked it up. Many of the responses referred to ‘lack of experience’ or similar. OK, I get it, but the only real antidote to a lack of experience is to gain experience by trying it again and again until we are no longer naïve. That strikes me as a highly inefficient, not to mention dangerous process.

We have to be able to learn faster and better. That is where coaches and mentors come in.

What do I mean by naivety in how we deal with people? Among other things tolerating poor behaviour and imagining it will miraculously self rectify; seeing or hearing a team member doing something inappropriate, failing to correct them and being surprised when that behaviour repeats and spreads. Ignoring poor behaviour just once simply condones that behaviour, to ignore it more than once encourages it. To think otherwise is simply naïve.

If you see or hear someone in your team behaving in a way that doesn’t match your company standards and you don’t call them on it, any repetition – and it will repeat- is on you not them.

So the questions for this week are;

• How close are you to what is actually happening in your business?
• Is every action with customers on point?
• Are the people that answer the phone properly trained?
• Are the calls monitored?
• What feedback mechanisms do you have to enable customers to let you know how they feel about dealing with your business?
• How often do you see or hear team members coaching each other to better behaviour?

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