The Power of a Good Example
The Power of a Good Example
A good example is worth a thousand lectures on abstract principles. The best ones engage the reader’s interest, bring a principle to life, drive home the point and make it memorable. We like this one, which will appear in a new Book by Roger Connors and Tom Smith titled Change the Culture, Change the Game:
The leaders of a well-known retail brand, which we’ll call “Lauren-Smith” or L-S for short (to provide the requested anonymity), consistently delivered on their performance metrics. The owners of the firm had made it abundantly clear to their senior managers that they were accountable to solve problems and get results and that if they did not solve problems, they were “not doing their jobs.”
To produce and place reports of excellence on the owners’ desks, a practice evolved in the culture that amounted to what could be called “Potemkin visits,” a term that conjures up the image of the lovely but sham villages erected by General Potemkin alongside railroad tracks in 19th Century Russia. These sham villages were set up to fool Catherine the Great into thinking that her subjects were living well, when, in fact, they were beset by the most abject poverty. As soon as the Empress’ train disappeared around the bend, troops would dismantle and move the fake village (complete with waving peasants and flocks of contented sheep) further down the tracks to impress the Empress yet again.
In the case of L-S, when the time came for executive inspections to ensure that L-S products were advantageously displayed in stores, they selected stores grouped near one another in a straight line to the airport, minimizing the obstacles to the planned quick and uneventful trip. Any variance from the pre-planned route could cost the sales associate their job. With advance warning prior to each planned store visit, the area’s sales associates would scurry around erecting “knock-their-socks-off” merchandise displays to give the appearance that the brand was being promoted in the intended way, only to see these same displays dismantled within hours of the store visit. On top of that, associates were told never to raise any thorny issues or problems during the visit, since management was not coming to solve problems, but to see that everything was going as planned. In one especially egregious case, L-S associates ran the scam at every store within 50 miles of the North American Sales Meeting. People flew in from all over the country to make it happen. It all went smoothly enough, but it cost the company some $400,000 in free merchandise! The result: only perfect scores on the store visit report to top management. From the top, it appeared that problems were being solved and the brand presence in the stores was proceeding as planned.
Out of curiosity, we recently asked a sales associate who had worked at L-S for 35 years if he still set up “Potemkin visits.” “Sure,” laughed the veteran, “I just spent the last two weeks getting ready for one we ran just yesterday.” How, you might ask, could this go on year after year? Wouldn’t someone at the top wonder why all twenty stores in an area always received perfect scores during an audit? Apparently not. The “Potemkin visits” had become a part of the culture. Imagine the results the culture could have been producing if the company had eradicated such inefficiencies. Optimizing the organization’s culture in order to operate at the highest level of performance will always yield a competitive advantage, validating our central idea: the most effective culture is a Culture of Accountability.
P.S. Patricia Snell contributed the Potemkin analogy.
Monday, May 17, 2010