Great Service Grows From Great Praise

"Praise the tiny qualities you want to grow."

David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

Anyone who manages a retail business faces a dilemma. The very talents and skills that allow you to run a profitable business: successful processes to achieve specific objectives, management of information, relentless attention to business detail, and, of course, ability to deliver the numbers, are the same ones that damage a culture of service. Poison it, in fact.

You must learn to manage feeling, for feeling fuels service. And feeling is not numbers-driven.

Think about it. What are qualities that make for great hospitality? Warmth. A commitment to serve. Intuition to read customer moods and anticipate their needs. A sense of urgency born of a caring nature. The joy of sharing an experience. Relentless attention to how people are feeling. Spontaneity. As we are in the memory-creation business, then, by definition, we are in the feeling-creation business. Operator's who understand this will see lower turnover, stronger guest loyalty, more frequent return business and higher sales.

What technique, then, must a manager use to manage 'feelings'? Praise. Praise feeds feeling and is the means to develop the very skills you wish to instill in the staff. Information kills feeling. When leading your service staff, live in a perpetual 'glass is half full' world. Praise specific staff in specific terms. General praise to a group is a little like shopping at the $1.99 evening gown bin, yeah, they're dresses, but no one is going to feel like royalty.

Praise areas of your staff's performance that need improvement. To someone who is a little dour say, "I love your smile. It lights up the room." That is guaranteed to get more smiles from the person than, "You frown too much. Lighten up." Focus on feeling, not information exchange.

Praise frequently. To that same, smile-challenged person, recognize their efforts. "Did you see how that customer reacted to your smile? It was as if you took a thousand pounds off his back. Beautiful job." You may have 'targets' to reach ticket times, let's say. Most managers use the information sharing approach. "Our ticket times were too slow today. Get it together." This does not get the same results as, "George, I saw you get that table of business people their food in record time. They were on a mission and you helped them achieve it." Great service is as fast or as slow as the guest needs it to be. Can your staff tell the difference between customers who want more time to those that don't? If the restaurants I go to are any indication, the answer is no.

Management by praise does not preclude tough standards. Everyone wants to know what you want to achieve and in what manner you intend to achieve it. The point here is you raise your staff's performance levels in this tricky area of feeling only by using techniques to which feeling responds positively.

Where do you practice this obsessive praising? Praise everywhere: to specific people in the moment and at pre and post shift meetings. Ah hah, you knew there was a catch! Even here there are opportunities to blow it. Managers who run pre-shift meeting focus on sharing facts. Almost none run post shift meetings and those that do consider it a post-mortem. Just think, building great service by treating it as a corpse. That's a winning concept.

Feeling-creation does not respond to information sharing. Anyone squirming out there had better get used to it. A great manager shift gears from a facts and numbers-driven world to the trust filled atmosphere of acknowledgement and praise or they empower someone else to do it. And when empowering that person, they support them. We're in the feeling-creation business achieved by a staff of people who's feeling skills need to be admired and developed. Does it sound impossible? How do you balance profit, percentages, goals and objectives with trust, warmth, intuition and love? Start with the recognition that the skills to achieve one are not the same to achieve the other. Then go and find someone doing something right and praise him or her. Go on, because when you do, it's a beautiful sight to see.

 

I am reading a great book called The E Myth, Revisited by Michael Gerber. Ostensibly, it's a primer for small businesses on how to grow into mature ones. His stark review of the number of small business failures is chilling indeed. What has me excited is his conceptual framework: that every business person has within them the skills of the visionary, the technician and the manager. The problem is when one of the three skillsets dominate. In small business, that imbalance leads to overwhelming number of failures. I've been in large organizations and his insights are valid there, as well. If nothing else, I love how he challenges us to be warriors and to bring honor to our vision. I find that downright inspiring.

You can click here for a direct link to Amazon.com.

Rick recommends:

I come across vendors who have interesting products and services that can help you develop and execute Guest Relationship Marketing Strategies in The Experience Era. Since good help these days is so hard to find, I will on occasion share some of them with you.

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