Defensiveness-Our inborn ability to waste time

By our nature we as humans have a defense mechanism built into us for survival. We have the inborn desire to survive and will do whatever we feel we need to do. However this is often driven by emotion and not logic. Once we know this we can then begin to break down the barriers and find softer ways to approach problems. Always be focused on the solutions and not the problems.

When I used to manage for pizza hut I was always amazed at the reaction of my cooks when a customer who complain. Pizza Hut always had a very liberal customer service policy, if a customer felt there was something wrong with his pizza then our attitude was there is something wrong with his pizza so we would make him another one. It always astounded sometimes when I would ask a cook to do a remake. Often time they would stand there and argue with me for 5 minutes that there was nothing wrong with the first one. My response was always the same, “it doesn’t matter what the first one looked like just make another one and get back to work”. These cooks were not punished or reprimanded for these customer complaints; it didn’t affect their wages or shift lengths. It really had no effect on their life whatsoever despite the fact that they now had one more pizza to make. They would just stand their arguing with me about the initial quality and waste time. The come the end of the shift I would always get the same excuse if some of the important tasks were not completed. “Chuck I didn’t have time to get that done”, as I have always said we all have the same number of hours in the day, it is what we choose to do with them that matters.

CB

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