If you and your team are not in pursuit of the perfect customer experience, why not? Finding the simplest non-arguable (and arguably unattainable) goal for your company may be the most powerful thing you can do to increase accountability and create an ethical, humane and exciting team culture. It may also be the most important thing you can do to positively affect your bottom line.
Transcript:
Stephen Sendar: I really appreciate that you connected in the accountability. And in a certain way, no system frees everyone if accountability isn’t commonly agreed. This is the Will Schutz work, in some way.
Accountability for me that works is accountability to excellence. And I go back to the first time I really experienced that was when I went to work in this great restaurant in Pennsylvania. They just expected that the goal was perfection for the guest, and everything was directed at the guest. And it was everybody’s job to make sure. There was nobody whose job it was to walk past the table and go get somebody to go fix it. It was my job to fix it as soon as I saw it, and I was freed to. I was given the authority to do so. No matter what job I had in a restaurant, whether I was the dishwasher, the bus boy, the chef, the owner. The owner did the same thing.
And so the commitment to excellence, was defined by accountability and a standard for how everything was done. You put the coffee cup down with the little handle piece in exactly the same place. The table was set exactly the same way. Plates were put down in exactly the same way. Everybody poured wine in exactly the same way, so that there was no missing it. There was only the support of each team member helping every other team member to be perfectly excellent, every time. So that was my first experience.
And I go back to Rueben (Reuben Mark of Colgate Palmolive). The other thing he said to me that day, and he said to me often when I saw him, was, “We have a simple, singular goal or vision for our company, and it’s this simple: ‘Excellence in everything’.” And it was nothing else. It was no more complicated than that. And so if those measures of accountability are external, people can grow to them more easily than if we’re deciding if we like you or not. If it becomes a personal evaluation in a certain way, the measurement of competence at the job, it makes it very, very difficult, and that goes back to your micromanagement. It’s also that cult of personality. Someone could be doing a great job, but because their personality doesn’t fit, we don’t give them the reward to be themselves. That is not a system that is creating self-awareness as a value around which to build a business.