Wrestling With Success

Greetings.  I still have fond memories of the old days of "professional" wrestling when folks like Killer Kowalski, Haystack Calhoun, Gorgeous George, and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers ruled the airwaves and filled auditoriums.  They were geniuses who really understood their market and the needs and desires of their customers. No, they weren't the very buff, overly-costumed, and highly-scripted performers of today…accompanied by their anatomically enhanced entourages.  Just everyday people wearing a primitive version of spandex trunks who were trying to make a living by providing fun and relatively wholesome family entertainment.  And at the top of my list was Killer, a notorious villain and larger than life figure who used his amazing "claw" to quickly force adversaries into submission–a fearsome grip into their helpless stomachs that left them begging for mercy.  

No this wasn't Olympic sport, and I probably realized at a relatively early age that the whole thing was staged.  But I still delighted in watching matches with my Dad and marveling at the antics of the combatants.  And, I also enjoyed the "tag team" bouts filled with the oddly coreographed collaboration of two behemoths bent on crushing their witless foes.  The first team member setting the opponent up for impending doom, then "tagging" his colleague who would descend from the top rope and deliver the knockout blow.  Later in his career Kowalski would, in fact, team up with Big John Studd to form a tag team known as the Executioners who were really easy to hate.  Though I thought they were awesome. 

But what does the world of professional "wrestling" have to do with your success.  Actually, a lot.  Because all too often we play "tag" with customers without really making the commitment to be a team.  Instead, we waste their valuable time…then hand them off to colleagues we don't really know, colleagues who end up wasting even more of their time.  This point was brought home on a recent call to Sprint, a call to resolve what turned out to be a straightforward software issue.  Yet it was only straightforward to the fourth member of their team who was tagged to help.  An extremely capable young man who knew exactly what to do.  But it took three handoffs and more than two painful hours to ever get his help.  And it required enough patience and perserverence to qualify for sainthood while dealing with three "team" members who had no idea how to perform the claw or any other problem-ending move.  If they were really a team, the folks at Sprint would have understood their own strengths and how to size up the skills of all of their colleagues.  Then, since it's a company built around systems, they would have designed a simple and repeatable system for quickly assessing the problem and getting the customer to the team member best able to solve it.  Not rocket science.  Just simple business known to all of the leading wrestlers from the 1950's and 60's.

We win in business by being a real team and knowing who has the essential skills to make a difference in the life of the customer.  Are you bringing your best abilities to bear for those you serve?  If not, don't expect to be the last wrestler standing.

Cheers!