Business and Leadership Questions Answered with Marc Haine

Do you have questions about your business? Today's going to be a really fun episode because today we are going to be looking at questions from the bag. That is, I will be picking some questions out of the bag, questions that people have submitted to me. I'm also going to open up to anybody who wants to ask questions. If you're watching this live, if you have a question, go ahead and put it in the chat. But today is about kind of solving problems, just random problems that people are and leaders and business leaders are complaining about. And so, we're going to be tackling that today. And that's what we're doing today on Experience Leadership.

Welcome to Experience Leadership, a podcast that challenges small business owners and entrepreneurs just like you to dare to be the exception. Join our host, customer experience expert Marc Haine, as he uncovers relevant and timely content to help you script and direct your business and teams to create jaw-dropping experiences your customers and staff deserve. Here is the host of Experience Leadership, author of Lights! Camera! Action!, customer experience expert Marc Haine.

Thank you so much for joining me today. It is thrilling to be able to do Something like this, and this is episode number 128, and I have not yet done anything like this before where we're gonna do something super live, super unscripted. I have no idea which direction it's gonna take, but ultimately this is where small business owners and entrepreneurs pick up core skill sets to help them create the showstopping, jaw-dropping experience that their customers and their employees deserve. And I'm hoping that today's episode is going to be something that you can use, something that's going to help you in your business. I am Marc Haine, Service Expert and Master of Experiences, and I am thrilled that you can be here today. I'm going to try my absolute best to make this so worth it. If as we go through, you think that there's information in here that you think would be beneficial to you, or you'd like to get into something a little bit deeper, Feel free to go ahead and book me on my calendar. Book a 30-minute session with you and your team on my calendar. The link is going to be in the show notes. It's the one that's marked meetwithmarjhaine.com. It's a very easy process. Book 30 minutes with me and maybe we can start uncovering. You know, part of the challenge of doing this kind of questions out of a bag is I have no way to be able to push back into what you're asking and no way to push back and see if we could get clarification on some of the topics. I'm going to have to use a lot of assumptions, I think, today. So why don't we go ahead and get started? So I have a bunch of questions here. I limited it down to 8. I figure I don't know how many we're going to get through in our time together. So I'm just going to at random pick a question and we're just going to address it. So here's a question right here. Oh, I've been hearing the term quiet quitting. Shouldn't I just fire anyone who is being lazy and not performing? That's actually pretty good. And I love this philosophy of quiet quitting in that what makes quiet quitting different from disengagement is that quiet quitting is an intentional level of disengagement where disengagement as a whole is people evolve within their culture, within their work environments to become disengaged. And there's a lot of reasons why that would happen. There's the issue of not being heard, not being valued at work. Your contributions don't matter. You just feel like you're going in, you're just going through and doing your routine. And really, nobody really cares. You're just there to be a checkbox, or you're just there to be kind of the factory worker component of the business. And people want a lot more than that. Where quiet quitting is different is that quiet quitting is all about people looking at their work-life balance and saying, I am not going to do what my grandparents did. I'm not going to do what my parents did and give so much time to a particular organization and work themselves to death, being disengaged from their family, not having any kind of work-life balance and so on. They're turning around now and saying, my mental health is important to me and I am just going to do what I'm being paid to do. But then that's it. It's not about laziness. And so the big challenge, I think, when it comes down to quiet quitting is I belong to a lot of nonprofits and I have a lot of passionate people who are not being paid, and yet they're working their tails off. And so why is that? If quiet quitting is such a big deal, why is it that when people are passionate about what they're doing, they give their whole self into it? They really jump in with both feet and they give of themselves. So my challenge is, if quiet quitting is the big challenge that you're facing, maybe you should be taking a look and seeing what— who is falling into this realm of quiet quitting. And what are their passion points? What are their— what's the stuff that makes them wake up every morning engaged and wanting to absolutely kind of fly? I think this could be the differential because I really think that if somebody loves to play baseball, like loves it, or they love basketball and they get out on the court, they give their all. They're dedicated. They want to learn. They want to develop. They want to push themselves forward. So is there aspects of the business within your business that people can start living their passion points? I hope that helps. Again, more than happy to have some comments in the comment box if you want to push back. If you ask if this spawns a different question, please go ahead and put that in as well. Let's get on to a second topic. I've only seen these questions, by the way, just to copy and paste them onto a sheet that I could play with. So this question is, The labor shortage is killing us. We are running constant overtime, which is so expensive. My people are tired. There doesn't seem to be an end in sight. I hire someone and within months they quit. It's a revolving door. It doesn't seem like people want to work anymore. This is funny that this one comes right after we talk about quiet quitting because this does have— there's different ramifications here. Now, let's talk about labor shortages. Yes, the almost post-pandemic era. Now we're seeing that a lot of the entry-level positions are vacant. People are struggling to appeal to people. I was just at the Canadian Federation, the Canadian Chefs Federation Gala, and I was talking to some people in at the table about the fact that it's so hard for them to be able to find staff. It's hard to find these people to come into the work. And the truth remains is that through COVID, people got laid off. They started finding other jobs and they then realized, you know, there's probably jobs easier than hospitality where I can have regular hours. I don't have to work weekends or holidays and this sort of thing. Whereas hospitality, the grind is pretty consistent that you have to be— you have to contribute your all in order to make it work. So this idea of the constant overtime and the fact that people are tired, we are asking a lot of the small group of people to do More things. We're trying to do more things with less resources. But I think that we can— if the industries would get together, I think we could help solve some of this. The one thing that comes to mind is job share programs. Now, you might be thinking, but Marc, people working overtime, they're tired. There's something about being in one location doing your work and then going off to something else and doing it. A perfect case in point was when I was working for the casino. I would— my head down 10 hours a day. When I decided to start taking courses, I feared that I'm so tired at the end of my days typically that I don't think I'll be able to pull off a course, but I thought I'll do it anyway. And what I ended up finding was pulling myself out of that work relationship into a different relationship. I was more energized. I looked forward to the fact that there was a change in my day. So what I'm suggesting to people, especially if you're in industries where you have a lot of competition in your area, So, you know, hotels— this would be perfect for hotels to do some sort of a job share program where the general managers of various different hotels in the area say, hey, where are you at with all your housekeepers? You know, right now the vacancy rates are ebbing and flowing. We have some good weeks, we have some bad weeks. Where are you with your housekeepers? Can you keep them all employed? That was one of the challenges when the occupancy is so low, is that you have housekeepers coming on that are being cut off work and not getting hours. Well, if we were to share some staff, share some people within the industry, we could get together and actually shine and get people to be employed to the maximum that they can. They can earn extra money, and you have people who are coming back into your organization as fresh blood, as fresh— kind of a fresh push. And talk to anybody who's got a full-time job and a part-time job, right? It's different having 2 jobs popping in. Now, I do know that industries are terrible for kind of this, you know, we have something unique that nobody else has and we can't let somebody at a competition come and do what, you know, come in and be exposed to our business because they might steal all our secrets. Get over yourself. Precious little about what we do in industry, in our businesses, are subject to NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. A lot of what we're doing is not super secret. It really isn't. People know, your competition knows what you're doing. You know what your competition is doing anyway. You know, really, if we come together, we will have a much more powerful dynamic than, than not. We would have a much more powerful community of businesses if we started to share a little bit. This other part of this question was, I hire someone and within months they quit. It's a revolving door. It doesn't seem like people want to work anymore. This is a different issue altogether. Again, sitting at that table at the Chefs Federation Gala talking with some people, and they came up with this exact phrase. And where I find that we're falling down is in our screening process. We're hiring people. And so, the big thing that we have to be constantly cautious of is that people who are coming into our businesses have expectations. Just like we have expectations of them, they're coming into our business with their own sets of expectations. If people are coming in under one bill of goods, so if you say, hey, we have a flexible work schedule and we have all these different benefits that are coming in and people come in and go, yeah, that sounds good. And then you change as you go forward. So, you no longer have flexible scheduling or you're scheduling people when they've asked to be off. And all the sales jargon stuff that happened at the very beginning is you're not delivering. That's when you're going to actually lose people. I think we need to tighten up how we interview and vet new people coming in. And we also have to be extremely honest with the people coming on board. To tell people that they're only going to work 36 hours a week, but then you're pushing them to the full 44 hours all the time, and then you're constantly switching up their schedules last minute that they have no work-life balance or They're struggling to deliver what you've hired them to do. This is a big challenge. So it's really— the solution to this is really twofold. Number one is have a really strong hiring parameter. Who are you hiring? What kind of personality are you hiring? What are their values? Do they meld up with you? And I realize that some— you might be looking at me like, Marc, it's so hard to find anybody. If we can just get a pulse, that would help save so much anguish. If we can get just a body in, to alleviate the stress on everybody else. And I could see how that could be a solution, but it's a really bad solution because I bet you in 6 months' time, you're going to be looking at this person going, what the heck did I do? You create more problems when you're not fully prepared and fully defining who you want to hire into your positions to the point where it becomes detrimental not only to that person that you've hired, but to your business, the coworkers, who are having to deal with that person. And ultimately, your customers will suffer as well. And the fact that they quit within months, it's because this is all about expectations. If you set a bunch of expectations at the very beginning and the person agrees to come on board with you and you don't deliver on those expectations, you can basically guarantee that that person's just going to walk out the door. This has been great. Let's take a quick break and then we will come back with some more questions from the bag. When the spotlight shines on your business, are customers applauding or yawning? In other words, how is your business performing? Make your business a star with a new book, Lights! Camera! Action!, Business Operational Excellence Through the Lens of Live Theater by Marc Haine. Marc uses his business and acting experience to help you see your business like a live show so you can create a performance your customers will never forget.

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Action! today at your Your favorite online retailer or directly at marchaine.com. Welcome back. I am doing questions from the bag. I'm challenged as I'm reading the questions because, you know, I want to get into details. I want to be able to ask some clarifying questions and not be so presumptuous and not have to run off kind of my own assumptions of situations. The best I can do is just reflect kind of some of my own experiences. With this. So, I hope this is of value. So, let's go into another question. And oh, this is another HR one. Wow! That's like 3 in a row. I promoted one of my best cooks to kitchen manager. He was great as an employee. He was respected by the team and always had great ideas to make things better. And he was an amazing cook. But now, the staff feels that the power has gone to his head. There is a constant conflict and pressure and people have Quit because of him. We've talked about this before on this show, the idea that we take our best performers and we promote our best performers. I think I talked about one particular situation where there was a shop where they had a welder and the welder was so phenomenal. The manager was like, if we promote you to kind of a shift lead, we'll put you in a position where you can train people to work like you do and we're going to have an amazing business. What you end up doing is putting a lot of pressure on this brand new leader. So my first question to this person would be if I To clarify this, you promoted your best cook. What leadership training did you give him? This is huge. Promoting a cook who has the capacity and competency to be able to put out great meals, has great timing, and be able to do things. And this is the same thing for any tech, anybody in a technician role, which is essentially what we're doing. We're hiring people who are in technician roles who are really good at what they're doing. And then we're saying, what we want you to do now is change your skill sets and become A people person. We want you to become a people leader. We want you to not only manage things but lead people. But we've not given them the training to be able to do that. And so, we have a set of expectations when we promote this cook into a kitchen manager position that he's going to be able to do scheduling. He's going to be able to quash whatever conflicts he has within his team. He's going to come up with new menu ideas and new things to be able to keep the flow of things going. We're going to ask him to hire people. And it's like all these things require training. And I bet you, if I was to talk to whoever wrote this question and ask the question, what leadership training did you provide him? It would be zero. Chances are what I would get is I would get a response of, well, we provided him with mentorship. He could come to me anytime for coaching. The challenge with that is It's kind of like if I wanted to do a brake job and I wanted to learn how to do my own brake job, is I can reach out to somebody and say, hey, I have this one screw, how do I fix it? And they go, oh, well, you need to be able to turn that counterclockwise. Okay, so then I go and then I get it off and it's like, oh, what about this spring? It's like you can do certain things with coaching, but until you build the whole capacity, you're asking people to band-aid their job performance and learn through osmosis by coming up to conflicts, you not only end up with unhappy employees, but the leader themselves are feeling unfulfilled. They don't understand why they're not doing well. I used to be so good. People used to love me. I don't know why. And you hear things like, oh, well, he changed when he got promoted. And the person who got promoted goes, I've never changed. Honestly, I've never changed. But Now you're putting all this pressure on him to do different things, and now he's got to make harder decisions that affect people, not just himself, but people around him. And he's doing it without being taught the capacity components to it. For me, this is a quick and easy fix. This is— you need to get this person some leadership training. You have to pull them off out of the kitchen, and you need to pair them up with a real coach, a real leadership development specialist, in order to make that happen. And that's probably the quickest way because obviously, he can't. You have no time to send him to a 3-year university leadership course. So, that would be my recommendation is you pair him up with a leadership coach, a leadership development specialist in order to help move him forward. And he's going to thank you for it in the long haul because the investment of time and money that you put into his development, A, will make him more effective. B, he'll stay longer. It's been proven that people who get trained will stay much longer and be loyal to you because of this capacity that you've helped them achieve. Great! I hope that answered that question. Here we go again. Another question. This one is leadership. My staff really hates change. Every time I put a new policy in place, they do nothing but complain and whine. Is there a good way to motivate my staff to want to change? This is really interesting. There's again, a couple of components to this. One is attitude is implied here. The minute you turn around and talk to your staff about them whining, there seems to me that there is a lack of respect. This is something that you're feeling. So, somewhere along the way you're saying, my staff whine. It's an emotional reaction to your frustration for that. So, just be very cautious if you're using My staff are lazy, the whining and stuff. Keep in mind that somewhere along the way, your feelings are being hurt and that you're reacting emotionally. And that's going to come through how you deal with your staff. So, I would caution on using words like that and really try to make it get more onto the logical side of the argument rather than the emotional side. As to change, nobody likes change, but nobody expects anything to stay the same. It's a conundrum for sure. But fact of the matter is we all evolve. We're not the same. Hopefully we're not the same person we were a year ago or 5 years ago. We've evolved over time. Your business is gonna evolve over time. And I think one of the reasons why some people get really frustrated with especially policy changes, policy changes tend to be a management team or a manager decides, oh, I'm tired of this, so I'm gonna make a policy. And then they throw it out there and the policy is addressing the lowest common denominator.

Right.

Within the team because there was a problem that the policy was there to solve. These are band-aids. I would suggest that you tighten up your team communication, that you start meeting more regularly with your team to be able to outline what challenges you're seeing within the businesses. What are the things that are frustrating you? But at the same token, opening yourself up to talking to your staff about what's frustrating them. Nothing is worse than somebody coming up from on high handicapping your performance based on a criteria that they believe is factual. And so, when we do this thing about, I've created a new policy and I'm just going to put it out there, I would challenge that you would probably be better off bringing your team together, sitting down and outlining what the problem is, and then brainstorming a solution. A couple of things happen with this. Number one, you're not relying just on your brain to do the work. You tap into the expertise of the people around you. And again, this is something I'm constantly getting pushed back on. You know, my minimum wage employees are minimum wage, unskilled people. They have no expertise. And it's like, excuse me, the people doing the work every single day. When I go into a hotel, the housekeepers know the rooms intricately. They know the flow of the processes that they have to do each and every day without us being able to sit down with them and help them understand what challenges we have in our business and then help letting them lend their voices to it. If we just, again, if we just rule from on high and just tell them what their reality is going to be, of course, you're going to get people who are going to be upset by it and people who are going to be challenged. Again, it's kind of like if we decide to play a game, right? If you and I get into a game and a third of the way through, I change the rules, how frustrating would that be? Okay, maybe not so much the first time. But what about the second, third, and fourth time? And so, people who are— they don't like change or they're whining because of the change that you're bringing forward. Usually, it's because they're not included in the process. They don't understand why you're doing it. And the end result is complicating their lives. So, I encourage you to bring your people together and explore any changes you want to make in your organization, in your corporate culture, in your leadership teams, in your processes. Bring them together, outline what the problem is, and see if you can come together and formulate some bigger questions. I'll tell you, nothing is more empowering than telling your staff, guys, I have a problem and I don't know what to do about it. I need your help. So, I hope that helps. Again, if you're watching this, if you're watching the replay of this, please put comments in the comment box. I'd love to kind of go back and forth a little bit, hear your reality. You might hear something I said and you go, well, that doesn't work in my reality at all. I'd love to understand what that reality is. And of course, if you have questions or if you would like to get together and kind of open up your business with your team and you want to explore some solutions and stuff, feel free to book a time on my online calendar. This is so much fun. Okay, we are 27 minutes in, 28 minutes in right now. So we're going to do maybe time for a couple more. Let's go to my business, which— and he wrote down a Greek restaurant— is suffering because I don't have enough customers. When I opened 12 years ago, I was busy all the time. Now, even when I run promotions, I get virtually nothing. Again, without being able to look into the business, this is going to be a tough one to answer. But let me just kind of give you some points to consider about your business. You've been in business for 12 years. As I mentioned earlier, everything evolves. So, what's evolved in your business? What's changed in your business? One of the best things that any operator can do, and many times I've worked with operations by going in and creating it, I do a secret shopper program for them. So, I send in people who I've trained to be very observational about the experience. In my book, Lights! Camera! Action!, I talk about experience expectations. That every single time that we get together, we have expectations of each other. And that could be you as my vendor, it could be me as your customer, it could be vice versa. I mean, even you being on the call today, you have an expectation. You're watching this video with an expectation. I'm gonna learn something. I'm gonna get some valuable things I can apply to my business. Maybe it's something I could share with my management team. You have these expectations, and if I do well, I deliver on those expectations. Those experience expectations drive satisfaction and dissatisfaction all the time. Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People talked about the trust bank account. This idea that everybody deals with you. There's a level of trust there. And everything you do will either add to the trust account or withdraw from the trust account. And I've used this example many times with restaurants when I'm speaking to business operators and Chamber of Commerce and business operate and associations. And the trust bank account, when you go into a brand new restaurant for the very first time and your trust is about here and you think, I'm going to give them a try and see how they are, and you have a phenomenal meal and your trust goes up, it's like, wow, that was great. Then you go back another time. You said it was so good that first, I can't wait to go back again. And you have a decent meal. It's like, yeah, that was just as good as the last time. And so then you bring some friends and you say, hey, I have a really great restaurant. This would be fantastic. Why don't you come? And so then you sit down and you have your meal and you have your experience and you go, that wasn't quite as good as the first 2 times I came. And so the trust gets withdrawn a little bit. And then you go back again for another time. You go, yeah, you know what? Last time there must have been a hiccup or something, but we'll go back again. And you go and it's like, What happened? It's not the same. And the trust gets withdrawn a little bit more. And you start thinking, wow, I wonder if they changed cooking. Maybe you were talking to serving staff. Did you change cooks? Is the owner different? What's different about the place? Who knows? But the next time that you want to go and eat there, you might say, well, the first 2 times were good. The last 2 times were okay, but they weren't the same. Maybe I'll try one more time. Now, if the trust bank account was here that you started and now you're here, now you're withdrawn. Well, then from that point on, you're going to turn around and say, why should I ever go back? And so for this restaurant that's been in operation for 12 years, I would need to know from you what has changed over the 12 years. If you were to bring in my services as a secret shopper and I was to come in, what were some of the things that I would find in your business that would put me off? Now, we've all been in businesses where you walk in and you go, oh my goodness, This is a little shady. And then you slowly step out and it's like, I don't want to do business there. There's some things, some touchpoints that are really good indicators. A perfect one in restaurants typically is if you want to see how good and clean the kitchen is, go to the bathroom. Because if they focus and keep their bathroom clean, chances are they have enough focus in their business to keep their kitchen clean. That's the basic underlying philosophy. Whether it's true or not, it's really relative to the operation. On my website, marchaine.com, I do have a customer touchpoint assessment. This is an assessment that you can take and you can kind of do your own secret shopping. You can walk through your business with the same eyes that your customers have and see where are the barriers to having a great experience and where are the things that you're doing really great. In my book, I talk about this one gentleman who got a secret shopper report and he was just livid with it. He was absolutely livid. He was a pizza restaurant. And he said, why do I care if there are fingerprints on the windows? I make great pizzas. And then when I sat down with him and I said, well, how do your new customers, people who've never dealt with you, how do they know you make great pizzas? When people walk into your business, there's going to be all these different indicators on what kind of business you run. And one of the things I would say is when somebody sees the fingerprints on, they might not walk up and go, oh my goodness, dirty fingerprints. But it's like a sum game between the dirty fingerprints, the squeaky door, the sticky tables, the server not bringing you cutlery. All these things add up and you go, this doesn't look like a business I want to ever come back to. And so then you turn around and you say, yeah, okay, I'm done. I don't want to play here anymore. So if you've not been busy, if 12 years ago you were busy and now you're not busy, we really have to uncover what are these touchpoints that you let people down? It could be over time that your food quality went down, your service quality standards are missing, any number of things. I do know that with that one gentleman that I mentioned in my book, that when he started focusing on the small things, the bigger things started to disappear. The bigger issues started to disappear. So as he started working on things on appearance, let's say, like making sure that he had a routine to make sure the windows were clean, somebody oiled the door hinge, and so on. All of a sudden, like when I went in to visit him months later, I noticed that his staff were dressed differently. And I said, oh, did you implement a uniform policy? And he goes, no, no, I haven't. And so it turned out that because he was caring about what he was doing, his staff started caring more. And so they started taking more pride in what they were doing. So for your business, if you've lost all that business, you really have to take a look at what is it that's changed? How is my mindset? First and foremost, everything starts at the top. I hate to tell you. If your business is suffering, you can blame the customers all you want, but it's your problem. And chances are is you are probably the seed of the cause. And I know that that's probably going to make you say, oh, I've had enough of this guy, and you'll hang up the— you'll kill the replay. But the bottom line is everything does start at the top. And so, if you could look at how have I changed over the years? How have my expectations changed over years? How do my customers rate me? Something else that you could do Go and check your reviews. Go look on Glassdoor for your employees, indeed.com for your employees, any of the TripAdvisor, expedia.com, Google reviews. What are people saying about you? And I challenge you to do it in a way that you're open to the feedback. If you look at a review, even look at a secret shop report and you get defensive, I'm going to ask you to park your ego and take your ego out of it. These are people who have had an experience with you. And as much as they don't understand how hard your life is, for them, it doesn't matter. They don't care how hard your life is. They came in with sets of expectations. If you didn't meet those expectations and they decide that it's so bad, I want to actually leave a review, then that's a you problem. It's not a them problem. So I would challenge that. And so again, if you feel that you need some help with this and you would like some intervention, maybe a new pair of eyes, feel free to book time on my calendar. We're going to take a quick break so I can clear my throat. We will be right back after this.

Attention meeting and event planners! Is your company or association planning a live or virtual conference, seminar, or staff retreat? Are you looking for a fresh, energetic perspective on what it takes to put on a jaw-dropping experience for your customers or staff? Book customer experience expert Marc Haine for your next group event. Past participants have said, Marc kept us in stitches while teaching us how important and powerful actually designing our customer experience can be. Read more testimonials and find out how Marc can serve you and your group at marchaine.com. That's M-A-R-C-H-A-I-N-E dot com.

Welcome back! As you can tell, my throat is now clear. But as you can tell, I'm super passionate about this. The stuff that we talk about here on the show around leadership, business operations, and so on. I do believe that most of us have never been trained in business operations. We're, you know, to the point that I talked about at the very beginning, we tend to be technicians first and then we build a business around what we know. But we've never been trained in human resources or marketing or business operations or leadership and so on. And so sometimes getting an outside view of stuff really is helpful. If you think that what I've been talking about today is helpful and you belong to an association or an organization that you feel could use my help, please go ahead and book yourself on my online calendar. I would love to serve you. It's what I live for every day. It's what gets me out of bed every single day is to know that I can help people who might not have the exposure to the experiences that I have had over my 30-plus years working with business operations and businesses. I do know when I've gone into businesses and they look like they haven't been cared for, I know that a lot of times that becomes situational. I do know when I was working in economic development, I was touring around to different businesses and I would ask them how business was. And they're like, oh, my business is It's terrible. It's not very good. I'm losing customers. And on and on and on about how negative stuff. And they're negative. But their business looks negative as well. And when I stopped and asked them, tell me how you started. Tell me how life was when you first started. All of a sudden, their eyes open and they get animated. They get excited. All of a sudden, I see the passion that they started with. So, one of the recommendations I would make to you if you're in a position where you just don't know why you keep doing what you're doing, and you've kind of lost that mojo within your business is look back at what it was that prompted you to start your business in the first place. Or if you're in an industry, if you're a manager working for a business and you think, when I first started here, I was so excited to be here, but now I'm not. Really look back and say, why were you excited back then? Because that will help give you a seed into the expectations you had many, many years ago. So I picked another question out of the thing. I am constantly getting staff complaints about my highest performing salesperson, that she is mean and rude, but my customers love her. She generates more sales and makes more commission than the next 2 salespeople combined. I've spoken with her but think people are jealous of her success. Boy, would I love to get into this. There's so many things I need clarification on here. I can, again, only based on the assumption, You know, I had a really great person working for me when I was working in the casino. I was the director of food and beverage at the Palace Casino in West Edmonton Mall, and I had this amazing girl. She was like the Energizer battery rabbit. Her customers absolutely loved her. She was all about her customers. Unfortunately, she didn't look at her coworkers as being customers as well. So if there was any conflict, if there was anything that needed to happen, For instance, if she went to run out food to a client and there was what she ordered up in the window, she would just take it to deliver it without clarifying whether that's her order or not. And so what ended up happening was a table that was supposed to get that with something else didn't get both their meals. And so that affected another server. This server, because of her personality type, was a dominating, a Type A personality on the team. And so, she was being really defined as a bully. Customers loved her. The employees unfortunately didn't like her at all. Part of what we have to look at, if you're looking strictly at the earning potential of your individual people and nothing else, then you are going to end up with cutthroat team dynamics. You're going to end up with a culture where integrity and values don't matter. And because of that, you're going to end up with huge problems. And these problems will manifest themselves over time. This particular person who is being defined as mean and rude, if you're not addressing that, if you're not figuring out how to give her the tools to be able to be a high performer but not at the expense of the rest of your team, you're not giving her those tools, then at some point your teams are going to— your people are going to start to leave. They're going to go and find a happier place to work. There is no room in our organizations for incivility, for bullying, and for meanness. And so, this is something that you really, truly, as a business owner, as a business manager, if you have anybody on your team, you must, must with a capital M, you must address it. I do believe that all behavior is evolutionary. That means if you have somebody who behaves badly once, and you don't address it, that will manifest itself into bigger problems later on. I do believe that what gets recognized and rewarded gets repeated. So being able to recognize and reward good behavior— and I'm not saying here's $1,000 because you showed up to work on time. It is you recognizing that people are doing good. You're recognizing that you are having conversations with people and recognizing specifically what they're doing well. Hey, Donna, I just overheard part of that conversation you had with that one client. You did really well because he was pretty choked and you de-escalated him so well. Thank you for doing that. Well done. Now, you might turn around and go, but that's so patronizing. And maybe it can be. But if your intent is real, if you really truly want to celebrate the people who are working with you, then it's not patronizing. If you turn around and you really appreciate what Donna did because what she did was extraordinary, I promise you that the next time she has a difficult customer, Donna is going to use the same tactics that she learned got her the reward and the recognition before. So with your mean and rude person, I bet, and the fact that you've even put down here that she generates more sales and makes more commission than the next 2 people combined, you're celebrating sales. As long as you celebrate sales, you're going to have this. So, what you really need to be looking at as far as your team culture is concerned is, is sales the biggest value that you have? If it is, then I can promise you at some point that you are going to end up with huge business problems over the long term. You're creating, as Simon Sinek would say, you're creating a very finite working environment. You're not playing an infinite game where you're going to be lasting for many, many moons because your systems don't support that. So, I would strongly recommend that you sit down with your staff individually. Find out exactly what makes her mean. Find out what are the behaviors, what are the triggers that they find that makes her mean. Is it when she loses a sale or when she's had a tough conversation with a client? What is it that she manifests it then with the rest of the team? Find out individually. And I'm not saying this is a tattletale, whatever. What you need to do is you need to find out what are the behavior dynamics that you don't see as a manager. Because I have a sneaking suspicion if she's rah, rah, rah, rah with her coworkers, as soon as she sees you, she's like, hi, how are you? And so, you're not going to see some of the team dynamics. So, being able to sit down and do a 365 evaluation with her, find out the people around her, who she's serving internally, how are they dealing with her, who is serving her internally, how are they dealing with her. And so on and get a really good picture. And then, you can sit down and say, as I've been looking at our team dynamics here in our culture, I've noticed that whenever you lose a sale, you tend to get a little persnickety. We need to address how you're going to address— how are you going to work through some of the dynamics that we're seeing and making sure that you can work with the team. It really is Looking at values first. Values, I think, are the key. If her only reason for being is to step on everybody else so she can be successful, then you have a bigger problem. And I hate to say it, but you might have a cancer on your team, and a cancer needs to be treated if you want to have longevity in your business. I hope that helps. As you can tell, I'm super passionate about this as well. I've had lots of issues. I remember driving in as a young manager, having to deal with a very difficult cancer in the business. And I remember thinking to myself as I was driving to work that how I deal with this one person will define the kind of leader I am. And it's imperative that we reflect those values as we move forward. I think we have time for one more and then we'll wrap up our show for today. So one more, hopefully it's a quick one. I've been running a brick-and-mortar retail business. Amazon is killing my business. I have lost so much business to them. It's not right. I have to pay business taxes, upkeep, labor. My costs keep going up and my revenue is going down. Help. Oh, I have heard this time and time again. The challenge with Amazon is that they're convenient and that's what people are buying. The convenience of being able to have home delivery and so on is what you're competing against. What Amazon doesn't have is they don't have human interaction. They don't have advice. They don't have the ability to build human relationships. I had this discussion with a hardware store owner, and one of the things that they decided to do was they decided to start their own delivery business locally with whoever bought stuff, uh, from the hardware store. They decided they were gonna do free delivery. Now, it's a relatively small community where I live, But what a difference that that makes, that it's not just a faceless person dumping goods onto your porch. They're actually helping you load in your stuff, your purchases. They're coming to the door. They're treating you as, as if you're a human being. We have a lot of ability to be able to shine within the realm of internet-based marketing. And, you know, Uber started up specifically because people in San Francisco were tired of the taxi systems. The Airbnb started taking hold because people were tired of just the cost of staying in a hotel when all they wanted was just someplace to sleep, someplace I'm visiting and I need to come in, go out, and so on. And so all these disruptive technologies have happened because they're fulfilling a need, and that is convenience more than anything else. That is convenience. I would suggest that as a business that's running a brick and mortar, that You get out into your community more. Get out there, get Lions, Chamber of Commerce, whatever fundraisers you have out there. By putting yourself out as being a community contributor, people are going to be more likely to want to take time, get in their car and drive to you and shop with you. When people come into your store, take a look at what is the experience that they're getting. Do they come into the store, look for stuff, and then you have people going, I don't know, it's in aisle 12. Right. And you just leave them be? Or do you have people who are there saying, so what problem are you solving today? Oh, you're in a hardware store. Yeah. Oh, you're plumbing. Oh yes. Okay. So what kinds of things? And have knowledgeable staff. And I think this is one of the challenges I'm seeing in, especially in service-based industries. I'm seeing that there's not a lot of knowledge, product knowledge on what's being served. I mean, when was the last time that you went to a restaurant and you asked the server, hey, what's the soup of the day? And she goes, um, okay. I'll be right back. I'll just go check. Right? And it's like needing systems in place to be able to effectively and confidently answer questions, I think, is the key. I'm shopping just this morning. I was on the call to a tire shop looking for tires for my wife. And I said, here's the challenge. I want really good tires for her. What would you recommend? And this is something I can't do on Amazon. I can't have this conversation on Amazon. So, leverage that and make sure that you know that a colleague of mine, Jeff Mowatt, talks about you as being the trusted advisor. What a great word. Taking your role and instead of being like a sales clerk or whatever, you put on the name badge metaphorically that says, hey, I am a trusted advisor. Doesn't that change your mindset? And I think that's brilliant. So, a call out to Jeff Mowatt about that.

Great!

Hey, we are 50 minutes in. This has been so much fun. A couple of things, you know, when it comes down to dealing with some of these problems, keep in mind that you have your own bubble that you live in. I have my own little bubble that I live in and so on. And all our bubbles are made up of our experiences, our own biases, our value systems and so on. And so a lot of the stuff that we do, because we're stuck in our little bubble, we don't see the forest for the trees. So bringing a second pair of eyes in and bringing some knowledge that you might not have into your business might be the key to your longevity and your success. So, if you would ever have some questions about what we talked about today, you'd like to brainstorm some aspects that you feel might be worthwhile, again, feel free to book yourself on my online calendar. The link is down below. I do live to serve. And please, if you did enjoy this episode, please feel free to subscribe to the podcast. This is episode 128. It's been a blast and a half doing this show. And bottom line is if you can apply some of the stuff we talked about today and just open up that perception of, oh, there might be some solutions, you're gonna end up with so much more engagement in your business, both from employees and your customers. And you're gonna be able to rock your world with the most amazing loyal brand ambassadors supporting you. So, thank you so much for joining me today. My name is Marc Haine. I hope that you stay safe, stay healthy, and I hope you dare to be the exception. Thanks for joining me today.

Thank you for joining us this week on Experience Leadership. Make sure you visit markhaine.com for a full directory of available episodes. While you're at it, if you found today's content valuable, please share it and tell your friends about the show. As Marc says, knowledge is power, but only if you share it. Be sure to tune in each week for the newest episode. Please stay safe, stay healthy, the end. Dare to be the exception.