On a recent trip to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store I discovered the real job of the Genius.

While you might think that the role of the Genius is to fix things, it’s not.
The first job of the Genius is to acknowledge your problem and to change how you feel.

Chad told me that he can tell how the appointment will go in the first few seconds. He said appointments go badly when the customer believes that he won’t be able to help them. Apparently Apple Geniuses get twice as much training in changing how the customer feels as they do in solving tech problems. I lost count of the number of times I overheard a blue-shirted Genius saying “don’t worry I am going to….” that day.

The only thing that the Genius has to do is make people walk out feeling better than when they walked in. And when waiters, doctors, librarians, leaders of all stripes and you do this every day it’s a kind of genius too.

Image by Steve McFarland.