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Matthew Hudson | December 24, 2008

Well, its that time of year when we all stop for a few hours and set aside our laptops and turn the ringers off of our cell phones to celebrate our families and our faith. Regardless of your faith, we wish you all a very joyous holiday season. And a very prosperous new year with your families and your business.

So, in the spirit of following my own blog, this will be the last post for 2008.

Thanks for reading and supporting us in 2008. We look forward to 2009!

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Matthew Hudson | December 7, 2008

If people draw the majority of their self-esteem from their job, then you have a responsibility to build a culture that allows them to do so—a culture of nurturing, praising and accountability. If your people are going to serve the customer the way you want them to, they need to feel good about themselves when they do it.

A few years ago, a company by the name of Performance Group Inc. in Dallas, Texas did a survey of 1,000 people who had just changed jobs. They asked these people to tell them why they left their last position. Guess what the number one answer was?

If you are being honest, you probably said money, as did we at first. But the overwhelming answer was “lack of recognition.” What were these people saying? They were saying they worked in a culture that did not value them and did nothing for their self-esteem, so they left.

Think about yourself. You might be working a position now that pays less than the last one you held. Why did you do this? The same reason these people in the survey did. You want to work for a place that allows you to come home to your family and be proud of what you do and who you do it for.

The person is always more important than the position. Remember that!

This pattern started when you were a little kid. You wanted be an astronaut or a fireman or a ballerina – you wanted to be someone important and what made them important was what they did for a living. Make what your company and its employees do for a living the most important job in the world. There are no small parts, just small actors.

The real resolution is for a person to learn NOT to draw their self-esteem from their job. Culture change is an odds game. You must play the odds or percentages sometimes. We talk abut this to help you understand the basis for many of the things that we suggest. A service culture must be a self-esteem-enhancing machine. Every policy, every award, every process you put into place will impact the self-esteem of your employees.

As you try to capture the hearts and heads of your employees, you will find that the main reason you only get their hands and feet can be traced to the regard they hold of themselves. You have adults who have spent their lives being programmed to settle for less than what they are worth and for less than they can achieve. And more importantly for you, less than what they can deliver!

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Matthew Hudson | December 4, 2008

Let’s analyze the nametag situation from our last entry. What message did the nametags send to the employees? We are different. What message did changing the nametags send to the employees? We are only different if the employees say so. Now, the employees of this company will not take anything else seriously. And why should they? All they have to do is complain and they will get their way. But the ones complaining are the vocal third that will complain no matter what you do!

Never let the resistant third decide your culture.

The truth is up until now; this resistant third probably has been running your culture. These are the first steps you are taking to take control of the culture. They are not going to want to give up that control so easily.

What we will say about the conference center management staff in this story is that they had their heart in the right place. Management was trying to be empathetic to the voices of its employees. This is not something tried by most companies, so we will give them credit for that. The mistake they made was who they were trying to be empathetic towards – the resisters. This is the wrong third to cater to. Remember in the “Casting” chapter, what did we say to do with someone who does not like the new plan? Either recast them in another role where they will be more comfortable or move them on. The saddest part to this story is that the most vocal opponent to the nametag quit five days later anyway. If the conference center would have stuck to its plan…

Be open to resistance. Do not form the secret “culture police” whose job it is to find the resisters and convert them with any means possible or snuff them out. Let everyone know that they are entitled to their opinion and you are happy and willing to listen. Keeping it out in the open like this actually diffuses a lot of the resistance.

For the resistors, speed is their worst enemy. As we stated earlier, SPEED, SPEED, SPEED. (You see there is a reason we use a bus as our analogy many times!) Actually, resisters are not trying to slow you down to mess you up; they are trying to slow you down to give themselves time to formulate a plan. If you slow the pace of change, then they are winning. The slower the change rate, the more dangerous it is for you. Keep the pace up to a speed that only allows the resistors to play catch up. When you achieve this, their impact will be minimal. This will keep them off balance and destroy the resister’s campaign.

The most important thing we can leave you with is this – You must get to the heart of your culture to change it. It is very easy to get a culture to change its mind (as we saw with the nametag story); but, it is very hard to get it to change its heart. Your employees will always take the path of least resistance for themselves. It will be some time before they will take on this new vision as their own.

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Matthew Hudson | December 1, 2008

Whatever you do, do not give in to resistance! Many times companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to change their culture, but they change their plan so many times that by the time they hit the finish line, it has moved two miles away. And suddenly, guess what? You are now ready for another culture change!

When we were helping a conference center put in a service culture, one of the ideas was to change the nametags of everyone to include their nicknames. We briefly mentioned this example in the “Casting” chapter.

In the travel industry, it is very common to place your hometown on the bottom of your nametag or the number of years you have been with the hotel. If you travel at all, you have seen this many times. This company wanted to do something really unique with this idea by adding the employee’s nickname on their nametag.

Two months after the nametags were passed out (in a very nice ceremony, we might add), there were two cast members that became very vocal about the nametags. So management decided to hold a meeting and vote on the nametags.

Before we go any further, some background that you need here is the response from the customer to the new nametags. It was wonderful. When a letter was sent in praising employees, the customer always mentioned them by his or her nickname instead of their real name. One manager told the story of running into someone at a convention and that person was not sure what her real name was, but he sure remembered “Sweet Pea”—her nickname! So the idea was working wonderfully. The problem was that there were a few “vocalizers” who personally did not care for the new nametag.

The vote caused confusion among the employees. It divided them. Obviously, the resistant third voted against them, the supportive third were all for them, but the third on the fence were afraid where to put their support. The result, management changed back to the old nametags. The damage? The people started commenting to us (including one of the customers) how different thing were since they took the new nametags away. The regular customers had noticed a positive difference in the service of the conference center employees since their last visit.

The nametags were a visible sign of the new culture. Everyday, each person was reminded that they were supposed to think and act differently now. Unfortunately, with this reneging of the plan, this company has set its culture change back by six months. “Come on. All this over a nametag?” you say. “I don’t know about that!” Well, it’s true.

tune in next time to see how we analyzed this situation…

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