Leave your ego at your feet.

Posted on March 2nd, 2010 by Robbin and currently 11 commenting.

Photo via flickr via peachknee.

Geno has this little book of doodles. Love it. And occasionally I will ask him… “What’s new in your world?” This morning’s doodle is the title of my post.

Interesting set of words, huh?

Like a lot of companies we work with and know, we get our share of praise and love. Sometimes in the form of love letters, well crafted and sweetly emailed. Sometimes praise comes in the form of tweets and retweets while we are out speaking. Sometimes even face to face.

I heard this quote about praise once. “Getting carried away by praise is like climbing a pole of grease.”

Hmmmm…

If your company starts drinking your own Kool-aid, you run the risk of becoming complacent. You stop challenging yourself. Or in the eyes of Cordell, you lose your “sense of wonder with the world”.

Geno has another way of reminding himself and others to focus on what matters:

Concentrate on being interested, not interesting.

We do the Net Promoter Survey every year and in 2006, the first year we did it I poured over the comments to see if we could set our sights as a group on a couple of areas to focus on and therefore improve our score.

One thing that struck me on our first survey was a couple of quotes that went sort of like this: Great work/people/company, but kinda arrogant.

Well, I was stunned. Us? Really. Nah.

So we talked about it as company and we realized that we needed to work at being more approachable and interested. Some good ideas were tossed out. Like when we go to conferences spread out and meet others. Don’t stick together. Welcome everyone who walks in our door. Everyone took on a personal challenge to listen better.

And you know what — with effort it worked. The next year, there were remarks about us being…well, approachable and very genuine. Not an arrogant message in the whole lot.

That self awareness thing is pretty powerful stuff.

Ramsey said this to me over a beer the other night. “We should lose the term “rock star” from our vocabulary.” Yup he’s so very right, if you create rock stars, you create an ego driven company (look at us, look at us), instead of a one that is driven by heart and soul. A company that promotes rock stars runs the risk of getting focused on themselves instead of their customers.

So there’s what I think about that little doodle of Geno’s.

Your turn…

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