BYOS, or someone else will

Bring your own story, or someone else will tell your story for you.  This was one very important lesson I learned over my years of professional experience.  Growing up as an Asian American, I constantly struggled to navigate the space between boasting and self-advocacy.  Most Asians were raised in very strict homes where children were disciplined rigorously to be quiet, respectful and humble.  They were taught to study hard and let their grades speak for their achievements.  This upbringing commonly translates to Asians living up to the stereotype of hard-working but do not stand out among their peers.  

Corporate America recognizes performance above all.  This country was built on the backs of pioneers, challengers, and outliers.  Those who stand out positively will ultimately do well in the work place.  These attributes are counter intuitive for many of us who were raised not to make waves.  

Performance Review time represents a critical time for everyone to stand out and advocate for their body of work.  This is not the time to be heads down and let the metrics speak for themselves.  Those who are well versed in the art of self-advocacy help their superiors to ‘pound the table’ on behalf of their advancement and increases.  Those who are not, take the chance that someone will tell the right story for them.

So, how can you bring your own story?  I offer the following 3 A’s of Performance Story Telling:

1. Authentic. (Tell YOUR story) Goes without saying you need to tell accurate stories.  Don’t be caught in a lie!  You do want to tell a story that leaves your audience to see who you were in the story.  Just as you need to limit using the pronoun “we” and put more emphasis on “I” when telling stories at an interview, you need to do the same when it comes to telling your performance story.  This is again counter intuitive for many Asian American professionals because we grew up being told not to brag.  When the audience hears “we” more often than “I,” they may begin to suspect that you are claiming credit for someone else’s effort.  Therefore, it is important to make sure that you clearly articulate the role that you played in your story.  Our team’s hypothesis was that our clients can increase their market share if they add social media as a promotion channel.  I developed the financial models based on benchmarks of comparable businesses for our analysis.  My models validated our position by illustrating a potential of 5% increase in market share over 12 months through advertising in WeChat, Twitter and Facebook. 
2. Audience-centric. (Tell portable stories) You need to tell your story in a language that the audience understands.  Many times, your story will need to go beyond a group of people who know you.  It goes without saying that you should avoid jargon and acronyms that limit the ability for your story to go viral to a wider audience.  There are many things that companies do to help create a common language, such as company values, strategy and goals, burning platforms, agendas, competency behavioral indicators, etc.  When you tell a story leveraging these elements, it demonstrates that you are aligned with the company and people who do not know you will still be able to recall the value you are bringing to the table. In demonstrating the company value of innovation, I led a project that leveraged bots to automate and accelerate the close processes.  We were able to shorten quarterly closing by a week or 25%.
3. Amazing. (Tell stories with a “so what”)  You need to structure your performance story in a way that provides the audience with clear understanding of the purpose of your performance during the period, your approach and solutions, and most importantly, your impact.  Your performance story needs to help your audience understand what was amazing about your period.  I have been a part of many performance review round table discussions where common challenges to performance stories included, “So what?” “How was that distinctive?” “Was he or she just doing their job?”  You need to make sure the story helps your audience understand how your results set you apart from others.  I set out to improve my sales this year.  I actively expanded my network and deepened my relationships at the clients.  As a result, I increased incremental sales of my accounts by 25% and brought in 10% more new accounts than my peers.

In Corporate America, it is as important for someone to be able to articulate the value of their performance as it is to be a high performer.  Why?  It demonstrates your ability to describe performance, measure impact, and articulate value in alignment with desired outcomes.  The higher up you move in the organization, the more you will be called upon to perform that task.  If you cannot do it for your own performance, then it would be difficult to see you describing the impact and value of your project, team, division, or organization.  So, before you write off telling your own performance story over lunch as office politics, consider it as an audition for your next job.

I will leave you with this thought.  As companies are doing away with periodic performance reviews and shift to everyday coaching, you will need to become even more comfortable and vigilant in telling and building upon your own performance story.  When it comes to your performance, be aggressive.  Tell your own story.

Thank you for reading this post.  As always, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments and share with your networks if you found it to be useful.

Stay Cheesy,

The Rambunctious Rat

Time to check your Leadership Visual Acuity

As a 10 year old boy, I was told by my eye doctor that I needed to wear glasses.  I wore them for a year.  True confession – I was a very superficial teenager.  I stopped wearing my glasses when I started middle school to avoid being branded as “four-eyes.”  When I returned to the eye doctor years later, he informed me that my eyes had naturally corrected themselves.  I never wore glasses again.  

As I approach my mid 40s, I started to question my visual acuity due to the constant strain I put them through with screen time.  Like most people today, I called upon the power of the internet to research.  My search results list for "vision" was peppered with articles on organizational and leadership vision.  So my brain started churning and began fleshing out a metaphor for Leadership Visual Acuity.

We all know that being a visionary is one of the key attributes of a leader.  A leader must be mindful of the future when developing strategy and plans.  We also know that great leaders will gain alignment on their vision as they lead their organization into the future.  We have seen when this is a good thing (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and when it is a bad thing (Adolf Hitler).  Therefore, it is probably important to understand how good someone’s Leadership Visual Acuity is before buying into his or her vision. 

20/20 vision is the bar for normal eye sight.  Therefore, 20/20 leadership is just table stakes for a leader.  Leaders need to at least be able to see what the average leader can see in order to be in the game.  Here are some deviations from 20/20 Leadership:

• Hindsight – “Monday AM Leaders” look at historical results and trends to act on lessons learned so not to make the same mistakes again.
• Myopic – Nearsighted leaders are great at navigating through the path of least resistance and risks. 
• Hyperopia – Farsighted leaders are constantly mindful of the pulse of change and what it will bring in the future.  They live by the “art of possible.”
• Peripheral Awareness – Leaders who have great peripheral vision are not easily caught by surprise.  They have a great pulse on the surrounding market conditions and the competitive landscape.
• Color Perception – Leaders who have a diverse and empathetic mindset are better able to navigate ambiguity and have a willingness to explore options.  They can perceive the different emotional responses of a diverse population.
• Depth Perception – Leaders who see multiple dimensions will approach the same problem from different angles and understand the importance of measuring the depth of impact.  They leverage data models to shape decisions, inform priorities, and take action.
• Eye Coordination – Leaders do not just stop at seeing.  They take action.   All the flashiness of modern data analytic capabilities and dashboards would mean nothing if the leader still shows up unprepared to the Roman Senate on the “Ides of March” .

So how do you improve Leadership Visual Acuity?  Is it possible to get to a hawk-like 20/4 Leadership Visual Acuity?  The good news is there are many ways to augment and improve your acuity:

1. Get your Leadership Visual Acuity tested!  Figure out your strengths and weaknesses so you can set a course of action to improve your acuity.
2. Keep your eyes open.  If you take your eyes off the ball long enough, then you will lose sight of it.  So do not let distractions keep you from focusing on your vision.
3. Keep your eyes clear and clean. Filter what you see.  There are plenty of examples of how quickly misinformation goes viral, elicits emotional responses, and distorts perceptions.
4. Remove blinders.  We all have unconscious biases that affect our acuity.  It is helpful to become aware of your blinders and remove them to see more broadly.
5. Don’t go it alone.  Find people who have different acuity strengths than you to gain new and different perspectives and insights.
6. Employ robots.  There are many ways technology can enhance your Leadership Visual Acuity.  Big data analytics and artificial intelligence has come a long way to support leadership decisions.  

My teenager self would not recognize the shortcomings of poor Leadership Visual Acuity because he is too vain to want to appear as someone who requires corrective augmentations.  Leaders should hold their ego in check in favor for improving their visual acuity.  Depending on the level of leadership, the impact of their vision can range from a marginal to global.  Therefore, I recommend that all leaders test their Leadership Visual Acuity and take corrective measures when they are needed.

Thank you for reading this post.  As always, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments and share with your networks if you found it to be useful.

Stay Cheesy,

The Rambunctious Rat

Lead a winning team

Recently, an article from NY Times highlighted Google’s Project Aristotle – a project set out to understand great teams and to leverage findings to improve team performance.  Several years of data collection, the conclusions were that teams worked better when they were connected at a deeper level by being more open to each other, allowing everyone to contribute their talents, and creating a safe haven for everyone to take risks. 

These conclusions should not be a surprise to anyone because we were put into teams since we were very young.  By the time we enter the workforce as professionals, we would have had countless hours of working in teams for sports, games, homework assignments, volunteering, or just plain ganging up on our older siblings.  Given today’s culture, our children are likely to have been immersed in squad-based video game campaigns or teaming up in MMOs.  So with all the tens of thousands of hours experience in teaming, why is it something that Google and others are still trying to improve? 

I believe team performance is challenged by egos and cultures. Teams are made up of individuals who inherently bring their own egos (and personalities), agendas (needs), values and beliefs to the table.  Individuals also bring their own cultural differences inherited from their diverse backgrounds including where they were born, where they grew up, and where they’ve worked.   These two factors play heavily on how individuals will behave on the team.  I do not think there is a proverbial “cool-aid” that you can give to everyone that will make them all fall in line.  Rather, I believe the answer to leading higher performing teams is helping individuals to learn how to flex their egos and cultures so that they achieve balance between their individual diversity and team success. 

In my experiences, the best teams that I worked with were definitely ones that had a solid identity and purpose, invested in each other’s success, and shared a comradery.

Team identity and purpose – At Superbowl XXXVI, the New England Patriots shocked the American Football community and fans by taking the field as a team rather than being announced as individuals.  They understood that their strength was in unity and the collective talents of the entire team versus a few individuals.  When a team sheds the egos of its individuals and summit to a single identity and purpose, they are more likely to achieve the team’s goals and objectives. 

As a team leader or member, you should think about how you can help the team gain alignment on its identity and purpose.  A popular past time for Americans is engaging in Team Trivia Night at a local pub.  The first task for any team is to come up with a fun team name.  This immediately creates an identity for the team that they can rally around throughout the evening.  I have been part of project teams who established vision, mission statements, and team norms from the get go, and periodically revisited them to ensure everyone remains aligned with the purpose of the team.  You can also leverage team-based competition to create greater employee engagement, and better performance at the workplace.  For example, you can award teams for having the fewest defects or accidents, highest sales, greatest number of lead generations, etc.

Focus on each other’s success – In 2007-2008 NBA Season, the Boston Celtics under the coaching of Doc Rivers adopted an African philosophy known as "Ubuntu" which means "all humanity is connected through a universal bond of sharing."  The basketball team acquired two super stars to complement their own, thus creating an era known as the ‘Big 3.’  Instead of the normal period of “storming,” where individual egos clash when a new team is formed, the team accelerated to “performing” quickly and won the Championship that year by adopting the Ubuntu philosophy of selflessly working as a team. 

As a team leader, you should think about how you are motivating your team.  Are you incentivizing the right behaviors to encourage teaming and selflessness?  Do you curtail behaviors that take away from teaming?  How are you establishing a culture of diversity and inclusion and lifting as you climb?  I’ve facilitated team meetings where we used penalty cards to call out bad behaviors and assigned each person to lead a topic so everyone took a turn in the conversation.

Shared comradery – The book, “The Teammates, A Portrait of a Friendship” by David Halberstam details a 60 plus year friendship between four iconic baseball players of the Boston Red Sox.  The book describes the close friendships between the baseball players that extended well beyond the years when they played as teammates on the field.

The major reason that drives me to be more connected to my team is the depth of my relationships with the other team members.  As a team lead, I often gave ample time for my virtual team to bond in our team meetings through provocative ice breakers.  Sometimes, we would spend extra time on them and did not get to other agenda topics.  I was ok with that because I saw the power of that connection.  When team members opened up about themselves during our regular ice-breakers, it invited others to do the same.  The emotional level of that openness affected how they treated one another.  They were nicer.  They were more comfortable in speaking up, sharing their ideas, and taking risks.  They were less self-oriented.  They wanted each other to succeed.  We sustained these relationships by making sure that we spend time socially together when we are in the same location.  So as a team leader, I encourage you to create opportunities for your team members to connect and bond.  

Thank you for entertaining me as I shamelessly plugged three of the four Boston major sports franchises to illustrate my points.  Apologies to the Boston Bruins hockey team for not getting to your winning ways.  Sports is an easy target for highlighting teams that work well.  Boston sports teams are well known for winning championships.  There are also plenty of examples in sports of egos and cultural differences getting in the way of a team’s success.  Boston teams are no exception to that fact.  When the good things about a team are not sustained, it is very possible for a team to go from being first in league in one season and then becoming the worst in the next.  So as a team leader, you will need to think about ways to sustain the commitment, selflessness, and comradery of your team.

Thank you for reading this post.  As always, please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments and share with your networks if you found it to be useful.

Stay Cheesy,

The Rambunctious Rat

Stop scheduling appointments, start scheduling your life

Sometimes it feels like we are not in control of our schedules.  Whether you are leading a Fortune 500 company or balancing life as a stay home mom, your calendars can quickly fill up until it looks like a giant multi-colored quilt.  There was a time when my calendar was filled with back-to-back 30 min meetings days and many of the blocks were triple or double booked and I would have to decide how to split my time.  I thought nothing of it until one morning when Siri pointed out that I had busy day because I had 16 appointments on my calendar.  I took a bigger gulp of my coffee after hearing that news.

There were so many bad things that came with the situation.  I was not necessarily productive because I was multi-tasking at many of the meetings to complete action items for the next meeting.  I was often late for meetings because the previous meeting ran over.  Eating and bio-breaks were a luxury.  Worst of all, I was not enjoying my life.  I dreaded getting up in the morning to go to work.  Two things happened that made me pivot and start to wrestle the control of my calendar back.  

The first incident happened right before Christmas 2012.  I was in the middle of a seventeen back-to-back 30-minute meeting day and happened to grab my phone to look at it.  I realized in a panic I had missed multiple texts and voice mails from my wife.  Her OB/GYN wanted to admit her to the hospital because our baby was showing signs of being born two months early.  I knew I needed to go to the hospital and I stared at the remaining 9 meetings on my calendar and started to stress out.  Fortunately, I was in a meeting with some very close colleagues who immediately ordered me to leave.  They promised to cover for me for the remainder of the day.  After I got off the phone, I spent all of five minutes to arrange for my absence from those remaining meetings and left for the hospital.  Although we spent Christmas Eve at the hospital, the doctors were able to keep my son at bay and he was born two months later.  While I was on paternity leave, I reflected back to that day and the ease with which I was able to rearrange my commitment at the last minute.  I started to wonder whether or not it was important for me to be in all those meetings.

The second thing that changed my "outlook" was that I was the fortunate recipient of executive coaching.  One of the things I discovered from the experience was that everyone knew I was very busy but nobody fully understood what I was working on and why.  The priority for all my meetings and actions were unclear to my others.  We evaluated my calendar and identified a number of activities that were not low impact distractions, and nice-to-haves.  My coach taught me one very important lesson.  He taught me to use my calendar to schedule my life.

Here are a few "work hacks" I learned to do with my calendar:

1.    Prioritize meetings – look at all of the meetings that you are attending and evaluate it against strategic priorities that you are accountable for delivering.  Make sure the appropriate amount of time is spent for priority meetings.  Get rid of low impact or no impact meetings.  If a standing meeting is often cancelled or has become staled, then decrease their frequency.  Manage your acceptances so that it empowers delegation for development rather than micromanagement.  You should also assess who else were invited to the meeting.  My peers and I showed up to many of the same meetings.  Eventually, we divvied up the meetings so that we would have a more appropriate level of coverage and less meetings to attend. 

2.    Schedule time for prep and action – what you do before and in between meetings matter.  If you show up at every meeting unprepared and without accomplishing your assignment from previous meetings, then that unreliability will become your brand and affect the level of trust others place on you.  So when you are creating an appointment, you should also block off time to prepare for it and perform action items after.  I have found blocking off an hour at the beginning and at the end of every day to be a good solution to ensure I prep for my meetings and knock out quick action items.

3.   Disrupt and develop – I met a young singer who competed on American Idol.  She told me about her hectic week and she was sad because she had no time to be an artist and create.  I told her, “Sometimes, you need to take a look at your schedule and see how much time you are spending on things that others want you to do versus doing things that you want to do and make more time for the latter.”   It is useful to make sure that you have time in your calendar once a month that is spent to disrupt regularly scheduled programs.  Spend the time being creative or developing new perspectives.  This will drive your own growth and innovation. 

4.    Schedule quarterly personal Town Hall’s – you should block off time on a quarterly basis to run a personal “Town Hall” where you assess your progress against priorities, document and share the value of your accomplishments, and determine how prepared you are for the remainder of the journey.  This is good to do with your team and your peers, so that everyone feels appreciated for their hard work and are rejuvenated for what comes next.

5.    Schedule time for relationship management – you need to make time for the people that matter.  Relationships are driven by frequency and richness of interactions.  Take time to reach out to your clients, mentors, sponsors, and protégés.  Make the time about them rather than you and you will earn their support and trust.

6.     Don’t forget about yourself – We know we are hurting ourselves by not taking breaks, inhaling food on mute, and not being active.  I have worked with people who manage their health by making sure they block off time for family time, working out and eating meals.  Make sure that your vacations are scheduled well in advance so everyone else around you will plan accordingly and you can truly unplug and unwind.

By taking control of your calendar, you can be more present, productive, and prioritized.  Stephen Covey's "Big Rocks of Life" analogy is great for thinking about how to manage your calendar.  Make sure you get those big rocks on your calendars first.  The last thing I will say on the topic is that you should also pay forward and do not become a burden on someone else’s calendar.  Invite only the people you need to a meeting and be sure that they understand how it fits with their priorities and what is expected from their participation so they can prepare for it appropriately.

That’s it from me for this post.  As always, please comment with your experiences and if you liked what I had to say, please share with your networks.

Stay Cheesy,

The Rambunctious Rat

You can’t “Dab” your way to the top

I have spent a lot of time in one-on-one informal coaching discussions with professionals who were frustrated with the lack of upward movement in their careers.  The key theme that I picked up in those discussions was that the professionals’ perception of promotion readiness were misaligned with their employers/superiors’ definition.  Today, I want to share a few things that I discussed in those informal discussions.  I know that context matters.  So, please consider these ideas against your own realities.

1. Don’t hate the player nor the game.  The most common thing I heard from professionals was that promotions were all about politics.  Hiring managers played favorites and the person did not get promoted because he or she did not play the game.   Office politics is actually a good view into the corporate culture and values of your employer.  If favoritism is indeed what drives promotions at your workplace, then you need to dig deeper and find out what makes that person a favorite over you.  If you discover that discrimination or unethical behaviors are commonplace, then you should question whether or not you want to work there at all.

The more common thing I encountered was that the individual did not see what was really happening.  Companies, leaders and managers recruit and promote people whom they feel are a match for their cultures and values.  At times, this becomes more important than the technical capabilities or performance history of individuals.  If you are passed up for a promotion, then you should explore the reasons behind the decision.  If you are not getting good answers, then spend time reflecting on your differences, and how those differences may have signaled the other candidate’s readiness over you.  You can use published company values and career level specific behaviors to assess how you stacked up against your competition.

I learned to trust that people are trying to set me up for success and would never promote me if they felt that I would fail shortly thereafter.  The tactics that seem like “office politics,” such as being a self-promoter and spending a lot of time with the boss, may actually be the types of things that one should be doing to demonstrate they have the capabilities for the next job.  Soft skills associated with value articulation and relationship building are critical for executives.

2. Being a “Top Performer” is a trap.  I have witnessed one too many professionals who had high performance ratings completely meltdown because they were passed up for promotion.  Year-end evaluations typically carry two dimensions. A.) Performance and B.) Promotion Readiness.  The performance part focus on how well the individual performed their job.  The readiness is about whether or not they demonstrated behaviors consistent of the next job.  The two use very different metrics and yet, more often than not, are lumped together in one conversation leading to misconceptions that A leads to B.

Often, Top Performers end up being less attractive candidates for promotion because they were overly focused on performing well, and not focused enough on the other dimensions necessary to demonstrate promotion readiness.  In some cases, that could be Top Performers did not lift as they climb and trained their replacements.  In other cases, they were heads down performing and did not look around for opportunities to make an impact for their team and company in other ways. 

If you find yourself in the situation of being a Top Performer but passed up for promotion, then you will need to regroup.  It likely bruised to your ego and you were probably angry.  You cannot lash out and complain to whoever will listen.  You cannot retaliate by taking a back seat on your performance.  You need to take a breath, then find out where you came up short.  Rally the decision makers to coach you through the next cycle so they have skin in the game for your success.  Create believers and advocates by demonstrating you are not only a top performer but you are also ready to move up.

3. Change what gets you up in the morning.  There is a thing in consulting where we always ask our clients, “What is keeping you up at night?”  A positive spin on that question is, “What makes you get up in the morning?”  Either way, you need to keep in mind that what you focus on to be successful for your current job is too narrow for a promotion. 

In math, the term “dynamical systems” refer to the similarities of micro and macro systems – a piece of broccoli looks like the whole broccoli, the solar system is a small version of the galaxy, etc.  The metrics that matter to your job are a subset of larger metrics that matter to your boss.  The priorities that you follow are a subset of the priorities that your boss follows.  Therefore, if you are able to align your thoughts and actions with the bigger picture, then you will demonstrate that you are performing at that next level.

For your next conversation with your boss, try to understand how your performance ties into the bigger picture, what keeps he/she up at night, what gets he/she out of bed in the morning.  Then articulate how your performance supports those things in your subsequent conversations so that they start to see you caring about right things for promotion.  It helps to dust off what you learned about business imperatives in your MBA programs (or learn about them).  I got my MBA shortly after my undergrad degree.  I did not have the job experience to fully appreciate what I was learning.  After years of being heads down and focusing on my technical skills, I had to relearn all those business concepts to get ahead.

4. How are you an equal?  Would your boss enjoy doing the things with you that you enjoy doing with your peers, such as sharing a meal or catching up over drinks?  Do you look, act, and sound the part?  I spent a lot of my career being subservient and respectful to the hierarchy.  It was part of my upbringing and culture as an Asian.  I still catch myself doing this with clients or superiors.  I find myself excessively expressing my gratitude for their time and sometimes lost for words leading to awkward silences.  Worst, when my boss was looking for me to demonstrate that I could be strong and equal in handling my clients, I only showed them that I was good at being their ”Yes Man” in a cape.

Part of being promotion ready is being seen as a peer to your superiors.  You have to help your boss and their peers “experience” you as ready to be one of their peers.  This means you need to prioritize the right things, use appropriate tone for that level of authority, and show that you can walk in their shoes without tripping over yourself or needing a lot of hand holding.

The “Dab” seems to be a popular dance move these days.  However, I will say that you cannot dance your way to the top by burying your eyes into your arm and ignoring what the universe is trying to tell you.  There are many signposts for success and many more people who are willing to help you get there.  If you become frustrated and do not learn from the experience, then you will only slow down your momentum.  Quitting just takes your problems to your next job. 

That’s all from me today.  I hope you have found these points to be useful.  Please comment if you want to share your insights and experiences, and share with your networks if you enjoyed the post.  For all of those who are celebrating, Happy Lunar New Year.  May prosperity, happiness, and good health find their way to your homes.

Stay Cheesy,

The Rambunctious Rat

How do people experience you?

 Hi everyone.  Today, I want to apply the concepts of customer experience to career progression.  "Experience" has been a heavily used buzzed word for the past decade.  Corporate functions and consulting offerings have been built around customer experience.  The idea is that a customer's experience heavily influences purchase decisions.  As an Omni-channel consumer (catalog, online, app enabled, and in store), I wholeheartedly agree.  If I am frustrated by my experience at a store, a website or an app, then I will less likely complete my transaction or shop there again. 

I had conversation recently with a retired executive.  We discussed how people's experience of an individual greatly influences his or her career progression, especially at the executive level.  Most executive development programs include psychiatric and 360 assessments to help participants benchmark themselves against behavioral models and explore observation and feedback from others.  The first time I participated in these assessments, I was humbled to find out that people’s experiences of me were different (in good ways and bad) than my own perception.  

So let's explore five major customer experience metrics and apply them to career progression:

1.) Net Promoter Score – This is arguably the most important metric when it comes to customer experience.  It is a score that answers the question, "Would you recommend this provider, product or service to someone else?"  

Executives will make sure their peers are comfortable with their protégés before recommending them as successors.  They will build the “net promoter score” case for promotion by allowing the other executives to "experience" their protégés’ capabilities.  It is important for the protégés to come off  as equals with the other executives with the right tone and presence.

2.) Response time – Another key metric to customer experience is response time.  Like me, you can probably think of a few people at work that you turn to regularly because they respond quickly.  You can probably also identify a few people that  you have reservations about because they only responds when you CC the right person or name drop, or never respond at all.  This is a very interesting metric to crowd source because while you may think your response time is appropriate, others may disagree.

3.) Problem resolution and reliability – Obviously, the more positive experiences people have around your problem resolution skills and reliability, the better.  I have had some hard lessons learned here.  At a certain level, you become the face of quality issues.  This is true even if there are legitimate reasons and other parties that were directly responsible for the issues.  Problems are sticky, especially for people who have a tendency for having blind spots.  They will recall their experience of you for all the wrong reasons for a very long time.  It is important to resolve issues quickly and rebuild trust by delivering issue free experiences going forward.

Keep it real – if you ever had the experience of receiving a cheap imitation of the product advertised online, then you know that people will share negative reviews of you with others if they discovered that you were not authentic.  

4.) Contact volume – Are you interacting enough to develop a "relationship" with your customers?  The depth of people's experience of you will depend on the frequency with which you have had meaningful interactions with them.  I have heard positive feedback about leaders who are known for spending the effort to interact with their constituents.  I have also heard negative experiences from employees who felt their supervisors only came around once in a while, usually with one-sided constructive feedback.  It is important for you to strategize and plan meaningful interactions that will improve people's experience of you.

5.) Relationship economics – Who are you focused on when you are interacting with others?  Clearly, people's experience of you will be much more positive if it results in something of value to them - business benefits, reputation, advice, information, connections, job opportunities, etc.   Information is an interesting one.  I have had some very frustrating experiences when I cannot quickly find the information that I needed to make a purchase decision.  Think about how others experience your ability to provide useful information to them.  Are you articulate?  Do you respond with the right information with the right level of detail?

As I took you through this analogy, I found myself gravitating to the importance of having an open dialog about how others experience you.  In the past, I have made the mistake of leaving a lot of things unspoken.  Why make waves?  Why force uncomfortable dialog?  Unfortunately, when there is no open dialog, all the bad experiences end up festering and sticking to our brand.  All of our bad habits become more solidified because they are not being called out as areas needing improvement.  So, it is good idea to schedule self-assessments and solicit feedback from your own board of advisers.  

That's it for now, thanks for reading.  Go out there and get your 'likes' and '5 stars.'  Please comment with your thoughts and share with your networks if you found this post to be helpful.

Stay cheesy,

The Rambunctious Rat