Look at the Emotional and the Professionalism will Follow
I’m a Yorkshire lass, born and bred in Wakefield. I am used to people saying ‘mornin luv’ and ‘ta luv.’ Maybe that is why people in Yorkshire seem to be happier than the people living in the big cities because they are greeted with a kind word and feel like a part of a community. They were not taken to a room as children and taught the magic of words to make others feel good. The magic then is passed on and on and on and on. We were just brought up this way, no emotional education, no training.
Move away from the rain now and come to sunny Cyprus where no one really speaks with nice words when they greet you — unless you come from a certain part of Larnaca. Sunny Cyprus where sometimes employees seem to be shocked when a want-to-be client calls up and starts the conversation with “good morning”. That is how I started my conversation with a doctor’s receptionist a few days ago when I was frantically trying to book an appointment for my husband — even when time is of the essence, I am still polite, it’s the Yorkshire lass in me. But even though I was polite you could still tell that I was in a panic. After the “good morning” I followed with “I wanted to ask if I could book an appointment with the doctor please,” still very polite, I needed something after all. Silence. Nothing. “Hello, are you there?” I said. All I heard was paper moving through fingers, then she mumbled a date that was something like a month away. I said “but I need to see him today” the reply was “he is operating today.” So I said I would see and call her back. Surprise, surprise not even a goodbye, just a dead tone, a kind of whistling in a dark tunnel, emotionless and natural.
Maybe she was tired, she talks to people all day. It was nine in the morning so that theory goes out the window. I don’t know about her personal circumstance, she might have had a really bad car drive into work, she might not have had her coffee yet. But hold on, she works for a doctor, no matter if she works for a heart surgeon or a plastic surgeon she works for a doctor. Shouldn’t she have some kind of emotional tact? She is the first line of contact, she is the gatekeeper, she is the ‘woman behind the man’ kind of thing — the doctor is a man in this case. Shouldn’t she have had some training in how to talk to people? Shouldn’t she keep the notion of the emotional always on her mind? But the doctor is trained in this you might say — yes he or she is, most probably, but again that is no excuse.
I say most probably because I was once faced with a situation where two doctors were fighting over why one chose the treatment she was giving me. You can imagine how emotionally stressed I was at the time as I was giving birth to my first child.
I will try not to get too emotional and go further into my own experience — I tend to do that, having emotions and having been brought up in a place where being polite and considerate is just part of the human package. But I will say that being considerate goes hand in hand with being professional in any profession. Doctors, receptionists, bankers, bakers, you name it, everyone in any profession should show professionalism and the emotional also has a lot to do with it. But how can they be emotionally supportive to their customers if it was not built into their system if they entered the job system believing that an academic education and knowing someone in a place you want to be is enough? It might have been a few years ago but taking into consideration the recent pandemic and the fact that the emotional way in which we handle things was tested, this isn’t the case anymore. It was never really the case, we were always human, the work environment just camouflages the fact with high salary promises, a pension fund, and a job for life — for those in the public sector of course.
This is where emotional coaching comes in. This is what companies could aim for with their employees and look for in the people they want to hire. We are much more than our degrees, we are much more than our business experience, we are way more than the people we know. We have backgrounds, friends, family, childhood memories, moral standings, stress, distress, and some of us don’t function in the same way that others do. So when we put someone in a position where they are in charge of customer care, when we consider putting someone in charge of hiring someone else, when we take up any position and when we are given any position, we should consider the emotional side of things and not view it as a hindrance towards getting the job done.
If you teach someone how to handle their emotions, if you understand how someone reacts emotionally to situations, if you give them some kind of release mechanism when needed, if you show you care, if you show you have emotions, if you show you are not just bothered about the bottom line, then maybe there will be lots more satisfied customers out there and, in turn, business will take care of itself because you took care of the people who carry that business to the finish line.
In’t it chuck?
