Ugh! I know I have talked about the power of listening before, but I just had an experience that brought it up and I thought I should share.
I needed some help with a program that I use at work, so I called technical support. I just wanted to be able to run a report for my customer, so she could see the payments she made were credited to her account. I had made a change to a payment on the account and didn't understand where in the program it went.
The tech support person answered the phone quickly and asked how she could help. As I started to explain what it was that I had done, she immediately began looking for what I did wrong. I literally could not get three words out of my mouth before she would interrupt and start moving the cursor across the screen to make "corrections". (Which, by the way, she didn't need to do- because what I had done was right, there was just an extra step that I didn't complete)
She was so busy trying to "fix" something that she never even found out that I was trying to print a report for my customer. I tried to ask why the payment went where it did, but she continued to interrupt me - again, not even getting 3 words out. By the end of it, I was so frustrated that I said, "O.k. thanks" and hung up, without ever asking how to run the report.
Now I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was incredibly busy and just wanted me to get to the point, so she could fix my problem and move on to whatever it was she was working on before I so rudely interrupted. BUT- she is a support person; her job is to LISTEN!!!
I then wondered to myself how often I do this. Am I just assuming there are problems that I have to "fix" instead of just listening and letting my employees, guests, even family members get what they need said out of their mouths? I got off the phone with that woman and said, "I never want to talk to her again!" That isn't good. I am likely to need help from her in the future, so I need to be able to go to her for that.
We need to make sure we allow ourselves to be sounding boards when needed. Our employees need to feel secure that when they come to us for something we will listen to them completely and be fair, caring and honest with them. Our guests sometimes just want to be heard. Oftentimes they aren't looking for "something for nothing", they just want us to know we could have done better, and how that could have been.
So... next time, JUST LISTEN!