David J.
Pollay
Read David's bio and previous columns
December 10, 2007
Build Your Business
with Gratitude Chains
The third in a
three-part series on building gratitude in your life and business.
Our three-part
series on gratitude has focused on building Gratitude Chains™ in your
life to increase your happiness. Today we’re going to focus on how you
can create Gratitude Chains™ to support your business.
Remember that you
create Gratitude Chains™ in your life when you cultivate three things:
1) awareness of what and for whom you are grateful, 2) curiosity about
what they do that makes you feel grateful, or what makes something you
value possible, and 3) memory of what is good about these individuals or
things by engaging in gratitude practices.
I interviewed Arthur
J. Kobacker earlier this year in his home. Art was 83 when he passed
away on July 12, 2007. He was a philanthropist with his wife Sara Jo.
One of Art’s most personally rewarding endeavors involved providing the
initial funding (and supplemental annual funds) to build and support The
Village Academy, a K-12 school in the heart of Delray Beach, Florida’s
inner city. Art was also a successful businessman who sold his Kobacker
Shoe Company (679 stores in 31 states) in 1994 to Payless ShoeSource
Inc.
In our two-hour
interview, Art shared some of his experiences in business and in life.
Art believed in the importance of building Gratitude Chains™ in business
(although he used his own words to describe the idea). He believed that
successful business leaders should always connect directly with their
customers and their employees.
So let’s look at a
Gratitude Chain™ focused on business. And we’ll include Art’s insights
to illustrate each part of the Gratitude Chain™ building process.
Step 1: Cultivate
Awareness
Spend time in your
stores. Visit your customer service centers.
Art told me about a
time when an international group of businessmen arrived for a week-long
visit with him, but they arrived on the wrong week. Art was out of town
visiting a store. So Art’s office called his wife Sara Jo to ask if she
knew where he was.
Art said, “I
remember my wife started calling stores . . . and she reached the store
in Portsmouth, Virginia, talked to a very nice store manager, and she
said, “Is Mr. Kobacker there?’ And he said, ‘No, he’s not.’ ‘And had he
been there?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is he expected?’ And this manager said, ‘He is
always expected.’”
Step 2: Cultivate
Curiosity
Ask your customers
what they value. Ask them what they like best about your products and
services. Ask them what they would like you to improve.
Talk to your
employees. Ask them how they best take care of your customers. Ask them
what helps them support your customers the most, and what makes it hard
for them to do their job.
Art said to me, “If
you ask the right questions, you get the right answers, and you find out
where you are making mistakes and where you are doing things that are
right, and how you might expand on them. And I just learned a whole lot
from doing that. Visiting stores, meeting with people, and the store
employees, and the store manager, and talking to customers were the high
points of my retail experience.”
Step 3: Cultivate
Memory
Recognize publicly
and privately the employees who best service your customers. Include
“great service” stories in your talks and interviews – spread the word
that customer service is prized in your company. And pay personal visits
to your best employees.
“We had a particular
store manager by the name of Bob Mallick,” Art remembered.
“And he was . . . in
Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania in a Picway Shoe Store, and I used to say at
various times, ‘Let’s fly to Belle Vernon and worship at the seat of Bob
Mallick.’ So here we would come flying in on a plane with our head of
store operations, and our regional vice president, and the district
supervisor for that area, and the men’s buyer, and the women’s shoe
buyer, and the children’s shoe buyer, etc. And we would all arrive in
the store, and we would ask Bob Mallick, ‘What do you need?’”
Art concluded, “I
always felt that I could learn so much from a store manager who had to
deal with the customer every day, all day long.”
Gratitude Chains™
Build Your Business
The best leaders
build Gratitude Chains™ in their business. They make it clear what they
value. Arthur J. Kobacker knew how to build Gratitude Chains™ in
business. And the beauty of Art was that he knew how to build Gratitude
Chains™ at home and in the community.
Increase your
gratitude: Build Gratitude Chains™ in business and in life.
David J.
Pollay
is a syndicated columnist with North
Star Writers Group, creator and host of “The Happiness Answer™”
television program, an internationally sought-after speaker and seminar
leader, and the author of “Beware of Garbage Trucks!™ - The Law of the
Garbage Truck™.” Mr. Pollay is the founder and president
of TheMomentumProject.com, a strengths-based training and consulting
organization with offices in Delray Beach, Florida and Washington D.C.
Mr. Pollay is also the associate executive director of the International
Positive Psychology Association (IPPA). Email him at
david@themomentumproject.com.
© 2007
David J. Pollay. Distributed by North Star Writers Group. May not be
republished without permission.
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