Relationship Lessons from Another Language

In the April 2006 issue of Fast Company, there is an article about Dan Mintz, an American who has become a very successful businessperson in China. (You can read the full article here.) Early in the article a Chinese word is introduced - guanxi (pronounced gwan-she). According to the article, it is literally translated as "relationship building", but in practice it means "carefully cultivated clout, a culturally calibrated measure of respect, influence, and honor." The article goes on to say that it is a personal as well as political form of capital.

I've long been interested in learning words from other languages because it is through language that we create understanding. It is no coincidence that our vocabulary and our intelligence are closely linked - the more words we have in our mind the easier it is to express our thoughts and to think in new ways.

Guanxi is a word that does this for me - it expands my thoughts about relationship building. Relationship building is an important part of our lives in many ways - within the last two weeks I have had conversations or done training where relationship building has been discussed connected to Customer Service (even in very short relationships), consulting, leadership, facilitation, and sales. I'm sure you could expand this list and it doesn't even yet include our personal and family relationships.

So here are two questions for you: In the relationships you are working to build now, how would the components of guanxi - respect, influence, and honor - influence your behaviors and choices? Do you think about those factors when building a relationship?

I encourage you to think about those components in the coming days. Recognize that if you want to gain respect, influence, and honor, you will do best by focusing on giving those things first.

Build relationships by putting the other person first - respect them at higher levels, influence them not for your gain but for theirs, and honor them highly.

The dual lesson in this post for me is both the power of the insight gained by adding a new component to relationship building and that these insights came from a new word I learned from another language. I encourage both to think about the lessons of guanxi - both in terms of relationships and vocabulary.

Resistance and Change

In consulting and working with organizations regarding change, a major concern surfaces when I hear questions like:

"What do we do about the resistors?"
"How do we lower the resistance?"
"What if people don't buy-in?"

It is our natural inclination to deal with resistance by combating it, "pushing back" or in some other way getting defensive. We know from our experience that rarely works. And while we know those approaches don't work, we resort to them anyway.

In my experience you will only change your response to the resistance when you view the resistance differently. We encounter three basic initial responses when sharing a change with others:

- Acceptance
- Resistance
- Apathy

Assuming you'd pick acceptance as your first choice, let me ask you a question - would you prefer resistance or apathy? While you might be tempted to think apathy - after all in the moment of conversation that might be easier - in the end you know you don't want apathy either.

When people are apathetic they don't care. When people are resistant, they are engaged, just not sold.

The next time you encounter resistance, remember this mathematical equation,

resistance = engagement

then respond to the resistance you encounter hopefully, openly and eagerly. Your new response will not only be more pleasant, it will be more successful.

Customer Service Made Simple

On Saturday I was delivering some Customer Service training to the parking, gates and security staff for the 150th Indiana State Fair. Whenever I work with groups on this important topic, I try to find ways to help them see that it is the Customer who writes their paycheck.

In both sessions, after thinking I had already made this point clearly, I tried again, by asking this question:

How would you treat each Customer if you knew that their full $6 ticket price was going into your pocket?

In the morning session, I heard, "I'd say thank you. Thank you VERY much. And please come again."

In the afternoon session, I heard, "I'd treat them like gold."

There it is. Most everything we need to know about Customer Service emanates from those two answers: thank them and value their business, and treat them like gold.

It is easy to treat "nice" and "pleasant" Customers this way. It is our job when serving Customers to treat them ALL that way (even when they are mean, grumpty and irrational). We may not get their full $6 ticket fee, but without them we don't get any check at all.