KateNasser.com

With ONE Simple Question!

Leaders, managers, investors, parents, and coaches, are often realizing and mentoring someone’s big dream.

The bigger and more outlandish the dream, the greater the disbelief and concern.  This doubt can produce unhelpful reactions like “what are you thinking” or “it sounds too risky”.

Yet there is ONE simple question that powers success with both inspiration and practicality.

The ONE Simple Question

“What do you picture?”

This questions powers positive inquiry, broader and deeper perspective, dialogue, and research. It unearths understanding of:

1. What does the dreamer think it will take to make the dream a reality?
2. How complete or accurate is that picture?
3. What strengths and how much endurance does the dreamer have?
4. What obstacles does the dreamer foresee – internal and external?
5. How will the dreamer handle missteps and mistakes – psychologically and practically?
6. What help, truly, does the dreamer expect?

What do you picture is a far better question that what is your plan? The latter requires great foresight of details at the start yet doesn’t assess the dreamer’s true readiness.

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For leaders and managers with a tough career slot to fill, knowing the applicant’s vision of that job is critical to a successful decision.

For parents with wide-eyed teenagers or high achieving college students, asking what do you picture encourages them to consider their dream more deeply without killing their spirit.

For investors in new inventions, knowing how the inventor thinks and pictures the future will affect the win or lose.

For coaches, this one simple question — what do you picture – sets up a positive non-directive dialogue with those they coach.

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There will be time for plans and details. Yet if you skip the picture and go right to the plan, the plan will be incomplete. It will lack success factors that are found within the dreamer not within the plan.

Have you tried this question — what do you picture? What was the result and response?


From my experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach


©2011 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish this post, please email info@katenasser.com. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach, guides people from inspiration to action. Her workshops, consultations, keynotes, and DVDs, turn interaction obstacles into interpersonal success and business wins. View footage, keynote topics, workshop outlines, and customer results at this site.

For years I have been able to spot job applicants who are drawn to service careers. They excel at it. They have an ease, commitment, and skill that makes them, what I call, the naturals in customer service. Theirs is a calling to customer service work and they answer that call very well.

Leaders, spotting and hiring those with this natural calling to customer service work gives your business a competitive advantage. It gives you the trust to empower these naturals to wow the customer. Since they need little if any supervision to deliver outstanding customer service, the customer experiences the ultimate in care and action — in the moment, every time.

What will you spot in potential hires who have a a natural calling to customer service?

Naturals in Customer Service do all these things …

1. Accept the absurdity of life without using sarcasm toward the customer.
2. Easily adapt; need for control is low.
3. Brilliantly balance objectivity and caring.
4. Initiate both caring and action.
5. Know that they can’t change others — only their own perspectives and reactions.
6. Love diversity and are inspired and excited by it. Non-judgmental.
7. Exhibit a high sense of ownership and teamwork.
8. Understand the big picture and show attention to detail; they follow-through.
9. See and hear far more than what the customer is saying and use it well.
10. Continuously learn from interactions and quickly reapply this insight.
11. Love to serve because of the giving — not to be liked or loved in return.

Be wary of job applicants who say they like customer service work because they enjoy hearing thank you and being appreciated. When the difficult customers are there and the thank yous aren’t, these types become frustrated and do poorly. Remember, customer service work is about caring for others not about the customers caring for you.

Job applicants: If you a natural, you will be happiest working for an enlightened company who sees the business value of outstanding customer service to every customer or working for high end customer care departments (in traditional companies) that focus on their top level customers.

Leaders/Employers: The one thing a natural in customer service does not do well is work in very highly structured scripted departments with loads of supervision and rigid rules. If this is how you operate, select nice people whom you can train to work specifically the way you want them to perform. Your customers will not have the ultimate customer experience yet you will spare yourselves the upheaval of the naturals leaving your company.


©2011 Kate Nasser, Somerville, NJ. For permission to re-post or republish, please email info@katenasser.com.

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Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach is widely known for her insight and 20 years of experience in customer service for the ultimate customer experience. Her workshops re-energize caring and activate follow-through. See this site for workshop outlines and what so many have said about the results.

There is much press today about whether people skills (also known as soft skills) are considered during the hiring process. Do people skills count more than your occupational (aka hard skills)?

Quite honestly, to me the debate is both useless and a bit risky. Your professional career is in your hands. Hiring managers, teams of current employees, HR reps are people. They may consider people skills. Do you want to gamble that those interviewing you don’t consider people skills in making the choice? Whether they do it consciously or subconsciously, why bet that they won’t? Develop your professional people skills. Work on you AND the work. Be workplace ready!

When to start? Yesterday. Developing your people skills can begin in school. In can happen in your everyday life — inside and outside of work. I was lucky enough to have a mother who demanded it of us. So when I graduated college with a BS Mathematics, I had been developing the interpersonal skills of my right brain while sharpening and expanding my left brain.

Is it too late to start? Never. I continue to learn and improve my people skills. You have infinite interactions with people and it costs nothing to learn “on the job” so to speak. Even those who debate whether or not interviewers consider people skills in the hiring decision, agree that people skills are expected and assessed for job assignments and promotions once you have the job.

How to start? The most productive first step is to understand your own personality type — for two reasons.

1. You will interpret what other people say and do based on your own personality type.  It is your reference sheet.
2. Knowing your type gives you limitless potential for adapting to others of a different personality type.  It is the fuel for success in teamwork, leadership, customer relations, and long term professional friendships.

Here is some valuable footage on personality type differences to spur your learning: GPS Your Brain to Work With Any Personality Type.

Get Started! Take a well respected personality indicator like The Kiersey Temperament Sorter and then use the knowledge in your daily interactions. People-skills are the conduit to delivering your occupational knowledge to those around you and to the company that employs you.

If you get stuck, you can always call me (or my mother) for help!

Warmest wishes,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach in This Technical World
Masters in Org. Psychology

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Kate Nasser delivers her 20 years of experience and her natural intuition about people in inspirational keynotes, transformational teamwork and customer care workshops, and coaching for your success. Preview her new customer service training DVD Customer Service USA.

Posing questions to job candidates in interviews, no matter how behaviorally based, doesn’t show you what they will contribute.  Perhaps this is one reason temp-to-perm positions became so popular even with the buy-out fee the employer pays.  The employer has seen the temporary staff in action.

Yet you can achieve a similar success by engaging job candidates in action interviews.  If you are looking for candidates with 21^st century skills like creativity, conceptualizing, synthesis, re-invention, and true empathy/customer service, action interviews will get you there.  You can do them in-person or via videoconferencing.

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To find creative problem-solvers …

Hold a mock meeting on solving a generic problem.  Have the job candidate participate.  See if s/he offers out-of-the-box or safe ideas.  Does s/he contribute any ideas or simply listen?  You can assess the people-skills as well as creative problem solving. 

To spot empathetic staff for customer service …

Have your best customer service staff role play true-to-life scenarios with the job candidate.  Use blatant and subtle examples needing empathy and see what the job candidate responds.  It is one thing to discuss how you would handle a customer interaction and quite another to do it. 

To find synthesizers who can see new ideas in disparate details …

Pick a recent example that you solved through synthesis of different ideas. Give the different ideas to the job candidate and see how and what s/he synthesizes. 

To tap the pool of reinvention talent …

Give the candidate 2-3 everyday objects and ask them to make a new useful object out of them.  The useful object can be anything; it does not have to relate to work.  You are tapping innate abilities with this activity that you can later apply to work related challenges.

To find conceptualizers …

Have the team of interviewers and the job candidate play “What If We”.  You can use a hypothetical product or service that relates to your industry or customize it to relate to your organization’s products and service.   State the product or service in question.  Then each person states aloud “What If We …” to conceptualize a new angle or improvement.  This is also a great way to find out what the candidate knows about your industry and company.

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Remember: To find the best talent in the 21st century, engage candidates in action interviews.  Replace the bad surprises you get after hiring with happy surprises about job talent you find during action interviews. Combine them with resume/references and certain skill or interests tests where appropriate to get a fuller picture of the job candidate’s potential and interpersonal style.   

I welcome your comments, new ideas, and questions below. 

Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach