Marriott: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

It’s always been the major belief of our company, take good care of your people, they’ll take good care of the customer and the customer will come back.

And we celebrate them. We train them. We teach them. We provide opportunity for them. You’ve got to make your employees happy.

If the employees are happy, they are going to make the customers happy.

–J. W. Marriott, Jr.
 speaking of his father,
the founder of Marriott Hotels

How Bill Marriott’s Putting Employees First Transformed A Family Root Beer Stand Into $14B Hotel Giant by Steve Forbes in Forbes Magazine January 8, 2014 

The Courage to Create Community

Expanded 2nd Edition Now on Sale!

Tony’s short book on building community is now available
with an extra chapter and a guide to additional resources.

The Courage to Be in Community Expanded 2nd Edition

The new chapter is a simple, practical guide to building better relationships at work and at home. The focus of the book is the importance of compassion and authenticity, while this new section is all about implementation, with specific advice on how to be compassionate and authentic in your day-to-day life.

This expanded edition also includes links to recommended books and articles for further study and practice.

Click here to “Look Inside” & see a sample on Amazon.

➤ Paperback , hardcover, and Kindle available on Amazon!

➤ Paperback and hard cover available on Barnes and Noble!

 

iTunes Spoken word version available on Audible

Audio version read by Tony Mayo also available.

 To hear a sample click here for Audible or iTunes.

 

 


(more…)

Jeffrey Pfeffer

 


This was a guy in one of their [Men’s Wearhouse] stores in the Northwest who was an exceptional salesperson. But the company’s managers believe in the concept of team selling — they believe in this idea of human development that you always succeed when your colleagues around you succeed, and that you ought to participate in all this training. And this guy said, “I’m not going to do any of this stuff.”

 

The company’s big measures are the number of transactions and the dollars of sales per transaction. This guy was way above on the number of transactions but not doing very well on dollars per transaction. What that meant was that people would come in the store and he would steal them. Finally, they said to this guy, “We want you to get with the program,” and he wouldn’t.

 

So they fired him — and guess what? Sales in the store went up 30 percent. His replacement, of course, did not sell as much as he did. But everybody else in the store sold more. In other words, he was bringing everybody else down. And you see this in other organizations where there is one star.

 

Jeffrey Pfeffer
Strategy & Business


 

Victory nor Defeat

 


 
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, if he wins,knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

 

 

 

John F. Kennedy
on Theodore Roosevelt
New York City, December 5, 1961

 

 

 

 

 


Google Data Show ‘Behavioral Interviewing’ Works

 


 

[Our data on hiring at Google show that] what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.

Behavioral interviewing  — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

— Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President
of People Operations at Google
in Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
via The New York Times.com

 


 

See also, on this blog,
How to Write an Ad to Hire Employees.

 


 

The Fraud Triangle

 


 

The fraud triangle is a model for explaining the factors that cause someone to commit occupational fraud. It consists of three components which, together, lead to fraudulent behavior:

1. Perceived unshareable financial needThe Fraud Triangle

2. Perceived opportunity

3. Rationalization

The fraud triangle originated from Donald Cressey’s hypothesis:

Trusted persons become trust violators when they conceive of themselves as having a financial problem which is non-shareable, are aware this problem can be secretly resolved by violation of the position of financial trust, and are able to apply to their own conduct in that situation verbalizations which enable them to adjust their conceptions of themselves as trusted persons with their conceptions of themselves as users of the entrusted funds or property.1

1Donald R. Cressey, Other People’s Money (Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1973) p. 30.

The Fraud Triangle.

 

See also my post on the MCI Worldcom scandal, Integrity Ebbs by Inches.

 


 

Workplace Passion

 


 

Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world.

The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book Drive offers a nice summary of this literature.)

These traits can be found in many jobs, but they have to be earned. Building valuable skills is hard and takes time. For someone in a new position, the right question is not, “What is this job offering me?” but, instead, “What am I offering this job?”

–Cal Newport, Ph.D.
New York Times
September 30, 2012

 


 

Confront & Converse: Every Manager’s Responsibility

 


 

While coaching many top executives I have noticed that managers seeking “advice” are often just avoiding a confronting conversation. I remind them of some wisdom embedded in the development of our language.

Con is Latin for “with.” Con-front is to face something together, to move forward in unison.  Doesn’t that make confrontation more appealing? Appealing or not, it is a big part of every manager’s job.

Versare meant to turn or change, especially to open or close a door. In early English a con-versation meant talking with a person to make a change, to open some doors and close others. This also is a big part of managing.

Still, not everyone knows or remembers how to have these confronting conversations. Here is my step-by-step guide, for free: tiny.cc/toughtalk

 


 

See also, on this blog, step-by-step conversation instructions with video here:
The Conversation Contract.