I was talking to a sales friend of mine over the weekend, and a customer call came in on his personal cell phone. Earlier that morning, a lady had called to ask the store hours, and by the time she got to the store an hour before its posted closing time, it was empty and locked. It seems the store had closed early that day and she’d driven over an hour to visit it. My friend had wanted to do the right thing so he told her he would look into the situation with the team working that day and call her back. He called the owner, and the owner was willing to leave a set of keys so that he could go help the customer. But he didn’t want to. When I asked him if he planned to do the right thing for the customer who needed him, he asked, “Why should I go in when it was someone else’s day to work, and I worked for free the entire weekend before? Why should I give extra time on my day off when they cut my commissions when I was successful in sales? Why should I give one more thing than the minimum?”
The conversation made me sad because I had always thought of that person having a lot of professional integrity, but I also can understand his point of view. If we, as leaders, continually ask more and more from our teams without giving anything back, and in fact go so far as to DE-motivate them by taking advantage of them, how soon before they take it out on our customers? How soon before they “do the minimum” to get the job done but fall short of making memories?
It reminded me of a meme I saw online last week that talked about treating your people right, and in turn, they’ll treat your customers right. I really think it all comes down to values and being uncompromising in your pursuit of living by them.
If you have a core value of fun, do you have fun with your customers AND your teams? Do you smile at them? Do you engage with them? Do you care? If the answer is no, then how aligned are you with that value?
If you have a core value of “doing the right thing” but when a team member comes to you for help, you shout at them, or get angry that they’ve come to you, would you want them to do that with your guests? Have you ever heard the phrase: “garbage in, garbage out?” It’s easy to say how “guest-centric” we are, but we can’t forget our internal guests, our teammates. Without demonstrating and sharing in the values of our organization, I believe we’re at risk of practicing something different than what we’re preaching. And we all know how well that works out.
In the end, the job still needs to get done, and we have to do the right things for our businesses, of course. And sometimes that means doing things we don’t want to do. But I think that you’ll have a bigger pool of people willing to do those tasks, and more often (and with less resentment) if we’re building them up along the way.
If you’re wondering how my friend’s situation ended, you’re not alone. I just had to know, so I called him back. Turns out, he went ahead and met the customer at his store, and he made her day. My faith in humanity was restored. Whew! Will your team do the same?
