A Little Learning Leads to a Lot of Empowering

Two years after being in Jakarta, I still don’t understand how cell phones work here. I typically spend about four hours a day in a taxi so, needless to say, I use a lot of data!
When we first moved here, our plan was to just put pulsa (money) on our account and then we would buy a data packet (texts and phone calls are charged per use). Simple enough, right? Unless you forget and run out of money on your account and then have to fill it with money again.
So, recently we changed to a monthly plan that gave us an amount of data, calls, and texts. There’s a bit of a language barrier and it turns out we had no idea how much data we were receiving or how to check and refill it. It’s not until mid-month when I can’t get any websites to work or it’s super slow that we suspect anything is wrong. This past week, I turned to a friend and asked her to call and translate for me. The company wasn’t able to upgrade my package but she did everything and didn’t show me how to do it.
After having her write things to say in Bahasa Indonesia to the clerks, I got brave and went in myself. The communication was hard but after two years of talking with people at the same location, one female employee, who spoke very little English, took the time and patience, to show me how it worked. She didn’t just do it to get it over with, she showed me how to check how much data I have and how to add more data. She showed me so I could do it myself. She empowered me to take control and fix the problem.
That’s what we need to be doing with our team. We need to take the time to show our leadership team, our team members, even our guests, how to fix the problem or handle the situation. I know it’s easier to take the game card from a guest and start swiping instead of showing them it needs to face a certain way or to just fix the jammed register tape rather than show the team member how to do it if it happens again. We are all busy and it takes time, but you will be amazed how empowering them to do things themselves will change how they try and fix the problem next time.