Transform Culture and Brand into World-Class Excellence
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State regulations require shoes and shirt when you enter a public environment such as a restaurant. To that end a sign is usually found toward the front of the store, insisting on such compliance. Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches chooses to use humor to get people to do what is required. It aligns well with their brand and culture which has humorous signs throughout its decor.
Go back to a hotel or public pool you enjoyed as a kid. Nearby was a sign probably listing at least a dozen rules on them. Did you pay attention to it? Probably not. And you were surprised when the lifeguard then blew the whistle at you. Much better to get people’s attention in a positive way, than to create some rote sign and expect compliance by it merely being shown.
Providing great customer service is often impeded by the reality that sometimes we have to ask people to do things they would rather not do. The question is how do you create compliance other than using stiff enforcement tactic. I think humor or encouragement is often a better way to guarantee compliance, rather than stating signs and posting guards.
Celebrating the same birthday as mine, McDonald’s Hamburger University turned 50 this year. So before 2011 is over, I wanted to acknowledge this major corporate university which has trained some 80,000 restaurant managers, mid-managers and owner/operators over the years.
Courses are taught in some 28 languages. And another university was established in China, where according to an article earlier this year in Bloomberg, it is said that getting into Harvard is easier than getting into McDonald’s University.
This last Fall World Class Benchmarking brought participants from SHRM’s Strategy Conference to McDonald’s University for a tour. Participants from every corner of the HR sector attended and we’re wowed by the experience. They also had a chance to speak to McDonald’s Chief Human Resource Officer Richard Floersch about strategic steps they have taken over the last 10 years to maintain their leadership in the fast food industry. As he puts it “We took our eyes off the fries.” In its place came a strategic focus on building the leadership necessary to taking McDonald’s into the future.
He’s further cited in Talent Management Magazine this month, discussing the challenge of uniting the business with the needed talent. He notes”There’s a lot of orchestration that goes into this but you’ve got to connect against the business strategy. You’ve got to match the culture and the values so they feel like it makes sense for McDonald’s, and then you’ve got to have leadership that holds people accountable. When you do that it starts to cascade throughout the organization.
Such ideas stem from founder Ray Kroc who once said, “If we are going to go anywhere, we’ve got to have talent. And I’m going to put my money in talent.” Hooray to McDonald’s for making the investment. And congratulations to Hamburger University for being in the center of that strategy.
Tom Cruise’s new movie, Mission Impossible is out this weekend. It’s Brad Bird’s first live action movie, having created before both of Pixar’s highly acclaimed films, Incredibles, and Ratatouille. One of my favorite quotes on employee morale comes from Brad:
“In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, forever $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.”
I completely agree–companies should pay much more attention to morale–and engaging their employees. The reviews are very positive for this film. Best of luck to Brad Bird’s team. And best of luck to all of us, who are trying to get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of employee morale.
While at Chick-Fil-A the other day I caught sight of a worker who had taken left over break to the back of the restaurant to feed the birds and ducks.
While Chick-Fil-A often gets involved with many good causes, I don’t know that feeding the birds is listed any where in their annual philanthropic report. Nor do I think there is a handbook or a standard operating procedure that says old bread must be handed out to the birds. Still, someone took leadership to prudently use what was left over and to share it with nature.
Leadership at a very personalized level. By someone who simply cares.
Nice.
After spending 60 years with his family’s company–40 of those as CEO, Bill Marriott announced that he is stepping down at 80. The Marriott company is legendary in the hotel business. But few people know the relationship between the two and its influence on Disney. Click here to read how Marriott was not only a critical influence on Disney, but nearly purchased the entire company.
 Example of a Con-way Star Award for employees demonstrating their values. It’s hardly imaginable that a large trucking company like Con-way would really bother with promoting values. You would think that it was all about efficiency and the bottom line. But they have gone to great lengths over the years to establish a culture that fosters excellence. Their values are:
- Safety
- Integrity
- Commitment
- Excellence
As such, they have rolled this out as their constitution to all of their employees. More importantly, they have established management tools, local task forces, celebrations, and reward/recognition programs. To that effort I say, “Keep on Truckin’!”
 A statement like "Quality you can taste" can be really gimmicky--unless you actually deliver to that promise! I had visited In-and-Out Burger several times over the years–especially on trips to California. But I had always gone through the drive-in. Therefore, there was not much to judge of the experience other than product and price–which was always great.
This summer I was in Utah and took my family inside an In-and-Out Burger restaurant for the first time. I wasn’t expecting much. But I was fairly blown away by the experience.
First, lots of employees, and working hard. While the counter wasn’t that busy, the drive-in was, and everyone had a job to do and was very focused. Don’t say you can’t get a Millennial to work hard. That’s not what you find at In-and-Out Burger.
Secondly, it was very fresh food. Yes, I had to wait a few minutes for it to be served, but the time was minimal. What I didn’t know was that there are no freezers, microwaves, or heat lamps at an In-N-Out burger.
Third, wildly spotless. I could look from the counter through the entire kitchen of the operation. There was not a stray fry to be found at all. If you’ve seen a busy kitchen else where, you know what I mean when I say that it can be quite ugly. Here it was spotless.
But what was over the top, was a moment when an employee started wiping down booster seats for the kids. When’s the last time anyone has ever done that? And like everyone else I saw working.
Some 250 stores have opened–not many–but they are expanding eastward from California. This summer restaurants opened in Texas. It may be a while before we see one out here in Florida–but I’ll be in line when they do. It’s easy to be come one of their advocates, and their devoted patrons are no less than those who love Disney, or Apple, or Harley.
We took this picture when I was with The Disney Institute a number of years ago. Everything in the box actually belongs to my family, including the picture of my grandmother as a small child, and a quilt made by my other grandmother.
We took the picture as part of a Disney Institute program entitled Disney’s Approach to Quality Service for Healthcare Professionals. The story is told that a woman came to collect the belongings of her mother who had passed away and who had been in a rest home for a number of years. The woman had come to build relationships and get to know the staff at the rest home. In her mind, they had become like family. But when she went to retrieve the belongings, she found them waiting for her thrown in a cardboard box. The attention to handling those belongings was jarring to the woman, and she commented to the staff member on duty how upsetting it was to her to see those belongings carelessly thrown into a cardboard box.
The staff learned a huge lesson and subsequently created a different process for handling the belongings of the deceased in a way that it would be almost more of a gift when the family members came to pick them up. It’s a little way of showing how you care not just for the patient, but for all of your customers.
However, here’s the twist. Where did this bad habit originate. Truth be told, employees treat customers the same way we treat them. And how do we usually handle an employee when his employment has been terminated?
With a cardboard box.
 Cirque du Soleil at Downtown Disney, Walt Disney World I have to admit, I wasn’t too much of a fan of Cirque du Soleil until I read The Spark: Igniting the Creative Fire That Lives Within Us All, created by Lyn Heward and written by John U. Bacon. The book, short and readable as is, was amazing in its ability to shape whole new paradigms about how we work and live.
One of the more interesting insights was that many of the performers came from athletic/sports careers such as gymnastics. Their world for many years was about competition, about being the best. The challenge is to change that and create an artistic, but collaborative experience where they all come together.
One example of this was a team of artists practicing a bungee ballet. To the narrator in the story, just seeing them fall to within ten feet of the floor then rocket back upward toward the ceiling would create a “wow”. But the coach was much less impressed.
“Alex, this is not a solo act!” he yelled out to one of them. “We only have one month left-this will not do! You must pay attention to your partners. You must sense the rhythm, you must feel it and respond to it! Only then can you express yourself to the audience…Now let’s try again.”
That’s coaching we all deserve to have. We should all be more aware, more in sync, more in response to those we work with daily. Imagine how our customers would respond if we did!
 Lead With Your Customer in Chinese We’re very pleased that ASTD Press has made available our book, Lead With Your Customer, in Chinese. It’s one further step we want to take to make our products and services available to all of our international clients, in this case, those in the Asian market. It’s available to order on Amazon.
We’ve had a great year meeting and working with so many internationally. Last week we provided programming to those from Sweden. A few weeks ago we had a great group we hosted at Orlando’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel from Holland. Our ASTD program earlier this year had more folks visiting us internationally than from the United States. It’s wonderful, and we really hope that our thought leadership can make a difference elsewhere.
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