DOING THING WITH RIGHT PEOPLE - Catch People in the Act of Doing Things Right

by Bill Taylor

I'd like to say I was surprised by the wave of commentary triggered by my most recent HBR post, but I had a feeling it would get a big reaction. In the post, titled "It's More Important to Be Kind than Clever," I told the story of a touching gesture by a store manager at Panera Bread toward a customer undergoing chemotherapy, described the huge social-media phenomenon the gesture unleashed, and posed two simple questions: "What is it about business that makes it so hard to be kind? And what kind of businesspeople have we become when small acts of kindness feel so rare?"

Those questions obviously struck a nerve with readers, who spent weeks discussing why and how we've drummed basic emotions, and simple acts of decency, out of so much of day-to-day business life. As I argued in my earlier post, "In a world that is being reshaped by the relentless advance of technology, what stands out are acts of kindness and compassion that remind us what it means to be human." Now it's time to raise the obvious next question: How do we as leaders encourage, spread, and make more "ordinary" ways of behaving that today seem extraordinary? Are there clever ways for leaders to help their organizations become more kind?

Those are huge questions, of course, but my basic answer is for leaders to think and act in ways that are designed to bring out the best in whomever they encounter. That is, to spend less time scoring, critiquing, and correcting colleagues who make mistakes, and to spend more time identifying and rewarding colleagues who behave the way we wish everyone would behave. Leaders who engage in relentless fault-finding can't help but lead to a culture of bloodless execution. Leaders who celebrate small acts of kindness, who reward moments of connection, give everyone permission to look for opportunities to have a genuine human impact.

I first learned this lesson when I studied the intensely human service culture at Commerce Bank (now TD Bank). It's hard to think of a less emotionally charged business than retail banking, but TD Bank has built a legendary brand by persuading tens of thousands of front-line people to think of their jobs as "retailtainment" — not just providing technically adept service, but keeping customers engaged, surprised, entertained. This is truly an organization where small acts of kindness have become an everyday reality, a warm-and-fuzzy culture that attracted the attention of the famously no-nonsense editors at The Economist. 

How does TD Bank maintain its human-centered ways of working? In large part by defining the work of leadership as reinforcing positive behavior rather than correcting behavior that falls short. Front-line employees carry a kind of "pledge card" that lists the company's principles of great service. Bank managers and officers, as they visit locations and make the rounds, carry rolls of stickers. They slap these stickers on the back of an employee's card whenever, as one senior executive puts it, "we catch somebody in the act of dong it right." As their card fills with stickers, employees become eligible for prizes. 

"It's too easy to catch people screwing things up," this executive told me. "What fuels this company are the high-fives, the wacky stuff we do to engage people in the business, to make them feel good. It's the job of every manager and officer of this bank to go out and catch people doing it right." (TD Bank managers distribute about 100,000 stickers per year.)

Ward Clapham is a leader whose very business involved catching people screwing things up. When he took command of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force in Richmond, BC, the third largest force in the country, he faced a problem with juvenile delinquency and misbehaving young people. His response to the problem was an innovation he called "positive tickets." Of course his officers cited and arrested kids for breaking the law. But they also went out of their way to find at-risk kids who were staying out of trouble, who were doing small things at a skate park, or in a school, that were making life a little better. At those moments, he and his officers issued "positive tickets" — citations that entitled the recipient to a meal at a restaurant, or admittance to a movie or a theme park. "Instead of catching kids doing something wrong," he explained in a book he wrote about the experiment called Breaking With the Law, "positive ticketing is about catching kids doing something right."

Clapham and his colleagues issued 40,000 positive tickets per year — three times as many citations as they issued for violations. As a result, he reports, youth-related service calls dropped by 50 percent, and an estimated 1,000 young people stayed out of the criminal-justice system. More to the point, the very nature of the relationship between the police and the community changed: "The part that makes it worthwhile is pulling into a parking lot full of kids. Instead of running away from me, they swarm me...Kids don't feel I am hunting them anymore; they see me as a friend."

Ultimately, whether the setting is a fast-growing bank or troubled neighborhoods, the lesson is as simple as it is powerful. If we are eager to create environments where people routinely act their best, it's up to leaders to bring out the best in everyone — to focus less on fixing what's going wrong, and to highlight and celebrate what's going right. That's how we get humanity back into business.

 http://blogs.hbr.org