Your Career and You: “I Broke a Teacup…or Perceptions and PR"

As the saying goes, “Perception is reality.” 

What you believe you have experienced is, to you, fact or truth.

Well…I dropped a teacup today while setting the table for lunch.

In the realm of teacups (in this case, a Chinese teacup…basic, inexpensive), this one was way down on the list. It has been with us for a bazillion years, travelled to the Philippines with us and all over the U.S. as we moved around in my career. But (at least in my fuzzy brain) it was just a teacup.

Not according to the other side of the household, who immediately set out on an hour-long dissertation on the meaning behind the dropping of the teacup.

As she perceived the incident…this was yet one more sign of encroaching “old age.” Motor skills are going to hell in a handbasket.

Doesn’t matter that I’ve been dropping stuff since the beginning of time…a 50-pound roll of paper on my right foot (broke a toe in that exercise) and a computer hard drive (old-style, heavy hard drive) on my left foot (ditto on the result)…just for starters.

Nope…it’s “old age.”

And that started me thinking about perceptions…how others process events or actions that we, ourselves, also experience, but in a different way.

This, as I tell my undergraduate Communication students at Curry College, where I head the Public Relations Concentration and teach most of the PR courses, is what makes the public relations profession so interesting, challenging…and frustrating.

Things happen. Products break. Blood donors get hematomas. An employee has a really bad day and snaps at a customer.

If you’ve been around for a few (or more) years, you know that these events are inevitable. As a salesman once astutely told my wife as she was zeroing in on some minuscule defects in a relatively inexpensive lamp, “Nothing’s perfect, little girl.”

Your challenge as the public relations leader is to ensure that mechanisms are in place to respond quickly and efficiently…and to ensure that everyone involved, both internally and externally, understands what has been done.

Customers don’t leave you because your product was faulty…we all know products break on occasion.

They leave because their perception is…if you’ve done nothing to address the situation…that you don’t care. Your company doesn’t care, so why should they care? They can just go somewhere else.

Your job as the public relations leader is to help everyone in your organization understand that it doesn’t matter that products will break once in a while.

What matters is that the customer doesn’t see it that way. He perceives it as a sign of encroaching product inferiority…“old age.”

You have to take action to change that perception and to help the customer understand the reality…that you and you company are proud of your products or services and that you stand proudly behind each and every one.

That’s your reality.
 (Oh...and to close the story...she finally agreed that I'm basically clumsy!)

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion…”
Robert Burns, “To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church” [1786]

Your Career and You: “On Pigeons and Statues”

I had an epiphany a few days ago as I sat patiently (although you wouldn’t know it from the multiple snarky tweets I sent while waiting) as the folks at a local newly-opened restaurant tried to cope with a hungry lunch crowd.

“Chaos” is the only way I could describe the scene.

The front end of the restaurant boasted easily a half-dozen empty tables while the hostess “looked busy” but wasn’t accomplishing a whole heck of a lot.

The frazzled waitstaff had gotten their mantra down to a sincerely-mouthed “I’m sooo sorry for the delay” as patron after patron asked about an order.

The two guys at the table next to me gave up. Forty-five minute lunchbreak wait for a sandwich.

I decided to stick it out…slow day on the farm, so I had some time to kill…and Twitter was keeping me company!

Hamburger…35 minutes. Drink (“sweet tea”…hey, I’m a Southerner; I’m allowed to slip once in a while!) undrinkable. Who in heaven’s name puts nectar in tea?!?

So that’s the backdrop.

The young lady taking my order was the epitome’ of “cool-under-pressure.” Patient, empathetic...and exhausted…it was 1:30 p.m., and she'd been on duty since a little after 5 a.m.

Having done time myself after college working in my Dad’s soda shop back home, I understood how she felt…and appreciated her efforts to soothe ruffled feathers.

Through quick mini-chats each time she came by my table, I learned that this was an unusual day…apparently other days (the restaurant had been open just four days) had been less frantic.

And that’s what inspired this week’s thoughts…sometimes you’re totally in control of the situation and life is good.

Sometimes, as I often say in my classes at both Curry College, where I head up the Communication Department’s undergraduate Public Relations Concentration and teach most PR courses, and Regis College, where I teach in the graduate Organizational and Professional Communication area, you have no choice but to sit back and watch the train wreck happen.

Or…to use one of my absolute favorite sayings: “Sometimes you’re the pigeon; sometimes you’re the statue.”

Job-hunting is a good example.

Career searches, while they should be somewhat controlled, occasionally jump off the track and you find yourself scrambling to straighten the mess out.

A friend texted me at the end of last week to say she had hurt her back moving into a new apartment and had had to call and re-schedule a job interview. She was in a bit of a tizzy because this is her first real job hunt, and she was afraid things were going to spiral out of control.

I assured her that her excuse was entirely legitimate and…more important…if the organization with which she had scheduled the interview was unsympathetic…she didn’t want to work there anyway.

We like to feel like we're in charge of our lives. And, for the most part, we are.

But occasionally things happen. And there's not a blasted thing we can do about it except soldier on and do our best.

Back to my young, anonymous friend at the new restaurant. She’s heading off to UMass-Amherst in September to study English, and I hope her professors recognize early on that this young lady is a budding young professional.

Cool under pressure. Poised under fire. Pleasant and upbeat while Rome burns. I would hire her in a microsecond.

And, to close this conversation…statues stand all regal and self-important…and immobile, oblivious to all that is going on around them. Pigeons (forgive me pigeon-lovers) are annoying birds that poop on people, places and things…including the regal, self-important statues.

Professionals understand that not everything is going to go the way they want, and they learn over time how to respond to unexpected glitches.

It's called "experience."

“There comes a time in every man’s life and I’ve had many of them.”

– Charles Dillon (”Casey”) Stengel

Your Career and You: "Customer Service-It's in the Eyes"

I just had an interesting experience at a local, somewhat upscale, pizza place.

Went in. Ordered a pizza and coke to go. Paid. Waited. Picked up. Left.

In that roughly 15-minute interval, the young lady at the register never once made eye-contact with me.

Ø  As she was processing my order, her eyes were glued to the register.

Ø  When I paid, she carefully examined the top of the counter between us.

Ø  When my order was ready, she ogled the pizza cooker guy.

Ø  And as she slid the pizza box and coke across the counter, the best I can figure is she was checking out a spider crawling up the wall behind me.

Absolutely NO eye-contact in this entire process with the customer.

I chimed in on a blog post this morning (pre-pizza) about one of the culprits in this “failure to see eye-to-eye”…social media and mobile devices. I deal with it in the classroom…and in the “real world” as a shopper.

We/you have grown up in an online world, and apparently there’s now a fear of turning to stone if you actually set eyes on someone, like in the tales of the goddess Medusa. Seems that, if you looked directly at her, you would instantly turn into a rock. Hard way to go (snicker, snicker)!

But that’s mythology, and I’m talking about real-world customer service where people interact…where there are people who need people to help them. And part of that interaction is eye contact.

I hear time and again from colleagues in the professional world that one of their pet peeves in a job interview is the inability…or outright failure…of the interviewee to make eye contact during the interview.

Flash forward to yourself at work. How do you think the customer feels when you don’t bother to look at him or her?

I won’t ask how you would feel if that were to happen to you because I doubt that you would even notice or care…feel free to correct me if I’m wrong (sneaky way to find out who’s reading this blog!)!

So this is a short rant today on a growing problem as the younger generations morph into the workplace and, at least for brief periods of time, are detached from their computer screens or mobile devices.

Look at people when you are interacting with them…you won’t turn to stone, and you will make the other person feel appreciated…and you just might convert that person to a return customer!

How cool would that be?!?

“Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes – so as to see things through his eyes.” – Basil Henry Liddell Hart, “Deterrent or Defense [1960], 'Advice to Statesmen'”