Last Friday morning, Robert Pasick, Ph.D., and I spoke at Leaders Connect, a networking event at Zingerman’s Roadhouse in Ann Arbor. Our topic was “Ten Steps to Meaningful Goals for 2017,” based on our recent book Self-Aware: A Guide for Success in Work and Life.
If you’re interested, you can watch the entire hour-plus of video on YouTube here.
I thought I’d share a quick video excerpt here, about three minutes of Rob and I chatting about how we collaborated on the book.
I’ve gone back to school, college actually.
![[066/365] Back to School](https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2564/3838634535_739f0ff5a8_z.jpg?zz=1)
Thanks and keep in touch!
What is your team doing when they aren’t “customer-facing?” Hint, it influences the customer experience too.
There is a fancy grocery in Ann Arbor where I sometimes shop (and that will go unnamed). Generally, the folks here are friendly at the cash registers and at the cases where I order seafood, meat, or prepared food. Yet, I’ve noticed that the staff at this grocery are in a hurry when they’re in the aisles. When I’m shopping with a cart, I’ve had to “pull over” and wait for staff hurrying by to pass me.
When this happens, I wonder what’s so important in the back room—a smoke break, the punch clock, or an angry manager? I imagine that the store’s leadership has stressed quickness or efficiency over courtesy (a customer experience failure). In my head I rewrite my shopping list to frequent other stores.
There is another “fancy” place in town – Zingerman’s. I visited a friend at the Zingerman’s Bakeshop recently, and he walked me around behind-the-scenes. Everywhere we went in the facility, people stopped what they were doing (at their computers, wheeling a hand truck through a loading area…) and greeted me. I’m sure they had as much to do as the staff at the other location, yet they weren’t in a rush, seemed genuinely glad to meet me, and meeting each of them was a pleasure.
Zingerman’s has published their mission and guiding principles. They emphasize two relevant phrases in their mission:
“giving service that makes you smile” and
“showing love and care in all our actions.”
Through stopping to greet me, the Zingerman’s team exemplified courtesy and the mission of the company. While I didn’t yearn for a chat with the team at the other store, I would prefer not to feel “in their way.” I don’t shop there as often as I might, and I don’t want to work there.
So the question becomes—what values do you promote in your organization? Values and intention matter whether it is a knitting group, a writing circle, a start-up, or an established business.
What experience do you want newbies, visitors, new team members, and the old guard to experience? Because it is those values that shape the behavior of your team and the experience of your customers.
Dave’s dad likes ponds. He put a pond in the backyard of the house where Dave grew up.
We got a small man-made pond when we bought our house. It was at the edge of a slate patio in the back yard, ringed with a kind of perplexing boxwood hedge that blocks the view of the pond from the house. The pond is a graceful figure eight shape. It has aqua concrete walls, cracked now. It was lined with black plastic, held at the edges with loosely placed (unstable) slate tiles.
The pond was the project Dave spent the winter planning. In the early spring, Dave pulled up the black pond liner, finding several garter snakes nestled into the cracks in the cement underneath the liner. We suppose they overwintered there…!
Under the black liner was a clear indication that the pond had previously been fed by a spring coming out a few feet north of it. The spring came out of a pipe, from somewhere near our foundation (or from the other side of our foundation).
If we reinstated the flow through the pond, instead of a stagnant pool full of water striders, leaves, and a few frogs, we could have something more lively and fresh. And, we’d get to engineer a waterfall.
The planning began. Dave’s dad Nate, similarly inspired, booked a trip to visit from out east. Dave worked to get the end of the spring pipe excavated so that the pond work could begin in earnest once Nate arrived.
Nate and Dave chipped away the concrete edge where they wanted the waterfall and created the waterfall and streambed using pond liner, river rocks, and rocks from the garden. They endured a false start where they filled the pond and it started leaking back up along the piping, re-designed the flow into the pond, replaced the liner, and finally got to enjoy the waterfall after three days work and many trips to the hardware store. My contribution was putting in my calla lily and voodoo lily bulbs near the spillway. Otherwise, I did other weeding and garden work while Nate and Dave reconfigured the pond and the liner and the piping..
We watched the water flow into the pond this afternoon with our neighbors, and then once the pond had filled, we watched the overflow start to spill down the waterfall. There’s still work to be done – pond lining to trim, slate to arrange at the edges, landscaping to do, mulch to spread, and weeds to pull, but it’s flowing nicely across the pond and down the rocks and then back into its old streambed. Cool!
I tweaked my back two weekends in a row. I have some history of back pain, largely stemming from a jaunty twist in my spine (scoliosis). And, because I bend towards my knitting, bend towards my computer monitor, and otherwise stress out my upper back and neck, my upper back gets cranky now and then.
Once I’ve tweaked it, it is a long process of hot baths, ibuprophen, bodywork, arnica gel, and mostly just rest and time to undo whatever kink or constriction I’ve triggered.
Boring.
My interesting stories are the divergences from this pattern: I have had two experiences of spontaneous improvement in my neck/back pain: through pranayama breath, and at a music concert the other night.
The first spontaneous release I’ve experienced was in a yoga workshop taught in Ann Arbor by Navtej Johar at Sun-Moon Yoga. During the session, the pranayama breath work (shown in the photo above) released the kink that had stuck my neck for days. I have used pranayama breathing some since then, not enough considering its powerful effect that day….To encourage my practice, I recently picked up the Pranayama iPhone app by Saagara from itunes. I used it recently to relax during a bout of insomnia, and last night to further relax my back and neck. It helped!
Sunday night was the only other time I’ve experienced seemingly “spontaneous” healing. I think I whacked out my upper back on Saturday by trying to move some largish rocks we have in our garden. I woke up Sunday morning kind of sprung behind my right shoulder blade. Later that day, I attended a concert at Rackham Auditorium. It was a reading by Alex Ross of his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, accompanied by Ethan Iverson on the piano. While I enjoyed the crisp and funny writing, I found the turbulent 20th Century history revealed in the lives and concerns of its composers daunting.
I was excited about the concert because I wanted to hear the music of the composers I’d read about. I also sometimes lose track of time, and so I was late for the performance and stressed out when I arrived. They wouldn’t seat us because the piece had started, so I waited, fretting, in the hall for the a slight break to be seated. Well, Rackham has very comfortable seats, and once I settled into our row, the soothing notes of the piano, even playing intellectual 12 tone music, which I’d expected to be annoying, had a physical effect on my body.
I don’t know what Ethan Iverson was playing in that particular moment, but in the middle of the performance that included Babbitt, Bartok, Gershwin, Ives, Ligeti, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Webern, I felt a muscle next to my shoulder blade go into a release that felt like an inverse spasm. It was a kind of drumming pattern of releases and then slight recontractions, but without pain. I don’t know what it was exactly – I’m going to guess, based on my experience with pranayama, that what might have helped was a relaxation in my own breathing in time to one of the pieces. Or, perhaps my absorption in the event let some other process take its course in my back. I doubt that new age spas around the world play a selection of 20th century classical music, but maybe they should. The concert had an unexpected and salutary effect on my body!
Ever wanted to know how to renovate your home the green way? For the DIY earth friendly homeowner, the folks at Greenovation.TV want to show you how. It’s a website and a media channel, launching Earth Day April 22.
They’re available online 24/7. What’s even cooler is they’re local here in Ann Arbor, in my neighborhood!
Greenovation.TV‘s Matt Grocoff will speak on “greening a historic home” at 7:30 on April 23 in the Bach School multi-purpose room. Matt reports that he pays in a year what many pay a month for utility costs since doing some updates to their Old West Side Ann Arbor home. I wish I could make it, but I will be traveling that day. I look forward to tuning into the channel as it grows!
You can find out more in Concentrate’s feature article on GreenovationTV.