July - All Star

July Customer Service All Star

“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” I was reminded of this recently while learning a new job in the Electrical department of Home Depot.

After almost 30 years of working in the jewelry industry, I found myself overwhelmed this summer with: new training materials, employee names, technical terms, acronyms, advice, procedures, passwords, and of all things - locker combinations.

Developing a readiness to learn is the art that all good teachers practice. I’m afraid people tend to forget what it’s like to be a beginner. I know I do at times. Let’s face it, you tend to take for granted the things you do by habit. In hindsight, it’s easy to explain experiences based on your level of knowledge and understanding, rather than a student’s level of mental preparedness. There’s the key - mental preparedness.

Learning a new job is not just having the right attitude towards the job; it’s being able to process the information and DO what’s expected on demand. People selectively remember what they’re ready to when their experience, confidence, and skill levels balance. I call this selective absorption. In the book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell refers to this phenomena as "stickiness."

According to Gladwell, stickiness means that a message makes an impact. You can't get it out of your head. It sticks in your memory. When Winston filter-tip cigarettes were introduced in the spring of 1954, for example, the company came up with the slogan, "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." At the time, the ungrammatical and somehow provocative use of "like" instead of "as" created a minor sensation. It was the kind of phrase that people talked about, like the famous Wendy's tag line from 1984, "Where's the beef?”

How do you make a memorable impact on a new employee? It’s not just remembering More Saving. More Doing. Or is it? Company facts, projection figures, and department details, can set up mental roadblocks for employees who think they must memorize these things to understand the corporate culture. Memorization does not lead to understanding, in my experience, it’s - doing - that solidifies understanding and builds confidence. Doing means being willing to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, without a loss of self-esteem, and move on.

So, the teacher is the student in you. Students learn best when a mentor challenges them to teach themselves. Like sunlight is to plants, the teacher is a catalyst for the student to discover their goals and then set out a path to achieve them. This requires drawing out what an employee knows in relation to what they need to understand to perform the job.

Being a rookie is a humble reminder that you must create a blueprint to learn new tasks. It’s simply a matter of establishing a plan, trusting the procedure, and building the confidence to be yourself.

By practicing the art of being a student, you can rest assured the teacher in you will appear.

Comments

Back to School (Without the Triple Lindy)

I hadn’t set foot inside a public library in over thirty years. Last Saturday, when I walked through the sliding doors of the modern County of San Diego branch on Eucalyptus Avenue in Vista, my eyes instinctively scanned the floor for the familiar, comforting sight of varnished oak cabinets and brass pull-handles. Nothing . No card catalog. No little wooden drawers. No rows of index cards typed by someone who presumably had beautiful penmanship and a pension. I walked up to the front desk, looked the librarian dead in the eye, and asked with complete earnestness: "Where’s the card catalog?" She didn’t laugh, though she had every right to. Instead, she offered a warm, dry smile: "We magically had the computer digest it." And just like that, I was enrolled. Not the Rodney Dangerfield kind of back-to-school. No diving board, no loud blazer, no campus party, and thankfully, no need to convince anyone I belonged there. Just an overdue reminder that while I was busy with ...

Beyond Facts-The Deep Dive

✨ In this episode, Beyond Facts: Reimagining School–in the Age of AI . . . This week's podcast is a bit different; it's another example of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can offer tools to creatively enhance your analytical presentation of information. We took this week's blog and copied it into Gemini with the question, “If a story is to work, it must, on some level, create an illusion of escape and also achieve a goal simultaneously. Does this apply to my blog post that follows?” What's created is not just an analysis of the writing, but an AI-generated discussion produced “On the Fly” - Enjoy! Did you know that the word "school" comes from the ancient Greek word scholē , which originally meant "leisure"? Not a rigid schedule or droning lectures filled with "facts," but free time for thinking and conversation. To the Greeks, learning happened best when life slowed down—when you had room to reflect, to ask questions, and to wrestle ...

Doc Welch - The Country Doctor

In this episode, Doc Welch . . . Many authors have characterized life in rural Illinois over the years. Among the more notables are Edgar Lee Masters, who wrote Spoon River Anthology, Carl Sandburg for his poetry and biography of Abraham Lincoln, and little known to me until recently, my first doctor, whom everyone in town always called Doc Welch - James K. Welch, M.D. (Feb. 7, 1915, to May 5, 1998) While exploring the microfilm of the Cuba Journal (published from 1884 to 1992), I consistently kept running across articles entitled The Country Doctor. This intrigued me. Doc Welch was a third-generation practicing Country Doctor in Cuba for over 40 years. His father, James William Welch, M.D., practiced medicine in Cuba for more than five decades. His grandfather, James Knox Welch, M.D., settled in Cuba after the Civil War. Cuba, Illinois, is a small, rural farming community in west-central Illinois, where I grew up. Like many small towns, it boasts a central square with a ban...

The Rhythm of the Woodpecker

The morning in Vista often begins under a heavy, gray marine layer that rolls in from the coast, pressing a damp, muffled stillness over the neighborhood. At 4:30 a.m., the driveways are still full. The local commuters are either blissfully unconscious or stumbling blindly toward their showers, clinging desperately to their last shred of peace before the nine-to-five grind claims them for the day. I, on the other hand, am voluntarily wide awake in the dark. When your agenda consists of absolutely nothing, it is critical to get an early start. Inside the house, the quiet is profound, broken only by the sharp, mechanical click of the kettle as it reaches a rolling boil. I stand at the counter, watching the dark ground coffee bloom as hot water hits the French press's stainless steel. The smell is sudden and heavy—a deep, roasted-earth aroma that cuts through the morning fog. I push against the plunger’s gritty resistance, pouring a cup that radiates dark, stinging heat against my pal...

On The Fly

Search This Blog