Blog

Business Visioning

How to Write a Vision of Success

Before I get too far into this blog post about how to write a vision, it feels appropriate to share a vision of what success looks like for this blog post.  Here goes:

Training & Business Systems

How to Hire for Positive Bottom-Line Results

There may be industries out there where employee turnover isn’t a problem, but retailing certainly isn’t one of them. Finding, hiring and retaining good staff is one of the biggest challenges that retailers face, and many owners and managers get discouraged by how hard it is—regardless of the economy.  One of the most frustrating situations […]

Leadership Development

How to Lead When You’re Not a Leader

In the Servant Leadership workshops we teach, we often lead in to the content we’ve adapted from Robert Greenleaf by asking the group:

Training & Business Systems

Why the Best Performers Aren’t Always the Best Trainers

OK.  How many of you are willing to admit that you’ve experienced this scenario: You needed someone to train a new hire, automatically chose the person who was the best performer in the job that needed to be trained—and then were disappointed with the results?  Unfortunately, it’s likely that we’ve all done that at one time […]

Open Book Management

4 Reasons to Consider Open Book Management

Open Book Management was a brand-new concept to me just four months ago. I hopped on the ZingTrain in October 2018 as the next-generation ZingTrain Concierge, a position responsible for coordinating ZingTrain’s on-site seminars and workshops here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition to that, I report on, forecast and track ZingTrain’s public sales numbers […]

Customer Service

Bring Your Best Self to Work

Back in 2007, when Zingerman’s wrote Zingerman’s 2020 Vision describing what the business would look like in the year 2020, we wrote that “we [Zingerman’s] have successfully quantified fun, measured fun, and improved our fun factor by at least 380% since 2007. We actively teach people how to have fun at work. We have games […]

Customer Service

6 Tips for Creating a Truly Great Customer Experience

What does a truly great customer experience look like? We spend a lot of time thinking about this at Zingerman’s. In fact, we actively measure the customer experience  by way of the Zingerman’s Experience Indicator (ZXI), which is our adaptation of the more commonly known Net Promoter Score. As Ari explains in this article, “the […]

Leadership Development

When Things Get Hectic… Appreciate!

When the holiday season rolls around, most of us have the ‘Busy Dial’ turned up to 10, or even 20 on some days.