Jody Holland (00:10.968)
Hey everybody, Jodie Holland and Megan Slaughter here. We've got a special edition. We've been talking a lot about culture in our business and with our clients. And so we wanted to do an episode specifically on how do you create the kind of culture that is felt, not just talked about. So we're going to get into this. Megan, I'm going let you kind of do a quick introduction here. Talk a little bit about that variance between.
What people say their culture is and what people experience as the culture.
Meghan Slaughter (00:42.863)
I think the key here is that culture is a set of repeated behaviors and values that are demonstrated within an organization. It's not just a poster on the wall, it's not a buzzword that you see on social media. Culture is actually experienced. And I think that every individual employee contributes to what the culture of the organization actually is. So you can't just fix it with one person and expect the rest of the organization to fall in line.
You have to center your team around this idea of what are our critical actions, what do we value the most? How are we demonstrating that internally and externally? Because I do believe that culture is seen and felt by the customers and in your branding. So it's not just what the employees experience, but it's how you're perceived.
By the entire world. And so that's why I think culture is so critically important. And you have to be very intentional about what you're creating within your organization. Because culture is going to happen either way, whether it's by intention or by accident. So you would rather get ahead of it and center your values around what matters most to you and then demonstrate those in your behaviors.
Jody Holland (02:02.369)
So lot of times what I see is companies will go to these retreats and they'll have a great two or three days and they'll, you know, celebrate how amazing they are and they'll talk about their vision and their values and their culture, and then they'll go do something totally opposite. And Wells Fargo is probably a good example of that getting reamed by Congress for what they did and find, you know, don't know, 183 million or some ridiculous amount.
Their stated vision was we start with what the customer needs, not with what we want to sell them. So what they were saying is our motto is help customers succeed financially. What they did is they incentivized opening up opening up fake accounts and pushing products on people where they didn't need the products. One of the things that Congress revealed is that these fake accounts, they then proceeded to charge them fees on an account that they didn't agree to.
And when the account got overdrawn because they didn't know they had an account, they charged them more fees. It was like $50 million in fees on stuff that nobody agreed to. So when the employees opened millions of unauthorized accounts because of the intense sales pressure, the behavior of management did not match the statement of management. You know, we start with what the customer needs, not with what we want to sell them. However,
Go sell them stuff or you will die. You know, whatever it was that they said. And the CEO, his defense in front of Congress says, Well, I never specifically said to open up fake accounts. If you show me the reward, I'll show you the culture. You have to think about what we're incentivizing and what we're what we're pushing on people. Enron is probably the most famous, absolutely horrific example.
And their stated values were rice, R-I-C-E, respect, integrity, communication, excellence. But their action was let's hide debt, let's steal money, let's protect one another, let's force our employees into buying our stock instead of any other stock. And then when it all goes belly up, Ken Lay is like, not my fault. Look, we did the best that we could. But I think your point of
Jody Holland (04:21.708)
Making that alignment, the fastest way to destroy the public's trust in your organization is to say this, do that, and incentivize the other. There's no alignment between what you state, how you act, and the outcomes that you achieve. Because as a as a customer, I'm going to tell you, I want to feel valued.
And if Wells Fargo actually started with what the customer needed and not what they wanted to sell them, I might bank at Wells Fargo. But I don't bank at Wells Fargo. And I would never bank at Wells Fargo because once the trust is gone, the trust is gone. Now they may have gotten it back in in place, but I know what they pushed. So
Meghan Slaughter (05:08.194)
Exactly. And to your point, what you recognize, you reinforce. So if they were rewarding people for creating new accounts and profiting off of that, then they were saying that it's okay to do that, even if it's a little bit shady, because we're making more money and we're benefiting as a culture. And so you need to be very intentional about that. And then also on the customer side, we know what we expect as customers.
But we don't always meet those expectations as the employee and serving our customers. And I think that's critically important to be able to put that into perspective and realize what I would want in this situation and how would I want to be treated? And you shift your mindset, and then that allows you to take care of the customer in a better manner. And I was thinking about some of my past experiences with organizations and
I went into this position and I had some of my coworkers telling me tips on how to avoid customer interactions. And it was avoid eye contact at all costs, walk with purpose, be really fast, just zoom on past them, look like you're busy. And at first I was like, you know, that's really helpful because we genuinely are really busy and we have a lot to do. But then I took a second to think, part of my job
Jody Holland (06:16.593)
my gosh.
Meghan Slaughter (06:36.812)
is taking care of the customer. So I should never be upset when a customer asks me for help because how would that make me feel as the customer if I felt like the employee was annoyed by me asking them where something was in the store or how to get somewhere or anything of the sort. So I shifted my mindset and I realized I actually really enjoy interacting with customers and you just have to be open to that conversation. And that
is very intentional by the employees. Now I do want to clarify that our managers encouraged us to be very friendly with the customers. So that was not because of management by any means. That was because employees felt annoyed by having to do their jobs. But we started talking about that in our meetings as a department and as an organization and we talked about why it was important to take care of our customers.
And I also want to say here that part of creating a good customer experience is taking care of your employees first. Because in my opinion, your customer is never going to be happier than your employee. So if you take care of your employee, they will take care of the customer. It's a natural progression.
Jody Holland (07:43.982)
Yeah.
Jody Holland (07:55.427)
So think about this. Zappos, which is one of the coolest companies, and Tony Shea, who was building Zappos, their core value was deliver wow, like a feeling experience through service. And initially, one of the things that he noticed when I read the story about his Zappos journey delivering happiness, he was describing that they had a metric for how many calls people were taking, because it's very call center-based. You know, you'd call in, you'd order some shoes.
They would send you the shoes and then they got into clothes and other things and they were measuring how many people are you taking care of, that kind of stuff. And he goes, We're literally violating what we said we wanted. So as a founder, he realized that the metric itself was causing mismeasurement. They were not measuring the right thing. Show me what's incentivized and I'll show you what your culture is. That was kind of what he came to the conclusion of. So he switched up the metric.
And he said, I just want you at the end of every call to rate how engaged do you think the customer was with you? And they started celebrating when customers had amazing conversations with their customer service folks. The other thing they noticed is that when they were restrictive in how people organized and decorated their area, you can have two things that are personal in your area, in your cubicle or whatever. People weren't as happy. So
If you ever toured Zappos in Vegas, which is an amazing tour, by the way, you might see My Little Pony next to Goth, next to, you know, Proverbs 31 Woman, next to like so every cubicle was decked out for who the person was. They found that celebrating engagement, celebrating the conversation, and celebrating the individuality of the person brought out the best in them.
Meghan Slaughter (09:30.811)
Mm-hmm.
Jody Holland (09:49.731)
They started incentivizing loving your customer. If deliver wow through service is what we're doing, then we have to incentivize and celebrate wow, not how many calls can you make, blah, blah, blah. Zappos grew at such a massive pace because they went culture, then performance. But culture is performance. And that's where I think a lot of people miss it, is they go.
you know, it'd be great to be somebody like Google where you can you can have napping pods and you can have restaurants on site and you have all this stuff. And like I don't think you realize Google was so driven by organizing everything that they wanted to create an atmosphere where people didn't feel like they needed to leave in order to go get something to eat or take a quick nap. They could just stay there and then get right back to work. And they also
kind of democratize success, it it didn't matter who fixed the problem. They were really direct and and really intense on we will organize everything. They should not have won the browser game or the search game. They were less funded, less experienced, but their people were so invested in the success of the organization, they couldn't imagine backing down. So those are a couple of examples that I think of of strong cultures
also a leadership lesson that was interesting for Tony Shea is he said, take your time on hiring, be really intentional. He screened people, he assessed them, he did multiple interviews, and he did something I've never seen anybody else do. He offered them two grand to not take the job. They could get all the way to the end. This is our favorite ones who we want. Say, look, it's been a long process. I'm gonna give you two options here.
You can either go to work for us, but we won't you take twenty four hours and think about it, or we'll give you a check for two grand and you can go do something else. Can you imagine offering two grand before somebody goes to work for you?
Meghan Slaughter (11:51.546)
Well.
Meghan Slaughter (11:56.217)
Not really, no.
Jody Holland (11:57.443)
That blows my mind. So strong cultures hire slowly, they onboard intentionally, and they protect their standards relentlessly. They do not allow, you know, culture creep where the negative culture gets creeps in there and starts destroying stuff. They also vehemently protect their organization against bad actors. People that will violate their culture, they get rid of them. So
I look at it and I go, I don't think this is our mission statement. I think when we look at this alignment, I think culture is our action statement. And like what you were saying, those critical actions that people take will determine the experience that they have. And I I believe, this is me, it starts with the feeling that you want your customer to have, your customer or your client. How do you want them to feel as they have an experience with you? Then you think.
How do my people need to feel in order to deliver that feeling experience to the customer? Then you think, how do I as a leader have to develop myself in order to do that? And I'm going back and rereading High Output Management right now by Andy Grove. He was the founder of Intel, but he was also one of the key people that left Fairchild Semiconductor because of their bad culture.
Had Fairchild had a better culture, there would be no intel. I don't I don't think Andy would have ever left. He was just a phenomenal producer, but he and a bunch of others just got sick of the way they were being treated at Fairchild. And so, like 13 of them quit and went and did their own thing. We got some of the most successful businesses that you can imagine in Silicon Valley. And because they wanted to move to
Silicone semiconductors, which was one of the ideas that Fairchild squashed. That's how Silicone Valley was actually started. So there's some benefits to some bad cultures. Like the bad culture will fail in an epic style and spawn a bunch of really great people going and doing it right after that. The downside is they will fail in an epic style. And and the part that I think gets so messed up is businesses forget.
Jody Holland (14:19.948)
What they're in the business to do. You are in the business to serve the customer and solve an important problem for the customer. Secondary, you are in the business of creating opportunities for your employees to go serve the customer and solve that problem. That's it. Money is a byproduct, but it is not the goal. And that's to me, that's where it gets messed up. And that's where in
Meghan Slaughter (14:38.033)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jody Holland (14:48.172)
book Good Business, where Chick sent me high describes 100% of companies that put money as the primary objective that they are incentivizing will end up unethical.
A hundred percent. And I'm like, cool. You got to keep it in order. So if you were giving advice to people on, like, let's take, we work with a lot of banks. Let's go with banking. What do you think that a banking customer wants to feel or experience when they go to the bank to borrow money for a home? They're they're buying their first home. You have your first home, buying your first home.
What do you want to feel when you go to the bank?
Meghan Slaughter (15:31.719)
First, you want to feel welcomed. You don't want to feel awkward because it's already something that there's a lot of nerves behind when you're dealing with money or asking for money or spending a lot of money. So you want to feel welcome when you walk in and you want to feel comfortable and heard as you're talking to the employee. So whether it's a frontline teller or a manager, you want to feel valued in that interaction. And so
There are a lot of things that you can do as the employee to welcome the person as they come in. A simple hello can go a long way. And that's something that we talked about a lot in one of my previous roles. Every customer who enters the room, you say hello to them. You greet them. You don't even have to ask them how they are, but that helps a lot too. Just saying, hi, welcome in. How can I help you? Something like that.
So just be very intentional with your interactions. Make eye contact with them. If you're looking at other things as they're walking up and you're writing something down and you're saying, just give me a minute. I'm I need to do this. Rather than saying, I'll be right with you. I just need to finish this up and then I can give you my full attention. Be present in that interaction and friendly and
Jody Holland (16:35.309)
I think that's
Meghan Slaughter (16:55.596)
Ask them how you can help them because you are there to serve them. They are not just there to make you money.
Jody Holland (17:02.572)
Right. So value the customer. I think that is going to be absolute. So if you value the customer, you will greet them, you will make them feel welcome, and you'll do that. Go back to the action, tying it in, making eye contact, saying hello, asking how you can help. So good, good morning. You know, glad you're coming to ABC Bank. How can we help you? And you go, Well, we're we wanted to talk to somebody about getting a loan.
fantastic. Do you have an appointment or do you want me to get you with somebody? I didn't know I needed an appointment. That's okay. Let me just see who's available and I will be right back. And you might, this is me. I would go, do you guys want a cup of coffee or water while you wait? The moment you give something to somebody else, it's like you're anticipating a need that they've not stated. Let's say you're nervous, you're buying your first home.
They don't know yet that it's your first home. They just know you want to talk to somebody about borrowing money for a house. You're probably gonna get some dry mouth because you're nervous. Coffee or water or whatever it is that you have to offer will help. Or if you have a customer fridge, which I think is a great idea, you you go, Hey, we've got some waters and some sodas right over there and some coffee. I can get it for you, or you're welcome to help yourself. Most people will go, it's okay, I'll I'll help myself. So great. I'll go see if I can get you with somebody.
Meghan Slaughter (18:06.447)
Yeah.
Jody Holland (18:25.986)
The anticipation of their needs, I think, goes a long way. And then go back to what you said about the eye contact and being present. If you are listening to a person, you're with the person. And you will look like you're with the person. If you are not listening to the person, you will not look at the person and you'll be like, ugh. So think pet peeves. One of my biggest pet peeves is what you just described with the give me just a second, I gotta finish this.
I've been flying the last week. I I did a round trip to another state. And when you're in the airport, I don't think they care 99% of the time at any of the food places. As you walk up and they go, What do you want? Like, food. That's what I want. I came to a food place, so clearly I want food. Could you anticipate that I want food? Instead,
if it were me, I would be teaching great customer service at the airport because you'd be so packed, could you be the only restaurant delivering great customer service? It seems like they go out of their way to hire people that are really annoyed that humanity exists in almost every restaurant in an airport. even like I like Chick-fil-A, but even the Chick-fil-A is not the level of service in an airport that you would experience in a regular Chick-fil-A. So if they they did what you said, make eye contact, you know, hey.
Let's say it's Firehouse Subs. That's not where I ate, but hey, welcome to Firehouse Subs. What's your favorite sub? Something like that makes them think. And I think when you're trying to listen to a person, if you can ask an odd question, it stimulates a conversation. I used to, when I worked for JC Pennies in high school and college, I would say, Hey, welcome to JC Penny's. Have you ever shopped here before? Well, at that point in the 1980s.
Something like 91% of middle income moms shopped every week at JCPenney's. That is a lot of middle income moms going to one specific store and they loved deals. Here's where Ron Johnson screwed up when he took over. If you're not anticipating the needs of your customer, you're thinking everybody should be just like you. In true caring style, which
Jody Holland (20:49.538)
Ron was actually pretty good dude and very successful at Apple and Target. But he goes, I don't think our pricing is very transparent. Everything is on sale. Well, if everything's on sale, just lower the price. Excuse me. Thanks. So he just lowered the price, and everything was a price, and there were no sales and no coupons. Well, what do middle income moms like?
Meghan Slaughter (21:15.984)
Good deal.
Jody Holland (21:16.81)
A good deal. That's why Target gets such good deals with their, you know, Target red and circle days. And that's why right now, as we're recording this, it's during prime days. People love a good deal. That is anticipating the customer's needs. If we're listening and we're learning from the customer, then we're gonna provide the experience that they want.
That's not what Ron did. So I don't think that he was being intentionally bad as a leader, but I think that his lack of understanding of the customer and his unwillingness to listen to his own people pushed it over the edge and basically destroyed ninety-six percent of the value of JC Penny's in the 17 months he was there before he got fired. That is a very quick descent into almost oblivion because of one person.
So bad service, bad culture, like in his mind, he came out of a Steve Jobs culture, which was, you will do as I say. And he tried to take that into JC Penney's, and that was not the culture of JC Penney's. The board made a bad hire. I blame the board for that, that they should have thought, how do we, like third level of alignment, align the leader with the culture we have and we want to keep.
Meghan Slaughter (22:27.248)
Yeah.
Jody Holland (22:40.142)
I mean, there were over 13 billion in market valuation at the time that Ron Johnson was hired. He destroyed that. They're still not back. Like they're still limping along. I think they're back to like two point five billion in valuation, but he took them down to two hundred and sixty seven million. Can you imagine destroying a company that fast under a year and a half? I that might be a record. I don't know.
Meghan Slaughter (23:04.174)
That's a huge gap. And I do think that culture is collaborative. So when you have somebody come in and take over and they just tell you this is how it's going to be, you're not going to get the buy-in from your people. But also you're not taking the time to understand that your frontline employees know a whole lot more about the customer than a top level level executive does. So that's why you want to have this conversation.
And talk to your employees, ask them questions, what matters to you, what matters to our customer, and then you map out those critical actions based on what you learn in that conversation. You're not just going to slap a poster on the wall because that's not effective for so many reasons. one of them being people don't read things in front of them. I can't tell you how many times.
Jody Holland (23:53.164)
Yeah.
Meghan Slaughter (24:00.045)
I changed a poster inside one of our classrooms to see if anybody noticed in my class in college. Nobody ever noticed that it was different. We were in that room every single day. So yeah, a couple of words are not going to change your culture. You actually have to experience it and you have to get the buy-in from each and every one of your employees. And part of how you do that is by listening to them. Let them play into their strengths.
Let them contribute to the process and then be intentional about what you do, when you do it, and how you do it.
Jody Holland (24:37.602)
So think about the contributing to the process. That's kind of like using ownership as a tool for success. So if you give people the authority to act like an owner, they can make a huge impact. And to your example, go back to the retail place that you were in management. If you are taking the time to take the customer to the part of the store where they're trying to find the thing that they're trying to find, you have a customer that feels very grateful.
But if you're going, yeah, it's you're gonna go about 10 aisles that way, take a right, it's in that area. you'll find that on aisle nineteen. Find that on aisle nineteen is not the same as let me walk you there. It's a little tricky because the store is so big. Let me walk you where you need to go and it'll make it easier for you. When I am lost in a big box store and somebody walks me to where I want to go, I'm really grateful. And and I
Meghan Slaughter (25:33.158)
Yeah.
Jody Holland (25:33.721)
Don't mean this as derogatory towards my species, the male, but stuff could be literally like the poster in front of my face, and I can't find it. Babe, I can't find the ketchup in the refrigerator. Like seriously, it's on the shelf that you're staring at. there was a grape in front of it, you know, or whatever. So the small moments, the the positive emotional experiences make a huge impact. But I want you to think of it in layers. Small moments at
at the customer level, then small moments at the employee, supervisor, manager, executive, and top level executive layers. You have small moments of cultural experience at every layer that tell people I value you, go back to what you started with, or I don't value you. When I left JC Pennies, it was because a they had made it clear they no longer valued me.
And there were two things that they did with that. First thing was the department that I was in was commission. So you had guaranteed minimum wage. And then once you earned enough commission to cover minimum wage, then you started earning commission on top of that. The lowest hourly wage that I ever earned, and it was just a bad like two weeks, was about 14 bucks an hour. I typically made about 25 bucks an hour and during back to school and Christmas.
I could make as much as 50 bucks an hour in commission. Now I was young. I started when I was 15. I worked there until I was about 18 and a half, almost 19 years old. But that's a lot of money. And you take me back to 515 an hour, which you're telling me is generous because minimum wage was still 475. That's not generous. That says, I don't care about you. I care about the money more than I care about the employee.
So I'm going to violate what we agreed to, and I expect you to just take it. Second reason that I quit is they started hiring more managers that were angry if anybody succeeded at a higher level than them. Now think of this from a parenting standpoint. If you're raising your kids, the number one thing that you should want is for your kids to succeed better than you. That's the number one thing. Now think of it as raising up leaders in that same light.
Jody Holland (27:58.787)
The number one thing you should want is for those leaders to succeed at a higher level than you did. So you learn, you grow, you invest, and you you propel them forward. If you, as a leader, creating negative moments of holding people down or treating them poorly, they will leave you. That is bad leadership, which creates bad culture. Action creates outcome. Everything in our world is cause and effect. If we follow the right path, know what you're going to create.
know what it takes action wise to create that, then go deliver on that consistently, you've got the culture code. You just crack the code and it's going to be great. It is not that difficult to create a great culture unless your ego gets in the way. Then you're not creating a good culture. You're going to create a Wells Fargo or an Enron or one of those that is out for self-serving interest to the exclusion of all others.
So give me your final thoughts here. If you're gonna give people some advice of what's one to three things they could go do in the next twenty four hours after listening to this that would improve their culture, what should they do?
Meghan Slaughter (28:57.03)
Exactly.
Meghan Slaughter (29:09.19)
I actually do have a challenge, and it is that I challenge you to write out the behaviors that define your organization in its current state. And then I want you to take a look at what your stated values are and put them side by side and evaluate are they in alignment with one another? Because if they're not in alignment with one another, then you need to take the time to map out the actions.
That demonstrate your organization's values and do this as a team, not just one person, but really look at where are we at versus where we said we wanted to be. What can we do in the next 60 to 90 days to start demonstrating our actual values?
Jody Holland (30:00.259)
I love that. And I can't think of anything to add to it to make it better. So I'm going to wrap us up here. Thank you guys for joining us. if you did enjoy this, you got some value out of it, please consider sharing it with other people. Please go give us a rating. If you have any suggestions for the show, we've gotten some good ones. We would love to hear from you. But as always, I want to challenge you to deliver on the promise of being the kind of leader you said you were going to be. So until next time, I'm Jody.
Meghan Slaughter (30:03.29)
Ha ha ha.
Meghan Slaughter (30:28.934)
I'm Megan.
Jody Holland (30:29.922)
We'll see you on the next episode.
