What The Heck Is "Delivery Sauce" And How Can It Change Lives In Under 2 Minutes?
"Hi! How are you? I'd love a small, black coffee, please.""Uh, yeah, I'll be with you in a second."
Has this ever happened to you?
You bring the courtesy and it's not returned?Your job, whether you're on the clock or off the clock is to treat people with respect.
If you're in the service industry, it's your job to go above and beyond that benchmark.
Let me explain how this is relevant to life and how it's not just me complaining.
Our job is to deliver value, not just create it.
If you make the coffee and deliver it with a smile, the coffee tastes better and people want to come back to your cafe.If you make the coffee, push it to the counter and yell "CHRIS!" you're not making customers for life.
Just creating the deliverable isn't enough.
You need to DELIVER it in a way that your customer, student, client, patient, or user can accept and enjoy.It's like adding bearnaise sauce to a steak, or Caesar dressing to a salad. It will work by itself, but the enhancement is a differentiator from the usual.You need to add your special delivery sauce!
2 Minute Action
How can you add more delivery sauce to your work?Is it reading an article on bedside manner?Is it sending a follow-up thank you email to customers after their first purchase?Is it getting a coffee with the teacher in the grade ahead of you to see how to you can better "on-ramp" students from your class to his?
Do you know what doesn't even take 2 minutes?
A smile. A fist-bump. A pat on the back. A "thank you." An anonymous post-it note on the monitor of your colleague.You have all the resources you need to improve the state of the world around you.And you can make a difference right now.
How To Align Your Team, Continuously Improve Work, And Make Everyone Stronger
Every morning, I ask my team to stand in a circle to have a 5 minute meeting.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What will I accomplish today?
- What is in my way?
At the end of the sprint (in our case, one week of work), we review how we did.
This is called the Sprint Retrospective.
We look at how much stuff we did and whether we did the right stuff by asking two questions:What went well? (So we might replicate those things in the next sprint)What could we improve?From there, we turn the most notable things into action items, sometimes requiring teams to assemble around them.
It sounds straightforward and easy, but do you know what the hardest part about this is?
Not skipping the meeting.It feels like it’s just this one time or that we don’t really need to have the meeting because not that much stuff happened this week . . .
I’ve never run a Sprint Retrospective that hasn’t generated meaningful action items.
It’s this discipline, early on in your work that is the compounding interest of your project.By staying the course, you will continuously be aligned as a team, you will be focused on the right work, and you will have a team that feels capable in the face of challenges.
2 Minute Action
Since it’s Saturday, chances are you just finished a work week.Take today’s 2 minutes to ask yourself “what went well?” and “what could be improved?”
The Best Argument For Minimalism I've Found So Far
Look, I'm not trying to get you to give up all your stuff and be a dish towel wearing hermit.I'm asking you to look seriously at your baggage (physical, social, and emotional) and decide what actually adds value to your life.Here's a great example:
This is a photo of a divorcing couple, in court, dividing up their beanie babies.
I don't know the details of this breakup, so it could be a completely healthy one for all I know.All I can tell you is that it looks an awful lot like they are valuing the wrong stuff.Consider this a strong visual representation of "Christmas Yet To Come."Whether it's physical stuff, emotional stuff, work projects, ideas, or whatever--it's up to you to make sure you're focusing your time and energy on the few things that truly add value.The rest is all noise.The rest is a distraction.
2 Minute Action
What is your intention for today?What will you accomplish?What will you get done no matter what gets in your way?Decide on one, focused thing and get going.