Finally, the smallest group upon which the entire pyramid balances is the senior leadership. This is the level that implements policies, establishes culture, and sets the direction of the company. The fact that they are on the bottom of the inverted pyramid does not belie their importance. The entire organization balances on the extremely fine and precarious point the senior leadership represents. The decisions they make, the direction they provide, and the environment they promote among their teams on every level can keep the pyramid upright or cause it to teeter and topple. In this model, the responsibility to keep the pyramid upright belongs to everyone on every level. If something goes wrong on the service or product levels, senior leadership has the responsibility to make decisions that can readjust the balance. Think of the United Airlines conflict from Chapter 1. An exceptionally poor experience was delivered to the passenger, but decisions by senior leadership may well have made the effect on the brand worse, more far-reaching, and more long-lasting.
ORGANIZATION CULTURE CAN MAKE THINGS GO RIGHT
Without question, establishing and nurturing a collaborative corporate culture that recognizes the essential contribution that every individual can make at every level will help make things go right more often. Kevin Catlin, managing partner at Insight Strategies, Inc. in Los Angeles, California, likes to share the story with his clients of a practicing surgeon who was being interviewed by a news crew as he walked through the halls of the hospital he also managed. The doctor interrupted the interview briefly to chat with a janitor working in the hallway. After a few moments, the two chuckled and shook hands. The interview resumed as the janitor returned to cleaning a windowsill. A junior reporter asked the janitor what he and the surgeon had discussed and was startled by his response:
“Saving lives.” What possible role can a janitor in a hospital play in fulfilling its mission to save lives?
“This hospital is teeming with germs,” he explained. “Every time a child touches this windowsill as she walks past, puts her hand to her own mouth as children often do, then kisses Grandma in her sick bed, she can literally kill her with a kiss. That is not happening on my floor.”
The surgeon in this story is a rare individual who simultaneously inhabits all levels of the inverted pyramid. He was the senior leader of the company who, in fact, had had a long history of successfully turning around struggling hospitals. He was a practicing surgeon who was both part of the product patients came to the hospital to receive and he had a clear and personal focus on the service side of the equation. His chief contribution, as illustrated in this story, however, was establishing a culture that embraced a clarity of purpose.
The mission of the hospital was to save lives. Everyone in the organization understood their contribution to achieving it. This is not about getting employees to care about their job. Caring only about the job is simply an act of self-preservation. We must imbue teammates with a genuine understanding and appreciation of the contribution they make. When they do, they care about doing things right, and keeping things from going wrong, just like our valued friend at the windowsill.
In a 2013 Forbes.com article, Kevin Kruse, founder and CEO of LEADx, offered one of the finest definitions of leadership: “Leadership is a process of social influence which maximizes efforts of others towards achievement of a goal.” Kruse explains that his definition is not limited by authority or power, and that the people being influenced don’t need to be “direct reports.” It has no requirement of title or personality traits, and acknowledges that “there are many styles, many paths, to effective leadership.” It is further defined by “a goal, not influence with no intended outcome.”
Let’s face it. You are just one person and if you are leading a company, business unit, or project team, there is a lot on your shoulders, for example: the profit-and-loss (P&L) performance; the launch of new brands or products; and the management of a myriad of operational details. Leading is not the same as directing every activity or fixing everything that goes wrong. I learned this the hard way because I’m a perfectionist. I want everything to be flawless and I sometimes did things that I could have had other people do because, well, since I know how I wanted it to turn out, wasn’t it just easier to do it myself?
Kruse suggests that leading is not telling people what to do or how to do it. He says that leadership is influencing and motivating those around you to get the best results possible. The team we need to assemble is composed of people who WANT that, too. There is nothing so demoralizing as people who worked hard but didn’t accomplish what was expected of them. Many times, it was because no one told them what was actually expected of them or what goal they were working toward. You can be an expert archer and shoot arrows with exceptional precision. But, if you shoot an apple cleanly off someone’s head, it doesn’t count if you were supposed to be aiming at a nylon target safely attached to a bale of hay.
You might think that excitement and the desire to do a great job was preprogrammed into everyone working on the Super Bowl. After all, you’re working at the Super Bowl. But, checking credentials at a gate for eight hours, with only the distant, muffled roar of the crowd to connect you to the excitement, you might not feel all that invested in providing a wonderful fan experience. Perhaps you are in a location where you don’t see fans at all.
In an average year, there were 18,000 people who wore Super Bowl credentials. Fewer than 1,000 people worked for the League Office. The rest were stadium staff, concessions and catering workers, temporary staff, contracted security, production staff, drivers, host committee volunteers, and many others. They worked for a patchwork quilt of different companies, contractors, and agencies. But, to our customer, the fan, they ALL worked for the NFL on game day. Every one of them was an ambassador of the brand. Given their diverse responsibilities, pay scales, and employers, how was it possible to get everyone on the same page? By making sure they were reading the same book, one that clearly communicated the mission, the purpose, and the values shared by everyone working on Super Bowl Sunday.
DEFINING THE TEAM’S MISSION
The project team’s mission is often related to, but not the same as, the company’s business objectives. The metrics used to measure their respective success can be quite different. Business objectives may include: achieving certain financial goals, increasing the company’s share of market, enhancing customer perceptions of the brand, or boosting awareness of a new product. But, an effective mission for the broader team is frequently expressed in relatable terms that every teammate can share and embrace. By making the mission common to everyone, regardless of their role, team members can contribute significantly to the company meeting its objectives, whether directly or indirectly.
A mission statement should consist of a single sentence that is easy to understand, personalize, and express. For example, an airline might establish this shared mission: “We ensure that when passengers deplane, they are already looking forward to traveling with the company again.” Nearly everyone who works for the airline can understand how their jobs can impact that mission, not only customer-facing gate staff, flight attendants, and pilots, but also baggage handlers (luggage should arrive the quickest and safest), custodial staff (our cabins should be the cleanest), and the Information Technology (IT) department (our website should make finding, booking, and paying for a flight the easiest). The mission given above will beat “we have to increase revenues by 25 percent” every time. It’s relatable, personal, applicable, and easy to sustain.
Think of your own company, department, or project, and you will discover that anyone and everyone can have an impact your customers’ experience, either directly by delivering a positive interaction or by contributing to an environment that ensures they occur. At a sports stadium—which includes food preparers, escalator mechanics, groundskeepers, parking lot attendants, IT technicians, bus drivers, and electricians—there is no role that cannot contribute to, or potentially detract from, creating lasting memories. If everyone understood their
integral, incremental contribution to our purpose, like the janitor in the hospital or the guard at the gate, things would go right more often. Conversely, things go wrong more often when teammates are ambivalent, unappreciated, and do not understand the importance of their role and how much we count on them. So, as leaders, we have to tell them. Often.
THE EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
Every leadership group, regardless of industry, can take maximum advantage of the early warning system built into their organization to reduce the number of things that could go wrong or contain the severity of their effects when they do. At the Super Bowl, our early warning system was composed of 18,000 credentialed staff and contractors. As leaders, our responsibility did not end with defining and sharing the mission and how each teammate fulfilled our shared purpose. We also recognized that the flow of communication could be even more powerful and effective if we encouraged it to move more freely in both directions. Leveraging the real-time observations of all 18,000 teammates, and communicating our encouragement that they should share them, provided us with indispensable diagnostics on how we were performing. The team in the trenches—invested in the mission and clear on their purpose—have more eyes, ears, and brains in the field, and can help us make midcourse corrections in real time to avoid having small problems become larger ones. We shared the notion that it is everybody’s job, and it is part of everyone’s purpose, to be on the lookout for something that didn’t look right. It is not, by any means, an understanding that is implied. We, as leaders, must make that expectation explicit.
During the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, we hung banners from hundreds of light posts, across roadways, and on hotels and office buildings. On a windy day, a banner might pull loose from the hardware that kept it in place. It was not just the banner-hanging company responsible for refastening the banner to the building. It was not solely the NFL event department staff member who contracted the banner company who had to tell them it was flapping about in the wind. It was the job of any one of the 18,000 teammates who passed by that banner to let us know it was loose. By doing so, we greatly increased the likelihood that it would be repaired before it could pull away from the building entirely and cause injury or damage to property.
We all know this as the “see something, say something” philosophy promoted by the law enforcement and security communities. It applies just as much to our businesses and projects. In the United States, reporting problems is easy. If we see a suspicious package, what we believe to be a crime being committed, or a situation that requires help, we call “9-1-1.” We need to make it just as easy for our team to surface issues, as well. For members of the Super Bowl team, we printed a hotline number on the back of every credential, along with the expectation that they would use it to communicate a problem. Any problem.
Collectively, businesses wisely invest billions of dollars on security equipment and personnel each year to prevent physical and financial loss. Empowering every teammate to identify emerging or existing problems, and giving them an easy way to inform management, can significantly add to our preparedness without significant cost. It is essential to communicate our belief that it’s everybody’s job to be part of the early-warning system, and that time is of the essence when something looks like it’s going wrong or has gone wrong.
Keep in mind that the larger and more dispersed the workforce, the more important it is for us to provide a simple way to elevate their observations and concerns. Certainly, informing a supervisor is the usual, most timely, and most appropriate first step. But if a supervisor is not reachable or the nature of the problem is not directly related to the teammate’s core responsibilities, a central reporting system can be very powerful. That’s why I like the hotline approach—a common and easy-to-access text or phone number any teammate can use to elevate literally anything that might be going wrong. On the receiving side of the hotline, assign an individual or team to monitor incoming reports of threats and problems, and to route information quickly and efficiently to the teammates who are best qualified to solve or manage them. Be sure that teammates who use the hotline receive a confirmation that their report has been received and that it is appreciated.
A useful way to communicate our reliance on every teammate’s vigilance is to distribute laminated wallet cards that display both our common mission on one side and the hotline information on the other. Putting both messages in the same convenient and accessible place can reinforce our expectations and our dependence on our team. Getting them to use it, however, requires building a culture of empowerment.
13
BUILDING AN EMPOWERMENT CULTURE
It was approaching 11:00 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten much of anything since noon. I absently scooped out a small handful of crumbs from the deep bowl of tortilla chips that had been sitting for hours on the credenza in our 2001 NHL All-Star Weekend production office. We had been buried deep within the windowless bowels of the Pepsi Center in Denver since early morning; our only glimpse of the outside world peeking in was from the television permanently tuned to ESPN. It was a typically long day of rehearsals for the next night’s on-ice pregame show.
Our talented and exhausted associate producer Tanya had left the office about a half-hour before to get a little rest. Musing that I really didn’t relish another midnight run for sliders, I turned to a fellow teammate who was furiously clicking away at his keyboard. “With Tanya gone for the day, you know what would go really well right now?” I reflected as one of the arena’s catering staff cleared away the dirty bowls. “A peanut butter sandwich and a tall glass of milk.” Tanya was allergic to peanuts and we were painstakingly careful that our provisions never included any trace of the magical bean. In other circumstances, I could, and often did, eat peanut butter for dessert.
I ventured out into the darkness of the empty arena to watch our lighting director programming effects for the player introductions from his massive console. No more than 20 minutes later, I returned to the office and there, sitting on gleaming white china beside my computer was a freshly prepared peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich on hand-cut whole wheat bread accompanied by, yes, a tall, ice-cold glass of milk. I was pretty sure there weren’t many catering staff working near midnight on a rehearsal day, so it is entirely possible that the same person who quietly gathered up the dirty bowls took it upon himself to make a snack for a hungry client. It was a gesture of care and kindness that continues to impress me about the Levy Restaurants brand more than 15 years later, as much today for how an empowered staff member late one night built a lifelong relationship on behalf of their company as for the most appreciated peanut butter sandwich I have ever consumed.
THE POWER OF EMPOWERMENT
Companies routinely budget many thousands of dollars to host focus groups, develop customer surveys, and analyze social media to gauge customer sentiment about their brand. All these instruments have been proven to be effective as barometers of engagement with the customer, but none have much of an effect on that interaction while it is actually taking place. If something has gone awry, these tools can provide us with valuable intelligence, but sadly, only after the fact.
Empowered front-line teammates can, however, impact the quality of the experience, and facilitate the recovery from a poor experience while the interaction is taking place in person, on the phone, or online. Properly trained, informed, and engaged, empowered teammates can help a company build stronger, more positive, and more personal customer relationships when things are going right, like my peanut butter–providing friend. These teammates can also identify new challenges and shortcomings, keep problems from “going bad to worse,” and keep management apprised of potential failures on the horizon.
Instituting and nurturing a culture of empowerment imbues and inspires our teammates with tangible, palpable manifestations of management’s trust. In turn, it confers to them the responsibility to act more independently, applying good judgment to making informed decisions that deal on-the-spot with things starting
to turn wrong. Empowerment is a powerful motivator, one that instills a strong personal relationship between our teammates and company, brand, or project leadership. According to a 2017 study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 61 percent of U.S. employees surveyed ranked “trust between employees and senior management” as “very important” to overall job satisfaction; this was mentioned as often as “overall compensation.” Sadly, however, only 33 percent of those surveyed reported being “satisfied” with the level of trust they experience.
As discussed in Chapter 4, time is our most limited and precious nonrenewable resource. We can employ more teammates, but no matter how many we hire, we can’t gain more time. Senior management, however, can borrow time from empowered teammates to assume responsibility for a greater share of the routine decision making. Writing in the Houston Chronicle, freelance small business columnist and adjunct instructor at Central Maine Community College Kristen Hamlin explains: “When employees don’t have to wait for approval from a manager or supervisor, workflow doesn’t slow down or stop. Employees solve their own problems and move on to the next task.” This frees us up to do other things and solve bigger problems when they present themselves. “Empowered employees feel as if their contributions matter,” Hamlin continues. “When the company trusts them to make decisions, morale increases, and as a result, so does productivity. Empowered employees often feel as if they have a stake in the organization and their work and strive to consistently produce quality results.”
Teammates that feel a sense of ownership, “a stake in the organization,” will make better decisions on behalf of the company. Although we may have key directives for them to follow, they begin to understand that they are not there simply to follow directions. When we give them the opportunity to identify problems, errors, and other situations requiring attention, they are more likely to make the effort to either correct the problem themselves or elevate their concerns. Because they feel trusted, and trust that their leaders will make the best use of the information they provide, they will also feel the satisfaction of having contributed to the solution.
What to Do When Things Go Wrong Page 14