Lessons Learned from Companies That Exemplify BD
Written by admin on January 17, 2010 – 5:50 am -Lessons Learned from Companies That Exemplify BD
The most important lesson we learn from companies like Men’s Wearhouse, SAS, Volvo, and Southwest Airlines is that in exemplary companies BD is not a passing fancy but a deeply rooted idea. It’s one of the governing principles of the organization, and it’s driven by the leaders’ or founders’ convictions about how to treat employees, customers, and other stakeholders. In these exemplary companies, BD is not a program imposed by a new CEO or the head of customer service; it’s a set of core beliefs about how to behave. Those beliefs are embraced at all levels of the organization: They are used to screen candidate employees; they are taught in introductory training programs and corporate universities; they are reinforced in regular meetings of employees; and they are modeled by the organization’s leaders.
We must become the change we want to see.
–Ghandi
Moreover, in a remarkable number of our exemplary companies, the leaders act like servant leaders. It’s George Zimmer’s favored philosophy, and you can still find him waiting on customers and mentoring the next generations of leaders at Men’s Wearhouse. Herb Kelleher still loads baggage at Southwest Airlines. Go to a Harley-Davidson rally, and you are likely to run into Jeffrey Bleustein (the CEO) or Willie G. Davidson. If you had flown SAS while Jan Carlzon was still there, he might have checked you in for your flight or welcomed you on board the airplane. These are not ivory tower leaders. They understand that they can’t mandate BD; they have to live it themselves, and that means rolling up their sleeves and working alongside employees to serve customers. In an article for Fast Company, Alan M. Webber sums it up well: “Where do you start? You start with a philosophy, and the rest follows from that. If you believe in training and developing people, you don’t necessarily need a huge training budget. You begin by imparting knowledge in various ways-by holding meetings, by talking to people, by coaching them, by mentoring them. If you believe in reciprocal commitments, you start by building those commitments with the people you work with. If you believe in information sharing, you share information with the people you have the most contact with. In other words, you begin in your immediate sphere of influence. You start with your own behavior”.[2]
For Horst Schulze, the deeply rooted idea was that Ritz-Carlton is distinguished by ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. A consummate gentleman, he embodied that philosophy himself and modeled it for others. For Herb Kelleher, the core idea was getting people to their destination when they want to go, getting them there on time, and making it enjoyable. He drove that concept with persistence and a class clown’s appreciation of the value of levity. For George Zimmer the core idea was selling suits with soul. An iconoclast from birth, he turned the business model of his chosen industry on its head and treated his employees as though they were the most important people in his business. Each of these leaders had not only a behavioral principle that would distinguish them from their rivals but also the will to drive that principle through the fabric of the organizations they led. The leaders’ will in action is the fundamental difference between companies that know what to do and do it and those who know what to do but don’t. Here are some other lessons learned from companies that exemplify BD:
- You have to be thoughtful about your behavior. It becomes an important element of corporate strategy as well as the basis for decisions you make about the people you hire, the jobs you create, the training and education you provide, the goals and expectations you set, the responsibilities and authorities you delegate, the rewards and recognition you give, and the processes you create for running the business on a day-to-day and moment-by-moment basis. For example, SAS and Ritz-Carlton identified every customer touch point and thought about how to behave at those touch points to serve customers exceptionally well and build a behavioral advantage. Ritz-Carlton specified those behaviors in its Gold Standards (shown in Figure 5-1) and reinforces them in daily lineups of employees. Men’s Wearhouse promoted a clinical psychologist and specialist in human behavior to one of its most important executive positions: Executive Vice President for Store Operations.
- You have to invest more in employee education and development than your competitors do. The exemplars of BD spend an extraordinary amount of time and money training, educating, and coaching employees on their behavior toward customers. As we have observed throughout this book, companies like Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, Hall Kinion, and Men’s Wearhouse invariably spend more to develop their people than their rivals do. The corporate universities at Ritz-Carlton, Southwest Airlines, Hall Kinion, and Men’s Wearhouse are among the finest in corporate America.
- Along with a strong commitment to education, you have to build systems and processes that make the exceptional treatment of customers routine. These systems include policies for interacting with customers, decision rules (such as how to handle returns) that enable employees to make decisions that will delight customers, and performance expectations that result in exceptional treatment of customers. EMC’s rapid-escalation protocols, for instance, minimize downtime for customers’ systems and behaviorally differentiate EMC.
- You have to enable people who are on the front line with customers to make the decisions that will result in extraordinary behavior, which means that you have to trust frontline employees. Clearly, this level of trust does not come automatically. To build high trust in their employees, exemplary companies like Heidrick & Struggles, Hall Kinion, and Southwest Airlines screen job candidates carefully, generally with teams of employees doing the screening. Then they give new hires a comprehensive program of orientation and education. They set very high expectations, provide ongoing coaching and reinforcement of core behavioral principles, and then monitor customer satisfaction closely. Obviously, other companies also screen candidates, train new hires, and monitor customer satisfaction. However, in the exemplary companies these functions are carried out with an almost religious conviction. Companies on the negative end of the behavioral spectrum often do not trust employees or customers. They offer less training, have punitive policies (designed to keep employees in line and minimize customer misbehavior), and use managers and supervisors as police. It is important to bear in mind what Benjamin Schneider and David E. Bowen observed: “Workers are the service organization to the customers they serve”.[3] When they feel trusted and empowered, positive BD is possible; when they feel distrusted and powerless, the only BD you may get is negative.
- You have to create a culture that dignifies and respects the individual. We found it remarkable, although not surprising, that the companies that behaviorally differentiate themselves with customers also behaviorally differentiate themselves as employers. They have lower turnover and higher employee satisfaction scores than their competitors. They are consistently ranked among the best places to work. Since 1997, for instance, Southwest has been among the top five in Fortune’s list of the “Best Companies to Work For in America” four times. Men’s Wearhouse has made Fortune’s list three times in the last three years. Forbes also named it one of the “Best Big Companies in America” three times in a row. BD begins at home. You differentiate yourself as an employer first. You create a workplace that elevates employees’ self-esteem and makes it a rewarding place to work. That becomes the foundation for expecting and getting extraordinary behaviors from your employees.
- You create reinforcing mythologies around differentiated behaviors toward customers. You turn your behavioral superstars into heroes and tell stories about them in company e-mails, newsletters, meetings, awards ceremonies, and other forms of communication and social interaction. We felt that of all the companies we studied, Ritz-Carlton and EMC did the best job of this, but all of them found ways to tell stories about exceptional treatment customers received and the people who treated them that way.
- You have to think like the customer and then craft the kinds of customer experiences you would want if you were the customer. In many of our interviews with people in exemplary companies, we heard a similar version of the Golden Rule: Serve customers as you would like to be served. Maybe it is as simple as this simple rule, yet we have noted throughout this book that knowing what to do is not the same as doing it, and that most companies never realize the full potential of this principle. Herb Kelleher understood both the simplicity of the concept and the fact that most companies fail to do it. “You want them to get off the plane”, he said, “with the feeling that they were welcome, that they enjoyed great hospitality, that they were, perhaps, entertained. You want it to be a warm event in their lives, so that they will come back. And that’s the hardest thing for a competitor to emulate”.
Good players are always looking for ways to make their pieces as active as possible. Knights need to find advanced support points, Bishops need open diagonals, and open files must be created for your Rooks.
–Jeremy Silman, The Complete Book of Chess Mastery
[2]Alan M. Webber, “Danger: Toxic Company”, Fast Company, http://www.fastcompany.com/online/19/toxic.html (May 20, 2002).
[3]Benjamin Schneider and David E. Bowen, Winning the Service Game (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995), p. 237.
Taken From : Winning Behavior-What the Smartest, Most Successful Companies Do Differently
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