You’re late for work.
You spilled your coffee.
There’s construction causing a traffic jam.
We all have bad day, but we are supposed to be able to leave our problems at the door. However, most of us have trouble doing this, and it can severely affect our work. Who wants to deal with angry customers when you just had to deal with an angry spouse or kids? So, how do we drop our problems to help others with theirs?
- Be aware of your stress and your emotions.
If you are aware of them, then you can focus on controlling your interactions when you are dealing with customers.
- Visualize a good day and believe it.
If you think positive, then your attitude will become positive.
- “ Happy”
Constantly remind yourself that you are at work to serve your customers. If you treat them well and keep them happy then they can only have a positive effect on your attitude.
Mark Murphy, author of Hiring for Attitude and founder/CEO of Leadership IQ, a provider of research and leadership training, conducted research on 20,000 new hires. Of these, 46% failed within 18 months. More surprising than the failure rate was the fact that when new hires failed, 89% of the time it was for an attitude issue and only 11% of the time for lack of skill. The attitude deficits that doomed these failed hires included a lack of coachability, low levels of emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament.
When was the last time you heard about employees being trained or coached in attitude development? What about manager’s ability to coach attitude development and nurture positive ones; whereas, most managers only deal with attitudes when they are negative and they have to “correct them”.
In a recent study we did we asked managers and leaders across the country what they felt were their top 2 attributes that positioned employees to perform at their optimal level. Attitude was the # 1 choice at 65 %!
|
ANSWER CHOICES |
% RESPONSES |
|
|
Their attitude |
64.66% |
333 |
|
Their ability to receive feedback |
23.30% |
120 |
|
Their ability to create relationships internally |
15.53% |
80 |
|
Their ability to engage and connect with their manager |
17.67% |
91 |
|
Their learning style and ability |
8.16% |
42 |
|
Their willingness to invest time into their own learning |
43.69% |
225 |
|
Their confidence in pursuing new tasks or skills |
30.10% |
155 |
|
TOTAL RESPONDENTS: 515 |
||
Now what do we do knowing all this? We leave it up to the employee to monitor and change their own attitude without coaching or management help? Heck if that worked we would not be writing this stuff nor would you be reading it. Attitudes take nurturing and manager’s investment in creating positive ones with their employees.
