Author Archives: Bob Adams

Puttin on The Ritz…

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When it comes to refined service and exquisite hospitality, one name stands high above the rest: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company. With ceaseless attention to every luxurious detail, the company has set the bar for creating memorable customer experiences in world-class setting.

With unprecedented access to the company’s executives and staff, best-selling author and business consultant Joseph Michelli obtained the leadership secrets behind the company’s extraordinary success. In “The New Gold Standard,” Michelli takes an exclusive tour behind the scenes of The Ritz-Carlton and comes away with great reference work for church Guest Services Teams who want to learn and apply principles of a WOW! Experience to their own practices.

Michelli develops “5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience” that you can explore in the book. I’ll take a look at those principles in a later post. First, here’s a quick look behind the brass lion that symbolizes excellence at the Ritz:

The Credo

  • The Ritz-Carlton is a place where the genuine care and comfort of our guests is our highest mission
  • We pledge to provide the finest personal service and facilities for our guest who will always enjoy a warm, relaxed, yet refined ambiance
  • The Ritz-Carlton experience enlivens the senses, instills well-being, and fulfills even the unexpressed wished and needs of our guests

The Three Steps of Service

  • A warm and sincere greeting, using the guest’s name
  • Anticipation and fulfillment of each guest’s needs
  • A fond farewell, giving a warm goodbye, and using the guest’s name

Service Values of Ritz-Carlton Staff

  • I build strong relationships and create Ritz-Carlton guests for life
  • I am always responsive to the expressed and unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests
  • I am empowered to create unique, memorable, and personal experiences for our guests
  • I understand my role in achieving the Key Success Factors, embracing community footprints, and creating the Ritz-Carlton mystique
  • I continually seek opportunities to innovate and improve the Ritz-Carlton experience
  • I own and immediately resolve guest problems
  • I create a work environment of teamwork and lateral service so that the needs of our guests and each other are met
  • I have to opportunity to continuously learn and grow
  • I am involved in the planning of the work that affects me
  • I am proud of my professional appearance, language, and behavior
  • I protect the privacy and security of our guests, my fellow employees, and the company’s confidential information and assets
  • I am responsible for uncompromising levels of cleanliness and creating a safe and accident-free environment

Gold standard indeed! These are priceless nuggets of truth that you can mine and put into practice in your Guest Services team immediately…

Why not start this week?

Utilizing the Power of the Lineup with Your Guest Services Team

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It’s one thing to have a Credo, Three Steps of Service, and 12 Service Values like the Ritz-Carlton (see the post here for more details on these Gold Standards). Many businesses go through the exercise of defining key values or composing mission statements. They might even display them in their literature, or in imposing art displays on the corporate walls.

But how many business leaders understand the importance of regular and repetitive presentation of these core aspects of their business – not only to management, but also to their front-line staff?

Enter the “lineup” at Ritz-Carlton.

To truly appreciate the Ritz-Carlton leadership approach to repeated dissemination of the “Gold Standards” mentioned above, you would have to drop in on a section of the housekeeping staff as they prepare for their days work – or at the corporate headquarters – or in the kitchen of the fine restaurants that serve the hotel chain – or anywhere, and everywhere, throughout the entire organization.

You would observe that a meeting is taking place at the beginning of each shift. Not just any meeting, though: the leader in each group starts by sharing the Credo and talking about the importance of creating a unique guest experience. Another team member might share a guest story from a Ritz-Carlton hotel in another country. Another team member shares how what they do in their department helps create memorable guest experiences. Then a few quick announcements, special recognitions are given, and another team member closes the meeting with a motivational quote.

All in about 20 minutes.

Every day.

On every shift.

In every Ritz-Carlton hotel and office around the world.

The magic of the lineup involves the following:

  • Repetition of values – the core belief that values need to be discussed daily, and that values can’t be discussed enough
  • Common language – shared phrases across all tasks binds the team together
  • Visual symbols – The Credo is printed on a card that all team members carry at all times
  • Oral traditions – Personal, direct, and face-to-face communication makes a huge impact in a world increasingly dominated by e-mail, text, and voice messages
  • Positive storytelling – stories communicate life in a powerful and memorable way
  • Modeling by leaders – the active, daily presence of the leaders communicates the importance of the time together

What would “lineup” for each of your Guest Services teams do to preserve the core values, communicate the importance of everyone on the team, and provide momentum for the day’s activities?

Or how about this word for the process?

Alignment.

The 7 Step Road Map to Being All In

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To have any hope of succeeding as a leader you need to get your team “all in.”

No matter the size of your team, few things will have a bigger impact on your performance than getting your people to buy into your ideas, your cause, and to believe what matters.

– All In, Adrian Gostick & Chester Elton

Best-selling authors of The Carrot Principle and The Orange Revolution, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton’s new book All In answers one of the most overlooked leadership questions of the day: Why are some leaders able to get their employees to commit wholeheartedly to their culture and give that extra push that leads to outstanding results?

As with their previous works, a huge (in this case, 300,000 person) study led to a groundbreaking finding: leaders of the highest performing groups create a “culture of belief.” In these distinctive organizations, people believe in their leaders and in the organization’s vision, values, and goals. Team members are engaged, enabled, and energized (the authors use the term Three Es).

Based on the extensive interview process and combined with their years of experience, the authors created a seven-step road map for creating a culture of belief:

  • Define Your Burning Platform – define the mission with great clarity and instill a sense of urgency
  • Create a Customer Focus – focus on customers and mandate a pro-customer orientation
  • Develop Agility – learn to see the future and position your team to meet both seen and unseen challenges
  • Share Everything – create a culture that is a place of truth, has constant communication, and exhibits marked transparency
  • Partner with Your Talent – success is direct result of your teams’ unique ingenuity and talent
  • Root for Each Other – high levels of appreciation and camaraderie create a tangible esprit de corps
  • Establish Clear Accountability – teams must be held accountable for goals, but have the responsibility and tools to ensure their success, with appropriate rewards at completion

All In is a book about culture, but more than that it is the story of how great leaders create unique, inviting, and rewarding places to work – or serve.

What about you – are you ready to lead all in?

Family Air Force History

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My son, serving in the Air Force, worked with my wife to create this picture, which they gave me on my father’s birthday yesterday.

 

When my father entered the Army Air Corps in 1945, he was assigned to the 36th Airlift Squadron, part of the 3rd Air Force. He was not part of an air crew, but served as a mechanic. The squadron’s plane was the C-47.

The planes depicted show the succession over the years since the C-47.

I think it’s pretty cool that my son would honor the memory of his grandfather by working on this and sending it to me. I have a large print framed (thanks to my wife) hanging on my office wall.

The 4 Principles of Guest Satisfaction

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…illustrated by parking cars…

…for a church…

…meeting in a rented facility.

Translate “customer” into Guest and you have a real opportunity for learning how to deliver WOW! Guest Services at your church.

A Perfect Product

Customers want defect-free products and services. You need to design your product or service so that it can be expected to function perfectly within foreseeable boundaries.

At Elevation Church’s Uptown campus, we meet in a rented theater – the former First Baptist Charlotte’s sanctuary, purchased by the city in the 70’s and turned into a performance venue. It’s a beautiful, intimate setting for our worship experiences – but it has no parking, other than a few spots along the street. Practically everyone attending drives from all over the city, so we have to provide parking to accommodate them. Our solution? We rent 2 adjacent lots for VIPs (our term for first time guests) and families with small children, a parking deck 1 1/2 blocks away for attendees, and a small lot about 3 blocks away for volunteers. All parking is free for people attending our services; we put up signage in a 1 block radius around the facility to direct traffic to the right place; we have friendly parking teams to provide the human touch; and our web site has a campus welcome page that includes video of where to park.

Application: Design the product (in this case, a service system) to get people from point A to point B, foreseeing all that is foreseeable. It’s just parking, right? But when you’re averaging over 50 new guests every Sunday, along with 1,100 other attenders, all coming into the same 2 block area in a short amount of time, you’ve got to remove as many barriers as possible. We drove and walked through the process of getting to campus, and designed  systems to get people into the garage or lot, up the sidewalks, and into the theater. Once there, the rest of the amazing team of Guest Services (VIP team, Greeters, Ushers, and First Impressions) takes over – each with their own unique system of providing an audacious welcome to guests and attendees. It’s an ongoing process, reviewed constantly to adjust to lessons learned.

Delivered by Caring People

Your perfect product now requires caring, friendly people to deliver it.

At the Uptown Campus, parking is concentrated into 2 primary areas, with the majority of that being in one parking garage – with only 2 entrances/exits. That simplifies the Parking Team a little bit (one of our other campus locations is in a mixed use environment, and has 5 surface lots, each with multiple entrances – but that’s another story!). With an optimum team size of 5 people, it’s our job to smile and wave at each car entering the lot, personally greet everyone, be visible inside the deck on multiple levels, and take the validated ticket as the car leaves.

Application: An interaction with just a single, caring, friendly team member can make a guest feel good about being there in the first place, and sets the stage through a powerful first impression about what’s in store for the rest of the morning. We’re the first face of Elevation – we take that responsibility very seriously.

In a Timely Fashion

In this fast paced world of instant results, our customers (guests) decide what is and isn’t an appropriate timeline. A perfect product delivered late by friendly, caring people is the equivalent of a defective one. Ouch!

Application: Learn your own customer’s definition of “on time” – and structure the process to meet that definition, not your own. I don’t know about your church, but at Elevation’s Uptown campus the intensity and volume of traffic increases incrementally the closer the worship experience start time approaches. For the 9:30 start time, traffic trickles in beginning at 9, picks up the pace around 9:20, and by 9:30 it’s cars lined up the street waiting to get in. We move the cars through as fast as possible, and encourage those in a long line to drive around the block and use the other entrance. As we greet, we remind drivers of the second entrance. In between services, we open two exit lanes, allowing the deck to empty quicker. For the 11:15 worship experience, it’s more of the same, only worse – the rush comes from 11:15 – 11:25. Our team is always brainstorming ways to make it flow quicker and smoother. Valet parking? Nah, just kidding! Would it be easier for everyone if they came earlier and weren’t as rushed? Sure – but it’s not going to happen.

With the Support of an Effective Problem Resolution Process

Everything described so far is great – in theory. But like most things in life, there’s reality. Sometimes we are short-handed on our teams. Occasionally we have equipment malfunctions with the gates or ticket machines, or our validator in the lobby isn’t working right. An occasional Uptown event (a Panther’s or Bobcats game, the circus, a big convention) sometimes creates more traffic on a Sunday morning. We’ve even arrived to find the main entrance closed, along with the first floor of parking, due to maintenance that we weren’t notified about. When these unexpected surprises occur, effective problem resolution is measured not when we have restored the situation to the status quo, but when we have restored customer satisfaction.

Application: Because until a problem occurs, the customer doesn’t get to see us fully strut our service. It’s almost become a game among our parking team to brainstorm what could go wrong with the process, and then come up with a solution to use when it happens. Main entrance blocked? No problem – in 5 minutes we can shift all the signage and personnel to redirect traffic down the block, around the corner, and into the rear entrance. Ticket validated but not working? We have pre-validated tickets to get out guests out and on their way. Lost ticket? Ditto. Guest have a flat tire, potentially blocking the whole deck? Pull off our best impression of a NASCAR pit stop to get them on their way. A guest wants to grab a quick cup of coffee or meal? We have a map of nearby coffee shops and restaurants. Someone pulls up wanting to know when the Children’s library opens? Our team leader has the schedules of nearby venues to give information as requested. Here’s the real goal: Resolve a service problem effectively and your guest is more likely to become loyal than if they had never run into a problem in the first place.

Want to learn how to provide extraordinary, loyalty-building customer service to your guests? The first step, as outlined above, is to learn what makes them satisfied. Customer satisfaction is based on the four predictable factors above. I’ve used just one part of the Guest Services practices of Elevation Church to illustrate the principles. Take these four factors, apply them in the context of your own place, and watch amazing things happen.

Check out Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit by Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon for more big ideas you can put to use as you build a five-star service organization.

Defying Gravity

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The “rocket ride” comment in yesterday’s post reminded me of some remarks by Andy Stanley when he came to Elevation Church in Charlotte NC for one of our leader training sessions. They are an appropriate reminder as we consider changing change.

Recalling the dispute in Antioch and the resulting Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, Stanley developed the following thoughts about what the church should be vs. gravitational pull of culture.

1. There’s always a gravitational pull toward insiders and away from outsiders

  • You must continue to create empty seats at optimal worship times for the unchurched

People who were nothing like Jesus liked Jesus

2. There’s always a gravitational pull toward law and away from grace

  • Have as few policies as possible and as many conversations as possible

With conversations you can always extend grace

3. There’s always a gravitational pull toward complexity and away from simplicity

  • Do what you do well and do it better than anyone else

Complexity always slows things down, is expensive, and makes you lose distinctiveness in the community

4. There’s always a gravitational pull toward preserving and away from advancing

  • When you start preserving, you are building walls instead of bridges

Back when we had nothing, what would we have done?

If you want to defy gravity:

  • You must be a raving fan publicly
  • You must be an honest critic privately with the right people in the right environment for the right reason
  • You have to be extraordinarily generous

That’s how you keep the church in orbit.

Leaders Need to Work Out of Both Sides of Their Brains

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After my design thinking diatribe in yesterday’s post, maybe it’s time for a little balance in the ever-present battle between the linear, analytical left brain and the chaotic, creative right brain. There is an unavoidable but healthy tension between creating the new and preserving the best of the present; between innovating new ideas and maintaining healthy existing ones. As a leader, you need to learn how to manage that tension, not adopt a wholly new set of techniques and abandon all of the old. It’s not that many analytic approaches are bad – it’s just that in many organizations, it’s all they’ve got.

The VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous)future we’re living in will require multiple tools in the leader’s tool kit – a design suite especially tailored to starting up and growing new ventures in an uncertain world, and an analytic one suited to running established organizations in a more stable environment.

What leaders need is not a right brain transplant that throws the old left brain tool kit away – they need to be taught some new approaches to add to the tool kit they’ve already got. Business as usual can help leaders do things designers have trouble with. Design needs business thinking for good reasons:

Novelty doesn’t necessarily create value

The flip side of the defense of the status quo because of its familiarity is the pursuit of novelty only because it’s new. How many times have you seen (or have been guilty yourself) ChurchWorld leaders who have attended the latest conference and returned to their church to try the latest and greatest geewhizjimmyhawthingy guaranteed to (fill in the blank) your church?

Even value creation is not enough

Churches, in order to survive, must care about more than just creating value for the existing organization. It is an important, but insufficient, first step. To survive long-term, churches need to be able to execute and capture part of the value they create in a duplicatable process that accomplishes their mission and reproduces their “product” – disciples. While doing creating and innovating, they must in Jim Collins’ words “remain true to the core.” This requires solid businesslike thinking: can we translate a new and innovative idea from small experiment to a significant part of the organization’s being without messing up the recipe?

How many more stylish worship environments or new group ideas do any of us need?

Cool stuff is great, but design has the potential to offer so much more. Design has the power to change the world – not just make it pretty or more functional. Just because you can do a thing doesn’t mean you should do it. The discipline of design should address our most challenging problems, not just pretend to make us better or fulfill our dreams.

Part of an ongoing adaptation of Designing for Growth by Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie to fit ChurchWorld realities

What’s Up with Olympic Scoring?

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Watching the Olympics is a biannual tradition in the Adams household. Of the two of us, my wife is hands down the biggest sports fan in the family.

I’m just trying to figure out how to keep score. 

Basketball I’ve got covered: shots from behind the free-throw line are 1 point each. Shots inside the arc are 2 points each, and shots scored outside the arc are 3 points each. At the end of regulation play, the team with the highest score wins.

There are lots of other sports in the Olympics with similar scoring rules – I’m pretty good with them. But then it starts to get complicated.

In gymnastics, scoring is a 2-tier system with technical difficulty which starts at 0 and points are added for the performance difficulty combined with execution and technique which starts at 10 and points are subtracted as mistakes are made. I would probably meet myself coming and going – it’s no wonder coaches and judges are always glaring at each other. Then there’s that visible money changing hands thing…

What about diving? A judge in a diving contest shall award from 0 to 10 points for a dive according to his or her overall impression using the following criteria:

–       10: Excellent

–       8½ – 9½: Very good

–       7 – 8: Good

–       5 – 6½: Satisfactory

–       2½ – 4½: Deficient

–       ½ – 2: Unsatisfactory

–       0: Completely Failed

If that wasn’t complicated enough, you move to synchronized diving and get two competitors diving simultaneously from the springboards or platform. The competition is judged on how the two divers individually perform their dives, and how the two divers as a team synchronize their performance. The factors to be considered when judging synchronized diving are:
- the starting position, the approach and the take-off, including the similarity of the height
- the coordinated timing of the movements during the flight
- the similarity of the angles of the entries
- the comparative distance from the springboard or platform of the entry
- the coordinated timing of the entries…(insert snoring sounds here).

How about trampolining? It’s a math formula where the score = difficulty + execution + time of flight. The difficulty is measured from 0 up and the execution is measured from 10 down. Heaven help the judge who meets in the middle! The time of flight (debuting at these Olympics) is measured by digital device. Here’s the kicker: the athlete must begin and end their routine on flat feet – with the landing being held for 3 seconds. Have you ever tried to stop on a trampoline?

With the Olympics singular nod to equality of the sexes, there is the equestrian events, where the rider who finishes the course with the fewest penalties in the fastest time gets the best score. Men and women compete together.

Finally, let’s head out to the water for Olympic Sailing. There are two races: Fleet Racing is run on a low points system; the boat at the end of the competition with the least number of points wins. Then there’s Match Racing – each match is sailed between two boats, with the first boat to cross the finish line the winner, receiving one point. The team with the highest core wins. One can only hope the captains don’t get their races mixed up.

As for me, I will continue to watch the 2012 Summer Olympics from the comfort of my recliner, occasionally participating in our family’s own competition that’s been running for over a year now: The Adams Family Pizza Quest.

There’s no scoring difficulty here: try out new pizza restaurants and rate them on a 5 slice (by half slice increments) scale:

1 – a complete failure in every way

2 – barely functional; won’t be back or recommend to friends

3 – serious flaws; the jury is still out

4 – downsides outweigh the upsides

5 – recommended with reservations

6 – a solid meal with some issues

7 – very good, but not quite great

8 – excellent, with a little room to grow

9 – nearly flawless; we’ll be back again with friends

10 – metaphysical and culinary perfection

I’m enjoying the Olympics best when I don’t worry about the score – how about you?

How to Be Like Walt, Part 2

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Walt Disney had a burning desire for excellence in everything he did. He was always thinking, ‘We can do it better.’ That’s a common trait of all successful people.

Royal Clark, former treasurer of WED Enterprises

Walt Disney’s life provides powerful lessons that can be applied in any leadership position. Author Pat Williams recognized this, and went behind the legend to discover a man every bit as fascinating as the world he created.

How to Be Like Walt is the result of thousands of hours of interviews of the people who knew Walt best. In addition to being a fascinating life story of one of our nation’s most creative minds, the author has distilled Walt’s life into 17 lessons – lessons that we all could learn from. I introduced the topic yesterday; here are a few more:

Plus Every Experience: Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb – an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your guests more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. No matter what “business” you are in, your success depends on your commitment to excellence and attention to detail. If you deliver more than people expect, you will turn people into fans. Pursue excellence in everything you do.

Be a Person of Stick-to-it-ivity: Today we look at Disneyland and say, “Of course! Just what the world needed. How could it miss?” But in 1955, Disneyland was the biggest gamble in the history of American business. The risk paid off – not because Walt was lucky or favored or a genius. It paid off because Walt wouldn’t quit. The success of Disneyland is, first and foremost, the result of sheer dogged determination and persistence in the face of obstacles and opposition. In his own words, “Get a good idea and stay with it. Dog it, and work at it until it’s done, and done right.”

Become Like a Sponge for Ideas: Walt continually fed his mind with information and ideas. He absorbed inspiration wherever he went. If you want to be like Walt – more creative, more imaginative, and more successful – then keep your eyes and ears open. Read. Watch. Travel. Talk to people wherever you go. Ask questions. Invite opinions. Become a sponge for ideas.

Ask Yourself “How About Tomorrow?”: Walt embraced the future and put the stamp of his own personality on tomorrow. If we want to help shape a better tomorrow, then we need to continually ask ourselves the same question Walt asked Ray Bradbury: “How about tomorrow?” The difference between today and tomorrow is something called change. It takes courage to embrace the future, because the future is about change, and change brings uncertainty and anxiety. We fear change; we prefer the comfort of the familiar. But change is inevitable. If we do not become future-focused, we are doomed to obsolescence when tomorrow arrives. There are so many possible futures – which one will you choose?

Here are the rest of the author’s “How to Be Like Walt” lessons:

  • Become an Animated Leader
  • Take a Risk
  • Dealing with Loss
  • Live for the Next Generation
  • Build Complementary Partnerships
  • Stay Focused
  • Accept Your Mortality
  • Make Your Family Your Top Priority
  • Be the Person God Made You to Be

Each of the 17 lessons in the book are richly illustrated with stories by and about Walt Disney. I encourage you to get a copy and prepare to be delighted – and challenged.

Walt’s life challenges us to dream bigger, reach higher, work harder, risk more, and persevere as long as it takes. That is the rich legacy Walt Disney left us. That is the supreme lesson of his endlessly instructive life. The riches of an incredible, adventure-filled life are within our grasp – if we will dare to be like Walt.

Pat Williams

If you liked these two posts, here a few more select Disney-related posts:

The Secret of Disney World

Top Ten Takeaways from Our Disney World Adventure

Understanding Guests Like Disney