Chris Collins Debunking the Myth: Happy Employees Equal Happy Customers

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Look, look. Okay, everybody, Today Lola is going to do part one of the five leadership lies told today. Oh, Mama, she does not look that exciting, girl.

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This is a fun topic to talk about. So five leadership lies told today that you want your competition to believe, and you really do. And so the one today is going to be happy employees equal happy customers. And there couldn't be anything further from the truth with that. My experience is that all of the leadership gurus out there today, teaching and training, like to talk about the idealized version of how things work, but they've never actually gone into a business and had to turn it around really quick, create a culture and create results. And I've done it in hundreds of businesses, and it always amazes me when I hear people say stuff like, happy employees equal happy customers, because most of the time, the businesses that I've gone into that have focused on happy employees, they're not focusing on happy customers. And if you go into a business and you order. Let's say you go into a coffee shop and you order coffee. I don't know if we really care, hypothetically, if the people serving us the coffee are happy. I mean, I think we in general want people to be happy, but for the most part, I think we just want coffee. For the most part. If you want to get insurance, you want insurance and you want good insurance. I don't know that we care that the people on the other end are happy. It's better if they're happy. But I want my coffee. I want the food. I ordered food through Uber Bikes a month ago, and I ordered Thai food, and this is terrible, but it was two hours late. And we called, complained, they said it was on its way. And then when it got there, it had been in the car so long that it gave me food poisoning, and I literally had to go to the hospital. I don't care if the person driving the Uber eats was happy. I wish he would have not given me the food or the food would have got there or I would have been smart enough not to eat it, but either way. So there's a big gap between what we're taught and. And what actually works in a store and what actually works in a business? And.

You know, I don't know, happy is an emotion and so you can't teach somebody or make somebody be happy. You can't make somebody love you, although I think many of us probably have tried. You can't make somebody love you and so you can't force an emotion on somebody. What we want in business is we want performance. We want you to care about the customer, care about the business, and do what you're paid to do. It's a funny analogy about happy because.

ACDC goes on stage all the time. And do you think Even though there's 20,000 adoring fans out there, do you think that they're happy to play Back in Black one more time? Do you think Jon Bon Jovi gets up on stage and he wants to play Living on a Prayer? I bet you money that Jon Bon Jovi hates the song Living on a Prayer. But he goes up and he plays it because that's what he's getting paid to do and that's what he's there to do. So when it comes to creating employees that take care of customers, whether they're happy or not, we can't control that because that's a choice. That's something that they choose and depending on their environment the day, how they handle things, we can't fix that. So I'm going to go through some steps with you today about how you can create an outcome for your business as a leader or as an entrepreneur.

Without chasing happy employees. This is a true story. I was in my early 20s and an owner of a business in Seattle had written me a big check and I was commissioned on. So just in case you don't know, for most of my career I was commissioned on going into businesses that were underperforming and I would get a piece of the upside I created. I would get a sign up fee up front to make sure that they were serious and that they were going to do what I asked them to do and that they were committed. But most of my income was made off of the commissions that I created. And the way that it would work is it would be I would get a percentage of the upside over what they had done before. So there was a marker. This gentleman had a lot of friends that I had worked for and he called me, wrote me a big check. In month five, I think we were just starting to go. I'd had a couple good months, couple good checks from him. He was really happy with the results. We were getting momentum in the business.

He was an example of somebody who was chasing employee satisfaction and spent a lot of time creating benefit plans. The benefits in that business were better than anywhere else.

He had time off and sick days better than anybody else. He really did treat his employees really well, and they were a miserable group of employees. And it's funny today, before I did this, I looked online and I looked at the businesses with the worst customer service, and then I looked at the Forbes 100 top 100 businesses. And a lot of the businesses that are the best places to work and have the worst customer service are on the same list, which is not good, right? And so he calls me up to his office one day. So I was living in California, and I had flown up there, and he called me up into his office, and he was in his late 60s, and he's sitting at his desk in his office, and literally he's welling up with tears. And I didn't know what to do. And I said his name was Steve. I said, steve, what's going on? And he had this book in front of him that looked like some sort of composite. And he said, I just want to tell you, you've done a great job, but I sold the business yesterday, and I was in shock. And I said, why would you sell the business? We're just getting going. This is going to be fun. And he had gotten back a survey from the employees. So there had been an independent company that had came in and done something they call an ESI survey, Employee Satisfaction Survey. Employee Satisfaction Index is what it stands for. And the things that they said about him in that.

It was unbelievable how miserable and vicious and terrible those employees were. And he really didn't need the money. He had made his money in bonds. He owned that business as a labor of love. And he really was more trying to create a family atmosphere for himself. And those employees were the most vicious, ungrateful, entitled employees.

And he sold it. He sold it. And most of those people were gone very, very soon after that. And that made an impression on me because I was like, how come when you try so hard to make employees happy, they're miserable, right? And I've seen this a lot with kids, parents that try really hard to make their kids happy, and they're chasing making their kids happy. The kids end up being entitled and miserable. And the kids that have a lot of discipline and structure and have to go through some obstacles end up actually having a better life and not being so entitled. So I'm going to go through some steps with you here and kind of Explain what I've learned in hundreds of businesses about how you can create an environment where you're performing at a high level. And it is not. It is exactly the opposite of chasing happy employees. It's chasing the customer and the customer experience. Like I said, if I go see acdc, I want to hear him play Back in Black. And I don't care if they don't want to play it. I don't care if it's the millionth time they played it. That's what I bought the ticket to hear. I want to hear the hits. And so I was just at Tom Petty the other night at the Hollywood bowl, and he played the hits. That's what I was there for. And whether he's happy or not, I don't know. He seemed kind of miserable. He's kind of a grumpy guy, Tom Petty.

In fact, I think he kind of said that it was the last show of the tour and he was really glad that the tour was going to be over. So I don't care. He played the hits, he played American Girl, he played Refugee, played all the songs. That's really what I cared about. So the first thing is there's a lot of businesses out there that we see in Silicon Valley, like Google and Apple and businesses. A lot of startups will do this in Silicon Valley. They'll have foosball tables and nap pods and they'll do the dry cleaning for the employees and shuttles and all that. And. And the truth of the matter with that is that's less a perk for the employees and more a way to keep them there working. And there's been a lot of conversation about this lately about it really is the opposite of any sort of work life balance. They're working crazy hours and they are trapped there because all the amenities are there for them. And so perks, usually in business, I haven't seen. I mean, we have, here in the building that we're at, we have foosball tables, there's a pool table. I think there's all kinds of stuff. And I never see any of. Rarely would I see anybody on our team go, you know, go use that. They want to work and when they're done, they want to leave. So I don't know that that is a big, you know, big, big thing, chasing the perks. I find that most of the time, if you want to recruit really, really good talent, they're different. And so you might have really, really talented Joe and you might have really, really talented Lindsey, and Joe doesn't care about foosball. You know, he wants to watch football and sports. And Lindsey cares way more about time off and experiences and going on trips. So employees are motivated by different things. And I don't know that perks in the business so much matter to the employees. What matters is, and this is kind of the first one is knowing your employees and getting to know them on an individual basis more than anything else, and figuring out a plan for each employee, not doing the whole thing, as, you know, not approaching all the employees as one big swipe together.

There's a great quote by Steve Jobs that says, if you want to make everybody happy, don't be a leader. Sell ice cream.

Another thing that is a big equation in this of happy employees equal happy customers is leadership. If that's something that you're having an issue with or a balance with, you got to become a better leader, because better leadership fixes this. So.

The time that you spend with your employees should be more in reference to the performance of the business and the performance of them in relation to the problem you're solving for customers. Every business is solving a problem for customers and less about them being happy, because once again, happy is an emotion that you can't fix. So better leadership is the key. Knowing them individually and being consistent and fair, I think is another one. A lot of times in businesses that I've gone into where they've been chasing employee satisfaction and not chasing the customer, there's this weird thing where they're trying so hard to make employees happy that they're not fair to the general business. And there isn't structure. Which brings me to my next one, which is there has to be some sort of rules, and.

There has to be rules and a basic structure of what is good and what is bad. Because it's really hard to recruit top talent and have them hang around employees that get away with whatever they want, have no rules, are entitled, and aren't trying to perform. You're not. You know, you see in the NFL, a lot of players will go to the Patriots for less money because they want to win, right? And that's how it is with top performers. If you want to attract top performers, then you need to have an environment where performance is rewarded. And then here comes the one that's hard for Everybody. The bottom 20% needs to constantly go away. You have to have some sort of hierarchy where people are going away when they don't perform.

And I know that's hard. People say, oh, Kris, you're terrible when you say that. But it's just how nature works, it's how business works. If you're not getting rid of the low performers in the bottom 20%, then you really don't have any sort of scoring system and nobody knows if they win or lose. And so there has to be some sort of scoring in your business where they know if they win or lose. And you're replacing the bottom with which by replacing the bottom you're rewarding the top because the top wants better people to come in. And then actually what you'll see is the top starts to go up and your bottom starts to raise. So when you're replacing that 20%, it keeps climbing and climbing and your performance of your whole business will keep getting better because the new people coming in are going to challenge the top. Most of the time the people at the bottom have resolved themselves to, to stay at the bottom. The key to having a thriving business and culture is there has to be a win loss record and there has to be people that are cut. In sports, people are cut. And in business for high performing businesses, the bottom is cut. And it doesn't mean they're bad people, it just means they belong working somewhere else or doing something else because it's not the fit for them. If they're in the spot and they can't perform and they can't bat 300, then it's not the spot for them.

Another thing to kind of take into consideration is to have some sort of common goal that you're trying to achieve as a group or some sort of common enemy. And usually that's a good way to implement gamification and use gamification to create a goal. So you could do something as simple as saying, hey, this month if we hit this number, we're all going out to dinner and we're going to have fun. We. Or it can be on an individual basis where each person that's key to your business has individual goals and there's some sort of reward or it can be if we beat, you know, if we beat our enemy.

Sorry about that. Somebody's trying to call me and this Apple rings which I don't know how to turn that off. Maybe somebody could help me figure out how to turn off the phone ringing on my, on my computer. So some sort of law standards. And then the last one I have here I think.

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Happy employees start at the hire when you hire them. So if you hire people and you screen better and you do a better job of recruiting winners into your business, then you don't have to Worry about your employees being happy because they're focused on the result and focused on the customer, and they're naturally happy. And this really comes into play with customer service. And I'll give you a tool that we have used over the years that has been priceless for us, that I learned from my dear Sylvia.

That used to be HR for me was group interviews. And it's unbelievable if you, let's say you're hiring somebody in your business that's for support, and you.

Let'S say it's a cashier, customer service, something like that, and you do a group interview and you get 12 to 14 people in a room and you go around and ask a couple questions while they're in a group environment. The happy employees that are going to perform that care about people, if you ask the right questions, stick out, they stick out. So if you ask a question like, give me an example of a time when you had a difficult customer and what you did to.

Exceed that customer's expectations. How about that? Give me an example of a time you had a difficult customer and you did something to exceed that customer's expectations. And go around 12 people in a room and see what the answers are, because the winners will stick out. And usually out of 12, one or two will be shining stars that you can't ignore. And then you can call them back for an individual interview. But the hire is where you keep the culture of your company intact. Because if you let people in that aren't about performance, that are entitled and expect you to make their life better.

You'Re going to be in trouble. You need to hire people in your business who have a chip on their shoulder, who want to prove themselves, want to do something great, want to be part of a winning team and want to perform. And they get satisfaction out of taking care of customers. They get a satisfaction out of solving customers problems, taking a difficult challenge, and making it into something. There's all kinds of screening processes you can do, but the best one I found to start with that will give you a very good example of this is to do group interviews, because they really will stick out to you when you do that. So let's kind of recap the five leadership lies told today that you want your competition to believe.

Happy employees equal happy customers. It's not true. And I think we kind of covered that. And so probably the most important part is if you want to make your business go and really thrive, you have to become a better leader first.

You want to only let people into your company that share your values and share your enthusiasm because happy is an emotion and you can't make somebody love you and you can't make somebody happy. That's a battle you're never going to win. What you can do is exceed customers expectations, break all the rules in your industry and all the benchmarks, and perform at a high level. You can have a lot of fun, but you can't keep turning around trying to make sure everybody's happy when you're going to war every day trying to do something amazing. There have to be rules and standards in your business. Murder is illegal for a reason. You have to draw a line on what is acceptable and what is not. I'll tell you a lot of times in a company that I've gone into where their focus was making the employees happy and not the customer. People are showing up late, they're calling in sick on a Monday all the time. They leave early without telling anybody. They're taking shortcuts, they're not following the systems. There's no accountability in place. There has to be a system in place that has an ecosystem, rules, accountability, and it has to be very clear. And then the other one is, then you have to hold people accountable and get rid of that bottom 20% have a win loss record. People need to know if they're winning or losing every day. Because you want the top performers to be surrounded by other employees that share that same enthusiasm for taking care of customers and really making a difference. So I hope that this was.

Educational for you. I hope you learned something. The bulldogs have all left. So obviously they weren't that interested in this, but they are. The bulldogs are very entitled and I don't know, they're happy, but they're not really performers. They're more nappers. These bulldogs, they're actually right here under the table. So I hope you have a great week. Thank you so much for watching. And next week, same time, I'm going to do another one of these. So this was number one. Number two will be next Thursday, same time, 4:00'. Clock. I will see you then. Thank you.