As I am already blessed beyond anything I deserve, with a wonderful wife and family, good health, dear friends, work that I love,  all the material things I need, and most of the material things I want, I find that my list of Christmas wishes digs, in some cases, deeply into the realm of the trivial, and in other cases, the seemingly unattainable. I, like many others, wish for peace in the world, the elimination of poverty, and that my Jacksonville Jaguars would have a winning season. But if I could sit down and make a list of wishes this Christmas, it might look like this:

I wish that people would:

• forever ban the use of the following phrases from their language:

1. the fact of the matter is
2. to a person
3. I’m reaching out to you
4. “I was like,” when they mean “I said”
5. “No problem,” when they mean “You’re welcome.”
6. At the end of the day
7. Does that make sense?

• stop referring to the “Queen of England”. She’s the “Queen of the United Kingdom”, or the “Queen of Britain”, which probably sounds better and is easier to comply with. What about Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland? We don’t say Barack Obama is the president of Hawaii, do we? I told you this was trivial.
• use their turn signals.
• speak more quietly on their mobile phones in public.
• learn when to use “Reply All” on emails, which is almost never.
• know what they want when they’re in front of me at Starbucks.

I wish the graphics operators at my local TV station would learn to spell, and to proofread what they put on the screen.

…that the socks I put into the laundry in pairs would come out as such.

…that my stapler had a gauge on it so that my first indication of its being empty would be something other than clamping down with a staple-less stapler.

…that Microsoft Windows was better than it is. Please don’t tell me to switch to a Mac to solve the problem. I know, I know…

…that I could figure out how using Twitter would help my business.

…that I could make better naan bread.

…that fast food restaurants were.

…that people were less uptight about the phrase “Merry Christmas”.

…that I could consistently remember where I put my sunglasses.

…that there weren’t so many things in my life that rely on batteries.

And I wish that our elected representatives would do a better job of representing us, and would behave with greater civility toward each other and people who disagree with them. I told you some of these were probably unattainable.

That’s really about it. Like I said, I’m lucky…very lucky. But as long as we’re wishing, those are my wishes.

And finally, I wish that everyone reading this has a Merry Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas, and that everyone has a blessed and prosperous 2010. That’s something we can all celebrate.

Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/rehadden) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that my good friend and business partner, Bill Catlette, and I don’t agree on everything. That’s part of what’s allowed our partnership to endure for going on 14 years.

As relates to yesterday’s post, One Button, Under Scrutiny at Home Depot, Bill, whose pedigree in HR goes back 35 years, pointed out, constructively, that in this case, HD really had no choice but to tell Trevor he couldn’t wear his button (although there’s still the problem with the tacit approval of it for more than a year before that, but that only support’s Bill’s point.)

Quoting Bill, “HD’s position is likely based on a ‘no solicitation policy’ that was enacted specifically to keep employees from wearing pro-union buttons/pins during a representation election campaign. The sad reality from a legal perspective is that, if you let people wear a ‘1 Nation Under God’ button, you lose the ability to prevent them from wearing a ‘Vote Teamsters’ button.”

Bill’s right, especially the “sad reality” part. It’s kind of like the story of Zachary Christie, the 6-year-old Newark, Delaware student who was nearly suspended for 45 days for innocently bringing a Boy Scout camping implement to school. Only after a public hue and cry about the absurdity of the district’s zero-tolerance policy did administrators decide that a more reasoned approach was probably more helpful.

You and I can’t do much to change big corporate or government policies, and in some cases, these policies are the unfortunately necessary by-product of the times we’re living in. But – we can sure do something about our own policies, rules, judgments, and decisions. My November resolution is to put a little more thought into the application of some of my own rules – at home and at work – in other words, to do a better job of exercising judgment and discretion, rather than just blindly applying the rules. Want to join me?

*******************************

Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/rehadden) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

We’ve recently witnessed a rash of boorish public behavior by people who should know better. Without naming names, let’s just say that athletes, actors, and politicians of every stripe have been well represented. Time will tell whether society is willing to accept this latest ratcheting up of coarse behavior as the new norm.

I wonder if perhaps we should adopt a color-coded “national civility index” to match the TSA’s threat meter. Think of the fun we could have with that. It would give tennis players and politicians alike something to shoot for. In the meantime, something more important is at stake, the afterwords from these outbursts – the eh hmm ‘apologies’.

Sadly, the ‘apologies’ that accompany these episodes seldom pass the smell test for authenticity. “Party leaders told me to call and say I was sorry” said one apologist. “I apologize to anyone who may have been offended” said another, whose offense involved getting off two f-bombs while describing what she would like to do with a tennis ball. Another issued an apology only after having twice denied the misbehavior. One had his agent issue an apology to his offended peeps. If anything is more offensive than the bad behavior, it just might be the apologies themselves.

This trend is bothersome not just because of its unpleasantness, but because in a lot of cases, impressionable children and young adults are viewing this as a template for acceptable behavior. The payoff isn’t pretty. In a recent survey of teens by the Josephson Institute, 64% admitted cheating on tests, 30% admitted stealing something from a store, 83% copped to lying about something significant to their parents, and, drumroll please… 93% said that they were okay with their own values. The notion that you can get away with pretty much anything as long as you mumble something loosely construed to be an apology puts us way down a slippery slope.

I have gained some experience at making apologies. It’s nothing to brag about, just a by-product of screwing up on a pretty regular basis, and getting more practice. And more importantly, because I had parents who took the hard road and made certain that I got this lesson right. One summer when I was a kid, I subbed for a friend on his paper route. Everything was fine until early one Sunday morning when I launched a tightly rolled Charleston Daily Mail through two layers of glass in a customer’s front door. I quickly learned from my parents that “service recovery” consisted of more than a simple apology. At a reasonable hour when the homeowner was likely to be up and wanting his newspaper, my dad made sure that I returned to the scene to sweep up the broken glass, replace the original paper, and make a sincere apology. Then, I got the chance to “make it right” by paying for the installation of replacement glass in the storm door. As I recall, that wiped out my profits for the month, but left me with a valuable life lesson. Thanks, Dad.

Recovering from one’s mistakes isn’t just the right thing to do. On both a personal and institutional level, it’s also good for business. I was reminded of this recently by a client whose company had shipped some off-spec product to their customers. He remarked that several customers had actually called to commend them for their prompt and thorough handling of the matter. In each case, the customers expressed appreciation that his team had reacted quickly, apologized in person, and then taken action guided not by what was legally required, but what was right. Hmm.

*****

A thought leader in the arena of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard Hadden, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ContentedCows

Just about this time last year, then-candidate Barack Obama repopularized the phrase “lipstick on a pig” in a campaign speech in Virginia, in what some thought was a not-so-nice slap at Sarah Palin, who had just referred to lipstick in her VP nomination acceptance speech. I’ve never been an Obama fan, but I don’t think he was guilty of that one.

And while the idiom “putting lipstick on a pig” may or may not have been a good metaphor for whatever it was Obama was talking about at the moment, the expression was coined PRECISELY for the merger of perhaps the two most dissimilar airlines in the U.S.  – Delta and Northwest.

I’ve had the occasion to fly a lot of Northwest…er, Delta (I guess…who knows anymore?) flights over the last couple of months. Within 30 seconds of boarding on the “new” Delta, one can tell whether the flight is a “real” Delta flight, or a Northwest flight with lipstick rather haphazardly applied.

Only a small part of the noticeable difference is the equipment, the food (LOL), and the on-board amenities, such as they are.

The most glaring differentiator is the people. The people! At the ticket counter, baggage check-in, gate, and most certainly onboard. In general, those who were hired as Delta employees are more helpful, more friendly, and more professional than their Northwest counterparts. It was always that way before the shotgun wedding. Little has changed.

On a real Delta flight, the pilots usually keep passengers informed about delays. On real Northwest flights, I’m not sure what they’re doing up there while we sit on the tarmac, but they’re certainly not talking to passengers.

One interesting observation – one shared by many others with whom I’ve compared notes – is that Northwest employees, in Delta uniforms, spend about 85% of their onboard time griping to each other about their jobs! That leaves only about 15% of their time to grudgingly take care of whatever annoyance the customer might be foisting on them at any given moment. If Delta employees are griping about their jobs, they’re doing it outside the line of sight of paying customers.

The lesson for us manager type people: with all that we’re doing to try to make the best of a troubled set of business conditions, many of which are caused by factors beyond our control, one area where we CAN make a substantial difference is with the people we put…and keep…on the payroll. And how we treat them once they’re there. Delta has always done a better job in that department than Northwest. It’s time the two companies merged – really merged – and quit operating with two highly disparate sets of standards.

To paraphrase another guy who’s lived in the White House, “It’s your people, stupid!”

And don’t you forget it!

*********************************

Richard Hadden (twitter at http://twitter.com/rehadden) is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and Bill are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.