Contented Cows Still Give Better Milk E-Book

Bill Catlette

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 324

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

How to foster happier employees for a healthier bottom line Managers could learn a lot from a message echoed by generations of dairy farmers: "Contented cows give better milk." This book is not, repeat, not a management tome. In this fully revised and expanded edition to a book which absolutely, positively makes the case that treating people right is one of the best things any business can do for its bottom line, Contented Cows Still Give Better Milk offers sound, practical advice for those who know that their reputation as an employer is as important as bandwidth. * Offers updated case studies and new examples from on-site research in a number of real organizations, as well as inspiring examples of companies that know how to do it right . . . and few that didn't * Fad-free prescriptive advice informed by the authors' combined four-plus decades of training and consulting with thousands of managers and employees, conducting employee engagement surveys, and translating the attendant learning to management audiences in a form they can appreciate and use * Coauthor Bill Catlette's Bottom Line Leadership Seminar has helped thousands of managers become more effective leaders Direct from the horse's . . . actually cow's mouth, this fully revised and expanded second edition will teach readers that having a focused, engaged, and capably led workforce is one of the best things any organization can do for its bottom line.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Premise

Chapter 1: Just the Facts

The Fine Print

The Business Case

Where’s the Beef?

Can You Hear Me Now?

The Core of Our Philosophy

Your Reputation Is Worth More Than You Think

Pragmatic Ideals

Look at What Works, and Emulate it

Robert Owen and Scottish Millworkers

Milton Hershey and the Town That Chocolate Built

Ruminate on This

Chapter Summary

Chapter 2: Cows with Attitude

Where Does Contentment Begin?

Peach Limbs Don’t Grow on Oaks

You Get What You Expect to Get

Core Covenants

Bogus Assumptions

Assumptions are a Two-Way Street: The Employees’ Perspective

What Employees Want: The Contented Cows’ View

The “Happy Curve”

A “Sticky” Variable

But Will They Be Contented Here?

Chick-fil-A: Never On Sunday

Contentability and Corporate Assimilation

The Proof Is in the People

Chapter Summary

Part II: Contented Cows are Committed

Chapter 3: The “Vision Thing”: Passengers or Crew

Burning Off the Fog

Making It Stick

“Moments of Truth”

High Expectations Beget High Performance

Chapter Summary

Chapter 4: The Path to Commitment

So How Do You Get People Committed?

1. What Is This Organization All About?

2. Where are We Going, and Why?

3. How Do We Plan to Get There?

4. How Do I Fit In?

Chapter Summary

Part III: Contented Cows are Cared About

Chapter 5: First You Feed the Troops

You Can’t Fake Caring

The Best of All Worlds at Incepture

Delta’s Gerald Grinstein—A Class Act

R-E-S-P-E-C-T at Plantronics Mexico

Order Up

Safety Is No Accident at Alaska Clean Seas

Motivation Doesn’t Necessarily Follow Money

Google Is Great—But It’s Not for Everybody

Pebble Beach Company—If You Care, You Listen

Chapter Summary

Chapter 6: Tell ’Em the Truth

Truth or Consequences

A Truth Recession

The Strength of Coffee, Steel, and the Truth

Nobody’s Perfect

Liar, Liar

Malice in Wonderland

Not Every Performance Deserves a Standing Ovation

To Tell the Truth

Chapter Summary

Chapter 7: When Times Get Tough

If You Care, You’re There

Marriott’s Response to Hurricane Katrina: Quick, Compelling, Sustained

Hanmer MSL’s Response to the Mumbai Bombings

Caring Means Going the Extra Mile

Employee Engagement in a Headwind

Give Us Some Recourse

Don’t Expect Employees to Pay for Your Mistakes

Layoffs—A Fact of Life

Some Rules for “Staying Out of the Soup”

There’s Got to Be Another Way!

Doing Well by Doing Good

Chapter Summary

Chapter 8: Contented Cows are Connected

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Let’s Start at the Top—Recruiting

Consolidated Health Services—Ambassadors for Connection

Connecting in Layers at The Container Store

Building Affinity at Incepture

Connecting Doesn’t Get Easier with Size

Chapter Summary

Chapter 9: A Case for Some Useful Benefits

Is There a Doctor in the House?

What to Do

Adults Only, Please

All in the Family

Programs, Programs, Get Your Programs

Caring Can’t Be Legislated

Bon Voyage, Vacation Policy

Chapter Summary

Part IV: Contented Cows are Enabled

Chapter 10: Empower This!

The Etymology of a Buzzword

The Next Step

Identifying Four Types of Managers

One Bad Apple Can Spoil the Whole Barrel

Give People Back Their Work

Chapter Summary

Chapter 11: Enabled Employees are Incredibly Well Trained

Training Expands the Meaning of Professionalism

The Hidden Costs of Ignored Training

Training Sends a Message

Training Moves Careers

Beyond the Classroom and Webinar

An Intelligent Learning Process

Visibility Matters

A Quick Self-Exam

Chapter Summary

Chapter 12: Enabled Employees are Tooled

Tools, Not Rules

Be Careful What You Incent; You’ll Likely Get It!

Help Not Hinder

A Tale of Two Brands

The Meaning of Mistakes

Mistakes Must Absolutely, Positively Not Go Unpunished

“Good Faith” Mistakes versus Errors of the Heart

Chapter Summary

Chapter 13: Enabled Employees are Trusted

Nordstrom Trust—As Simple as It Gets

Rethinking the Break Room

Opening the Kimono

Raise Discretionary Authority and Spending Limits

He’d Give You the Pants off His Legs

Chapter Summary

Chapter 14: When the Contented Cows Come Home

The Contented Cows . . . What Next?

The Path Ahead

No More Big Brooms or Silver Bullets

Keeping Them Fired Up and in the Game

So What About You?

Index

Copyright © 2012 by Contented Cow Partners, LLC. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-29273-0 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-33401-0 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-33180-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-33510-9 (ebk)

To William Catlette, Bill’s dad, who taught him a lifetime of lessons about determination, frugality, respect for others, having high standards, and how to fish. Only one of those “courses” was altogether fun, but they all made their mark. We miss him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not have been written at all were it not for an introduction made by Jeb Blount, of Sales Gravy, and the encouragement of Lauren Murphy, our acquisitions editor at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., or nearly as well without a lot of helpful wordsmithing by development editor Christine Moore. All three are consummate professionals, and we thoroughly enjoy working with them.

We are indebted to Brad Ziemba and Mark McCranie, who once again helped with the financial research associated with the Contented Cow companies. A very special shout out goes to Jermia Jerdine, a graduating senior at the University of Memphis who also holds a full-time job and still volunteered to assist us with research and number crunching. This young lady is going to go places.

Thanks, too, to the representatives of Plantronics Mexico, Marriott, Incepture, and Zappos, whom we peppered with questions during our site visits, and to Joyce Folk of the Atlanta Airport Marriott Gateway, who served up career insights along with strong coffee and a mean plate of eggs. Through her gracious hospitality, Rebekah Stewart, owner of Brigadoon Lodge and Flyline Wine, helped make the writing venue quieter, more scenic, and enjoyable.

For their time on the phone and over e-mail, we thank those we talked to from Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, Bazaarvoice, Hanmer MSL, LaRosa’s Restaurants, the City of Lakeway, Consolidated Health Systems, Dow Chemical, and Chick-fil-A. You brought to life for us what it means to be a distinguished workplace.

We are eternally thankful to the folks at Nestlé for their support, without which this book would have a very different title.

We are grateful to our spouses for their unflinching support; no, it’s more than that—for putting up with our single-minded obsession with this project for better than three months. Christine, Mary, we’re fortunate to have you in our lives.

INTRODUCTION

How Do the Best Get Better?

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.

—John Buchan

Since the original publication of this book in 1998, the workspace—indeed, much of the world—has been stood on its head. Oh, people (most of us, anyhow) still have jobs that produce income that allows us to sustain ourselves. But nearly all the terms of the deal have changed.

The old Protestant work ethic to which our parents and grandparents subscribed—the maxim that suggested that good things will happen to you if you keep your nose to the grindstone and your mouth closed—busted. The notion that, by definition, all work occurs within the confines of an employer’s workplace—gone. Loyalty and obedience to the organization—vamoose, along with job security and defined pension benefits. The bright line between personal and professional time and activities—completely blurred. The assumption that there must be something wrong with you if you are unemployed for more than a few weeks—forget it. The expectation that workers would receive training before starting a new job function—outsourced, eliminated, or relegated to do-it-yourself status.

In a nutshell, the game has changed in material ways. The rules are different, the field is bigger, the pace exponentially quicker, the goalposts narrower, shareholders less forgiving, and the talent is more elusive, cynical, and mercenary. An entire project or career can be launched or terminated with 138 characters and an RT.

One aspect of workspace physics remains rock solid, however: the precept that focused, fully engaged workers produce more and better stuff, yielding better outcomes. Motivated people move faster; they always have and always will. When you view this through the other end of the telescope, it is obvious that no one—repeat, no one—despite repeated attempts by a number of commercial airlines, can achieve success by foisting disgruntled, disenfranchised workers upon paying customers. It’s a simple, relatively understood and accepted concept—at least in theory.

It’s another thing altogether in practice, however. We tend to lose sight of what motivates people to want to contribute more, become weak-kneed at the prospect of actually doing those things, or arrogantly (and mistakenly) conclude that a weak labor market overrides the need to be concerned about them.

Our purpose is to once again bring front and center the very real, tangible benefits of treating people right in the workplace and to clearly define just what “right” means. (Hint: It may not be what you think.)

How does one organization achieve unprecedented levels of success over a substantial period of time while a nearly identical competitor struggles—or goes down the tubes completely? Is the former’s success the result of better mousetraps, dumb luck, or maybe just better execution? Consider, for example:

How Google could blow right past Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Baidu to totally dominate the search space with greater than 80 percent market share.

How 150-year-old General Mills continues to capture an ever-greater share of supermarket shelf space and your kitchen cupboard with brands such as Progresso, Bisquick, Wheaties, and Pillsbury.

And will somebody please explain how it can be that North Carolina–based Nucor Steel is able to operate a $20 billion business (one of the largest steel companies on earth) with a headquarters staff of fewer than 100 people—and do it in one of the worst economies in a century—

without

laying people off?

In each of the aforementioned cases, and in every similar success story we have been able to find, managements are taking strikingly similar approaches. Our mission is to discover, chronicle, and help others replicate those approaches. As Thomas Edison said, “There is a better way. . . . Find it!”

Discretionary Effort—Nobody Has Moved the Cheese

Not much has changed about human nature since psychologist Elton Mayo first studied the relationship between motivation and productivity at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in the late 1920s—and that was more than 90 years ago!

In a series of motivational experiments titled the Harvard Hawthorne Studies, Mayo—using a real company, real managers, and real employees—first uncovered the unmistakable relationship between worker attitudes and production, or output. Essentially, he learned two things:

1. Human beings are uniquely capable of regulating their involvement in and commitment to a given task or endeavor.

2. The extent to which we do or do not fully contribute is governed more by attitude than by necessity, fear, or economic influence.

In a nutshell, what Mayo learned—which has been reinforced by a number of subsequent experiments and surveys—is that there is an increment of human effort that individuals can apply exclusively at their discretion. This finding led to the coining of the term discretionary effort (DE), which is defined as the difference between that minimally necessary level of effort and that which we can, in fact, achieve. In short, it represents the distinction between obedience and high performance and between those who are managed versus those who are led. Its expenditure is clearly (and completely) a matter of choice. In the workspace, it is the difference between the minimum level of effort that employees must expend to keep their jobs and that of which they are truly capable. The equation therefore is:

Personal Capability − Minimum Requirements = Discretionary Effort

The context within which Mayo discovered DE at Western Electric was one in which employees were withholding it, for a variety of reasons. They were consciously performing at only a minimally satisfactory level, or, as some might put it, they kept showing up at work (and getting paid) even though they were essentially on strike.

Unfortunately, not much has changed. The only difference between then and now is that workers withheld discretionary effort much more covertly back then. People are open about it today, because the stick—the punishment for lack of effort, as in “carrot and stick”—has absolutely been worn out and thus has little effect. Moreover, it is relatively easy to sleep through meetings with your eyes open and make shopping on eBay or playing Cow Clicker look like work.

It’s Your People, Stupid

As Richard Pascale of the Stanford Graduate School of Business put it, “The trouble is, 99 percent of managerial attention today is devoted to the techniques that squeeze more out of the existing paradigm—and it’s killing us. Tools, techniques, and ‘how-to’ recipes won’t do the job without a higher order . . . concept of management.”

As managers careen wildly from one tool or tactic to another, many lose sight of the fact that the critical difference between a brilliant strategy and one that gets successfully executed resides in the hearts and minds of people—specifically, the members of your workforce. We can scream, exhort, and rattle the saber all we want, but we’ll never achieve successful organizational change without their willing participation.

In many cases, establishing alternative precepts (or the “higher order” as Pascale puts it) flies dead in the face of a definition of the managerial role that’s been held and nurtured for literally hundreds of years—namely, the old, authoritarian, “plantation mentality” scenario that features the manager as “order giver” and the employee as “order taker.”

This failure to change our outlook toward the management of human effort has become the chief impediment to competitiveness for many, both here and elsewhere. We certainly don’t lack the brains, ability, or technology. Rather, it’s a matter of will, specifically the will to change. Some have it, and some haven’t gotten there yet.

Our purpose is to entice those in the latter category to move along by calling attention to a few organizations that do “get it”—while highlighting the very real, hard, bottom-line impact they (and their shareholders) are enjoying as a result.

PART I

The Premise

CHAPTER 1

Just the Facts

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own set of facts.

—James Schlesinger

Every year, respected business publications like Fortune, INC, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek rank (in seemingly endless ways) those companies that are doing the best job in their chosen industry or niche. We read about the “Most Admired” and “Most Innovative,” the “Customer Service Champs,” the ones generating the “Highest Shareholder Return,” the “Fastest Growing,” the XYZ 500, and the list goes on.