I spent a stint working in grocery stores in high school in Nebraska. I worked for Nash-Finch in several Jack & Jill Stores in Hastings and Grand Island, Nebraska as well as an Econo-Foods store. I also spent some time working for the H.E. Butt Grocery Company in Texas as well.
The manager of the first store I worked at in Grand Island was Don Sallanger. He told me one time that when a customer came into the store to complain about a product or the way they were treated it was because they wanted us to help keep them shopping with us. They wanted to let us make things right because they liked coming to our store and wanted to keep coming.
He was right and I have held onto the thought from that day forward.
I truly believe that my experience of customer service at the very entry level of carrying out groceries to a customer’s car helped to instill my sensitivity to keeping levels of service perfect. In doing this, it doesn’t always mean you can give everyone what they want. But you do your best within the limits of good business sense. Don used to tell me that sometimes both sides have to give a little to reach a mutually agreeable solution.
That’s the idea behind Stephen Covey’s concept of Win-Win. Covey contends that we often fail because everyone goes into a situation thinking that winning means having their way. That isn’t always the case. Compromise often is the key to success.
There are a number of issues surrounding neighborhood and business area disputes that I believe can be satisfied if the principles of Win-Win are applied. In living and working together it is realistic to believe that one may not always be able to achieve all conditions desired, IE absolute silence in a neighborhood, no traffic on a street, various types of businesses in a congested district.
The key is to understand each perspective and respect each other’s point of view. It is a concept I encourage our staff to embrace as they go about the process of mediating and working with competing interests of neighbors and businesses.
If in fact our goal is to promote our community and make it a good place to live, then we can apply the same principles here.
When a person comes to us to complain, whether it is about our service, a staff member or a situation in the community, we look at it as an opportunity of mutual benefit. The challenge in the policing area is the fact that we are often constrained by laws and policy. But there are many issues that relate to quality of life issues that can be addressed in this manner and reach a successful conclusion.
The biggest challenge is when you encounter someone who equates winning with getting their way with no compromise. Unfortunately, this approach is often contagious and infects others. If not checked, it can infect a whole community. By providing an opportunity to work through mediation or coaching to reach a position where each side can gain some and give some a good number of the conflicts can be resolved. In some cases where one or more of the parties refuse to cooperate, they may try to use the police as their tool to extract their “pound of flesh” on the other party. As peace officers, we are very careful to balance our responses and to approach each situation in a fair and impartial manner.
In these cases it may be necessary for us to simply tell the person no. There are limits in which we are constrained and ethical conduct guides our responses. It is not our job to bully, intimidate or scare. We rely on the collective common sense of the majority of our community to help maintain constructive public discourse and behavior. Those who refuse generally find themselves in court through litigation or misbehaver. When this happens, everyone loses.
We will continue to be proactive in our responses to many of the recurring complaints in neighborhoods and business areas. Because of limited resources, we must rely on appropriate conduct by neighbors and business owners. When we find ourselves continually mediating between feuding factions over issues that would best be served in mediation, the whole community loses because the time lost is time that we don’t have for prevention.