If you have ever taken the time to read about or study ecology, you understand that ecosystems are carefully balanced and that everything within an ecosystem is important and interconnected. If you leave an environment alone, over time—often a very long time—it will eventually self-regulate. But if you add or take something away, everything else in that environment will ultimately be affected.
Your organization is like an ecosystem, and everything in it is interconnected, just as in the natural environment. In other words, what happens in one area affects every other area to one degree or another. Therefore, everything you do affects the quality of your service. If you want your customers to experience excellent service, pay close attention to every decision you make, every policy you announce, every procedure you introduce, every person you hire, every promotion you award, every e-mail you send, every conversation you have, every hand you shake, and every back you slap. Even something that seems a universe removed from a customer interaction or a point of sale can actually have tremendous repercussions on the service your customers receive, and therefore your bottom line.
When I give speeches and workshops, I often tell audiences that in my years as a manager, my job was to create an ecosystem of service excellence. Then I tell them that in that endeavor my success hinged largely on three things. One was hiring great people; the second was making sure those employees had the expertise, training, and resources to excel at what they did; and the third was leaving them alone to do their jobs without looking over their shoulders or micromanaging them. When I did that, I found that eventually the system would self-regulate, just like a natural ecosystem.
In companies with cultures of great service, the people at the top let their direct reports do their jobs. That frees the bosses to do theirs. For example, when I was running operations at Walt Disney World, I had two great executives named Bud Dare and Jeff Vahle who took care of all the capital projects. With their four-thousand-strong maintenance team, they kept the whole place looking great. Bud was a CPA, and Jeff was an engineer. Since those are two skill sets in which I have zero competence, I left them to do their jobs without interference, and over the years they both excelled, which made me look as good as the parks and resorts. I did the same with Dieter Hannig, who was responsible for all of our food and beverage operations. I had worked in that area myself for twenty-five years, but Dieter knew a whole lot more about getting great meals onto people’s tables than I’ll ever know, so I ceded that part of the operation to him. Ditto all the other top-notch people I worked with, such as Liz Boice in merchandise and Don Robinson, Erin Wallace, Alice Norsworthy, and Karl Holz in operations. The result was that each one had the freedom to make the kinds of everyday decisions—such as what wine to serve, or how to direct foot traffic, or dozens of other details—that they knew would best enhance the customer experience.
Those executives did their jobs so well that people would ask me, “Lee, with all these great people working for you, what exactly do you do?” The answer was: I was the chief ecologist. I focused on improving the environment and culture at Disney World, but without disrupting the delicate ecosystem. My goal was to nurture a healthy, toxin-free environment where everyone was motivated to do whatever they could to treat each guest like the most important person in the world—and had the skills and means to deliver on that responsibility. I hired and promoted the right people, made sure they were well trained, and created a culture in which everyone knew they mattered and woke up in the morning eager to get to work.
The great thing is that no matter who you are or what position you have in your company, you can be an ecologist. You don’t need any special authority or even a single direct report to make your corner of the enterprise a healthy, flourishing environment. Even if the rest of your organization is a mess and suffers from leadership blight, you can still create a Shangri-la among the people around you if you follow the Customer Rules. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing; focus on what you can do to sustain an ecosystem that is centered on satisfying every customer’s needs.