Last December, as we prepared to leave for a Christmas trip, my wife rushed to put together small gift packages for the teachers & staff at our sons’ schools.
As I drove around that afternoon dropping off some of the gifts, I would rather have been doing something else–packing, suspending the newspaper, etc. But there are certain things–OK, well, lots of things–where her instincts are sharp & mine are nonexistent. Thinking about small tokens of recognition is one of them.
Last Friday, my wife couldn’t find her mobile phone. She had run a lot of errands that afternoon & couldn’t remember where she might have left it.
On Monday, as I was dropping our 9-year-old off at school, the crossing guard waved & motioned to me to open my window.
“They found your wife’s phone!” he said, momentarily ignoring the kids waiting to cross. “It’s in the office.” And so it was.
All day I puzzled over how they found the phone & knew it was my wife’s. But this puzzlement morphed into wonder–wondering how much that small Christmas gift helped return my wife’s phone to her.
Behavioral economists will tell you that reciprocity is a powerful force in human motivation. The desire to repay a favor or a debt leads to many good things in society (and not a few bad things).
Done appropriately, though, the sharing of small gifts connects people who otherwise would be afterthoughts to you (and vice versa). This connection, when prompted, can provide a spark, a desire to take action, to see someone else’s urgent situation as one of your own.
In selling we must take account of this human motivation. While being respectful of boundaries, rules and regulations, more of us should act like my wife: share small courtesies with the people we encounter because it’s the right thing to do. It’s not about expecting any one gift to lead to a repayment, but instead understanding that making a habit of recognizing people who are part of our lives, even fleetingly, is in the long run karmic.
