Likeability

Witty Comebacks and Smart Responses for Nosy People

March 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

When somebody asks an invasive question that makes you feel offended, you’re never obligated to respond. Consider these smart responses.

A curious cousin: “I like your car/purse/home. How much did it cost?” Smart response: “Perhaps a tad more than I expected, but I like to pamper myself once in a while.”
Your inquisitive uncle: “How much do you make at this new job?” Smart response: “I do OK” or “I’d like to make more.”
Your snoopy coworker: “What was your doctor’s appointment for?” or “I heard you called in sick yesterday?” Smart response: “I’m just fine. Thanks for asking.”
The chatty visitor: “You’ve accomplished so much for your age! What are you? 30?” Smart response: “Still young at heart” or “I’m aging fast just thinking about it.”
A sneaky partier trying to estimate your age: “When did you graduate from high school?”Smart response: “When I heard Lucille Ball remark that a “man who correctly guesses a woman’s age may be smart, but he’s not very bright.””
A zealous coworker who can’t stop talking about God: “What do you do on Sunday mornings?” Smart response: “I do non-work things.”
An office busy body suggests a date: “Do you think you could ask her out? I know she’s single.” Smart response: “I don’t know. I’d have to think about mixing work and relationships .”
A prying friend: “When are you getting married?” or “Are you guys trying for a baby?” Smart response: “I’m kinda private and would rather not talk about this.”
A wanna-be Judge Judy wants to solve your parents’ problems: “When are you going to move out of your parents? When will you get a real job?”Smart response: “When my parents start talking to me about it directly.”
An intrusive colleague who’s just learned you’re getting married: “Are you going to invite the deputy manager?” Smart response: “It’s up to me and my fiance.” You could add, “Actually, we’re having a small wedding. Just family and a few close friends.”
A nosy new neighbor: “What heritage are you? I mean, are you mixed race?” Smart response: “Good question. I’d like to remain mysterious.”
A perky lady in your yoga class: “You look great, how much do you weigh?” or “Have you lost weight this summer?” Smart response: “I don’t know—each time I step on the scale, it reads, PERFECT.”
A snooping friend asks you to share a secret: “What were you and Sally nattering about?” Smart response: “Can you keep a secret?” and when your friend says “yes,” sneer and say, “So can I!”

You can try to redirect the attention or leave the conversation by saying: “Let me refill my drink.” But some people just don’t get a deflection.

Responding snappishly but firmly will imply that that the issue is not open for further conversation. “Why do you need to know that about me?” or “Why do you ask?”

If somebody continues to badger you, assert, “it’s personal and I won’t discuss it. Please stop asking.” Be as concise as possible. You shouldn’t feel compelled to give an explanation or justify your unwillingness to talk about sensitive matters.

Idea for Impact: Don’t Feel Rude about Quelling Impolite Boundary-Violators

Most meddlesome people often lack self-awareness. Others may just be making friendly conversation and may not realize that they’re being tactless and prying. Yet others tend to over-share the personal and inappropriate details of their lives and assume it’s OK to expect you to too. We live in a “do ask, do tell” society.

Often, though, people just assume enough rapport to be able to ask delicate questions. Spending some time with friends and coworkers creates a false sense of affability and trust that really isn’t there. We’ve all made that mistake!

Five Ways … You Could Score Points with Your Boss

March 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Know that your job is to help the boss win. If you’re not sure what exactly represents success for your boss, ask. Keep her goals in mind when presenting ideas. Minimize your use of her time and resources.
Keep track of everything your boss puts on your plate. Let her realize that if she assigns something to you, it’s either going to be handled, or you’ll bring it back up with her for a follow-up.
Size up your boss’s style. Is she a delegator (don’t overwhelm her with detailed updates) or a hand-holder (involve her in making decisions—even if to ask, “Does that sound right to you?”)? Match up your boss’s communication preferences.
Identify your boss’s pet peeves. Is it being late to appointments, dropping by unexpectedly, bringing a problem to her without suggesting a remedy, or coming to a meeting unprepared? Avoid them like land mines.
Take upon yourself any aspect of your boss’s job that she doesn’t find particularly interesting. You’ll improve her work-life quality. (And you’ll broaden your experiences and become noticeable to other leaders.)

Bonus: If she’s a good boss, tell her. Few people think to say it. Praise, but don’t flatter.

“But, Excuse Me, I’m Type A”: The Ultimate Humblebrag?

February 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Our increasingly egotistical culture sanctions competitiveness, achievement-orientation, impatience, assertiveness, and work-fixation. Fine. But do we need to recast selfishness, greed, aggressiveness, and egotism as virtues?

Consider the assertion “I’m type A” you’ll often hear from people who’re harried and quick to anger. That expression has become the ultimate humblebrag—an announcement for the narcissistic self, indeed. It’s often a lead up to some form of a self-absorbed burden to be imposed on others.

Intense people are off-putting, particularly to laid-back types

The designation “Type A” was presented as a negative characterization in the 1970s by cardiologists—not psychologists—about people prone to so-called “hurry sickness.” These people tend to get angry and, consequently, have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

Now then, “I’m type A” has become the special consent some people expect to be granted to be a bit infuriating. It’s a polite declaration of the self-conscious entitlement, “I have somewhat better standards. Sorry to be so persistent.” “Sorry to squeeze you dry on this project, but I’m driven to deliver my best.”

Idea for Impact: If you’re a Type A, by all means, be an overachiever, strong-minded, demanding, whatever. But be all these without being obnoxious or instinctively imposing uncalled-for pressure on everything and everybody and every time. Lighten up.

‘I Told You So’

October 26, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Something goes wrong, and your frustration is so intense that you just can’t resist blurting out, “Told ya, I saw that coming” or even “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

The phrase “I told you so” one of the least justifiable in the language. It rarely generates a positive response, and it’s unfailingly damaging to marriages, friendships, and parents’ relationships with children.

Events and premonitions thereof make perfect sense with hindsight. Your loved one already knows that you were right, and she was wrong. Going through failure is hard enough. She doesn’t need you to pour salt on her wound.

At some point, when the dust has settled, you may say carefully, “Sweetie, this stinks. That surely did not go as intended. Perhaps we shouldn’t do that again.”

It’s never okay to do the “I told you so” spiel even if you have her best interests at heart. Keep your disappointment—or delight—to yourself.

Being right about something feels so darn good, doesn’t it? But hold your tongue on gloating. Give up that attachment to the need to be correct. Let your loved one be human—let her heal, learn, grow, and evolve.

Avoiding negativity in the supportive relationship sometimes means biting your tongue and allowing the pieces to fall where they may.

Give your loved one the positive support she needs and help her cope. If you are kind, she may be more willing to listen in the future.

Idea for Impact: In relationships, a little tact and a lot of silence go a long way.

How to Create Emotional Connections with Your Customers

September 21, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Consumers are shifting towards memorable experiences over material objects that bring happiness and well-being. Experiential consumption is increasing—the global spending on travel, leisure, and food service is estimated to grow from $5.8 trillion in 2016 to $8.0 trillion by 2030.

Businesses are responding by offering indulgences (think Apple products,) enhancing shopping experience (ordering and carrying-out Domino’s Pizza,) and creating more intimate experiences (Mastercard’s Priceless campaign) for consumers.

One particularly edifying case study is Unilever’s Persil brand of laundry detergents (Unilever licenses this brand from Henkel in many countries.) As part of the “Dirt is good” campaign, Persil’s sentimental adverts that remind “learn to be a kid” (clip,) “climb a tree, break a leg … that’s part of life” (clip,) and “dirt makes us equal” (clip) have attempted to connect with consumers emotionally.

Persil bucked the longstanding ritual of creating dull adverts for its dull products (cheery moms grabbing washing baskets and fragrant flowers and butterflies rising from the clean laundry.) Persil doesn’t focus on the detergent’s stain-busting attributes. Instead, Persil’s campaign signals that children must feel free to experience the world around them regardless of the impact on their clothes. One prominent advert (clip) presented a cheerless robot who slowly transforms into a child while playing in the open air and splashing around in a muddy pool during a rainstorm: “Every child has the right to be a child. Dirt is good.”

Even the UNICEF commended Unilever for “creating awareness of children’s right to play, the right to express themselves—in short, the right to be a child! It encourages parents to see the value of exploration, play, activity and exercise as critical to children’s development and important for full and healthy lives, even if it means that children get dirty in the process.”

Idea for Impact: Enhance how your customers see and feel the benefits of your products and services. Promote an emotional connection between products and customers.

Putting the WOW in Customer Service // Book Summary of Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness

July 30, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To keep your customers in the present day, you can’t be content just to please them. If you want your business to thrive, you have to produce enthusiastic aficionados—customers who’re so keyed up about how you treat them that they want to tell stories about you. These customers and their cult-like loyalty become a key element of your sales force.

American entrepreneur Tony Hsieh built the online retail store Zappos on the fundamental idea that great service is not a happenstance. It starts when leaders decide what kind of experience they want their customers to have—and articulate that approach in a clear mission and vision. As in the case of luxury hotel chain Ritz-Carlton, leaders keep the mission alive by empowering their employees to go the extra mile for the customer. Above all, when it comes from the heart, great customer service keeps customers coming back over and over.

In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (2010,) Hsieh discusses the importance of cultivating happiness as a launch pad to better results for your business.

How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

Hsieh did not create Zappos. He was one of the startup’s initial investors but got sucked in to help the original founder after six years. Zappos operated in survival mode for a while. As it began to outlive its financial struggles, Hsieh and his leadership team went about building an intentional corporate culture dedicated to employee empowerment and the promise of delivering happiness through a valued workforce and devoted customers.

Over the years, the number one driver of our growth at Zappos has been repeat customers and word of mouth. Our philosophy has been to take most of the money we would have spent on paid advertising and invest it into customer service and the customer experience instead, letting our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Hsieh tells his entrepreneurial life experiences, often presenting biographical stories to make his line of reasoning. Many great entrepreneurs got started early, and Hsieh is no exception. He started with worm-farming (age 7,) button-making (elementary school,) magic tricks involving dental dams (high school,) burger joint (college,) and web-consulting (post-college) before having considerable financial success with the internet advertising firm LinkExchange (sold in 1998 to Microsoft for $265 million.)

In 2009, Hsieh sold Zappos to Amazon for $847 million under pressure from Sequoia Capital, a major financier of Zappos. As a point of reference, Hsieh later recalled,

Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project—“Tony’s social experiments,” they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view–namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board’s attitude was that my “social experiments” might make for good PR but that they didn’t move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.

How Zappos Fostered a Culture and a Business Model Based on the Notion of Happiness

Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh of Zappos Zappos’s corporate culture is guided by ten core values, which aspire to empower employees, create a sense of community in the workplace (employees are encouraged to “create fun and a little weirdness” in the office and build personal connections with colleagues,) and serve a higher purpose beyond bottom-line metrics.

Zappos’s core values include: deliver WOW through service (#1,) be humble (#10,) do more with less (#8,) be passionate and determined (#9,) and create fun and a little weirdness (#3.)
Zappos wants only those employees who really want to work for the company. All new employees attend a four-week training program that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and customer-obsession. Zappos offers $2,000 to walk out at the end of the first week, and the offer stands until the end of the fourth week. Only a small number of new employees take the offer.
Zappos challenges all employees to make at least one improvement every week. Allowing employees to improve the tasks they’re doing and enhancing the processes that they’re responsible for executing allows them to make their jobs more meaningful.
Instead of measuring call center efficiency by the time each call center operator spends on the phone with a customer, Zappos developed its own scorecards. Zappos quantifies such things as the personal and emotional connections operators make with customers using measures such as measuring the number of thank you cards.

Zappos is Obsessed with Impressing Customers

By focusing on company culture, everything else—such as building a brand with sustained revenue growth, fast turnaround times at warehouses, and passionate employees—fell into place.

Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships,) and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself.)

Recommendation: Read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. This insightful tome is brimming with practicable ideas on customer service, building a positive company culture, best hiring practices, how to motivate and train your team, and setting business goals and values. The core elements of Zappos’s DNA—purpose, happiness, culture, and profits—are an effective framework for making happiness a business model.

Undertake Not What You Cannot Perform

July 16, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Each time you break a promise or commitment, even to yourself, you chip away at your claim—and your intention—to be a responsible, reliable, self-aware person.

Making promises and keeping them is how you build integrity, how you foster relationships of trust, and, more importantly, how you learn to trust yourself.

Every time you break a promise, your word has less value.

Giving your word is a serious undertaking, even on trivial matters. Never ever make a promise that you think there is even the slightest chance that you may break.

Idea for Impact: Don’t make a promise if a situation warrants a more open-ended response.

How to Develop Customer Service Skills // Summary of Lee Cockerell’s ‘The Customer Rules’

July 13, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Becoming great at customer service doesn’t require you to excel at a zillion things. You’ll just need to identify the core principles and get the basics right.

“At the end of the day, everything a business leader does is in the service of customer service … the customer always rules, and there are Rules for winning customers, keeping customers, and turning loyal customers into advocates and emissaries for your business,” writes Lee Cockerell in his prescriptive manual on The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service (2013.)

Cockerell is a veteran of the hospitality industry and an eminent corporate trailer. He spent eight years with Hilton, 17 years with Marriott, and 16 years with the Walt Disney. Before retirement, he was the executive vice president of operations at Walt Disney World in Florida and oversaw the resort’s 40,000 employees at 20 hotels, four theme parks, and two water parks.

Non-obvious Customer Service Insights

Cockerell structures his guidebook along 39 tips to serve customers with consistency, efficiency, creativity, and sincerity. He glosses over everything—hiring right, communicating a clear and relevant customer promise, fostering a customer-oriented culture, and creating a superior employee experience. Those employees can deliver a great customer experience, respond to complaints, and practice verbal skills to express empathy.

Make customer service every employee’s responsibility. Everything every employee does can have tremendous repercussions on the service your customers receive, and therefore your bottom line. “Pay close attention to every decision you make, every policy you announce, every procedure you introduce, every person you hire, every promotion you award, every e-mail you send, every conversation you have, every hand you shake, and every back you slap.”
You win customers one at a time and lose them a thousand at a time. Satisfied customers will spread the word only if they’re truly blown away their experience. Angry customers are “far more motivated to shout about their feelings, and furious exposes get a lot more attention than glowing testimonials. Humans are wired to pay more attention to the negative than the positive.”
Anticipate your customers’ needs. Discover what customers aren’t getting from your competitors and give it to them. Customers’ problems are a good source of business innovations. “Great businesses stand out by being different from the rest in the right way: by finding customer needs that are going unmet and figuring out a way to meet them.”
Keep an eye on your competitors. Be a copycat. Look outside your industry for great ideas and tweak them for their own purposes. “Don’t just imitate; pay attention to everything around you, spot the best ideas, and then find a better way to apply them.”
Treat customers the way you’d treat your loved ones. “First and last impressions have a tremendous influence on a customer’s lasting impression. A cheery hello and a sincere good-bye can leave a customer with a memory of a positive experience, regardless of what happens in between.”
Treat every customer like a regular. Familiarity breeds repeat business. “Do whatever you can to make regular customers feel like family and new customers feel like regulars. Remember the theme song from the TV series Cheers? Don’t you want to go “where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came”? Make all your customers feel that you’re really glad they came.”
Prioritize WIN, “what’s important now,” your customers’ immediate needs, desires, and concerns. “Even a nod, a gesture, some brief eye contact, a pleasant “I’ll be right with you. Please make yourself comfortable”—that’s all it takes. People want to be acknowledged.”
Surprise your customers with a little extra when they least expect it. Neuroscientists have confirmed that the human brain “craves the excitement of surprise. The region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, aka the pleasure center, experiences more activation when a pleasurable stimulus comes unexpectedly than it does when the same pleasure is predictable. “So if you get a present for your birthday, that’s nice. But you’ll like it a lot more if you get a present and it’s not your birthday.””
Don’t try too hard. “Being excessively solicitous and eager to please is annoying.” It makes you seem phony. “Think how annoying it is when a server at a restaurant stops by your table every five minutes to ask if everything’s okay with your meal.” No one likes to be pestered constantly. “If your customers have to stifle the urge to scream, “Go away!” or, “Leave us alone!” you’re trying too hard.”

Recommendation: Read Lee Cockerell’s The Customer Rules. With plenty of anecdotes, experiences, and very short no-nonsense chapters, this book is an enjoyable summary of the many simple—but often overlooked—first principles of building a customer-oriented culture and delivering great customer service.

Why Your Employees Don’t Trust You—and What to Do About it

June 25, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you have trouble getting employees to trust you, perhaps one—or more—of the following reasons are to blame:

You don’t model what you say.
You make promises you can’t keep.
You guard and selectively disclose information.
You don’t allow your employees to exercise their judgment.
You ask for input from your employees and ignore them.
You seek to monitor everything—including time spent on social media.
You tend to shift the blame.
You avoid giving credit where credit is due.
You ignore workplace concerns and problems until they become more significant problems.
You have double standards (employees tend to be especially very alert to this.)

Management scholars have suggested that trustworthiness entails three attributes: competence to perform tasks reliably (your ability,) having benign intentions (your benevolence,) and acting consistently with sound ethical principles such as fairmindedness, sincerity, and honesty (your integrity.) If you can exhibit these three attributes credibly and dependably, all will trust you. Get any of these three attributes wrong, and your standing will suffer.

Here are a few actions you can take to rebuild trust within your organization:

Communicate openly. Listen. Value everyone’s opinions equally. Involve employees in decision-making. Be as transparent as possible.
Empower employees. Encourage them to use their best judgment to identify and solve problems. Don’t be unnecessarily rigid with enforcing rules.
Make everyone accountable. Take responsibility. Invite and listen to feedback. Communicate expectations. Invest in commitments.

Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

If your employees don’t trust you, then they won’t do what you need them to, and they won’t stick around long.

Trust is a consequence of your actions, not merely an intention or message. Trust is truly behavioral; it is complicated and fragile. Trust must be hard-fought, hard-earned, and hard-won every day, through actions, not words.

Leo Burnett on Meaning and Purpose

June 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Adman Leo Burnett (1892–1971) founded a global advertising agency that ranks among the titans of the trade. Burnett and the company that bears his name produced such famous brand icons as the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, Jolly Green Giant, Maytag Repairman, and Pillsbury Doughboy.

Burnett pioneered the ‘Chicago School’ of advertising, wherein product campaigns centered on the inherent appeal of products themselves. Burnett’s advertisements used meaningful visuals to evoke emotions and experiences. This approach contrasted the time-honored use of catchy catchphrases and clever copy describing the products’ features. The models in Burnett’s campaigns resembled ordinary people rather than celebrities.

“When to Take My Name Off the Door”

After 33 years at the helm of his company, Burnett officially retired at age 76. He delivered a remarkable valedictory (film clip,) reminding his colleagues of his advertising agency’s core values and its high creative standards.

Let me tell you when I might demand that you take my name off the door.

When you lose your itch to do the job well for its own sake—regardless of the client, or the money, or the effort it takes.

When you lose your passion for thoroughness…your hatred of loose ends.

When you stop reaching for the manner, the overtones, the marriage of words and pictures that produces the fresh, the memorable, and the believable effect.

When you stop rededicating yourselves every day to the idea that better advertising is what the Leo Burnett Company is all about.

When you begin to compromise your integrity—which has always been the heart’s blood—the very guts of this agency.

When you stoop to convenient expediency and rationalize yourselves into acts of opportunism—for the sake of a fast buck.

When your main interest becomes a matter of size just to be big—rather than good, hard, wonderful work.

When you lose your humility and become big-shot weisenheimers … a little too big for your boots.

When you start giving lip service to this being a “creative agency” and stop really being one.

Finally, when you lose your respect for the lonely man—the man at his typewriter or his drawing board or behind his camera or just scribbling notes with one of our big black pencils—or working all night on a media plan. When you forget that the lonely man—and thank God for him—has made the agency we now have—possible. When you forget he’s the man who, because he is reaching harder, sometimes actually gets hold of—for a moment—one of those hot, unreachable stars.

THAT, boys and girls, is when I shall insist you take my name off the door.

Idea for Impact: Leaders are Meaning-Makers

Burnett’s valedictory is a potent reminder of the power of meaningful organizational values and a leader’s role in upholding his company’s principles-based DNA.

Organizational values are at the heart of the long-term success of a company. When these values grow fainter, the company may no longer reflect the intended culture. The organizational values will no longer clarify, inspire, and bind the company’s customers, employees, partners, investors, and other stakeholders.

As the steward of a company’s culture, a leader is responsible for institutionalizing—not merely individualizing—a sense and meaning in the workplace. And, as Burnett demonstrates, an effective leader passionately expresses what the company stands for and shares personal lessons learned in that process.

Burnett’s name is still on the door.

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Likeability

Idea for Impact: Don’t Feel Rude about Quelling Impolite Boundary-Violators

Wondering what to read next?

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Intense people are off-putting, particularly to laid-back types

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How Zappos Profits from The Happiness Business

How Zappos Fostered a Culture and a Business Model Based on the Notion of Happiness

Zappos is Obsessed with Impressing Customers

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Non-obvious Customer Service Insights

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Idea for Impact: Trust is reshaped—strengthened or undermined—in every encounter

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“When to Take My Name Off the Door”

Idea for Impact: Leaders are Meaning-Makers

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