Are you wrapping up the year and finding that there is a goal you “forgot”?

This may be a goal that:

- You hoped you could, and others would, forget about.

- Was something you never wanted to do, but knew you needed to.

- Was buried, day by day, as more immediate issues got in the way.

If there’s a goal like this as you wrap up 2010, here are a few things you can do as you prepare to move into 2011:

1. Decide if this forgotten goal is something you still want to achieve.

Sometimes there’s a goal we hope to get to, but it’s big enough that we just don’t grasp quite how to begin to tackle it, much less know how to completely meet it.

At other times, the forgotten goal may be one you once had, but have now outgrown or for other reasons, no longer hold.

2. If this is a goal you still want, get excited about it again.

Maybe there are great benefits to getting this work done which you haven’t focused on fully yet.

Take some time to imagine you have achieved the goal. Experience that feeling of victory in its full glory…all the sights, sounds, and elation.

Also imagine the process of getting there. See yourself rising above each challenge that may crop up along the path.

3. Accept it if this is something you have to achieve, whether you want to or not.

This may be a “should” or “must” that you still have to carry forward.

If so, just accept it and get moving.

There is a lot of power in acceptance.

The energy you’ve spent running away can be used in far better ways, and you may find that you’ve met the goal far more quickly than you expect, when you just buckle down and get the work done.

Suddenly, the goal will be met, and the burden will have been lifted, as well.

4. Increase your dissatisfaction with the status quo.

This is the opposite of getting excited about a goal you still want to achieve.

To get to the point of action, sometimes we have to wait until we’re really ready to let go of the past. And, well, sometimes that takes a lot of unhappiness with the status quo. We have to be far more ready to go than to stay in the situation we currently find ourselves in.

How can you increase your dissatisfaction with your current situation, making you less willing to tolerate the status quo?

5. Take your big goal and turn it into a series of smaller, more accessible and achievable goals.

Put those smaller goals on your calendar and work to achieve each of those, one by one.

You’ll create a steady stream of achievements, which has far more benefits than you might realize now.

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The natural instinct when confronted by an unhappy person is often to want to back away as far – and as fast – as you can.

If you’re in business, and that unhappy person is a customer, an especially strong fight or flight instinct may kick in.

You want customers to be completely happy, every time, but that doesn’t always happen.

Don’t follow your fight or flight instincts.

Instead, stay calm.

Move in.

Learn more.

And then use that information to make the situation, and your business, better.

An unhappy customer is gold mine of information.

He or she may give you valuable information that helps you discover profit-improving improvements or innovations that others would also like, but may not have told you about so far.

Consider this: the unhappy customer with whom you’re now faced cares enough to tell you what’s wrong, while others may have just walked away, taking their business with them.

A colleague asked me recently how I handle it when a customer is unhappy.

Her question made me smile, and made me realize the contrast in our perspectives about customer dissatisfaction.

While neither of us experiences unhappy customers often, it has happened.

When she does, she feels fearful, and thrown off-balance. She has a hard time recovering and turning the customer’s unhappiness into a positive situation.

When I’ve experienced a customer’s dissatisfaction, my immediate perspective is that the customer just isn’t happy yet, but will be soon.

And I always see such a situation as an opportunity to get more information so I can make the problem go away, sustainably.

Once you know what isn’t quite right for this customer, you can use the information to design a better production or delivery process or a better solution to the problem you’ve been hired to solve.

As you gather information from a dissatisfied customer, you may discover these or other things:

-  Your target was wrong.

Perhaps you didn’t really understand what the customer wanted.

Maybe they didn’t know what they really wanted.

Or maybe their target changed as other things changed in their life or circumstances.

-  Your communication was poor or incomplete.

The ball may have been dropped somehow.

Maybe you gathered the right information from the  customer but did not communicate that well to other people in your company who were involved in producing the product or service the customer ordered.

Perhaps you or someone else at your company made assumptions you shouldn’t have made. Or maybe the customer did.

- Maybe the service you provided was less than it needed to be.

Perhaps the customer needed training or instruction, in addition to the product or service they ordered.

If so, that’s another service you may need to provide them for the solution to work for them now. Such training could be an additional service you provide or sell to others in the future.

- The customer may have ordered the wrong thing.

Your problem-discovery and solution-design skills may need to be improved.

Maybe what your customer asked you for was not what they really needed, and you didn’t discover the real need in time to meet that before they discovered they were unhappy with the way things have worked out, up to this point.

Whatever you discover in the customer dissatisfaction information-gathering process, if you’re in business, you have to learn to be comfortable with it.

Turn a difficult situation into a win.

Improve the situation for this customer, for you and your business, and for customers you will serve in the future, as well.

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Can you define your most important goal in one sentence?

If you have one problem you’re trying to solve, what is it, in one sentence?

I had to laugh as I was reminded of the importance of that recently. I was listening to an online training series I’m taking about product development. The program includes a regular mentoring call for those who want to be part of it.

I was listening to a recording of the most recent mentoring session.

One by one, people brought a litany of ills, their own great big virtual bag of stuff which they opened up and dumped onto the table.

The mentor’s response?

“Tell me what your question is, in one sentence,” he said to each one.

He wasn’t rude.

He was helping them to think clearly, and to choose.

He was helping them develop or improve the habit of focus, and of taking action as they solved one problem at a time, and then moved on to the next one.

He was also getting them to stop hauling a big bag of problems around, thinking that worrying about them was real work, somehow.

If you can get something down to a clear, simple statement, you can start to understand it, explore it, understand what causes it, then solve it, and move on.

Until then?

You’re just wrestling a mountain, and the mountain is going to win.

Guaranteed.

Again, then:

What’s your question, in one sentence?

What’s your goal, in one sentence?

Is it the most important one for you now?

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One tool rises above all others when it comes to speeding up the problem-solving process.

It is a tool that is consistently powerful, deceptively simple, and very easy to overlook.

That tool?

It’s a clear problem statement.

Doesn’t everyone take the time to clearly define a problem before they try to solve it?

You’d be surprised.

Let’s put it this way: anytime you see people start to lose focus, it’s often because they don’t have a clear view and understanding of the problem they’re trying to solve.

The result is a lot of frustration, wasted time, effort, time, and money chasing down would-be solutions to problems that doesn’t exist at all.

Meanwhile, the real problem continues to brew, often becoming far more complicated as time is lost.

All of that waste could be prevented.

Take the time, make the time to clearly state the problem you have to solve.

I have my own experience with this rush to a solution, the urge to get into action while careening right past a clear problem statement.

“It’s obvious what the problem is!” I thought in a recent problem-solving circumstance of my own.

“Who needs to take the time to write a problem statement now?”

Well, I did.

The symptom of the problem was that I had no dial tone on my office phone line.

It just suddenly disappeared, and I’d changed nothing in my office that might have caused the line to fail.

I called the phone company (and finding the number for customer support was a problem, itself. But that’s a story for another time).

An automated response line deciphered my request, which triggered an automated test, which asserted in a mechanical voice that the problem was not with the telephone company’s fault.

The problem was something inside my office, the automated voice declared.

“Good luck. Don’t give us another call,” was the essential message with which I was left.

Suddenly left alone with technology I didn’t really want to learn more about in order to isolate the problem and get it solved, what was my next step?

I made sure I had a workaround I could use until I could carve out time to conduct a series of experiments to isolate the offending equipment and track a replacement down.

I envisioned having to conduct about 50 experiments that might take days.

Ultimately, only about three experiments were needed, and the offending equipment turned out to be a small DSL filter between the phone and the phone jack.

That simple problem statement I’d started with, “Something is wrong with the phone line into my office,” was not the right problem statement at all.

Once I took the time to tighten the definition of the problem, problem-solving flowed.

The process took another important tool, too: patience. And patience, mid-problem state, is not always easy to find, but you must.

So once I knew what equipment I needed, the next problem was finding it quickly, and at a reasonable price.

That took a bit of experimenting, itself.

Finally, though, right part, right price, and the problem was “suddenly” solved.

The next time a problem shows up in your world, make sure you take the time to clearly state the problem.

And muster up your patience, for you’ll need that in your toolbox, too.

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Which is better: to like or respect your leader or manager?

This subject has come up recently with several people and groups I’ve worked with. I’ve been surprised by the simple informal survey results I found when I asked a few people that question.

Think of the best managers you’ve worked for.

Did you like them? Why or why not?

Did you respect them? Why or why not?

Or did you feel both emotions toward them?

If you are a leader, yourself, consider your own leadership and management priorities.

Do you care more about being liked or respected?

How does that priority affect your decision-making?

How does it affect your actions and behavior?

Are there times when you erred on the side of trying to be liked, or respected, and lost both?

Are there times when you erred on the side of trying to achieve one or the other, but might have achieved both had you tried another approach?

Now consider your finest moments as a leader.

Was your priority to be liked or respected at those times, and in those moments?

Did you achieve that goal?

How did you do so?

Would you use that same approach now, if you were in the same situation?

Intentional leadership and behavior, whatever your goal, usually leads to the best and most effective approach.

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In other words, is customer feedback a good thing, from your perspective?

Do you think of someone who’s trying to correct a problem they experienced with a product or service they bought from you?

Or do you think of a person who’s complaining in order to try to get more for less from you?

Customer feedback can be a source of very valuable information about how your products and services are being delivered, and how they’re actually working…or not.

If you’re having a hard time relating to customer feedback as a positive thing, remember your own experience that last time you had to call a customer support line.

Your experience was probably similar to this:

- You bought the product or service in good faith, with high expectations that it would work well.

- When it didn’t live up to expectations, you were frustrated, disappointed.

And this was probably true about your experience of making the call to customer support:

1. You did NOT want make the call.

2. You were frustrated that you had to take your time to try to figure out what was going wrong, possibly explaining the problem multiple times in order to get to a resolution for a situation you thought should not have occurred in the first place.

3. You didn’t want to need detective skills to try to figure out how to reach the right person to help you.

4. You may have tried several different ways to fix the problem on your own, long before you carved out the time to start working your way through the company’s phone tree queue.

5. You wanted the problem solved fairly, promptly, completely, and in as pleasant a way as possible.

6. You didn’t want to hear about “company policy,” or why the person on the customer support line could not do something for you. You just wanted to hear how they were going to fix the problem that should not have occurred in the first place.

The next time you’re having trouble feeling empathy for the customer who’s frustrated with a product or service they bought from you or your company, consider times you’ve been the customer making that customer service call.

Remember what you hoped the person you were talking to handled the call, and resolved the problem you were frustrated about.

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Having plenty of customers for your business is good.

Having plenty of the right customers is better.

If you’ve been in business for a while you know this is true, even in a challenging economy.

Not everyone who needs the product or service your company provides is a good customer for you.

And your company is not the right service provider for everyone who comes your way.

Think of the customers for whom you’ve done your best work in the past.

Now think of the people with whom you worked most easily.

The odds are, they may be the same.

Next, take a minute or two to think of a few project or client with whom the work did not go so well.

What’s the difference between the clients with whom things went well, and the ones with whom it didn’t?

See what you can learn and improve about your ability to identify customers with whom you’re a good match.

Consider these things about the clients with whom things worked well:

1. Could you tell that you’d work well together, right from the beginning? If so, what were the first signs?

2. Did you do specific things – or have a specific process you followed – that made the relationship and communication flow most easily? What were they?

3. If there were difficulties at any point in the project, how did you handle and resolve them well?

Now answer these questions for customers with whom work did not go so easily:

1. Did you and the customer have the same goals and objectives?

2. Could you tell that you might not work together easily, right from the beginning? If so, what were the first signs?

3. Could you have done more to make the relationship and communication flow more easily? If so, what, specifically?

4. If there were difficulties at any point in the project, how did you handle and resolve them? What could you have done better if you were doing that project or working with that client now?

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