Assign employees with the best interpersonal skills to positions with the greatest customer contact. In strategic planning, which also occurs during opening game, companies generally consider what resources and capabilities they need to accomplish their purpose. Called core competencies by recent business writers, and staff and skills in McKinsey’s 7-S model, these elements of planning also lend themselves to BD. Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, and Men’s Wearhouse—three exemplars of behavioral differentiation—hire for a person’s character and personality rather than specific skill sets, which can be learned. When you establish your recruiting policies and define the characteristics of the people you wish to recruit, you determine whether such factors as emotional intelligence, interpersonal skill, service orientation, and relationship-building experience are part of your employee profile. In your case, are they? You get what you look for, so if you intend to differentiate yourself behaviorally, you need to hire people whose temperament, attitude, and operating style lend themselves to that. Beyond recruiting, there are a number of ways to promote BD through your human resource policies and practices:
Assign employees with the best interpersonal skills to positions with the greatest customer contact.
Educate employees in behavioral differentiation. Ensure that everyone understands BD and the value it brings to your customers and the company.
Set high behavioral expectations for employees. Build those expectations into your standard operating procedures (which can result in operational BDs).
Give employees the latitude and resources necessary to serve customers in ways that behaviorally differentiate your company (in other words, create the conditions that lead to exceptional BD).
Hold brainstorming sessions to identify behaviors that embody your company’s values, operating principles, marketing themes, and slogan (i.e., behaviors that create symbolic BD) as well as sessions on how, when, and where to exhibit those behaviors.
Recognize and reward employees who behave in ways that differentiate you with your customers. Beyond normal customer service awards, create awards for outstanding BD. Feature these award winners in your internal newsletter. Make heroes of them in your culture.
Ensure that your performance measures incorporate aspects of BD. What gets measured, gets done; so establish BD as an element of everyone’s normal evaluation.
Cumulatively, these kinds of actions create a culture of behavioral differentiation. They raise employees’ awareness of the need for it and help them operationalize the concept. Moreover, they raise the “behavioral bar” for everyone in the company and can create an environment where differentiating behavior toward customers is the norm. When that occurs, you are also raising the bar on your competitors—a bar they will have great difficulty seeing, let alone clearing—by raising your markets’ and customers’ behavioral expectations. Since most companies don’t do this systematically and consistently, being self-conscious about incorporating BD into your human resources policies and practices is itself a behavioral differentiator.