Mortgage brokers encouraging false statements and then raking in their commissions on NINA (no-income verification, no-asset verification) loansi hope this news isn’t too dispiriting, but just about any business advantage you pride yourself on can be copied by a competitor. The only question is when your competitors are going to get around to it.
The culture of your company is the exception to this rule. Strong company cultures are overwhelmingly knockoff resistant. At last chapter’s standard-bearer, Apple, insiders such as former Senior Vice President Jay Elliot credit much of the company’s success in retailing to the cultural fit Apple looks for and inspires in its personnel: With a team that’s totally wedded to the Apple culture, Cupertino doesn’t need to sweat the imitation Apple Stores now popping up with identical furniture and Apple gear for sale.1 Those knockoff stores will always lack staff who have the all-crucial Apple mindset, as will the stores of archri-vals, such as Microsoft, which has announced that it’s planning to spend heavily to increase its own retail presence. Or consider Isadore Sharp’s Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, currently regarded as one of the top five companies in any industry for service, after having innovated and thrived through many different eras and trends of customer service.2 Above all else, here’s the factor to which Four Seasons founder and chairman Sharp credits the company’s success:
Over the years, we’ve initiated many new ideas that have been copied and are now the norm in the industry. But the one idea that our customers value the most cannot be copied: the consistent quality of our exceptional service. That service is based on a corporate culture.3
Why is a strong corporate culture so hard to copy? In some cases, it’s a lack of knowledge. But the knowledge needed is hardly top secret, and in any event I’m going to do my best to spell it out here in short order, available for you and your competitors to see. So what really protects a company culture from knockoff artists? The answer is your competitors’ entirely predictable inability to focus beyond the short term.
Look around and you’ll see businesses focused obsessively on the short term: this month’s sales target or this quarter’s analyst projections. Likewise, start-ups fixate on making payroll for the first time without dipping into their line of credit. While short-term aspirations can stimulate propulsion, a short-term preoccupation can also lead to catastrophic results.
This is a human issue, manifested through businesses, and except when the humans in business actively strive to combat it, the results can be calamitous. We’re still feeling the aftershocks from an extreme example of this—the stock market/real estate/global market calamity that started unraveling in 2008, powered by crazily configured home loans that were nearly impossible for the homeowners in question to repay. “It was fun while it lasted, at least for the financial types who profited by making dubious loans and selling them to investors,”4 summarizes New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson. The long list of myopic players here includes:
Mortgage brokers encouraging false statements and then raking in their commissions on NINA (no-income verification, no-asset verification) loans
Realtors ignoring warning signs of a bubble as they pumped up neighborhoods that were about to go bust
Bond traders and ratings agencies accepting the wishful thinking and mystical math that allowed low-grade loans to magically become “as good as cash” when packaged together to be sold in tranches (slices)
Congress allowing ING and others to go “regulator shopping” so that the biggest players in the mess were regulated by the smallest, weakest regulators available, which in turn courted these regulatees through promises of lax oversight, in order to increase their regulatory portfolio5
I’m not trying here to pointlessly joust à la Don Quixote at nationally or globally entrenched issues. I use this example only to illustrate the overwhelming ability of humans to slip into a short-term focus, and the power this gives you if you can pick a further focal point and start building a great company culture, one that works for you, your employees, and ultimately your customers. Your investment here will have legs, since nobody in your market is going to slow down or be patient long enough to knock it off. Take a moment to ponder Southwest Airlines and the lengthy list of predicted category killers that have tried to imitate it: United Airlines’s United Shuttle, Continental Airlines’s Continental Lite, Delta’s Delta Express, and US Airways’s Metro-Jet. What did these companies lack: Money? Name recognition? Hardly. They lacked Southwest’s relentless focus on culture. And all are now bust.
Building, or overhauling, a company culture isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s not for those looking for a quick gain. But it’s a key creator and sustainer of any company whose image and livelihood depend on customer service greatness. Here’s why:
The number of interactions between customers and staff is nearly infinite, the number of chances to get things wrong or right nearly innumerable. Or, if you want to try to put some numbers on it, Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research estimates that a business such as a two-hundred-and-fifty-room hotel will have some five thousand interactions between staff and guests per day.6 There’s no way someone in a leadership position can dictate every single one of those five thousand interactions. Rather, a leader’s only chance to get the preponderance of these interactions right is to develop a shared cultural understanding of what needs to be done—and why.
The ongoing technological revolution amplifies the problems of not having a strong culture. The best customer service approach in social media, for example, is to have people who are steeped in your culture handle the social media, and the best email responses to customers come from staff members who understand what is and isn’t consonant within your culture. The risks of deviating from this are potentially catastrophic due to issues spreading on the internet like wildfire.
Technological and other business realities are continually changing, even beyond the points described in this book. The changes described here are, in fact, subject to change even between now and the time of this book’s publication. Yet customers continue to need to be served. Only through a strong culture will your people feel reinforced in responding to, capitalizing on, and driving forward the changes that will allow you to serve customers in the manner they desire and that will show your business in the best light.
Employees have incredibly well-calibrated b-llsh-t detectors (to repurpose Hemingway’s immortal phrase). So, cultural alignment throughout all levels of your company is the only way to avoid internal bitterness at organizational inconsistencies that look like unfairness—bitterness that ultimately can end up scalding your customers.
What do you think’s the number one complaint I hear from consulting clients at the helm of businesses? It’s “I keep hearing that employees act differently—and not for the better—when I’m out of the building.” With a great company culture, your employees will act consistently. They won’t depend on your presence to remind them how to act. Their motivation will come from within themselves, reinforced by all those around them.
There’s an ice cream parlor forty minutes from my home—it’s a delicious enough destination that the drive doesn’t deter us. The ice cream’s made on premises, the awnings and décor are both retro and imaginative. And the people who work there are nice.
Or nice-ish.
What they lack is a culture of saying yes. Without a culture that has yes as its default, your customers will, well, start to say no.
I discovered this shortcoming the way any other customer would: by asking for something slightly off script. In the course of paying for the ice cream I had ordered for our family and guests (a $23.40 bill), I mentioned that my kids wanted to use a gift token they’d received from their violin teacher.
The cashier’s answer: “That token is only for one scoop, and every sundae you ordered was two scoops, so there’s no way to apply it. Sorry.”
It would’ve been so much better if he had ended with, rather than a “sorry,” a “yes”: “Absolutely, we can credit the value of a scoop.” That way, an eighty-minute round trip, plus six minutes inhaling our ice cream, wouldn’t have been colored by a single, unnecessary negative.
The importance of building a corporate culture of yes is a straightforward concept when we’re discussing the world of nostalgia-themed ice cream stores and the like. I need to concede, however, that when we get into certain corners of the automated online e-commerce world, it gets a bit less straightforward. In some businesses (eBay and its subsidiary PayPal come to mind) not everybody who visits the business is a customer. Some, sad to say, who are posing as customers are plain old (or, I should say, hypermodern) thieves, out to rip that business off. And a fortress mentality—in particular parts of the operation—has to rule, not just for the benefit of the company itself but for the benefit of other customers as well.
And yet … when a true, human customer—the kind who writes actual sentences or speaks them into the telephone—contacts a company, even one of these continually under assault companies, that contact needs to be handled by a representative from a culture of saying yes.
This balance is hard to maintain on the extreme edges of online commerce, so if we’re hesitant to entirely embrace the ice cream parlor analogy here, what does work as a model? Well, think about a great customer-centered bank or credit union. It has security procedures: extremely good, careful procedures. But the bank doesn’t repeatedly ask for ID from the customers who come in every day. It waives the overdraft fees for good customers. It has a culture of saying yes to customers. And no to the bad guys.
I can’t really tell you what your culture should be, but I’m going to try to anyway. Let’s start with employees. Quick question: Who knows best what customers want? Upper management or the people who face customers all day? (I don’t need to answer my own question here; it’s a no-brainer, like asking, “Who knows best what students need: professional administrators who haven’t been inside a classroom in decades or teachers who are on the front lines every day?”) With that answer in mind, how should you treat your employees? The way you want to be treated.
This makes it pretty simple. Don’t get disheartened that the physical environment you can afford to provide for them compares negatively to Pixar’s offices, so dauntingly perfect it feels like a writer who gets frustrated and throws his Coke against the pristine wall would be enough to set the place crumbling.7 Or that you’re unable to offer, like Google, “20 percent time” to engineers so they can work on projects of their own choosing one-fifth of the time, a brave and brilliant idea that led to Gmail and other key products, but may sound like a suicidal approach for those of us less well-funded (and who isn’t less well-funded than Google?). Just start with treating your workers the way you want to be treated.
Which means what? Obviously without abuse or capriciousness. Add to that with respect for—seeking out of—employee ideas, observations, and concerns. With opportunities for growth—not as a cliché to put in a press release but as a bona fide way of life in your culture—and with concern for the right of employees to have input into how their jobs and workdays are designed. Again, don’t look at reports on Google’s Googleplex and think, “I have to offer subsidized massages for weary employees?” That’s crazy talk for the average business trying to make payroll. Do look at Google and think, “How can I make my campus, like theirs, friendly to workers who have children?” (Because workers will have children.) That’s smart business and solid culture building.
The rules of being human haven’t changed. Many employers have just violated them for a long time. But you can do better. Without trying to out-Pixar Pixar, out-Google Google, and out-bankrupt yourself.
While I proceed to tell you how to run your business, I may as well be even more brazen and tell you what to pay your employees, because this is a part of building a culture. I’d like it if you paid them well—above market, in fact. That way, you’ll never lose an employee over her need to work somewhere else to pay the bills. If you can’t afford to pay above market, you need to at least pay employees an amount and in a manner that seems fair. In other words:
Pay needs to be in line with what people in similar positions outside your company make. (Exception: if there are mitigating reasons that are understood by the employees, for example, at a bootstrapped start-up, a company going through hard times requiring a temporary sacrifice, etc.)
And …
Pay needs to be in line with what people in similar positions/with similar credentials/with similar quality of work inside your company make.8 You can’t have a successful culture based on hoping nobody sees someone else’s paycheck or discusses relative pay, either within or across divisions. That just won’t fly in today’s ultra-connected, glassdoor.com-informed world. [If you haven’t yet, spend a moment checking out www.glassdoor.com to hear the kind of unvarnished comments from employees that are available online now. It’s the Rate My Professor of the corporate world.]
With benefits. That’s right: Your employees should be your cultural friends with benefits. For those of you at larger companies, this may seem obvious, but for smaller entrepreneurs, let me tell you: Offering benefits, starting with group health insurance, is one of the best things you can do to show you care about your employees. You don’t have to pay the whole cost, but you do need to facilitate its availability. It’s you who have the organizational structure to make it happen, so make it happen. Think about it! If one of your employees contracts leukemia, what are you going to do to help him cover the treatment costs if he doesn’t have health insurance—hold a bake sale or a raffle? I’m not being hypothetical or facetious here. I’ve seen it happen more than once, and it’s not pretty.
A hire, no matter how talented, who doesn’t fit what you’re striving to build is, simply put, not a hire. Careful here, tiger: I want to clarify emphatically that my definition of “fit” doesn’t mean avoidance of oddballs—I like oddballs—or people who aren’t the extroverts who tend to interview well. These are misuses of the concept of “fit.” (When Inc. magazine asked me to do its “Customer Service Makeover” for a promising chain of salons that was going national, one thing that concerned me was the salon’s single-minded pursuit of outgoing, bubbly personalities. “I think what you are really looking for [are] … people who can adjust themselves to the personality of the guest,” I told them. “Everyone should be able to deal with someone who is depressed or with the no-nonsense businesswoman.”9) Yet certain cultural-fit markers, such as the “T” for “Teamwork” in my WETCO acronym of optimal psychological traits (see Chapter 6), do require employee-to-employee people skills, and the extent to which the people you hire embody these traits will have a significant impact on your culture’s ultimate success.
One reason your hiring decisions affect the treatment of customers is obvious: the direct interactions between those you hire and your customers, not to mention employee involvement in the creation of systems and processes that aid or hinder those customers. But another reason compounds this: the peer pressure each employee exerts on other staff members, whether this pressure is negative or positive. Paying attention to this dynamic is another secret of companies with strong cultures and great hiring practices.
Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Tina Rosenberg has shown the power that positive peer pressure has had around the world in varied contexts: to combat tobacco marketing (a new youth sensibility was created where the rebellion became against corporate “brainwashing” pushing them to smoke, rather than against parents who were pushing them to abstain), to improve poor math performance in African American students (peer study groups, similar to those already in use by Asian American students, served to make learning calculus a friend-building activity), and in many other areas.10 A similar dynamic is at work at great customer-serving companies like Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Four Seasons, even though the specifics of what the positive peer pressure represents varies widely by company:
Where the “cool kids” are the ones who love the products and love explaining them to create new converts while, paradoxically, obsessively protecting the company’s intellectual property and other advantages (Apple)
Where everyone goes the extra mile to help customers—even to the point of gate agents slinging bags and pilots guiding wheelchairs—in a peer culture where not pitching in is unthinkable (Southwest)
Where employees support each other in their support of their guests—whether that means bringing milk and cookies for kids or working together to rescue guests in a swimming pool during a natural disaster (Four Seasons)
There are people you want on your team in addition to your employees: Don’t forget your vendors. You build great vendor relationships through a culture of trust and give and take. Why bother? Well, properly treated and included in your mix, vendors will save you in sticky customer situations and suggest innovations to improve future options for customers through their knowledge and effort. Question: Who knows more about the products you sell—you or your vendors? This question has no clear answer. Both knowledge bases are necessary. You have unique knowledge you’ve gained from your end users, but your vendors have specific product knowledge to share. The catch is, if you want that knowledge and support, you have to treat vendors like true partners.
In my manufacturing company, Oasis, some of “my” best ideas have come from vendors: “Hey, Micah, what do you think of this?”—and then something really forward-thinking is suggested to me. Maybe the concept as proposed by the vendor will lack exactly the right marketing angle, or will have a clunky name, but with mutual respect we refine the idea and we’re off and running. Zappos has opened up nearly its entire system via its “extranet” to give vendors transparency on sales figures, margins, everything. It treats its vendors as partners and because of this has most-favored-nation status in the vendor community.11
Yet how many companies treat their vendors respectfully? An approach that aims for synergy and mutual respect is rarer than the adversarial approach, at least in the United States (this kind of trust is more common within the Japanese Keiretsu tradition).12 Vendors are there to be squeezed, abused, and played against each other. You lose so much with this approach. I suggest you seek out and destroy every vestige of it in your company.
Express clearly for the record how you intend to treat people in your business dealings. That way, everything you do can be benchmarked against the standard you set, and your culture, as a consequence, can be molded and strengthened. Lay out in your core values how you want customers, employees, and vendors to be treated. Say it clearly: If your opinion is that employees and vendors should be treated as you would like to be treated, write that down. If there are specific ways you want customers to feel when interacting with your company—for example, if you want to give them a memorable, enjoyable, and safe experience where even their unexpressed desires are realized— write that down.
One way to think through the areas you want to cover, and why: An employee focus dramatically affects customers. Only appropriately treated, motivated, empowered, growing employees will consistently give a great experience to customers. A vendor focus also affects customers. Only appropriately treated vendors, acting as true partners, can come through for your customers in times of need. Finally, an obsessive customer focus, realized through your employees and vendors, becomes the icing on the cake. Articulate all these, and then get ready to live them. It’s the best way to start building sustainable customer service results that will, in turn, sustain your company.
Here’s an actual mission statement I found covered with mildew in the closet of a defunct company, where no doubt it had been tossed within days of the brainstorming session that created it.
We will be the supreme total quality, customer-oriented supplier to our industry of all our industry-related products while facilitating extraordinary growth and sustainable profitability at cutting-edge standards.13
That’s not how a great company culture starts. A company’s culture can begin with words, but they should represent a decision—something you actually stand for, that is then expressed in the clearest, and ideally fewest, words.
Something like this:
We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.
(The Ritz-Carlton’s Motto)
Or like this:
In all our interactions with our guests, customers, business associates, and colleagues, we seek to deal with others as we would have them deal with us.
(The central line in Four Seasons’ “Our Goals, Our Beliefs, Our Principles”)
Where should these principles come from? The two examples I’ve given come from strong leaders, but at disparate points in their careers and in the history of their organizations. In the first example, this statement formed the personal philosophy of the Ritz-Carlton’s founding Chief Operating Officer, Horst Schulze, from the time he was very young, and he was thus able to bake it into the very beginning of the Ritz-Carlton’s organizational history. (It was, in fact, the topic sentence of an essay he wrote in hospitality school at age fourteen, earning Schulze, as he puts it, “the only ‘A’ I ever got.”14)This kind of deep history leading to an inspirational company launch is ideal but not necessary.
If your company fails to have such a storied birth, don’t worry. While the example from the Ritz came from a fourteen-year-old future leader, who wouldn’t have his own company to captain for decades, the Four Seasons example came from a set of principles that weren’t defined at Four Seasons until many years into the organization’s existence, yet these words formed the crux of a dramatic turning point for the company that has continued to this day.15 You should take heart in this belated transformation. If your company started as a scrappy venture and cut corners in the culture department at first (the now illustrious Four Seasons was initially a rather seat-of-the-pants operation called Four Seasons Motor Lodge, if you can imagine that!), there’s no better time to start consciously building a culture than now.
Beyond your core statement (your central organizing idea, such as Four Seasons’ “In all our interactions … we seek to deal with others as we would have them deal with us”), you’ll need a bit more development and clarification to make these words more than a slogan. Do this by defining key principles in the areas that are most relevant to your business, to the people who work for it and with it, and to whom it caters. Again, brevity leads to memorability. Zappos started this process with twenty-nine core values, ultimately ending up with ten. Four Seasons, appropriately, has four, which include a brief paragraph in each of the following areas:
1. Who we are
2. How we behave
3. What we believe
4. How we succeed
The Ritz-Carlton augments its “Motto” (“We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen”) with a three-sentence “Credo” and a three-sentence “Employee Promise” covering the principles of how to treat guests and coworkers. In each case, these lists of values are short enough that every employee can understand, memorize, and internalize them, yet long enough to be meaningful.
It’s important to achieve buy-in on your principles, but please don’t read the phrase “achieve buy-in” as being entirely gentle and toothless. In all three of the companies discussed above, some stakeholders didn’t buy in, so it was those stakeholders who had to go, not the principles. In the case of Four Seasons, Isadore Sharp worked with a few trusted employees to develop his principles. He then read his principles to all of the company’s executives, receiving a reception that appears to have consisted of ear-splitting silence. (Résumés from those managers who couldn’t buy in to the new principles flew out the door, by some accounts, as early as the next morning.)
While Zappos developed its core principles early and has done its best to hire in a way that’s consonant with them, CEO Tony Hsieh discusses a similar fork in the road at his previous company, LinkExchange, where many of the later employees clashed with Tony’s unstated but implicit core values, leading him to want to start a fresh enterprise where those core values could be made explicit and be honored. (In the case of Horst Schulze of the Ritz, he was laughed at when he tried to use his Ladies and Gentlemen Motto earlier in his career at other hotel companies17 so it was the previous companies—not the principles—that ended up going.)
Core values can only go so far, but make sure they go somewhere by taking the following six steps:
1. Write them. Simply. Briefly.
2. Accept and solicit feedback on them.
3. Reinforce them continually. I suggest that for five minutes every morning you stress one value, or an aspect of one value, at your departmental meeting. If that’s too often, try weekly. But not just annually at a company picnic. Annual anything is the enemy of “core.”
4. Make them visual. The Ritz-Carlton has “credo cards”—laminated accordion-fold cards that each employee carries during work hours. The brand’s entire core beliefs, plus shared basics of guest and employee interactions, fit on that card. (Horst Schulze says people chuckled twenty years ago when he said “laminated card”; they’re not laughing now.) Zappos highlights one of its core values on each box it ships out. And sometimes “visual” doesn’t mean words at all. One way that FedEx shows that safety is a core value is via the orange shoulder belts in its vans: Everyone can see—from twenty-five yards away—that the driver’s wearing a belt.
5. Make them the focus of orientation. That way, if safety is one of your core values and you stress this at orientation, on day two, when the new employee’s coworker tells him “In this restaurant, we stack the high chairs in front of the emergency exit when we need more room to do our prepwork,” [This is a real-life example—visit micahsolomon.com for a candid photo] he’ll experience cognitive dissonance and work on a way to align the actions of the company with the core values they’re supposed to reflect.
6. Most of all, train, support, hire, and, if necessary, use discipline to enforce what’s important to you. A map is distinct from the territory that it defines, and a core values statement is similarly two-dimensional until the right people with the right attitudes bring it to life. You’ll be amazed where this “map” can take you—with the right people and energetic guidance. “Maintaining a culture is like raising a teenager,” says Ray Davis, President and CEO of Umpqua Bank. “You’re constantly checking in. What are you doing? Where are you going? Who are you hanging out with?”18 And, sometimes, you have to use some tough love when that teenager is acting up in ways that don’t support the culture you’re working to build.
I want to bring your attention back to that powerful statistic from Chapter 1: 87 percent of the public [in the United States] wants companies to put as much or more emphasis on doing societal good as on doing good for themselves. In other words, only 13 percent of your customers want to do business with a company that focuses solely on the bottom line.
This means it’s smart business when companies build into their culture what can be referred to as a “triple bottom line.” Depending on the company, the specific manifestation of this could include the alliterative “People, Planet, and Profit,” coined by the triple bottom line’s originator, John Elkington, founder of the British consultancy Sustain-Ability, or any variation on that theme, generally including labor practices, community impact, etc. in the first column (“People” or a similar name); carbon footprint, air and water quality impact, etc. in the second (“Planet”); and sales, return on investment (ROI), and the like in a third (“Profit”).
Southwest Airlines is a company that’s especially proud of how the three columns of its operation interact to form what it considers an inextricable link within the broader world in which it operates. Every year Southwest issues what it calls its “OneReport: Performance-People-Planet.” Southwest is the envy of its industry in the performance column, having an unprecedented thirty-seven-year streak to date of annual profits in one of the most volatile industries in the world. In the “People” column, it has a culture that values good treatment and support of employees and their families, including highly amicable labor relations in an industry where this is the exception, not the rule. (“Highly amicable” barely does the situation justice, actually: The day that long-time Southwest President Herb Kelleher retired, the pilots’ union took out a full-page ad in USA Today to thank him for his thirty-seven-years of service. That same day, by contrast, American Airlines pilots were picketing that airline’s annual meeting.19) And in the “Planet” column, its activities range from the somewhat expected (increasing the use of recycling) to the highly creative (implementing and advocating legislatively for the use of Required Navigation Performance, a type of performance-based navigation that reduces fuel use).20 (Where “Profit” and “Planet” conflict can, of course, be a touchy issue and not as tidy as anyone would like it to be. While Southwest gets top marks in my book for the way it manages the “Profit” and “People” columns, “Planet” may have to be left open to debate. Ask anyone who watched Southwest’s aggressive use of lawsuits and lobbying to stop high-speed rail in Texas, regardless of the implications for the planet of blocking that project.)
Disney theme song notwithstanding, “Planet” is an awfully big place. So really, where a triple focus pays off most is back home for a company, through the admiration it receives from customers and employees. Let’s look at that “back home” with Southwest. It’s one thing to know in the abstract that Southwest is a company famous for its strong and service-oriented company culture. But it’s even more striking when an example of this intersects in a concrete way with what you do for a living. As a public speaker and perpetual traveler myself, I was touched—although not entirely surprised—to hear that two Southwest employees had worked together to save the life of professional speaker Larry Colbert’s guide dog, Banner, even though those employees had no way to know that Larry was traveling on their airline.21, 22
As Larry and his dog Banner arrived at the airport, a taxi ran right over Banner’s leg. Although bleeding profusely, the dog never stopped working to get his master to the plane on time. Colbert was unaware of his dog’s condition until two Southwest employees alerted him that Banner was standing in a pool of blood, a five-inch gash in his leg. One of these Southwest employees, Troy Anderson, got a grip on Banner’s bleeding leg to stop the blood flow, carried the dog to the car, and rode with him to the veterinarian, gripping the wound all the way. (Ultimately, Banner healed entirely.)
Think about that: Troy was immersed in a culture that supports behavior like his, and Troy could predict that his management and peers would appreciate, and assist with, what he needed to do. He knew there’d be no negative repercussions if he assisted the dog—even though this meant taking work time for a taxi ride to the vet.
That’s a strong customer-centered, employee-backing culture. And ultimately, it worked out in spades for Southwest, although there was no way directly to predict this. Larry Colbert was, indeed, a Southwest patron—in fact, a very frequent Southwest passenger. More than that, his dog Banner is pretty much a mascot for the entire NSA (National Speakers Association), many of whose 2,500 members fly more than they drive. They’re not likely to forget this incident any time soon.23
Culture may sound like a fluffy, expensive frill. But it brings hard-nosed, impossible-to-knock-off results. In times of smooth sailing, a focus on culture may not seem necessary, but as Ray Davis from Umpqua puts it, when the seas get choppy, “a strong culture … is a matter of survival,” and there’s no doubt that right now rapid technological change is churning up the seas for almost every organization.24
Company culture is hard for competitors to knock off because most companies have an inability to focus beyond the short term.
The number of interactions at a business between customers and staff is nearly infinite, and only a strong, clear culture gives you a fighting chance of getting the preponderance of these interactions right.
The current technological revolution amplifies the problems of not having the correct culture.
Technological and other business realities are continually changing, and only a strong culture is going to help you respond to, capitalize on, and drive forward these changes in order to serve customers and show your business in the best light.
Cultural alignment throughout the company helps avoid employee bitterness at perceived unfairness.
Many business leaders say employees act differently when managers aren’t looking. With a great company culture, employees will be motivated, regardless of management presence or absence.
Your core values should state how customers, employees, and vendors should be treated. In my opinion, this means “the way you would like to be treated yourself.”
Paying your employees correctly is part of a strong culture. Pay them well, pay them in line with what people in similar positions outside your company make, and pay them in line with what people in similar positions/with similar credentials/with similar quality of work inside your company make—and don’t forget to provide benefits.
A hire, no matter how talented, who doesn’t fit the culture you’re striving to build is, simply put, not a hire.
A secret of companies with strong cultures and great hiring practices is awareness of the positive peer pressure great employees can exert on each other.
Only appropriately treated vendors, acting as true partners, can come through for your company and its customers in times of need.
A company’s culture can begin with words, but those words need to represent a decision—something you actually stand for, a decision then expressed in the clearest, and ideally fewest, words.
Ensure your list of core values is short enough that every employee can understand, memorize, and internalize it, yet long enough to be meaningful.
Only 13 percent of your customers want to do business with a company that focuses solely on the bottom line, which is a good reason to consider pursuing a “triple bottom line,” like Southwest’s “Performance, People, Planet.”