Being Friendly: A Dale Carnegie Business Solution

Wednesday, 11. 4. 2009  –  Category: Enversa

Great business relationships are the key to meeting and hiring new personnel, gaining more customers, finding a new job, etc.  Being a friendlier person helps improve your relationships with everyone, especially in business.  Even if you consider yourself to already be a very friendly person, reading Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is a great way to grow professionally and brush up on how to be a friendlier person.  The book contains several principals to improve business relationships, and therefore are something that every business professional should be eager to learn.  What you will learn, however, is not anything new, but instead an emphasis of what you know but might not be practicing.

How to become a friendlier person:

1.    Do not criticize, condemn or complain.
2.    Give honest, sincere appreciation.
3.    Arouse in the other person and eager want.
4.    Become genuinely interested in other people.
5.    Smile.
6.    Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
7.    Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves.
8.    Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
9.    Make the other person feel important-and do it sincerely.

(Source: Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc. 1981.)

To Highlight a Few:

Become Genuinely Interested in Other People
Whether you are meeting someone new or conversing with business colleagues, it is usually easy to ask the questions about the things that you are interested in, but what about what the other person would like to tell you?  Becoming genuinely interested in others allows you to build a relationship with the other person based on what they want to say and what they want you to know about them.  You can of course always ask about the things you are interested in, too, but really being interested eliminates not caring about “the rest.”  Your results will include better relationships in the workplace, with customers, and with friends.

Be a Good Listener: Encourage Others to Talk about Themselves
How many times have you been involved in a group discussion or attended a networking breakfast where everyone at the table is talking over each other and interrupting one another because they are so eager to give their opinions and talk about themselves?  Everybody has something to say, but it is the person with the available ear that gets the most one on one attention.  People want to be heard and like it when others listen.   Being a good listener opens up networking channels because you really hear what the other person is telling you instead of waiting for your turn to talk.  This allows you to retain more information about the people you are trying to network with.  Now you can call them up and say, “Remember when you were telling me about how your office is looking for a new assistant?  I have a potential candidate for you…”

Make Others Feel Important-And Do It Sincerely
Everyone wants to feel important, but always awaiting recognition can be a bit exhausting, especially if your team is not in the habit of doing so freely.  Instead, taking credit is usually the name of the game.  However, if your focus is on giving the recognition for somebody else’s hard work or their daily contributions to the organization, it takes your focus off from yourself and it develops an attitude within the company that everyone can be complimented regularly for what they do everyday.  Who wants to drum away day in and day out like a worker bee drone without feeling like they are being noticed or making a difference?  Recognition makes people feel important.  Feeling important encourages attendance, enthusiasm, and efficiency!

Each rule listed above has its noticeable benefits when practiced regularly.  If you have not already, learn them, try them, and reap the benefits both personally and professionally.  Doing business does not always require being friendly, doing good business does.

Katie Petre works for CornerWorld Corporation, parent company of Enversa Companies.

Tags: communication, customer service, Dale Carnegie, Katie Petre, sales