High Performance Company

new socks: the last post you ever need to read about Zappos

I ordered several pairs of running socks from Zappos last night and am pretty jazzed about it (it’s the little things that make a good life, right?). After I clicked the purchase button, it struck me – why are there any articles written about Zappos?

The internet is awash with articles and posts about the online shoe store, but why? Yes, they operate differently, but it’s not like it’s hard to figure why that difference works so well. Zappos makes it supereasy to purchase a huge variety of shoes, etc. at reasonable prices with zero risk that it won’t fit or you won’t like it, and deliver them quicker than should be possible. If anything does go wrong, they immediately bend over backwards to more than make it right. Their entire company – every process and system and policy – exists to enable a great customer experience and somehow the business world is surprised that Zappos has an enthusiastic (fanatical?) customer base lining up to give them money. Who knew that people might want to do business with a company that treats them well?

Are we in the business world truly that thick?

“But what about their culture?” some might ask. “They have a unique culture and are so successful, shouldn’t we try to figure out how to copy them? What about all their employees with blue hair coming to work in their pajamas? That’s weird isn’t it? Shouldn’t all us business and HR types be discussing how awesome/strange/wonderful/it-will-never-work that is? Shouldn’t we be desperately trying to figure out how to bring the Zappos culture and magic into our workplaces?”

As near as I can tell with my very low level of expertise (I once toured their HQ and I have bought some stuff from them), their unique culture and the unique results it creates is based on two things: 1) customer experience is everything; and 2) the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience (they don’t say it that way, they just live it). They commit to hiring great people who want to provide an amazing experience for customers and then create a work environment where those employees can and are expected to do just that. Create a great employee experience and the employees will create a great customer experience.

It’s an embarrassingly simple and devastatingly, disruptively effective approach. And, most businesses predictably ignore it. Puttnam’s Law tells us it’s better to fail doing what everyone else is doing than to succeed by doing different.

Sure, we could build a business around the customer and employee experience. Or, we could just keep on doing what we’ve been doing, keep getting the same results, and read some more articles about what Zappos.

 

Running Uphill Even When I’m Not

I often like to run through the neighborhoods around my house and try to get out several times a week. Well, “run” may be a strong word but it sounds better than “jog” or “who-are-you-kidding-it’s-a-fast-walk-at-best” so I’m sticking with it. Anyway, there is a long, steep hill early in my route. Naturally, I go slower up the hill. My stride shortens, it takes more effort, I breathe harder and faster, it hurts more. Naturally.

A person simply goes slower uphill and faster downhill. That’s just intuitive. But… That’s not how it worked. I discovered my pace slowed going up the hill and then stayed slow even when the road leveled and started going downhill. I would get used to running with a shorter stride and slower pace to compensate for the hill and then just keep that stride and pace even though it was considerably different than how I was running before the hill. The weird thing is that I would have never known it without looking at my watch – I would have sworn I was working hard and running at a great pace.

I’ve learned that I need to deliberately readjust my pace when I get to the top of the hill. It’s easy to do, but I have to make a conscious effort.

It made me wonder how often this happens at work. How often do we have to slow pace for a very legitimate reason but then don’t pick it back up once that reason has passed? How often do we start people out slowly because they are learning the job but then don’t ratchet the pace up as they gain skill? How often do we slow down and relax right after a big project and then slowed pace stays slow? From my experience, everyone believes they are a hard worker and may feel like they’re still putting in a great effort even when the road has turned downhill.

What’s the best work pace? Don’t know. Depends on the people and the situation. But I suspect that, like I discovered on my run, we get used to a pace and stay with it. We don’t naturally and intuitively adjust pace to the situation – we don’t automatically go faster just because it gets easier. I wonder if we don’t need to consciously and deliberately readjust each time the situation changes.

 

 

[Photo Credit: ~Oryctes~ via Compfight cc]

first day jitters

“Will I like it here?”

“Is this going to be a good year?”

“Will I like the person in charge?”

“I wonder what the people sitting around me are like?”

“Where will I put my stuff?”

“Where are the bathrooms?”

“Is lunch any good here?”

“I hope work will be interesting.”

“Did I wear the right clothes? I wonder what others are wearing?”

“How early is too early to show up? How late is too late?”

“How long will it take to get there?”

“I don’t want to be here.”

“Will I make any friends?”

“Should I have styled my hair different? My hair never looks right.”

“Which door am I supposed to go in?”

“Wonder what I should do first when I get there?”

“Is anyone else new here today?”

“Hope I don’t do anything that makes me look stupid.”

“Should I have brought anything else?”

“My stomach hurts.”

“I hope they like me.”

 

First day of school at 8 years old or first day of work at 56, it’s all the same. Insecurities, doubt, and “what if…?” questions loom large.  I wonder what the answers will be.

you kind of remind me of…

Matt Serra (not me either) [photo from sherdog.com]

Ben Kingsley (not me) [photo from wikipedia]

Yesterday, a woman told me I reminded her of Ben Kingsley. That’s kind of fun. A while back I was told I reminded someone of Matt Serra. That’s kind of fun too. But other than height and hairstyle – cropped or shaved – there’s not much connection or much in common. At best, I have Mr. Serra’s acting ability and Mr. Kingsley’s mixed martial arts skills (if only it were the other way around!).

I always find it interesting to hear which celebrities people are told they look like. The associations are always positive. I’ve never heard anyone say, “Hey, you remind me of that actor I hate. Dude can’t act and he’s supposed to be a real jerk.” But maybe the focus on celebrities we like has more to do with being polite and avoiding conflict than it does with having only positive bias. We tend to not voice our negative biases directly to the person. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist though.

Out in the real world, we are strongly affected by both positive and negative bias. There are people we like and those we dislike within seconds of meeting. Sometimes it’s obvious why, but usually it’s just a feeling. Generally, there are four big factors at play:

1) We humans like to divide the world into “us” and “them”;

2) We humans like people who are like “us” (or at least we give them serious benefit of the doubt);

3) We humans make assumptions based on past experiences with people like “them” (or at least people we think are similar to them); and

4) We humans like to believe we are fully, wholly, 100% rational and we don’t have these biases (other people do, sure, but not us).

In the silly extreme, these biases are causing you to hire me for acting roles. It’s making you think I’d excel in the caged octagon. You’re making decisions about me and the future of your company because I remind you of someone you like, someone who is good at those things.

The cosmic joke’s on all of us and it’s hurting results. It’s destroying creativity and innovation. It’s perpetuating the stagnation and silos. It’s keeping people in roles they aren’t good at and keeping others out of roles where they’d excel. It’s shutting down new ideas, improvements, and progress. It’s destroying the potential for productive conflict and driving away those who would do better. It’s creating a culture of sameness and mediocrity where everyone fits in and no one stands out.

And that’s not good enough. What’s the business case for ensuring diversity (of thought, perspective, experience, skill, ability, demographics, etc.)? What’s the need for rigorous selection systems and ongoing interviewing training? What’s the reason for continuously developing managers? Us vs them is the psychology of surviving.

We need the psychology of thriving.

What a 9 Year Old Can Teach Us About L&D

“SWEET! I wiped out! They should make pads for your butt!”

Five minutes into his first ride on his first skateboard and my son was bouncing up off the ground, getting his board out of the shrubbery, and jumping right back on.Skating There were no tentative “baby steps”, no hesitation. It was full force, hop on and go enthusiasm. That brief moment contained the most important aspect of successful training.

 

What is the most important aspect of successful training? Today, I’m guest blogging over at Performance I Create. Read the rest of this post here .

branding, HR, and the customer experience

Want to build your company’s brand? Give a close look at your HR department.

That’s not how we typically approach it, is it? There are a ton of articles on branding, but far too many that discuss it as though it’s a separate activity, as though it’s a shiny bit of chrome that gets bolted on to make the company look nice. Company leaders just decide how they want the company to be known by customers, then they create marketing to support that and it’s done, right? Um, no.

In reality, branding is deeply woven throughout the entire organization, despite our attempts to reduce branding to some eye catching advertisements. It’s a circular “chicken and egg” problem that has to be addressed as a whole and looks something like this:

Brand –> Values/Culture –> Hiring/Retention/Development –> Employee Experience –> Customer Experience –> Brand

 

Brand. The company decides what it wants to be known for and how it wants to be viewed by its customers. Highest quality, best value, best service, the choice of people in the know, whatever.

Values/Culture. Not the stupid mission statement nailed to the wall that no one can remember and everyone ignores. Not the list of safe values that shows up in the “About Us” section of the webpage but how things actually get down and the (unwritten) values the company uses to make decisions and set priorities. (Lest we forget: Enron’s posted values included “Integrity” and “Excellence” but those clearly weren’t the values underscoring their day-to-day operations.)

Hiring/Retention/Development. I cannot emphasize this enough: business gets done for, through, and by people. What the company stands for and how it operates is determined, supported, and reinforced by its people and the behaviors that are encouraged (and tolerated). The ideals written on the wall are irrelevant if they are not fully supported by who gets hired, who is allowed and encouraged to stay, and what they are taught through formal training AND daily interactions with managers and peers.

Employee Experience (EX). I’m not convinced we can create employee engagement or motivation – that’s one reason why who we hire is so important – but I’m very confident that we can utterly destroy it through the daily employee experience. Is the EX one of support, growth, and pride or terrible manager, toxic peers, inane policies, and a dehumanizing culture? Or, is it trapped in between and a daily dose of apathetic meh?

Customer Experience (CX). The customer experience determines how they think of your company. Your definition of the brand is meaningless next to the customer’s. Who determines the customer experience? It’s a combination of your culture (i.e., how things get done around your company) and your employees. It’s been said the customer experience will never exceed employee experienced (I like to think of it as: CX<EX). That makes sense. It’s ridiculous to think we can make our employees’ lives miserable and have them turn around and create a wonderfully fantastic experience for the customer.

Brand. Yep, all of this leads right back to brand. Not the one you want, but the one you actually have.

None of these operate in isolation; they all feed into each other. You can’t build the brand without linking it to your people and how you expect them to operate day in and day out. So how is you HR department supporting the brand?

Might be time to give it some thought.

are you struggling to treat everyone fairly?

Intriguing question isn’t it? If you’re a leader you probably struggle with being fair. Some people earn the benefit of the doubt, some don’t. Some people you just click with, some you struggle to make any connection at all. Some look to you as a mentor, some will loathe you just because you’re their boss. And then, try as you might, you have your own issues and challenges going on. Your own struggles with your job and your boss and your personal life. Like every other human you have your good days and bad days, your moments of clear thinking and irrationality. Leadership is very, very difficult.

Fortunately, I can help. You see a catalog crossed my desk the other day and right on the inside cover there is a blurb that reads: Are you struggling to treat everyone fairly? Learn how lapel pins can make every individual feel acknowledged and special…

Um, yeah. Lapel pins. Every individual. All sorts of scenarios spring to mind:

  • “I always thought my manager was a chauvinistic bigot who played favorites but then he gave me a lapel pin and I realized how much I’d misjudged him.”
  • “I’ve been working long hours lately. Coming in early and going home late. My family barely recognizes me anymore. The worst of it was that no one at work seemed to care. Or even notice. But then my boss gave me a lapel pin and all that hard work was worth it.”
  • “I used to be what HR folks call ‘actively disengaged’. I spent more time and effort figuring out how to avoid working that I would have if I’d actually worked. On my best days I was just going through the motions. Then I got a lapel pin. That was the day my life changed.”

That’s the dream, isn’t it? That all the challenges and burdens of leadership can be lifted just by buying some stuff out of a catalog. It’s not that easy though, is it? The issues can’t be solved with a purchase order or a credit card.

If only…

I’m not dismissing the importance of rewards and recognition. I think it’s vitally important and visible symbols have a place it all of it, but they aren’t the whole thing. The symbols are a means – a tool – but not an end. Trophies and trinkets can be a link in the process and a piece of the overall program, but cannot stand alone or replace sincere conversation.

Recognition will never be once size fits all and leadership doesn’t come from a catalog.

is learning about performance?

Sukh Pabial (@sukhpabial) over at Thinking About Learning (he writes good stuff – check him out) raised an important question the other day: Is learning about performance? As one who continually states that increasing performance is the only purpose of training, learning and development, etc. I liked his question. I say it so often and am so convinced of it that his question made me stop and think a bit about my own beliefs.

I do believe the immediate purpose of training is to either create additional skills or knowledge OR to help a person better use the skills and knowledge they already have. Why? Why take time away from the job to learn? Why spend the money, time, and energy? Why pour resources into learning? Because we expect the additional skills and knowledge will help people do a better job and get better results. Technical skills improve performance with tasks and soft skills improve performance with other humans (highly relevant for everyone who’s not a hermit). Even compliance training – safety, anti-harassment, regulations, etc. – aims to improve performance or at least prevent performance from dropping (death, dismemberment, lawsuits, or imprisonment all tend to have a negative effect on individual and company performance).

Put another way: if learning and development doesn’t increase performance through increased or better use of knowledge and skills, then what is the purpose?

When we develop learning events or provide learning resources we work hard to make the information as understandable, relevant, and real-world as possible. We design in the best ways for participants retain and integrate the ideas into their lives and jobs. Why? The more they retain and use, the more they can use on the job, and the better their performance. If knowledge retention and use didn’t lead to better on the job performance why would we spend time worrying about it? Deeper knowledge for the sake of deeper knowledge is nice but doesn’t help the individual excel in their job and doesn’t drive the company forward. I, like many, simply love to learn new things. Learning is a huge value for me and I could happily drain many a day on google, Wikipedia, and in the library. As an employee, my company cares most about the learning that might help me in my job (versus, say, mountain biking), BUT it has a huge interest in me being knowledgeable, competent, and continually improving in my role.

The good news is that I can help others improve their performance across a wide variety of jobs and even industries. I don’t know much about most jobs or industries, but unless I’m training technical skills, I don’t have to. I just have to know enough to be able to apply real world context. For example, with only slight changes, a class on conflict resolution could apply to a manager, customer services representative, sales person, negotiator, line worker, etc. It’s really hard to imagine a job where conflict resolution (or any important soft skill) wouldn’t improve performance – even if that person isn’t directly evaluated on conflict resolution.

It is the manager’s (and employee’s) job to evaluate performance – I can’t do that for them. But when they identify areas that need to be improved either because of low performance or to increase performance as a part of their career path I can help provide the resources and learning experiences that help them develop and use the necessary skills and knowledge. Just as I’m not involved in evaluating their on the job performance, I also can learn and implement it for them. The sole purpose of training and development is to increase performance but the employee and manager play a massive role in it.

I’ll take the discussion a step further. Not only do I deeply believe that the purpose of development is to improve performance (however that’s defined), but I believe development is a source of ongoing competitive advantage.

  • A company must have talent. It can choose to buy talent or develop talent or both. But it does need talent.
  • High performing people are required to create a high performing company. It’s hard to imagine any situation where we could create exceptional results far and above the competition using indifferent, unskilled people who lack the necessary knowledge.
  • We cannot improve a company’s performance without first improving individual performance. Sure, we can slash costs, buy new technology, acquire other companies, but those tend to be short term gains (measured very narrowly) or impossible to do without dealing with the messy human side of it (bringing us back to development).
  • We often struggle to measure the dollar benefit of development and spend much time discussing the ROI of training. Training is an easy cost to cut and is often the first to go when times get tough. Which is funny because I doubt any professional sports teams spend much time discussing the ROI of practice, training, and developing their players. Would a low performing team ever decide that the best way to improve their performance is to STOP coaching and improving their players? Put another way, we can easily measure the cost of training and tend to focus on that because it is difficult to measure the total benefits of development. The problem is we can’t measure the costs of NOT training. (Hat tip to Zig Ziglar for that thought.) And as the old saying goes: The only thing worse than training someone and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.

Is learning about performance? In my mind, absolutely. There are many, many side benefits to learning and development, but if we’re not helping people create the knowledge and skills they need to do better at their jobs and if we’re not helping the company perform better by helping individuals and teams perform better, what are we doing?

What thinks you?

ignoring the success stories

There’s two kinds of business success stories that everyone talks about and then learns nothing from.

The first is the upstart business that is just doing things disruptively different. Their organizational structure and processes go against the cookie cutter business school best practices. Companies like Valve with its completely flat org chart and BrewDog with their “Equity for Punks” customer ownership program come to mind. We all marvel at their ingenuity and then insist that it’ll never work anywhere else or dismiss it as being only viable for startups. We think that putting meaning or innovation ahead of the Wall Street Quarterly Numbers Game is somehow poor business.

The other is the upstart that hits it big: Apple, Amazon, Google, Zappos. We churn out the stories about their cultures and benefits and all the quirks of their leaders and then promptly focus on all the wrong lessons. Tire swings in the lobby won’t give you Google’s profit margins. Being weird for the sake of weird won’t give you Zappos’ customer retention. And wearing turtlenecks and screaming at people won’t give you Apple’s innovation and iconic status.

Steve Jobs’ gift wasn’t for leadership. His brilliance was in his unrelenting focus on design and the customer above all else. He thought long term and insisted on getting right all the details that no one else realized were details. I believe the single most important lesson we can take from Steve Jobs legacy is summed up in a quote from him:

“If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making really great products, then the profit will follow.”

This could be re-written for Zappos, just replace “product” with “customer service”. Or for any of the businesses, big or small, that succeed doing things disruptively different.

The magic “different” is almost always a relentless priority focus on creating meaningful products or services that customers value, love, and rally behind. Profits are important but seen more as a way to keep the doors open and create better products and services versus the end all be all. Profits are a means, not an end.

We admire the innovation, the ingenuity, and – yes – their profitability and then we all go back to focusing on profits over products, dollars over meaning, creating unhealthy dysfunction and disorder.

Consider it this way. Elite athletes are thin, skinny even, but not because they want to look like runway models. Athletes aren’t lean out of fashion or vanity; they are lean out of necessity. Extra weight on an athlete isn’t unattractive, it’s a crucial few extra hundredths of a second, it’s reduced performance, it’s finishing second. Being lean is the byproduct of focusing relentlessly on fitness and performance; it’s the means, not the end.

But what if we, in our emulation of athletes, got it backwards? What if we just focused on being thin first and foremost and slashed our calorie intake to survival levels? If an athlete were to focus on being supermodel thin, their performance would drop immediately and drastically. They wouldn’t have the necessary muscle to perform and the muscles they did have wouldn’t be receiving enough fuel to excel or even train and develop.

Now, let’s look back at companies. We want companies to perform at the highest level, but so often we focus on profits as the end rather than the byproduct of performance. It’s when we get those confused that the problems start.

We start cutting expenses to the bone and don’t invest in the things we need to be profitable in the future. No athlete in the world would stop training because they were worried that the muscle they were adding would hurt performance. Yet, one of the first things cut in organizations is learning and development. When performance is down, we eliminate one resource that helps improve performance (whaaaa?). The next to go is staff – those people who create, deliver, and support the products and service the customer pays for). So we end up with fewer people who are less skilled and somehow consider that better than having more people who are more skilled. (Please show me one successful sports team that’s run this way. Just one.)

Or we start binging and purging with hiring and layoffs. We focus on the image in the mirror (or in the spreadsheets) instead of how fit and healthy we are. We get corporate liposuction by selling off assets or radically cutting costs, making the company look good temporarily but without addressing the long-term decisions and habits that made the company overweight or underperforming in the first place.

We start asking, “What costs can we cut?” instead of “What resources should we invest more in?” We ask, “What can we offer that we can charge the customer more for?” instead of “What would our customers really value?” We ask, “How can we improve our numbers this quarter?” instead of “What do we need to do to be a thriving company ten years from now?”

Company performance and meaning aren’t mutually exclusive. Done right, profits help us create even more meaning, leading to more profits. Done wrong, a singular focus on profits kills meaning and, ironically, hurts long-term performance.

It’s fascinating how we have examples of the philosophies and attitudes that help create standout companies. We study them, give them a hero’s status, and then quietly return to doing what everyone else is doing.

What thinks you?