The power of good manners

Something that I noticed, in fact bowled me over, was the courtesy of the Asian people. And I wondered at the time whether we parents in the so called developed West are letting our children down by not teaching them better manners.

But then it’s more than our children. An interesting post on Tom Peter’s blog about civility and how it affects the bottom line came up at the same time as my experience with polite Asian people. Not only are we not teaching our children good manners but we are also neglecting to insist that our staff exhibit good manners to our customers.

Flying from Heathrow London to Bangkok in Thailand I sat next to two Asian girls. I’m going to guess they were Thai. I didn’t really speak much to them, they were part of a larger group and busy with their own community and I was happy to just vegetate in front of the movies. Three of those later…

Everytime they wanted to get up to the toilet they helped me with all the goodies on my small table, to lift, tuck in earphone cables, hand cups to other people to hold and in general in a gentle manner help as much as possible to make the interruption as hassle free as possible.

This genteel and friendly service has continued to be part of my experiences as I traveled to my final destination being Hanoi in Vietnam.

It was therefore quite interesting to see that several business books have recently been published that deal with the ‘power of civility’! And how this affects the bottom line.

It has been noticeable for some time now that good service is hard to come by. As customer you are lucky to be treated with indifference. That has become the standard now. It’s outright rudeness that is the more common story.

In fact any company that has staff who are friendly is so instantaneously noteworthy and memorable that people talk for days on end as to how shocked they were at this extraordinary level of service.

As much as companies need to take stock and realign their staff’s thinking toward the customer it is parents and child minders who really need to get back to basics. Maybe it’s time to reconsider the principle that children have the freedom to behave and do as they wish. Maybe the idea of common courtesy could be brought back into the curriculum. It certainly will help business.

What about the rest of the world? Would we have as much strife and war if people learnt to respect each other? Would be worth a try. No cost involved!