An exercise often done in strategic planning is SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
It’s common when we do this exercise for most businesses to include people or their culture for strengths.
Because culture and people are not easily measured, companies choose these as their strengths.
In most instances, however, it’s not easy to find people and a culture that works seamlessly together to deliver uncommon service.
Most often, the service model isn’t right; the company is trying to be good at everything.
Far too frequently, the culture isn’t right.
That’s why achieving Service Excellence is Design X Culture.
Southwest Airlines Culture
It may surprise you to know Southwest has a greater number of unionized employees than any other airline, yet it also has better employee relations than any other airline.
Unions love Southwest because, unlike other airlines, it has never had a layoff.
For Southwest whatever needs doing, they simply do it, without having to locate, for instance, a qualified master electrician to screw in a light bulb. This chain of interlocking trade-offs—expansion limits to preserve job stability in return for flexibility in job descriptions—all leads directly to faster turnaround, the key to Southwest’s success.
The Building Blocks of Culture
A great service organization needs to get both right, the service design and the culture that animates it.
Both must be pointing in the same direction; toward the outputs your business identifies as critical to your organization’s success.
When business owners fail to believe in the value of culture, it can be traced to their failure to follow the three distinct patterns in an organization's relationship to culture, Frances Frei and Ann Morris identify in Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business.
Clarity: knowing exactly what kind of a culture you want to build, and how this culture is critical to achieving your most important performance objectives. Uncommon Services example (Tony Hsieh and Zappos) is a bit outdated, yet the example of their hiring practices, shared in this 2014 blog, Zappos Employees Live the Brand – Core Values – LV Growth Summit, brings life to how passionate the company was about selecting the right employees to live their values. Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit–And You Should Too from 2008 further clarifies their hiring practices.
Signaling: relentlessly communicating the organization’s core values, particularly in moments when people are likely to be most receptive to these messages, such as during recruiting and orientation. David Neeleman, when he started JetBlue famously flew as a crew member on his airline once a month. He put on an apron to serve coffee. Every time he did this, he electrified passengers on the flight where he was serving, but he also sent a buzz throughout the entire organization. One of my customers gives Core Value awards at their weekly meetings. Most often these are driven by the leadership team, however, anyone in the organization can identify and give an award (which entitles the recipient to a modest gift card) to anyone they recognize to living their Core Values
Consistency: reinforcing the culture at every turn and rooting out cultural violations, that is, misalignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations. CEO Glenn Forbes states, “If you’ve just communicated a value but you haven’t driven it into the operations, into the policy, into the decision making, into the allocation of resources, and ultimately into the culture of the organization, then it’s just words.” At the Mayo Clinic, the staff has a well-worn phrase that’s tossed out whenever the threat of a cultural break creeps into a decision: “Is this right for the patients or not?”
To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems to schedule a free exploratory meeting.
Turn your team into a growth organization.
Growth demands Strategic Discipline.
Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact on the world.
A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms. Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.
Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.
Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:
DECISION |
RESULT/OUTCOME |
PEOPLE |
|
STRATEGY |
|
EXECUTION |
|
CASH |
Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $500M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.
NEXT BLOG – How to Change Your Organizations Behavior