The Contented Cow Blog

Building Workplaces That Work

Bill Catlette and I have been at the annual convention of the National Speakers Association this week in New York City. One of the highlights of the convention was a town hall style session with 2 titans of the travel industry, Bill Marriott, CEO of Marriott Hotels, and Dave Barger, CEO of JetBlue Airways.

Bill and I often speak from the platform about these 2 companies, as exemplary companies to work for. Hearing their respective CEO’s speak made it easy to see why we do.

Some highlights, first from Marriott:

• Marriott’s parents, the hotel chain’s founders taught him “take good care of your employees, and they’ll take good care of your customers.”
• One key to the success of Marriott Hotels is training. Training represents an enormous proportion of the company’s time, attention, and money.
• Another key is providing opportunities for advancement. By far, most Marriott managers started in entry level positions in the chain’s hotels, and were motivated by the strong connection at Marriott between performance and promotion.
• Bill Marriott spends a huge amount of time circulating among his thousands of properties to see the people who work there. “I can’t make strategic decisions unless I know what’s going on, and I can’t do that if I’m not there.”

From JetBlue’s Barger:

• Barger recently took a 50% pay cut.  (He was asked about this, he didn’t bring it up. I know the person who asked the question, and he was not a plant.) “We’re going to be flying less, so our people will be earning less. So I should, too.”
• “This is not a fuel business. It’s a people business. What keeps me up at night is not the price of fuel. It’s how we motivate our people to deliver the best product, especially in these tough times.”
• “We don’t talk about ’survival’ at JetBlue; we talk about ‘winning’.”

As much as I was impressed by what these guys said, I was even more impressed by who they appeared to be. I left the session with the feeling that I had just spent 90 minutes in the presence of a couple of guys who were not only brilliant, but really nice, ordinary (though extremely wealthy, especially Marriott) folks.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and his co-author and business partner Bill Catlette, are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.

The July 28 issue of Nation’s Restaurant News featured a piece by staff HR writer, Dina Berta, on efforts by Claim Jumper Restaurants to nourish their employment brand. That’s right, employment brand. According to Avery Block, a member of Claim Jumper’s HR team, who is quoted in the article, “the CJ brand is commitment to the journey. It represents and reflects the journey the company has been on the last 30 years… We’re committed to our community, one another, and to ourselves for individual growth and development. We want people to feel that when they come to Claim Jumper, they are on a journey.”

Two things are axiomatic in this respect:

1.Like it or not, every organization that has employees (including yours and ours) has an employment brand. At it’s root, that brand reflects your reputation within the community of those who would, do, and have worked for your organization. Not unlike other types of reputations, your employment rep is hard to enhance and easy to ruin.

2. Our employment brand extends well beyond the usual raft of trite, worn out slogans (e.g. people are our most important asset) to the very tangible qualities that define the employment relationship, things like trust, mutual respect, standards, and discipline.

If you’re at all uncertain as to the value of this reputation, chat up any recruiter in the hospitality or high tech industries.

A thought leader in the areas of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

In the May 12 issue of Fortune Magazine (OK, I’m a little behind on my reading), PepsiCo Chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi credited her father with the best piece of advice she ever got. “From him, I learned to always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different.” The rest of what Ms. Nooyi had to say also makes a lot of sense, as do the ‘advice nuggets’ of other business leaders. Check it out.

In short, what I hear Ms. Nooyi saying is, be an optimist. You will get further in life, and far greater measure of a person’s best effort when you expect the best, rather than the worst.

I was reminded of the whole optimism thing this past weekend, while watching tributes to former Fox News editor and White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow. In a video clip now permanently seared into my memory, while at the White House lectern, Snow, knowing that he had colon cancer remarked, “Not everybody will survive cancer, but you’ve got the gift of life - make the most of it.”

Tim Russert was not only a highly respected journalist, as a Vice President at NBC News, he was a manager, and a real leader. And by all accounts, he was the kind of leader who did a remarkable job of inspiring OOMPH! from those who called him “boss”.

During all this weekend’s tributes to Russert on his and competing networks, I’ve been struck by the descriptions of the man, not the journalist. He listened to the people entrusted to his leadership. He cared about them as human beings. He recognized that they had lives outside their work, because he had a life outside his work. And he spent time finding out about what was important to his employees.

When you’re gone, or retired, or have moved on to another phase in your career, will people talk more about the quality of the work you did? Or the quality of the person who did the work?

At about 8:45 AM I eased into a booth at Dick Clark’s Grill at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in search of breakfast.Though the day was still relatively young and nothing particularly bad had happened, I was annoyed.

Getting to the airport had first involved navigating to the omnibus rental car facility, a place that is not especially well marked on surface streets. Navigation was made more difficult by road construction in the area, but I made it, with only a couple of wrong turns. Having once before boarded the wrong bus from this facility to the airport, I knew that the buses don’t circulate to all terminals as they do at most domestic airports. So, as I exited the building I looked for the signs to tell me where the bus to Terminal 3 (my departure terminal) would be - not readily apparent. Thank goodness, an employee was standing by to serve as a human signpost. Once at the airport, signage for rest rooms and other essential ports of call was similarly weak. In fact, in my search for the nearest rest room, were it not for the pleasant, purple-jacketed guide at the top of the escalator, I might have gone from annoyed to well, uh, forgive the expression… pissed.

Don’t get me wrong. I very much like the Phoenix area. The people are great, there’s lots to do, and the weather is great about nine months out of the year. But I think I’ve figured out why the area is growing so fast, and it has nothing to do with the aforementioned factors. People simply get there and then, like a Las Vegas casino, can’t find their way back out of town.

I had lunch the other day with a handful of mid-level managers whose annoyance was a lot more acute than what I experienced this morning, but emanated from the very same cause. No, they hadn’t gotten lost at Sky Harbor. Rather, they are lost and confused within their own organization, where, to hear them talk, they get a fairly steady diet of the “mushroom treatment.” In other words, the “signage”, or visability into the organization’s strategies and plans is severely limited, and thus compromises their ability to do their jobs. One of them in fact remarked that she feels personally diminished by the fact that, when the boulders of change roll off the highest level of the org chart and land in the organization below, she is often ridiculed by her people for not preparing them for changes that she, too, is completely unaware of. As a result, she not only has the change to deal with, but first, she must contend with a workforce that believes that their boss is either lying about her lack of foreknowledge, inept, or asleep at the switch.

Despite burgeoning corporate communications budgets and the availability of more communications methods, modes, gear, and doodads than the mind can comprehend, we probably do a poorer job of communicating in the workplace than at any time in history. Communicating, as in making meaning. A few thoughts:

1. As managers, we get paid to think. To a degree, we also get paid to rock the boat a bit. If needed information about your organization’s plans and strategies is lacking, don’t be ignorant, and don’t be a victim. Go search it out. You can start by chatting up your boss, your peers, and your own network. but if that fails, don’t be bashful about going to someone who ought to know, someone higher in the food chain perhaps. Make it clear that you’re not whining about not having been told, but don’t be timid about asking for information or insight that you need in order to run your part of the business. In all likelihood they will thank you for the question and your interest. In the unlikely event that they react adversely, well, that tells you something too.

2. Use a simple test to determine whether or not your own people are getting the sort of information they need to do their best work. Ask a representative sample of your team members to jot down and share with you what they believe to be the organization’s top 3 priorities. To the degree that their answers are either inconsistent or off the mark, you’ve got atherosclerosis in your own area. Get busy.

3. Finally, we would do well to remember the advice of Jan Carlzon, former head of SAS, the Scandinavian airline, who maintained that, “An individual without information cannot take responsibility. An individual with information cannot help but take responsibility.”"

A piece of incoming email caught my eye this morning. It was from our friends at Workforce Management Magazine promoting their upcoming June issue and the feature article, “Best Practices in Talent Management.” Carroll Lachnit and crew at Workforce do good work, and I’m sure this issue will be no exception. I just wish they’d make one small change to the title, however. Let’s change the word, “best” to something a little less grandiose, like, well… better.

Having spent a good bit of the last 15 years studying leadership and employment practices, if I’ve become convinced of anything, it is that no one, repeat, no one has the market cornered on best practices in this arena. Not the ones mentioned in the annual ranking of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America” (Fortune), not the oft-cited exemplars like Southwest Air and Google, and no, not even the firms labeled as “Contented Cows” in our first book, Contented Cows Give Better Milk.

So where’s the beef? My point is this:  Branding your employment practices as the “best” or even accepting that mantle is putting yourself on a very slippery slope. It is a bit like calling yourself the best airline. Now there’s some rarified company for you! Admittedly there are some good players out there, but unlike the game of golf, there is no Tiger Woods; no consistent, odds-on favorite.

For the organizations that have earned themselves a spot way back in the pack, the point - indeed this whole post is moot. For them, the difference between best and better is an academic exercise. But for the ones who are doing some great things in the employment arena, the “A and B players” if you will, it is best, or should I say helpful to remember that one of the keys to greatness is staying hungry. Being proclaimed the “best” interferes with that hunger because at some point, you start believing that stuff and before long, your performance suffers as your breathe your own exhaust. I saw it happen at my alma mater, FedEx, where, after about the 3rd year of being labeled one of  the “100 Best Companies to Work For in America”, we started believing our good press and stopped working so hard at improving our leadership habits. Soon thereafter, our employees noticed, as did, in succession, our customers and shareholders.

To the  point of my last post, by all means celebrate whenever you’ve got cause to do so, but just like Tiger, keep your head out of the clouds and stay hungry.

Last week I had the pleasure of being on a Comair flight manned by a flight attendant by the name of Eric. It was immediately obvious upon boarding that this flight was going to be different, in a positive way. With a smile and a wisecrack about the plane’s designers, he reminded me upon boarding of the low door clearance so I wouldn’t bump my head. A few minutes later, with a half empty aircraft (a rare luxury on a regional jet), he invited passengers to spread out if they wished to do so. A couple of minutes before pushback he repeated the offer to spread out, adding jokingly that those who hadn’t heeded his previous offer would now have to pay a $25 fee for the right to do so.

It wasn’t so much that we had a frustrated comic for a flight attendant, but rather, a guy who seemed to be doing his best to brighten his day and the day of those around him. Somewhere between Cincinnati and Charleston, WV, I asked him about the shtick. “I want to become a pilot,” he said, adding that the Comair gig allows him to attend flight school, and get his foot in the door within the industry. Then, he added, “But for now, I try every day not to let my work become a job.” I - try - not - to - let - my - work - become - a - job… Let that sink in for a moment.

My guess is that Eric would agree with former U.S. President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said, “Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.” How many people do you know who go through life being prisoners of their own minds, preferring, unlike Eric, to see the dark side of just about everything? More importantly, how often do you and I fall into the same trap, allowing cynicism to overcome our good nature? Indeed, my granddaughter has been asked to call me “Grumpy” as something of a reminder of what I don’t want to become. I have also asked a few people close to me to gently (or not so) remind me whenever they notice that my smiles/frowns ratio seems to be getting out of whack. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I need to do better.

Regardless of what techniques or reminders we employ, it is important, especially for those of us who have accepted the mantle of leadership to remember that, in our increasingly uptight world, people simply will not follow, let alone go the extra mile for someone who lacks a generous dose of optimism… someone who sees their work as nothing more than a job.

A thought leader in the areas of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

In some faiths, the term “grace” is defined as “the unmerited favor of God”. In more earthly terms, grace is when we receive something we don’t deserve, and in fact, can’t possibly earn. When the police officer stops you for going 65 in a 45mph zone, and lets you off with a warning. That’s grace. When you pig out over the holidays, and gain only 2 pounds. That’s grace.

My family and I were recently the recipients of the “unmerited favor of Delta Air Lines”.  Or were we? Returning from a European vacation a few weeks ago, we were booked in 4 frequent flyer award seats, in coach, from Prague to Atlanta. Sometimes I have enough miles in my account to upgrade to Delta’s Business Elite (their version of International First Class), but not this trip. A ten-hour transatlantic flight in coach is no one’s idea of pleasant, but considering we paid nothing for these seats, I wasn’t complaining.

A long-haul flight is hard enough when you’re in the best of health, but my teenage son had picked up a nasty cold in Prague, and was feeling pretty lousy. None of us was looking forward to the journey.

When we checked in at Prague, we were told by the Delta ticket agent that, because coach was oversold, all 4 of us were being upgraded to Business Elite. Did we have any problem with that?

This is grace. And maybe a little like, in some ways, Discretionary Effort. I didn’t deserve the upgrades. I didn’t pay for them. I didn’t expect them, and therefore could not have complained had we not received this unmerited favor. And yet, it’ll be a long time before I regain rights to gripe about not scoring an upgrade on a domestic flight with Delta.

And yet, why did Delta pick us, rather than 4 other lucky winners, to fly back in comfort? Two reasons: 1. We checked in relatively early, and 2. I fly Delta a LOT, and was likely the only Platinum Medallion frequent flyer booked in coach for this flight. The airline had to upgrade 4 people. Why not do it for their most loyal customers?

In this way, the “favor” was not entirely unmerited. The same goes for Discretionary Effort. You, as a leader, can’t pay people to go the Extra Mile at work, to give you the Discretionary portion of their effort. You can’t exactly earn it. And because it’s not required, you can’t exact sanctions on people who don’t give it.

However, when someone on your team volunteers to work that extra weekend; covers for a sick colleague; does a 200% job, when 100% would have worked; bends over backward for a customer; quietly does without so the numbers look good this quarter; rolls up their sleeves without regard to their job description; does something on their own initiative rather than being asked; gets to work before you do because they can’t wait to get started; or renders any other manifestation of Discretionary Effort, it may be because their leader cares about them as a person; tells them frequently how much they’re appreciated; looks for ways to help make their job easier; cuts them a little slack when they’re going through a rough patch, has earned their trust; has been a good listener; and in short, has gone the Extra Mile for them over the years.

Favor? Yes. Unmerited? Not entirely.

Last week I delivered a speech at the University of North Florida on the leader behaviors which drive and restrain discretionary effort, and the attendant employee engagement. We call it Oomph!

As is customary, unless you really lay an egg, a small handful of members of the audience came up after I finished to ask a question, make a point, or pass along a compliment. I could tell that two of the women standing there seemed particularly interested in getting my attention. As I turned to them, one of them blurted out that the presentation, which at best I’d give a B to (after all, this was a university setting), was the best she’d heard in some time. The other simply said, “I want to thank you. You have no way of knowing it, but your remarks helped me make an important career decision.”

Wow! In an instant, I went from being a little tired (this was the 2nd such presentation that day) to absolutely pumped by the knowledge that what I had just done for the last hour mattered, really mattered to somebody. Her simple, heartfelt comment got me stoked, not just for the afternoon, but for the next several presentations I’ll be making. For the next few months, whenever I give a speech or a seminar, I will have a visual reminder of that lady’s face, and the knowledge that what I’m doing can make a real difference.

It’s not that this principle is new to us. In point of fact, we pound it pretty hard in our work. Yet, there is a world of difference between telling others that they need to let their people know that their work matters, and having it happen to you. So, for the next little while, I’m refreshed. The question is, what about the people on your team? When was the last time they heard how and why their work matters?

A thought leader in the areas of leadership and employee engagement, Bill Catlette is a seminar leader, keynote speaker, and executive coach. He helps individuals and organizations improve business outcomes by having a focused, engaged, capably led workforce. For more information about Bill, his partner Richard, and their work, please visit their website at www.contentedcows.com

My daughter Lindsay just Skyped me from her dorm room in Scotland (If you don’t know what Skype is, you oughta find out) to ask me to send her something from home. This is not the first such call we’ve had in the month she’s been away on this study-abroad program.

On this call, she was pleading that I send her as many boxes as economically feasible of Kraft Instant Macaroni and Cheese.

My wife’s a native Scot, and for that reason, all of us, including Lindsay, have spent a fair amount of time in that country over the years. The British have no shortage of scrumptious processed foods, but boxed instant mac and cheese hasn’t made it big there yet. Indeed, Kraft sells its M&C in the UK, but apparently it can’t be found in the part of Scotland where Lindsay’s studying (I’m convinced she is studying.) 

Lindsay said she hadn’t realized how much she enjoyed Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and was surprised at how much she missed it, calling it “one of life’s simple pleasures”. “I’m really not very high-maintenance, Dad,” she assured me.

“I guess I just took macaroni and cheese for granted. This experience has taught me to appreciate it.”

Twelve grand for an international cultural/educational experience, and she develops an appreciation for American staple foods.

I told her I could relate to missing something (someone), and learned that I had perhaps taken her daily presence in the house for the last nearly 20 years for granted as well.

She told a few of her British friends that she was Jonesing for some KM&C, and several of them, having visited the states, remembered it with great fondness, and wanted to get in on the action as well. So they pooled their meager resources and placed an order with me. We’ll be taking it to the post office today.

Is there something - or someone - in your life, at work, at home, or elsewhere, that you’ve taken for granted, but that you would miss if it/he/she weren’t there? Someone who makes your job, and/or your life a little easier?

One thing we heard expressed in clear and compelling terms while we were researching our latest book, Contented Cows MOOve Faster, is this: One of the clearest paths to getting people to withhold a measure of their Discretionary Effort, to power back a notch or two, is to take them for granted.

Before the day is out, do this: think of at least one person you would miss if they weren’t in your life. It doesn’t have to be a loved one. Just somebody you’d miss. You’d miss them even more than my daughter misses Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Tell them so, and to show your appreciation for them, maybe arrange for them to have something really special to eat - something they don’t often get, and definitely don’t take for granted.

Richard Hadden is a leadership speaker, author, and consultant who helps organizations improve their business results by creating a great place to work. He and his co-author and business partner Bill Catlette, are the authors of the new book Contented Cows MOOve Faster, as well as the acclaimed business classic Contented Cows Give Better Milk. Learn more about them and their work at ContentedCows.com.