Excerpt from Culturiffic! -

All parts of this are copyrighted and we will find you!

License to Drive

There are a lot of people on the culture change road driving under the influence – the influence that they know what they are doing. These drivers give culture change a bad name. Unfortunately, there is no law against DUI culture change.

So, you want to be a card-carrying member of the culture change elite. Well, before we can grant you an official driver’s license, you must first have a lesson on corporate culture. At no point do we intend to make you experts on the subject of cultures, but in order for you to understand the importance of many of the points of this book, we need to build the foundation and framework.

But first, is it really worth it for you to invest your time and the company’s money in trying to create a service culture within your organization? Take this test.

(The answer is YES!!)

If you are like most, the value given to Y varies from 5 to 25% depending on whom you’re asking. If a company has 3,000 employees (S) in it and the average salary is $20,000 annually (E) and the amount of time wasted is 10% (Y), then the amount of money lost to your culture is $6,000,000. Do we have your attention yet? Would it be all right with your CEO and stakeholders if you added an extra six million to the bottom line next year?

What is the secret to capturing back this money? Your company’s corporate culture. We are not saying that you will recover all of this money from reading this book. You will be investing quite a bit of money to get there. But we do think you will save enough money to pay for the investment of this book. So we are even! But, take heart. You’ll recover more than just the price of this book!

 What is the definition of culture?

Here is where we dig out our friend Mr. American Heritage Dictionary to help us. This friend will be very useful to use throughout this book. There are multiple definitions for this word, as there are for all words in the dictionary. The interesting thing about each is how the latter ones grow from the former. See what we mean.

Culture:

1.       The behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought expressed in a particular community or period.

2.       Intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced.

3.       Development of the intellect through training or education.

NOTE: These definitions are for the word culture, not for the term corporate culture. Is there any difference? None whatsoever. In definition 1, you replace the word community or period with company and Walla! In definition 2, the works produced (results) of a company. And in definition 3, intellectual capital of a company. We are especially fond of definition 3. It holds the key to corporate culture and more importantly to corporate culture change.

We could spend the rest of this book describing the intricacies of culture in more detail, but one of the Top 10 reasons you bought this book is because it wasn’t going to be a Harvard edition. The brief description above is all you need to know. However, to effectively change a culture, as in your case of building a Culturrific! service team, there is a little more you need to know. The people in your company right now are the ones you want to become more service oriented. What’s the secret before you go any further? You must involve the whole employee in a Culturrific! service team.

John Parker Stewart, in his work “Team of Champions,” relates it this way; “with a paycheck you earn are the hands and feet of the employee. But in order for them to perform at a high service level, you must capture their hearts and their heads.” Truer words have never been spoken. How many times have you said to yourself after a poor performance, “My heart just wasn’t in it?” If you are like everyone else in the world, way too many. This supports Stewart’s and our point. You must have the hearts and heads of your employees if you ever expect them to perform like a Culturrific! service team.  (We highly recommend the video of the program mentioned above. Like all true leaders, when we watched the program and heard these words we were elated. This was the same concept we had been teaching for years. So to have someone else say it as well...this man must be brilliant!)

It is a fact that a great percentage of your current employees come to work simply looking for the easiest route to a paycheck. These employees look to give the least amount of effort possible to get by. Truly this is their motto— “to get something for nothing.”

A group of scientists were performing an experiment with mice. (We know this is a shock and hard to believe, but it’s true.) They took a mouse and dropped him into a beaker full of water to see how he would react. The little mouse swam furiously trying to keep its head above the water so it could breathe. Eventually, the mouse’s legs tired and he stopped struggling and simply sank to the bottom. The scientists pulled the mouse out of the water, dried him off and put him back in his cage. The next day, they took the same mouse and placed him in the beaker of water again. This time the mouse swam and he swam trying to keep his head above water, but not as long today as he did yesterday before he finally gave up and sank to the bottom. It’s now the third day – same mouse, same scientists, and same beaker of water. They dropped the mouse into the water and guess what happened? Exactly! The mouse sank straight to the bottom. He had learned that there was no reason to go through the entire struggle and pain of trying to keep his head above water. In essence, the mouse had learned that if he would just sink to the bottom, they would take him out and it would all be over. If it takes a mouse three days to learn he can get something for nothing, how long does it take people?

Let’s face it. You have a workforce with lots of hands-and-feet clock punchers who are looking to get something for nothing. These are not the service providers you need. However, in most cases it’s simply because no one has ever tried to touch their hearts and heads. They have spent their adult lives “getting by” looking for the path of least resistance. But what about yourself? Have you always been a go-getter? Or is there some point in your life when someone got to your heart and head that made the difference in who you are today? Take a couple minutes to really think about this point.  You could, in fact, be that person for the employees in your company.

We are not advocating that you will have to fire all of your employees and start over. This is a ludicrous proposition (although tried by some!). The stops in this book are designed with the above philosophy. Every action you take from now on will look to capture the hearts and heads of your employees so that they can make a difference in the lives of your customers.

A corporate culture is a living, breathing part of your company.