We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested.

The snag in all of this though is employees don’t want that. They want the boss to be more interested in them, their career and their family. The feeling of being valued by the boss has been found to be an important trigger to create strong engagement in staff. Driver bosses rarely pull that trigger. They believe you need to “harden up baby”, do it yourself “like I did”. They wonder why we need to mollycoddle this lot.

In fact they don’t know how to snuggle up to staff and get to know them, because they never experienced that from their own bosses, and they are not built that way. They grew up independent and self-reliant. They are driven to achieve and have a take no prisoners approach to business. They are survival of the fittest advocates. Consequently, they are not much for small talk. They are permanently time pressed, so everything has to be driving toward an outcome, or it is a waste of their valuable time.

How do you snuggle up to employees anyway? Bosses need to engage with their staff by using the “innerview” to deepen their understanding of who the person is who works for them, what are their motivations and interests. The sceptics may be thinking “brilliant”. Now they can interrogate their staff, find and start pressing their hot buttons, to get more production out of them having found some keys to staff motivation. This is not what we are talking about. Staff can spot this very quickly. They won’t be interested in being manipulated by their bosses for higher productivity gains.

The effort is to get to know the team better, so that as the boss you can help them to succeed in their work by aligning their goals, interests and motivations with those of the organization. The classic win/win.

Getting to know staff starts with asking basic factual questions. Where did they grow up, where did they go to school, what did they major in. Where have they worked in the past, what are their hobbies, how many in their family etc.

To go deeper we need to ask causative questions. The “why” of their choices. Why did they pick that field of study, why that school, why this company, why that hobby, etc.

Then we get to values-based questions. Getting to know how they tick. If you had your life over again would you do things differently and if so , what would you do? What were some turning points in your life? What have been some of the work and non-work related things you have done that have made you feel proud? If you were giving advice to a person entering the workforce what would that be?

These questions have to be asked in a relaxed manner, not spewed out like machine gun fire. This is getting to know someone better in order to better be able to appreciate them as a person. It is not a drill in shaking them down for private information, which can be used later to exploit them.

Conversations like this, done correctly, invite massive mutual understanding. The end result is better communication and shared values. A uniting of mutual interests toward achieving goals together. So all of you driver bosses out there, this is how to get cuddly with the team.

First sort out your objective and make sure it is reflecting the real interests of the staff. Drop that manipulation thing. Then make the time available to have a deep one on one conversation with another human being who also exists on this planet just like you. Believe me, good things will flow from this.

Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years. What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing? Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time. The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures.

Do you have a good record keeping system? When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the Australian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Nagoya. As far as the locals were concerned, I was the Australian Ambassador to the Chubu Region. I am sure the parade of the various Ambassadors in the Tokyo Embassy never saw it that way, but that is how the locals viewed my vice-regal presence. One consequence was you were regularly asked to give long speeches. I say long because a one hour speech would be a dawdle, compared to the two hour monstrosities you were expected to fill.

I started writing down the speech number, the title, who it was for, what language was I speaking and how long was the speech. I did this because Japan loves the devil they know and you would be asked back to speak again and it is embarrassing if you don’t recall the first talk. I am now over 560 speeches on my list. Without knowing it I was compiling a body of work as a speaker. The list noted the topics I covered, which was a useful reservoir of things I could speak about if asked to venture forth a topic for the nominated speaking spot.

I would often use visuals. When I started we were back in the dark ages and were using overhead projectors (OHPs) and breakthrough innovations like colour OHPs instead of just black and white images. For photographs, we used a slide carousel and a slide projector. At some point we moved to powerpoint and life got a whole lot easier, when it came to preparing presentations. Somewhere I probably still have those OHP presentations stored away somewhere, except today you would struggle to find an overhead projector to show them with. We can much more easily store our presentation materials today, so there is no excuse about not doing that.

I keep my presentations in digital files stored by the year in which they were delivered. This is very handy because you can go back and see what you covered when you gave that talk. Some of the images may be plundered for a current presentation, if they are relevant, so it is a nice resource to draw on. You can also see how much you have grown in sophistication as a presenter, by looking at the quality of what you have been presenting. This is a step we shouldn’t miss because we are often so caught up in our everyday, we lose sense of the time progression in our presenter lives.

A more difficult task is to grab the points that are additional to the slides. These may be kept as notes on the print out of the slide deck or in a notes format for the talk. If I have notes, which these days is pretty rare, then they will be very brief. They are flags for me to expand upon when I am delivering my talk. More frequently I will print out two or four slides per page and then write on those pages. I will note some key points I want to make when we get to that slide. If I am not using slides then the notes format plays the same prompt role.

Things occur to me during a talk, which were not planned. Maybe I got a light bulb type of idea or a question exposed an answer and brought some additional information to the forefront. One thing I strongly recommend is immediately after the speech, carve out thirty minutes for quiet reflection on the talk and think about what things you would change in order to make it better next time. The tendency is to rush back to work, which usually means either meetings or catching up on email. They can wait. Don’t schedule back to back activities after the talk – give yourself a little time to think.

What I find hard to do is to store the notes hand written on the pages and the notes on the ideas which occurred to me after the talk. Paper tends to get lost and you throw it out in a bug of spring cleaning and lose it. Either take photos of the notes on your phone or scan the pages and then file them together with the electronic slide deck in the file for that year of talks. This way you never lose the inspiration and record of your thinking about this topic.

Time will pass. You will deliver talks, will get ideas both before and after. Capture them and learn from what went well and how you can improve on it for next time. You need a system and if you don’t have one today, then now is a good time to think about creating one.

Here is an important mantra: We don’t want a sale, we want the re-orders.

That task however is getting harder and harder. Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before. Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service. Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service. We have to be really clear about what is the customer’s perception of good customer service. This is a totally subjective idea on the part of the customer, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have influence on that perception.

Here is a quick audit on your understanding of the customer. How well do you know the customer’s perception of high quality customer service? When was the last time you asked about how well you were doing with serving that customer? Are you assuming that because there are no claims, that the customer is fully satisfied? Do you have a clear idea of the level of service your competitor is providing in terms of customer service?

The building of a strong fan base amongst your clients is a key step to becoming more successful. We all know the acquisition cost of finding a new customer is many times more expensive than deepening the scope of the relationship with an existing customer. That is fine but we need to also expand our numbers of customers. We always need more good customers, but how can we create new fans? How do we do that when there are so many rivals? Here are four approaches to consider.

1. Have broad product knowledge

Whenever we ask a salesperson a question and they cannot answer it immediately, we doubt their value to us. Often however, we salespeople can become concentrated on just a few products and lose touch with the broader perspective. We need to keep studying our total product line-up, so that we have broad knowledge to show we are professionals in our business. Prove that we can be trusted to serve the customer. So ask yourself, how well do you know your own product line-up?

1. Have an extreme desire to help

So many times, as customers, we are told “no” by salespeople. Are we ever happy about that response? Buyers are looking for salespeople who they feel are really motivated to serve. The way to prove that is to show your strong desire to serve at every customer face to face meeting, on every phone call and in every response. Great in theory but are you really doing that now?

1. Have a sincere interest in the customer’s situation

We have targets to achieve, pressure to perform and so often we can become totally focused on our own situation. By the way, here is a newsflash - the client only cares about their own situation and how dedicated you are to helping them. Are you really sincere about helping the customer or are you focused on yourself, your numbers, your deadlines? Don’t be in any doubt - customers can feel the difference.

1. Understand the customer’s expectations

Customer expectations change, but often salespeople are not changing with them. Business moves and what was enough some months ago, may not be suitable enough now. We have to really monitor the customer’s situation to see what has changed. That means we have to keep asking them about their expectations of service from us. Are we serving them in the way they want to be served. Most salespeople never want to ask this type of question because they are scared of the answer. We have to be brave and ask and if we do, we will be delivering exactly the type of service the customer wants and expects. When we do that, we differentiate ourselves from our competitors

So what percentage of your customers would you count as your loyal fans? What are you currently doing to drive that percentage score much higher? Customers will become someone’s loyal fan. We have to make sure that is us and not our competitor. Assume that the customer’s expectations and perceptions of what they consider outstanding service will keep changing. We have to keep up with the change but are we doing it?