One of my little party tricks is the ability to remember names.  I did a course a couple of years ago and we spent quite a lot of time practicing this and since then I’ve become pretty good at it.  I’ve been asked a number of times how to remember names and thought I’d jot down my top 6 tips.

My real world practice arena is in the trainings I run and the workshops I facilitate where most if not all of the people are new to me.

Firstly I should point out that this is not just a gimmick.  I think it’s important to remember peoples’ names – on some level it is a demonstration of caring and appreciation.

But enough of the warm, fuzzy stuff….Here are the techniques I use:

1.      Attention – this seems obvious but I had a dreadful moment last week with a group of four new people where I’d been fiddling with my computer when they were introduced.  In this moment of distraction I managed three of the names but one of them just completely escaped me.  There was no recovery and I went through the hour avoiding using the person’s name.

2.      Ask – I always ask if I haven’t quite heard the name properly and then repeat it back.  If the name is foreign to me and especially if I can’t pronounce it (I struggle more to remember these) I might ask two or three times.  It is much less embarrassing at the start of an interaction to have forgotten a name than it is to go merrily along and then two thirds of the way through come up without a name.  Similarly, I think people are much more forgiving of genuine attempts to pronounce their name than of someone failing to use their name at all.  The key thing here when learning how to remember names is not be embarrassed by the learning process.

3.      Repeat – this one is a bit of a cliché and if used wrongly makes one seem like one is the escapee of the ‘Win Friends and Influence People’ cult.  So I usually repeat the name with questioning tonality which is much less threatening and allows people to confirm that yes, I’ve got their name right.

4.      Locate – I’m not a particularly visual person but it really helps me to locate a person, with their name, in relation to something else.  If I do this initially then I find that even if they then move the name has somehow stuck.  It’s as if my brain does a reshuffle, puts them back in their original place and then adds the name label to them.

5.      Use – it’s no fun remembering names if you never get to play with this skill.  So, I’m probably a little bit of an over-user of names both directly to the person and in referencing their comments to a wider group.  For me this helps the name stick.

6.      Remember – because of the work that I do I meet a lot of people.  Often I might meet someone, say in a workshop setting, and then not see them again for a couple of years at which point they know me (because I was the trainer or whatever) and I draw an embarrassing blank.  So, here’s the thing…it’s only embarrassing if you let it be.  My usual approach is “you look familiar, have we worked together (or met) before”.  Nine times out of ten they will give me the clue or remind me of who they are and I haven’t insulted them by stating that they were completely forgettable.  Sometimes I get it wrong and they don’t know me from a bar of soap.  Now that momentary embarrassment I’m quite okay with.  I would rather look foolish myself than have someone think that I haven’t paid sufficient attention to them at our previous meetings.

So there it is: 6 tips on how to remember names.

Recently I’ve been on the wrong end of poor service from a couple of companies.  One is a professional services company, a legal firm, and the other has been providing some of our back-end accounts functions – primarily invoicing, payroll and debt collection.

So, this got me thinking…if I applied those things that I don’t like about the way these companies behave to my own organisation how do we measure up?

This was prompted also by Seth Godin’s entry Four Words in which he makes the point that if you fail to overpromise and under-deliver all of the marketing in the world isn’t going to save you.

Back to my legal firm…what went wrong?

·         Something that should have been reasonably straightforward became intensely complicated and way over the top for the scale of my business.  After four months, I brought my accountant into the picture who came up with a simple solution immediately that all parties agreed would work.

·         The four months!  In fact it has been even longer as we are now into May.  And we have only progressed at the speed we have due to constant prodding.

·         An under-powered junior assigned to my task.  Now, I can see the value of using juniors, especially if the saving is passed on to the customer.  But if it takes longer, and it uses more of my time, and the junior has to be poked and prodded then no thanks I’d rather pay the extra and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

And the accounting services firm:

·         Errors, errors, errors – again it cost us more in internal time checking, correcting and rechecking than it was taking us before we outsourced.

·         Constant reminders and things being missed.

What are the principles that should be distilled for us?  Here’s my top 5:

1.       Assign the right people to the job with the right level of competence. 

2.       Treat our customers’ business like our own – it has to matter to us and we have to get the detail right.

3.       Related to 2. Be proud of our customers.  If we can’t be proud of the work that our customers do and the things that they stand for then we shouldn’t be working with them.  Why not?  Because we won’t bring sufficient commitment and passion to the table.

4.       Our customers should never be chasing us up for deliverables.  That is not their job – it is our job to deliver on time when we say we will.

5.       Pay as much attention to ‘surprising and delighting’ our existing and past customers as we do to getting new customers.  Not just unexpectedly – to both us and them – but by asking ourselves for each assignment: “Is there anything extra here that I can give that would make a difference?”  We are not aiming for world domination, we’re not about grow, grow, grow.  We’re a team of specialists who pride ourselves in doing excellent work and making a contribution to New Zealand competing on the world stage.

Are we always going to get it right?  No…but certainly looking through the lens of these 5 principles will help us to get it right more often.

I spoke at the Christchurch Sharepoint User Group on Tuesday and was live-blogged by Michael Sampson.  His comments here: Stories from the SharePoint frontlines