It was the day of our first “Fans First” rally, an orientation, training, and rah-rah session for 7,000 of our front-line security, customer service, and volunteer hosts from the community. Under the leadership of sports event veteran Allison Melangton, and Mark Miles, former CEO of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the Indianapolis Super Bowl Host Committee had already established an inspiring volunteer program, which was representative of the warmth of “Hoosier hospitality.” But it was anything but warm that day. It was well below freezing, with a steady breeze dropping wind chills to uncomfortably numbing levels. Nevertheless, our event operations team agreed that it was important for us to brave the cold outside Lucas Oil Stadium, to greet our arriving staff members in exactly the fashion we wanted them to present to our fans on event day. We wanted them to experience for themselves how a sincere-and-friendly greeting in the Midwest cold could add a touch of warmth to someone’s day.
Most seemed to be excited as they arrived for the rally at the stadium. This was the day they would become Super Bowl “teammates.” With their heads turtled into their coats and scarfs, some were more focused on seeking relief inside from the cold. One woman, as I greeted her, speed-walked past, uttering a mild oath, and added: “It is not a good morning. I had to park five blocks away, and I am freezing to death.” I did feel bad for her. It was bitter cold outside and she appeared not to be dressed for the walk. “I’m sorry about that, ma’am. Run on in. It is definitely warmer inside,” I said as she shuffled past without a pause.
About two hours later, we were wrapping up the rally after a medley of entertainment, speeches by Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay and several players, and a customer-service presentation delivered by experts from The Disney Institute. My own on-stage contribution included an orientation to the 10-day schedule of events and a peek at how the downtown area around the stadium would be impacted leading up to the game. Our event management team that had surrounded the perimeter of the stadium were now positioned at the exits to distribute a special commemorative “Super Bowl Teammate” pin. The only way you could earn one was to have attended and stayed to the end of the voluntary rally. Everyone who earned one wore it throughout the Super Bowl, and those who didn’t attend the rally wish they had shown up just to get one. A woman sought me out as I handed out pins to our exiting teammates.
VOLUNTEER: “It figures. I would have been the biggest jerk to the guy in charge of the whole thing. I’m really very sorry.”
FRANK: “That’s okay. Remember, you never know who you are talking to. I might have been somebody important, or I might have been nobody at all. But we have to treat everyone as though they were a VIP.”
She accepted the pin with a handshake and a smile. That was the message we tried to impart to everyone. Treat everyone the same because they are all fans and we should assume they are all VIPs. We couldn’t have communicated that lesson as effectively had we not vividly modeled the behavior that we desired our teammates would emulate.
Influencing the actions of others by modeling behaviors is apparent to anyone who has ever watched the long-running children’s program in TV history. Sesame Street teaches youngsters the values of friendship, kindness, honesty, and learning, among other values, by modeling socially desired behaviors observed in adorable, childlike puppet characters. No one on my team, including me, was as warm, fuzzy, or charming as a Muppet, but I believe that modeling the behaviors we wanted our teammates to present to our customers, our fans, contributed significantly to better service and a stronger, empowered team concentrated on keeping things going right. To ensure that our team focused on the experience of our fans, our leaders, managers, and supervisors needed to be attentive to the experience of our teammates. How we treated them, we believed, would have a direct bearing on how they treated our guests. It would also have a direct impact on engaging them enough to share our interest in running a smooth event, especially when they saw something going wrong.
The large “Fans First” rallies were the last in a series of training sessions designed to transform our philosophy into a more engaged, problem-solving culture. We first staged a more immersive and interactive training session for our core leadership team of approximately 50 key event operations staff and contractors. Their feedback and buy-in helped to inform the content for the next gathering held one month later, where they were joined by the 300 additional teammates that they managed directly. By the time of the final “Fans First” rally for 7,000 teammates, the leadership and management groups who had been empowered to help develop the rally were already engaged and invested, and modeling what we were trying to establish—a working environment in which everyone was focused on shared success and on guard against contributing factors to failure.
We wanted to model a collaborative, communicative, and accountable culture. One way we conveyed this was with the use of first-name-and-hometown name tags. I’ll be honest. The original reason we included the teammate’s choice of hometown was to avoid having visiting fans ask someone from New York for restaurant recommendations in Indianapolis. What it did, however, was break the ice between teammates who first met in a restaurant, hotel elevator, at the stadium, or on the street. Once someone noticed a fellow teammate’s hometown and shared that she “had an aunt in San Antonio,” what usually followed was “what job do you have at the Super Bowl?” Thus, an usher could initiate a conversation with a television producer, and a team services liaison became the acquaintance of a greeter. Our name tags leveled the playing field, freely opening communication and reinforcing the concept of a team of collegial equals. Everyone, after all, no matter their position, had a first name and a town they call home.
Introducing universally accessible pathways of communication helped everyone to feel informed, and as a result, be more engaged. Now that all teammates could report problems, it was more likely they would feel empowered and encouraged to do so. But while we had taken steps toward creating a team, we had not yet developed a community. That’s where a platform called “Yammer.com” came in. Yammer was a private social media platform that had a universally familiar and easy-to-navigate feel like Facebook, but it was only available to a closed loop of participants invited by the Super Bowl management team.
Every teammate with a Super Bowl working credential received an invitation—from top-level NFL executives to contracted security guards. Once registered, teammates would be kept updated on the latest Super Bowl news, behind-the-scenes fun facts, traffic information, and last-minute changes. Teammates, for their part, could ask questions and post requests for guidance. “I am working for security but haven’t received any information on when my first shift starts,” notified one user. We were on the lookout for these posts around the clock and would either answer their questions directly or contact the teammates’ supervisor to respond. We made sure that the supervisors responded.
Our ability to communicate with the entire database of teammates to inform and engage them more deeply was enormously powerful. Our continuous monitoring of the site enabled us to respond rapidly to posted questions and expressed uncertainties, avoiding problems rooted in a lapse in communication or miscommunication. The Yammer.com app was the perfect place to focus teammates and respond to requests for help. Our posts of exclusive, behind-the-scenes insights made everyone feel like insiders. But what really created a vibrant, active, and engaged community was the app’s user-friendly functionality, which encouraged teammates to tell their stories and post photos of the venues, events, players, and celebrities they encountered when they were off-duty. It built a palpable groundswell of contagious excitement. Like many social media platforms, strangers became acquaintances and acquaintances became friends. In New Orleans, teammates even shared gumbo recipes, a thread that one senior NFL executive in New York signaled a failure of the initiative because it had nothing to do with the league or the event. True, but it had everything to do with community, one that felt engaged enough to transform their membership in our team into a social and cultural experience and establish “personal” relationships across the project. Through that membership, we created a team committed to making things go right and poised to respond to things that could go wrong.
As mentioned, our leadership and management teams participated in an interactive “Fans First” working session during which we collected invaluable input that fine-tuned how we would train the entire team. This conferred much of the ownership of the content to managers and supervisors, ensuring that they would embrace the program, reinforce its values, and feel more accountable for the results. It also had a remarkable, and unexpected, effect on how our senior team of planners, area specialists, and designers approached their own jobs. By putting the fan experience at the forefront of how they managed others, it also refocused their attention on how they designed and planned to deliver the best one possible.
Several years before we introduced the “Fans First” program, our parking-and-transportation director hosted a meeting with our leadership team to brief us on game day plans in his areas of responsibility before Super Bowl XLIII in Tampa. He and his team had struggled to identify real estate to cover the reduction in spaces at the stadium parking lots. Security checkpoints, media compounds, the NFL pregame Tailgate Party, and more had been built on space usually devoted to parking cars for Tampa Bay Buccaneers games. Mike Witte, a transportation expert from SP Plus Corporation, with the help of the local host committee, successfully secured spaces at the adjacent New York Yankees training center and in a wide range of unimproved property around the stadium.
MIKE: “We are contracting with a large lot northeast of the stadium that should accommodate the rest of our needs and is just 0.7 miles from the north gates.
FRANK: “That’s great, Mike. But just so I’m clear, is it the closest parking space, or the farthest space that is 0.7 miles away?”
It was the closest point that was 0.7 miles away from the stadium. The walk from a car parked the farthest away would be well in excess of a mile. Not knowing the physical health, age, or mobility of the fans who would park there, we recognized that we should consider a golf cart or mini-bus to shuttle fans unable to make the walk between the lot and the stadium. We were starting to put the fan experience first even before institutionalizing the “Fans First” philosophy, and in so doing, potentially averted inconvenience and, more importantly, something going wrong, like a fan illness from overexertion. Mike became among the greatest proponents of “Fans First” when it was formally introduced and one of the most fan-considerate thinkers in his planning of parking and transportation once it was. He was far from alone.
A plan that put fans first became a common criterion for decision-making by our event management team, and empowered teammates to think the same way across the web of command. Not infrequently, “that’s not very fans first,” was a common reflection during planning meetings and was directed my way more than once. Improving the customer experience always reduces the probability of something going wrong.
“Fans First” was a phrase that our customer-facing teammates heard often from the event management team, in training and while on the job. To further empower managers and supervisors, and to incentivize our teammates, we introduced a recognition program that was based on doing the job not only to specification, but exceeding expectations. Each member of the event management team—from leadership to management to supervisors—was given a liberal supply of recognition cards. On each card was a blank space for the manager to write their name and a discrete alphanumeric code to ensure its authenticity. Teammates who were observed doing a great job serving the fans or handling problems were given a card that congratulated them for putting “fans first.” The card further provided instructions to the teammates to visit our website, enter their code, and tell their own story on why they were recognized. But doing so, they were automatically entered into a drawing for prizes like autographed memorabilia and merchandise. We also captured firsthand accounts of service success stories and situations that required intervention. It was just a card, with no intrinsic value of its own, but when we handed them to the teammates, it visibly brightened their day and created a contagion of courtesy and vigilance across the entire team.
Then, there was an exceptional incentive—a rare, specially minted coin that would be awarded to those teammates who had gone beyond all expectations. Each senior manager received only five coins to distribute. The rarity of the coins and the limited number of people who could award them made them highly prized and sought after. I’m pretty sure the coins were even 20 percent rarer than we planned because most managers kept one as a keepsake for themselves, leaving only four to distribute. I know I did.
Many companies don’t have the ability to mint limited edition coins and it may not be practical or on-brand to give away autographed footballs and jerseys in a random drawing. Perhaps company T-shirts and caps would have the same effect on your customer-facing teammates, but you should resist awarding something off the shelf. Don’t underestimate the effect of a company-branded item that is exclusive only to teammates who exceed expectations. And don’t be surprised if your team raises the level of their engagement in competition so they can be recognized.
The time, money, and effort implementing communications platforms that empower teammates across the organization can pay enormous dividends in engagement, enthusiasm, and efficiency. Trusting teammates to make more decisions in the field can yield impactful results without clogging the arteries of communication. Yet, something often goes wrong that cannot be addressed without the assistance of senior management. How we respond as leaders to these situations can inspire continued vigilance on every level or can entirely discourage future engagement.
If a teammate perceives something is amiss, and they act to (1) try to prevent it from happening, (2) keep it from developing into a more serious problem, and/or (3) reach out for assistance the moment it is required, there should be no repercussions if it goes wrong anyway. I tend to hold colleagues more responsible for ignoring conditions that later led to problems, not acting to correct them, or failing to elevate the issue to a higher level when appropriate.
Sometimes, of course, something goes wrong—or goes from bad to worse—because of negligence, carelessness, inattentiveness, ambivalence, or an outright dereliction of responsibility. That’s when it’s important not only to hold our teammates and colleagues accountable, but to do so definitively and without any shadow of a doubt. If we react with the same level of force and volume to problems large and small, we begin to manage in an environment of fear and tend to blunt the efforts to empower our team. That said, some situations require a response that is strong, unmistakable, and consequential. The trick is to scale our reactions to the scale of the problem.
The people I work with—and for—know me as a pretty relaxed guy, at least on the outside; I’m someone who gets headaches rather than gives them. I don’t generally yell or stomp off into the distance when I’m pissed off. There’s often a better way to get the message across without turning the volume up to 11. When there isn’t, or I’ve simply had enough, my evil twin, “Skippy,” emerges. He doesn’t appear very often, but when he does, he is a very important member of the team. He doesn’t offer a pat on the back or answer every e-mail promptly. Skippy, quite plainly, can be a jerk.
Skippy doesn’t often appear during a true crisis. He is the first to run for the emergency exit. But, when something goes wrong because a teammate, contractor, or other project stakeholder lied, withheld critical information, or was just egregiously careless, Skippy takes command. My assistants at the NFL, Joan Ryan-Canu and Sherri Caraccia, would let anyone in the immediate vicinity know when Frank had left the building and Skippy was in charge.
Skippy showed up uninvited at a staff dinner in 2002, before the 52nd NHL All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, California. The schedule of events had been designed to better familiarize a nontraditional hockey market to a sport that was more a part of the culture in Canada and the northern United States than sunny southern California. The weekend before the game started on January 29, 2002, with a massive indoor fan festival called “NHL FANtasy” at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Because this was only the first of many events staged before the NHL All-Star game, held on February 2, 2002, our staff had been working around the clock for weeks. A let-your-hair-down team dinner, free of work obligations, I felt was just the thing to keep us energized. Our permanent staff of 15 had swelled modestly with the addition of another dozen or so interns and contractors. Everyone looked forward to an evening of breathing calmly, laughing generously, eating heartily, and making a respectable dent in a keg or two of good Canadian beer.
It is not a given that bringing up work in a social setting will turn things sour, but this time, it certainly did. Jerry (not his real name) had created a marketing program for “NHL FANtasy” targeted to sports entertainment seekers in downtown Los Angeles. Thousands of “table tents”—those self-standing display cards in restaurants that we usually ignore near the salt, pepper, and ketchup—were printed with a ticket discount code and a series of five or six engaging hockey trivia questions. The table tents had been distributed that afternoon to participating restaurants, including the one where we were about to have dinner. As we ordered our first round, Jerry drew our attention to the table tents atop every table. I picked one up and tried my hand at the questions.
I don’t recollect many of the questions and answers, except to say that the level of difficulty must have been developed for recent arrivals to North America. Even Americans from the hockey-deficient markets of Appalachia would have been able to conjure up the single answer that I do still remember.
I read the question aloud to my teammates at the dinner: “He was the holder of the NHL record for most goals (894), assists (1,963) and points (2,857).” The answer was also the owner of a trophy case overflowing with Stanley Cups, Harts (regular season MVP), Conn Smythes (playoff MVP), Art Rosses (goal scoring), and Lady Byngs (gentlemanly play), among others. A player so idolized that his trade from Edmonton, Alberta, enraged a nation and simultaneously established a cult of frozen celebrity in Southern California. A player so dominant over 20 seasons that his “99” jersey was retired leaguewide soon after hanging up his skates.
I looked down to the bottom of the table tent to discover that the answer was not who I thought it was. The answer was apparently “Wanye” Gretzky.
I read the answer out loud. “Wan-ye Gretzky . . .” I adjusted my glasses and took a closer look. All the letters remained right where I left them. “Wan-YEE,” I wondered even louder to those at the table. At that moment, Skippy, who wasn’t originally invited to the dinner, made an unexpected guest appearance as quickly as I had departed. Jerry, his immediate supervisor, and several of his colleagues also departed to collect and destroy every box of tent cards, and to inspect every table in every participating restaurant to ensure they were all recovered on the very first night of the promotion.
Jerry knew he had messed up. He may have even known how badly he messed up, but I wasn’t sure just how messed up Jerry had messed up. I was hoping that it was not so much that I would read about it in the Los Angeles sports columns the next morning. Jerry’s decision to show me the table tent that evening, and the quick dissolution of our team dinner contributed, at least in part, to containing the brand damage. Thankfully, it never made the papers.
I didn’t relish the situation, but Skippy made sure that Jerry got a sense of where he fell short, and it was a learning moment for our entire team. It wasn’t because he made a mistake. We all make mistakes. It was because of carelessness and the real danger to which he exposed the brand. A few moments invested in proofreading would not only have inoculated us against that risk, but also would have helped Jerry to launch what I am confident would have been a successful promotion.
As you may have gleaned, it is not my style to scare people or make them feel bad. I like making people feel good, valued, and essential to the success of whatever we are working on together. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I don’t. Skippy, notwithstanding his gruff exterior and unfiltered bluster, is a helpful partner because his authentic candor makes Frank more genuine and believable most of the time. Skippy didn’t show up when I was just disappointed or frustrated, like when people showed up late to meetings. It took more than that, but when he did appear, our team understood that something unusually egregious, disappointing, and frustrating had happened.
I believe that a good leader scales their response to situations when things go wrong. Skippy usually wasn’t in the room when there was a crisis-level issue that needed to be solved and time was of the essence. He wasn’t invited when problems were beyond our team’s control, or “stuff just happened.” But, he wasn’t shy when stupid or deceitful things happened. That’s my threshold for bringing Skippy into the room, but I recognize that everyone has a different definition and tolerance of when to release their inner Skippy. I have found it the most useful, effective, and productive when that tolerance is not only understood by my team, but also when it is scarce. If it’s not a rare occurrence, you either have the wrong team, or you may have the right one but have to work on your anger management skills.
Steven Spielberg knows a thing or two about the dramatic effect of infrequency. In his landmark 1975 film Jaws, a murderously famished 25-foot great white shark terrorizes a small New England beach community. The first time the audience sees the shark is almost 77 minutes into the 124-minute film. Until then, the tremendous tension in the film was generated by the audience’s knowledge that the malevolent shark might be out there prepared to strike unsuspecting victims, the scenes of the destruction he wrought, and only the scarcest visual hints of the shark’s physical presence. In fact, the great white shark only appears for a total of four minutes over the entirety of the film.
None of this is to suggest that building tension and drama into your daily interactions with your team is an effective way to manage, although I’m sure we’ve both encountered managers who thought so. What I am suggesting is that, like Bruce, Skippy was effective because he appeared so seldom. When he did appear, it was a learning moment for the victim, as well as for the rest of the audience.
I’m not suggesting you adopt my personality or management style, but what I am suggesting is that sometimes you need to find ways to cut through the noise and get people’s attention, whether it’s in a group, one-on-one, on the phone, or in writing. Differentiating your responses to challenges will help your team perform better, navigate solutions, and prioritize when things go wrong. Pick the strategy and the tipping point that is most authentic to you.