The Added Touch

Consider how important these gestures can be and how that importance is so often overlooked:

• The senior executive in New York who remembers the name of the company technician he met two years ago in Duluth.
• The manager who takes the time to call up the team members to see if they are encountering any problems and to emphasize the significance of each individual's role.
• The supervisor who routinely asks his employees, "How can I make your job easier?" and then follows through on the responses.
• The employee who calls a customer to doublecheck that everything was performed as promised.
• The boss who gets out to field in order to listen intently to the people who are at all levels of the organzation.

Do enough of those little things and you can boost performance from "pretty good" to "extraordinary."