Entrepreneurs accomplish a lot by themselves. Fierce independence is a common trait, but why not work smarter, not harder? In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn details why going it alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Rob Artigo: Well, Ray, you write so much it’s hard to keep up, but one thing that you did right recently was, “To succeed, we need the support of others. Friends, customers, mentors, families and associates.” And these are in the home, these are at work and these are in the community, people that you bump into regularly at ACE Hardware, for example. So you say that you need to get this support, why do you think that that level of support is necessary for success?
Ray Zinn: Well, because we don’t live on an island, no man is an island. We need the help of others. We are very much a society of people.
We don’t do things all on our own unless we want, as a show, a TV reality show called Alone. Unless we want to be alone. We need the support of others. Going back to that TV series called Alone, I mean, you’re left out in some wilderness area and you have to survive on your own without help from anyone. And then when you give up, when you say, “I’m going to tap out,” and you dial this number, and then they come and get you and you’re off the show. But what’s interesting is that I’ve watched that series a number of times and almost half of the people that tap out are missing their family, are missing their relationship with others, and that’s interesting that half of them just can’t be alone. They can’t do it on their own, even though they’d like the money if they could survive that a hundred days on their own, it’s difficult to do.
There are very few people that can literally be on their own as you would Alone, and so the purpose of that particular musing was to talk about how we need to nurture that relationship because we need that relationship with our friends, our neighbors, our community if we’re to be successful, even in a company. I mean, if you’ve heard on the news how certain leaders are, they’re not well liked by those in the office.
I remember when I was running [inaudible 00:02:44], HR, Human Resources, would interview the employees that were leaving and ask them if they could be open with us and tell us why you’re leaving. Three-fourths of them said they were leaving because they didn’t like their boss. Think of that. I mean, three-fourths, that’s 75% of the people that leave to go to another job are doing it because they don’t like their boss. If you want to retain people, if you want to keep them working at the company, then you have to treat them correctly, and so it’s not just an eight-hour job and when you go home with your family or when you go out into the community, you are still who you are, and if you want to have a good relationship, then you need to nurture it. You need to make sure, because if you have a person that you want to mentor you, that person’s not going to want to mentor you if you’re not willing to listen, if you’re not willing to, if you don’t nurture that mentoring relationship or a customer.
I remember one time we had a customer was unhappy with the product that we were shipping them, and so when we went to visit with them, see what we could do to straighten the situation out, they took our parts and threw them in a wastepaper basket and said, “That’s what we think of your company.” It was a shock. That was a real eye-opener and I went, “What?” So we weren’t nurturing that relationship and obviously that customer quit doing business with us. Then I had to dig into, do a post-mortem and find out why that relationship fell apart, and I found out that it was that interrelationship between the salesperson and that company was the problem. So it wasn’t necessarily the company, it was the salesperson that was that relationship with the company.
Rob Artigo: You touched on so many points there that are related to this. You mentioned nurture, that was part of the get the support from you mentioned friends, customers, mentors, families, associates, those people as a whole. You want to have that support and this awareness is accomplished by nurturing these relationships. And you focused on nurture, which is really the bottom line here, is you have to be aware of these relationships and you have to nurture them because it does matter if you lose the sale because of it.
As always, Ray, the listeners can reach out to you with their own questions at toughthingsfirst.com. They can continue their education there and the conversation with all the podcasts, blogs, and links to information about your books, Tough Things First and the Zen of Zinn series and of course coming soon, Essential Leadership. Thanks, Ray.
Ray Zinn: Thanks Rob.
