Competency

Did you hear the recent radio advertisement (In Singapore)? It goes something like:

Customer – I like to book a table for dinner for 2 adults and 2 children

Restaurant executive – With pleasure madam. Do you need a baby chair?

Customer – Yes, we need one, please

Executive – Do you want us to have our kids menu ready?

Customer – Yes, that would be nice.

Executive – And can we offer a family discount?

Customer – Oh, this is wonderful

And then the advertisement ends with featuring some key points about the restaurant.

Very friendly, very pleasing. What struck me? The executive didn’t fix the time and the date. Ooops.

Being friendly is, of course, very important and useful. But competency is, in my view more, important.

Related to that, I very often do an exercise in my seminars. The objective of the exercise is to get some ideas on how to build trust in a team.

Good to notice. Many groups come to the conclusion that competency is part of developing trustworthiness. It is difficult to trust your colleagues without having the comfort to know that he / she is competent to do the job.

Competency! Good to keep this in mind.