Have you ever had an experience where you gave your all for your customers and still they were unhappy? One possible reason for their reaction is that you implemented a major change without preparing them for it. In the absence of information about what they can reasonably expect, customers form their own conclusions about your motives.

In two organizations I visited, I came across situations which aptly illustrate how the failure to communicate with customers can have serious repercussions for the reputation and credibility of the provider. Unfortunately, these situations are far from unique.

Situation 1: Doing to customers, rather than with them

This first organization embarked on a technological upgrade that entailed replacing a significant amount of the desktop hardware and software that employees (internal customers) had grown accustomed to. Not a trivial transition, to say the least.

For many people, mandated change from the familiar to the unfamiliar is unsettling, even when the change will ultimately yield many benefits. Given the magnitude of the upgrade, information for customers about the upgrade and how it would take place would have been wise.

Unfortunately, however, customers received no explanation from upper management to prepare them for the upgrade. As a result, they had no basis for understanding its purpose, scope, or business benefits. To make matters worse, they lacked an appreciation of the steps they could take to contribute to its success, which only made the job harder for the technical staff. In short, those most affected were unprepared for the change.

Is it any wonder that customers reacted with intense negativity when technical staff arrived to “tamper” with their computers? And since many customers experienced an unanticipated period of degraded system performance, they saw the upgrade as a colossal disruption. Their widespread reaction was, “Why are you pushing this down our throats?”

Customers often complain that they don’t understand the reasoning behind the policies and standards imposed on them. After all, no one has communicated with them, prepared them, or involved them in the effort. As a result, they perceive the efforts “on their behalf” as arbitrary, thoughtless, and in some cases, even malicious.

Under such circumstances, customers understandably lose trust in their service providers, and providers face an overwhelming challenge and invariably, much more time that they anticipate to build back that trust.

Situation 2: Keeping customers in the dark

A Network Support Group concluded that the network in a particular customer area faced looming problems and needed to be taken offline for maintenance. The technical Wizard-In-Charge scheduled this maintenance during work hours. A thoughtless decision? It sounds like it, but his decision was based on sound financial thinking: Network maintenance was handled by an outside firm which charged A Big Chunk of Money for daytime work, and A Big Chunk and a Half for after-hours work.

So sure was the Wizard that the more cost-effective daytime maintenance was the right thing to do that he didn’t think to tell his customers the reason for his decision. Neither did he ask for their input. In his view, they were just a bunch of complainers, always grousing about one thing or another. Besides, this was a technology matter, and what did customers know about that? As a result, his customers were kept in the dark and so, during peak hours, was their network. All his customers knew was that the network was done and they couldn’t do their work.

Penny-wise and pounds of foolish

When efforts are undertaken on behalf of customers without keeping them in the loop, the affected customers often see the effort as yet another hare-brained scheme by those #$%!@& people who want to sabotage their productivity and complicate their already complex lives. The offending party, meanwhile, doesn’t understand the customers’ negativity. The sad part is that customers can sometimes offer options that provider staff might never have thought of.

And so it was in this network situation. The customer manager contacted the Wizard to ask why the network was done. The manager’s confrontational attitude puzzled the network maven, but he was certain that his explanation about the Big Chunk and a Half would impress the manager. Instead, the manager became even more upset, and said: “If I had known that was the situation, I would have gladly offered to pay the difference between the daytime and after-hours rate so that we could have kept the network in operation during the day.”

How often do you make decisions that affect your customers without considering their perspective, communicating your plans, explaining your rationale, and inviting their input? What changes do you need to make so that your answer to this question is “Never”?

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A black hole is a place in the cosmos where things get swallowed up, never again to emerge. Although I love to travel, it’s not the sort of destination I’m eager to visit. This is not just because it seems like such a dark, dank, distant place, or even because it’s a point of no return, but because it’s overflowing with problems.

How do I know it’s overflowing with problems? I know because of the comments I’ve heard from so many customers. When I ask them about the service they’re getting from their suppliers, vendors and providers, they tell me that when they ask a question or submit a problem, it goes into the Black Hole. These are their exact words.

When I ask customers what they mean, they say they submit problems or requests and never hear back. No response, no follow-up, no clue as to the status of the situation — or even when they’ll be advised of the status. Who knows, maybe after a hundred thousand years or so, the Black Hole will eject its contents and customers will finally get the responses they’ve been waiting for. But most customers aren’t that patient.

Not for customers only

It’s not just customers whose problems make the Black Hole such a congested place. I also hear complaints from service providers who depend on support from colleagues and co-workers in order to do their job. In one situation, I asked a Help Desk group about their experience with the technical problems they transfer to a Level 2 support group. “Often, they just disappear into the Black Hole,” one woman told me. And what about the customer who’s awaiting a resolution to the problem?

Same thing from another group for which I was reviewing the findings of a customer survey. For the most part, customers were pleased with the service they were receiving, but interspersed with the high ratings was a noticeable subset of low ratings. What are these? I asked. Oh, those, said the service manager. (“Oh, those” is usually a signal that bad news is about to follow). Those ratings, he told me, were associated with problems sufficiently complex that they couldn’t be resolved within the timeframe set by the front line staff, so they’d been passed to the R&D group for investigation. A group, he explained, that had actually been dubbed The Black Hole because problems submitted to them seemed to never again emerge.

Are you guilty of making the Black Hole such a crowded, congested place? Do you provide status information to those who submit problems to you or who can’t go about their business until you resolve a malfunction, outage or delay? Are you aware that not knowing the status is one of the most singularly frustrating experiences for customers everywhere? Sometimes, in fact, not knowing the status of the problem is even worse than not having a resolution to it. Not knowing, and not knowing when they’ll know, makes people angry. It doesn’t matter if you’re actually working on the problem. If customers don’t know you’re working on it, their perception is that you’re not. After all, they have no information to suggest otherwise.

Adding to the Black Hole

This frustration can emerge in any type of relationship where one party is awaiting status information from another. I was once invited to give a keynote presentation at an event for which the date had not yet been finalized; it was to be one of two days. I told my client I’d reserve both dates, and she could let me know when the final date was set. Time passed. No follow-up. More time passed. Nothing. Then I was invited to speak at another event scheduled for one of the two dates I had reserved. Now I needed to know.

I called my client. She wasn’t there. I left a message with a co-worker. My client didn’t call me back. I called again. This time I left a voice mail message. She didn’t call me back. I sent a fax and an email, and left a few more phone messages. She didn’t call me back. The Black Hole filleth.

Now here’s the thing. When you’re waiting for information that isn’t forthcoming and you don’t know what the situation is, you start imagining things. They forgot about me. They lost my problem. They’re angry with me. In my case, I wondered if my client wasn’t getting my messages. Or if she was avoiding me, though I couldn’t imagine why. Or if . . .if . . . if. . .

I finally called her one day at a time that must have been too early for her to have been elsewhere. She answered. I identified myself. She sounded friendly as could be. I told her I didn’t know if she knew I’d been trying to reach her. “Oh yes,” she said, “I’ve received your messages, but I didn’t have the information you wanted so I didn’t call you back.” I was flabbergasted.

Was she being malicious in not calling me back? I don’t think so. Nor do I believe that she was being deliberately rude or thoughtless or inconsiderate. More likely, it just didn’t occur to her that any response would have been better than none at all. She wasn’t in charge of selecting the date, and was dependent on others who didn’t yet have the information. But it never occurred to her that if she had told me she didn’t know and would contact me when she did, she would have given me something to know rather than something to wonder about. It was getting no response whatsoever that was annoying.

I don’t know when I’ll stop not knowing

It’s hard to call another party and say, I don’t know and I don’t know when I will know. But most customers would rather know that than nothing at all. Savvy professionals don’t let their customers feel ignored or forgotten, and that’s true whether or not they’re actually working on the problem, and whether or not they know the status of the problem. They regularly give customers updates, even if those updates consist of stating that there’s been no change since the last update.

If customer satisfaction is important to you, get in the habit of asking yourself, Who is expecting a follow-up call from me? Who is awaiting a status update? Who has submitted a problem and wants to know what’s happening? Then contact those people. Don’t contribute to the Black Hole. It’s crowded enough there without your help.

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When I ask people how to get somewhere, I hate it when they rattle off a bunch of directions followed by, “It’s easy, you can’t miss it.” When they say, “You can’t miss it,” I know I’ll miss it. See, I lack directional genes. I compensate by leaving extra time to get where I’m going. But I’m not incapable of following directions that are clear, complete, correct, and easy to follow. When your customers have difficulty following your instructions and directions, it could be that you’ve unintentionally provided information that’s unclear, incomplete, incorrect or overly complex.

The problem (one of them, at least) is that people often give directions from the perspective of someone who already knows the way. That was the case when I was given directions to a dinner meeting I was scheduled to speak at. I was instructed to bear left at the fork in the road. Even though it was dark out, I found the fork and turned left. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the intended fork — which, as I later discovered, was a half-mile further down the road. Meanwhile, I thought I was going right. That is, I was going left, but thought it was correct to do so. (I stopped twice for directions. Both times, I was told, “It’s easy, you can’t miss it.” I missed it.) I finally made it, with entire minutes to spare and a profound distrust of well-intentioned direction givers.

Ideally, directions describe two things: how to reach a certain point or accomplish a certain task, and how to know that you’re heading in the right direction — or at least, that you’re not going in the wrong direction. For example, if you instruct customers to turn right after passing MacQuickie’s Hamburger Emporium, they don’t know if the Emporium is one mile away or 15. It might be more helpful to direct them to stay on Main Street for two miles, and when they pass MacQuickie’s on the right, turn right onto Third Street. And if they come to a railroad crossing, they’ve gone too far. It may not be necessary to provide street names, distances and landmarks, but the combination of indicators makes it easier for the directionally-challenged to reach their destination.

To write instructions from the perspective of one who doesn’t already know the way, try this Visiting Robot technique. I once used it when a group of nontechnical people at a client’s office wanted to understand what programming was all about. I asked them each to write out a set of instructions that a visiting robot could follow to reach their office from a major intersection a half-block away. The office was on the fifth floor in an office park building that had multiple entrances.

I explained that this visitor would follow their instructions exactly as stated and these instructions must therefore be precise, complete, and in the right sequence. The results helped to illustrate the challenges of providing instructions that accomplish the intended goal. For example, one person created a set of instructions that had the robot look for a street sign that was no longer there. Another left the robot waiting by the elevator. A third brought the robot in one door and sent it out another. It hasn’t been seen since.

One member of the group, however, excelled at the assignment. In addition to guiding the robo-visitor to the right building, the correct entrance, the appropriate elevator, and the fifth floor elevator button, her instructions said, “Turn right after getting off the elevator.” Notice: after getting off the elevator. No smacking into the elevator wall for this robot.

Is the information you give your customers clear, complete, correct, and easy to follow? For myself, the situation is simple: Whenever someone tells me, “It’s easy, you can’t miss it,” I add plenty of extra time to my trip.

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(This article originally appeared in Perceptions and Realities newsletter.)

Personalized attention. That’s what this article is about. The two left feet in the title are my own, and personalized attention is something I’ve come to realize is important to me when those two left feet are struggling to figure out which is which.

But first I must digress. Almost everybody likes attention, even some of the people who claim they don’t. One of the reasons people like it is that they get so little of it. As a result, sometimes you can do no greater good than to give some attention to someone who’s not expecting it. And there are so many ways to do it, such as by listening attentively, offering a compliment, asking about activities of interest to the person, or occasionally calling or sending a note just to say “Hi, I was thinking of you.”

People like to know that others know they’re alive. In fact, giving personalized attention can often be more important than delivering a speedy solution. Sometimes, when people come to you with a problem, what they want even more than concrete help is simply to hear you agree that it really is a problem and they are right to be concerned.

One of the best ways to be an attention-giver is by acknowledging someone else’s existence when that person doesn’t even know you’re looking. That’s where my two left feet enter the picture — in aerobics classes. In case you’ve never partaken, aerobics classes entail an hour of energetic, high-intensity, fast-paced movements, in which your arms and legs flail in all directions to the sound of music that’s invariably too loud.

Doing that can be a challenge when you have a hard time following directions that require one foot to do one thing while the other foot does something else. The result is that when the aerobics instructor says to go this way, I go that way — and vice versa. And sometimes, as I attempt to follow her instructions, my feet get into an argument about which way each should go, and they both lose the argument!

But — and here’s where personalized attention comes in — every now and then, from across a crowded room, I hear the instructor say, “Nice job, Naomi” or “Naomi, good work.” At first, I was sure she was talking to some other Naomi. But no, she was looking directly at me. It was a nice feeling. I may have two left feet, but they’re not two anonymous left feet.

Do you know it took several classes before I realized that she similarly acknowledges everyone in the class? This is an instructor who is astute enough to realize the value of personalized attention. And knowing that she is going to deliver this little zing of attention doesn’t diminish how good it feels every single time.

It doesn’t even matter if I’m not actually doing good work when she makes the comment. Just the contrary. Once, near the end of a longer-than-usual class, I was running out of energy, and my two left feet had begun to do battle with each other. That’s when I heard her say, “Nice work, Naomi.” I knew I was in klutz mode at the moment, but she gave me just the boost I needed. My two left feet and I suddenly felt energized, and we completed the class in rare form.

In this world, if we are not left together, we are left alone. Who will you give personalized attention to today?

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(This article originally appeared in Perceptions &
Realities newsletter, www.nkarten.com/newslet.html).

A frequently touted claim is that when customers have
positive experiences, they tell 3 other people and when they have negative experiences,
they tell 11 others. But some people claim it’s 5 if positive and 10 if
negative — or 4 and 14.

My guess is that some speaker once convincingly spouted a
pair of numbers to a receptive audience and the idea took hold even if the
exact numbers didn’t. But if the numbers vary in the retelling, no matter, because
the larger point is made: If you deliver services, negative customer experiences
can damage your reputation far beyond just those customers immediately
affected.

But an even bigger problem than how many people hear about
a negative experience is the nature of the experience they hear. When people relate
a situation that angered or displeased them, they tend to embellish. They add
details. They focus on fine points. They stress certain parts of the story out
of proportion to the role these parts played in the actual incident. And that
makes the experience sound even worse.

Not only do people embellish, but the amount and intensity
of embellishment often grow with each retelling. For example, during a break in
my Managing Customer Expectations seminar, Julia, a project manager in the
group, told me about an upsetting experience she’d had as a customer. During
subsequent breaks, I heard three people ask her about the incident, and each time
she described it, she incorporated some new wrinkles. Each repetition of the
story became more dramatic and more negative. Each time Julia related her experience,
she became a more aggrieved customer. Woe to the company whose misdeeds she was
describing.

Furthermore, observe carefully, and you’ll see that when
people describe negative incidents, they don’t just embellish, they perform: They
take center stage and display a certain pained demeanor and a “you’ll never believe
this” tone of voice.

To make matters worse, if the circumstances of the saga are
striking enough, people who hear it repeat it to their own audiences. In doing
so, they add their own embellishments and tweaks and negative twists. And as
bad as word-of-mouth is, word-of-Internet is exponentially worse.

To make embellishment work in your favor, do two things: First,
strive to create compellingly positive experiences for your customers, mindful
that they’ll eagerly tell others. Second, when the negative stuff happens — and
it will — try mightily to turn it into a positive outcome for the customer. People
love to relate negative experiences that have been transformed into happy
endings. And when that happens, embellishment isn’t a risk at all; it’s a
benefit — and you’re the beneficiary.

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When is a thank you not a thank you? Consider these situations:

The anonymous thank you

While preparing an important presentation, a woman named Ginny requested and received assistance from six people. The presentation was a success. Afterwards, she emailed a message of appreciation to the six. The message began: "Thank you for your inputÖ". No opening names, no greeting, no indication of who the recipients were.

A thank you ought to be a personal thing. Given that only six people were involved, Ginny could easily have sent a separate message to each one, so that she could address each by name. There is, after all, a big difference between "Thank you for your input" (whoever you are) and "Scott, thank you for your input." How much more special Scott might have felt to be personally appreciated for his contribution, rather than to be merged into an anonymous list. 

The sideways thank you

A company event included a recognition ceremony for the people involved in a complex and highly successful implementation. I was pleased that John, the director, planned this acknowledgment; so often, management views the successful completion of a tough job as "what we pay them to do." Not worthy of any special attention, in other words.

John invited each person in turn to the front of the room and described that person’s contribution to the project. Unfortunately, though, instead of looking at each and saying, for example, "Sarah, thank you for the role you played . . .," or "Sarah, your role involved xyz, and I thank you for your efforts," he looked at the audience and said, "Sarah’s role was to xyz."

See the difference? Instead of speaking to each person, he spoke to the audience about each person. John understood the value of public recognition, but it would have had more impact if he had expressed it directly and personally to those who had earned it. 

The clueless thank you

Here’s a message from a senior VP to his managers and directors:

"I want to congratulate you for your superb work in recent months. I hope you will pass along my deep appreciation and personally thank those who report to you. I’m excited about our people and the performance the company experiences through their efforts. We have a great year ahead. Let’s not lose our momentum."

How many people do you suppose felt thanked by this message? Many might have if it had been part of a culture of appreciation. Such was not the case, however. Low morale and high turnover plagued the company, due in part to a prolonged pattern of non-appreciation, made worse by a reorg which treated employees as irrelevant. In such a context, an isolated, long overdue, global, yay-team thank you like this one can only worsen morale and hasten turnover. Which is what it did.

If you want people to feel lifted by your thanks, thank them personally, thank them directly, thank them now.

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This is the story of a runaway cat that helped me make a point during a seminar I was presenting to a client company. We were discussing how easy it is to make false assumptions and how they can lead you astray in solving problems. Suddenly, a secretary appeared with a message for Tara, a manager in the group. The message was from Tara’s neighbor who had called to say that Tara’s cat, Panther, had gotten out of the apartment and was running around in the hallway of her building.

“Not again!” Tara exclaimed. She said the cat probably dashed out when her cleaning lady opened the door. I told her this was the first time I’d ever had a class interruption caused by a fleeing feline. Fortunately, Tara lived only a few blocks away from work. Her secretary was most accommodating and, as she’d done in previous runaway-cat episodes, offered to go to the apartment, retrieve the cat, and return it safely to Tara’s apartment.

Which she did and didn’t. That is, she did go over to the apartment. But she didn’t retrieve the cat and return it. Why? It seems it wasn’t Tara’s cat. She’d met Tara’s cat before, and she knew this wasn’t it.

Tara had made an assumption. She had assumed it was her cat. It sounded like her cat. It was the sort of thing her cat had done before. There was no reason for Tara to question the situation before leaping to conclusions. As a result, the idea of calling her neighbor back and asking a few questions to validate that it was her cat never occurred to her. So she didn’t ask what the cat looked like. She didn’t ask where, exactly, it was found. And she didn’t bother to ask if it responded to “Panther.” The odds were that it was her cat. Except that it wasn’t.

The fact that Tara lived nearby eliminated the need to analyze the situation more carefully. It was easy enough to just check it out. If it had been her cat, the problem would have been quickly resolved. And even though it wasn’t her cat, no one had been seriously inconvenienced.

But what if Tara had lived further away? Or her secretary hadn’t been available? Or as accommodating? Or what if the temperature had been 30 below or raining you know what and dogs? Would any of these conditions have caused Tara to challenge her assumptions, or ask some questions, or avoid allowing strong circumstantial evidence to lead her to a false conclusion? Who knows?

I was most appreciative of Tara. It’s wonderful when real life intervenes in a non-threatening way to help drive home a point. This exquisitely-timed situation helped to reinforce for class participants how easy it is to make false assumptions and how readily false assumptions can lead to flawed solutions.

Both in and outside the workplace, false assumptions can create havoc when you assume that you and others mean the same things by what you each say. In important situations, the safest starting point is to assume that they don’t mean what you think they mean and vice versa — until you’ve asked questions, sought clarification, and offered explanations. That way, you are more likely to identify some of the false assumptions that could interfere with a successful outcome.

By the way, Tara isn’t the manager’s real name. And Panther isn’t the name of her cat. I’ve changed both to protect Tara from the taunts and jeers of those know-it-alls who, in the same situation, would have automatically asked, “How do you know it’s my cat?” If I ever catch you in a situation that helps me make a point, I’ll do the same for you.

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© Naomi Karten, www.nkarten.com

(This article originally appeared in Perceptions & Realities
newsletter, www.nkarten.com/newslet.html).

The weather seems to have gotten colder as I’ve gotten older. As a
result, the ski jacket that once kept me warm became too skimpy.
Sensible people would simply stay indoors, but that lets me out. So I
needed a jacket that would protect me when the thermometer suggested
I should be indoors, relaxing by the fireplace.

Off I went to the ski shop. It took some searching, but to my delight, I
found the Perfect Jacket. It was roomy enough to fit comfortably over
the quadruple layers beneath. It was long enough to keep the nether
regions from freezing. Its multitude of pockets would make me a
self-sufficient storage system. It zipped up to my nose, ensuring
protection from the wind.

And the color was striking. It was orange. Or rather ORANGE. I mean, it
was bright! With this jacket, you could have seen me from a mile away
on a moonless night. What a find this jacket was.

Until I got home, that is. I tried it on several times, and each time, one
more thing annoyed me. Such as that it wasn’t just long, it was
too long to ski in comfortably. The nose-high zipper would be great
in stormy weather but a nuisance on clear sunny days. The jacket was
big and roomy and heavily-pocketed, which was good, but with the belt
cinched, I looked like a blimp with a belt. And that was bad. When
short people wear big, bulky things, they look like big, bulky, short
people.

And then there was the color. Iridescent neon orange. My husband pointed
out that it would attract dirt. He, being a dirt magnet, would
naturally think of this. I knew he was right, and despite my best
efforts, it would soon be not just ORANGE but filthy
ORANGE.

I began to have unpleasant images. I can ski advanced terrain unless it
has strategically situated trees that remind me how much I value my
head. But just because I can ski it doesn’t mean I remain
vertical the entire time. By the 17^th time I tried on the
jacket, I could hear the sounds of skiers shouting, “Look,
there goes a short, dirty, orange, belted blimp — and a clumsy
one at that.”

The jacket had to go back. This 24-hour trial period made that clear. But
it did something more. It helped me clarify my requirements. I
thought I knew what I wanted in a ski jacket, but I was wrong. I’d
missed several key features that I wanted the jacket to have, such as
a color that wouldn’t result in signs saying, “This way
to dirty skier.” And I had failed to realize the importance of
other features. Until I saw a concrete example of my specifications,
I didn’t really understand what I wanted.

Similarly, sometimes your customers don’t initially know what they want
even when they’re positive that they do. What my ski jacket
experience helped me appreciate is that specifications are really
nothing more than a starting point, a first approximation. Sometimes,
customers need, in effect, to try on the solution, simulating its
intended use so as to see if it satisfactorily addresses their
requirements and to make adjustments if any are needed.

I returned my jacket, and after a bout of trying on, I found another
jacket, a beautiful, dirt-concealing blue. It lacked several features
I’d previously wanted, but I loved it. If I’d evaluated
this jacket based on my original requirements, I’d have
rejected it. I have now worn this jacket for many a ski season, and I
still love it.

I learned from this experience that in the abstract, it’s
impossible to know which requirements really matter, and of those
that do, which are more important than which others. You might want
to keep this experience in mind as you help your customers define and
refine their own requirements. You can help them avoid signs that
say, “This way to confused customer.”

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It was a gray and gloomy day when we pulled into the ski area parking lot, and decided to sit a spell to see if the sun would shine. A carload of skiers pulled in next to us. Not deterred by the fact that the mountain had vanished in the fog, they started unloading their gear. I noticed they had left their headlights on, and told one of them. The fellow nodded, but didn’t turn out the lights. Odd, I thought. Why did he ignore what I told him? Why wasn’t he paying attention? Why didn’t he listen to me? Can you guess?

A few minutes later, as the group prepared for a day on the slippery slopes, they started speaking to each other – in sign language. Ahhhh . . . . It wasn’t that they hadn’t listened. It was that they couldn’t hear.

I pointed to their headlights. They got the message.

Non-hearing at work

In the workplace, most of us at times have felt that others weren’t listening to us. But by “not listening,” we generally don’t mean that they were unable to hear. Rather, we mean that we introduced a change, prescribed a new standard, offered an idea, proposed a solution, or provided advice – and they didn’t do what we wanted them to do, or they did it wrong, or they did something else instead.

But could it be that, on occasion, we communicate in a manner that leads them to react in a way that we describe as “they didn’t listen?” Think about interactions you’ve had with your customers, employees, management, and vendors – or for that matter, your spouse, in-laws, kids, or pets – that led you to conclude that they didn’t listen. How might you have contributed to their non-listening?

Unmask your messages

Was the information you provided masked by clutter, so that they missed it? Though you didn’t intend to, you may have presented your information in such a way that recipients couldn’t distinguish what was critical from all the rest. As a result, they missed it, and therefore didn’t respond as you had hoped.

In reviewing policy manuals and service guides for companies, I frequently find key advice buried among less essential information. Yet it’s easy to highlight critical information so that it clearly stands out. And when speaking, you can use the spoken equivalent of bold type, such as by saying, “The following points are particularly important.”

Review the information you’ve given your customers and others; I predict you’ll find examples of masked messages.

Avoid a you’re-a-jerk attitude

Did you communicate in an offensive or arrogant manner? How you say something is at least as important as what you say if you want others to accept your directions and recommendations. Even the best advice is worth little if presented in an off-putting manner. If your tone of voice or choice of words convey a you’re-a-jerk, I’m-a-genius attitude, it’s hard to fault those on the receiving end for dismissing not only the information, but you as well. If you want others to be receptive to your offerings, think about how you come across. Would you listen to someone who sounded like you do?

View the world through their eyes

Did you communicate in a way that failed to take their views into account? How you see things is invariably different from how others see the very same things. If you want to sell your ideas to them, you have to consider their perspective. To do so, you may need to learn more about that perspective. Then present your ideas so that you’re clearly taking their concerns into account. Sometimes, gaining their attention is as simple as asking a few questions to learn more about their pressures and priorities. The very process of asking and then listening (that is, you listening to them) may make them receptive to listening to you in return.

Explain the why behind the what

Did you explain the reasoning behind your decisions? Or did you sound like you were issuing directives, orders and mandates? No doubt, your policies, standards and decisions are well thought out. However, in the absence of any explanation about how they came to be and why they matter, they may appear to the other party to be arbitrary and without rationale. It’s not standards, policies, guidelines, procedures and instructions that people resist; it’s being confronted with these rules-of-the-road with no understanding of the whys and wherefores. If it’s important to you that your ideas are accepted, explain the reasoning behind them. Doing so can be an eye-opener that leads the other party to respond, “Oh, now I understand.”

Synchronize what you say with what you do

Did you violate the very standards you created to guide your customers, suppliers, co-workers and members of other teams in working with you? Being responsive means occasionally making an exception. Just be aware of the message those exceptions communicate. Whenever there is a contradiction between what you claim you’re going to do and what you actually do, it’s what you actually do that customers notice. So don’t expect them to “listen” to standards that define your boundaries if you frequently step outside those boundaries. If you find yourself doing it often, it may be time to modify either those standards or your actions, so that they are in synch with each other.

The following point is particularly important

The next time you find yourself claiming others don’t listen to you, S-T-O-P and ask what you might be doing to contribute to this situation. Then decide what you can do differently so that they not only listen, but want to listen. Ya’ hear?

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I believe a man should change his underwear at least three times a year.

If you wear briefs, switch to boxers. If you wear white, try colors. Mix it up. Take a walk on the wild side.

I didn’t always think this way. Far from it. Like many men, I got set in my sartorial ways early in life. Around age six, I think.

I was twenty before I got up the nerve to change my shorts. I’d worn plain white briefs since I got out of diapers. I didn’t choose them. They were just there. Dad wore them. My older brothers wore them. I assumed that all right-thinking males wore white Y-fronts. To me they were a natural phenomenon, like sunshine or maple trees or Chevrolets.

I’d seen pictures of boxer shorts in the Sears catalog, but I didn’t know anyone who wore them. Maybe they were for the same people who wore tasseled loafers or plaid golf pants. For them, perhaps, but certainly not for us.

Then in college my girlfriend decided I needed a style makeover. She dragged me through the mall, picking out my new wardrobe. Including boxer shorts. I guess they were the norm in her family. I felt strange buying them, sure that people were staring at me. I felt even stranger wearing them. They seemed a bit, well, naughty. Thank heaven they only came in manly stripes and plaids!

Several years later it was my wife who rocked my boat. She gave me silk briefs for my birthday. Silk undies for a man? What was she thinking? But they came from L.L. Bean, outfitters to generations of hunters and fishermen, so I grudgingly accepted them.

Another year she gave me black briefs. I told her politely that I’d save them for a special occasion. I could tell by her look that I’d said the wrong thing.

“Does it really matter what kind of underwear I wear?” I wanted to know.

“That’s exactly my point!” she exclaimed. “It doesn’t matter at all. So why do you make such a big deal about trying something different?”

I finally got it. If something doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter. There I was, clinging to my familiar tighty-whiteys as if my life depended on them.

My wife is right. It won’t kill me to expand my comfort zone. To stop worrying about things that don’t matter. To take changes in stride. Of course, that means I have to try new things. They often feel uncomfortable at first. But I’m getting comfortable with that. One pair of shorts at a time.

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