Don’t you love when customers force you to be better?
Imagine working for a company that lets you decide which meetings you choose to attend and which you choose to skip.
Well that’s the conversation I had with a head of Human Resources last week. She had just purchased two sets of The Meeting PLAYce Mat and called to talk with me about how to best use them given this new strategy.
When I developed The Meeting PLAYce Mat it was a result of years of listening to people tell me what they were really thinking about meetings (too many, pointless, no agenda, one-way dialog, etc). The tool was developed as a way to poke fun at meetings and to keep people engaged. But like everything else in business, I designed it to have a purpose: to challenge each participant to contribute and understand that everyone plays a role in the success of a meeting. I have always felt that if a meeting sucks it’s not only the fault of the person who called/organized the meeting.
So after talking for a while she says to me, “Do you think you could send me some bullet points how to best use these PLAYce Mats before our meeting next week?”
My first and immediate thought was “Huh? What? Didn’t we just talk about that; weren’t you taking notes?” And my next thought was…….WOW! This is an opportunity for me to take a closer look at the uses of this product; but more importantly do something that I preach to my audiences………deliver more than expected.
So in all fairness I told her to give me a couple of days; and two days later I sent her my thoughts and ideas. She was thankful; but I was grateful. Grateful for the opportunity to be able to offer this client and future clients more value when it comes to using a tool that I think offers opportuntities to increase morale, create a better employee experience, and take the pain out of meetings by perhaps forcing the organizer to be a bit more strategic before calling a dozen people together for an hour and potentially wasting 12 hours of productivity.
So here’s a question for you and be honest here: How many times have you or your employees looked at customer demands as more work to do; instead of WOW opportunities? From now on keep this in front of you:
Customer demands are WOW opportunities for you to be better!
