LEADERSHIP
“If I don’t love working here, it’s much more diff icult for me to create the products and services that my customers are going to love.”
This leadership model is something
that’s open to everybody. Top-down is always great when you’re trying to change a culture or improve a culture or enhance an environment, but it doesn’t always have to start there. Regardless of your position or title, from wherever you sit in your company, ask yourself this question: What can I do right now, regardless of what anybody else around here is or is not doing, to change my piece of this business for the better? That’s a leadership question. To say, “Yeah, we’ll bring this love thing in as soon as my idiot boss gets it” — that’s the same thing as saying, “I choose not to lead.”
Knowledge@Wharton: But that’s a personal decision, and many people are nervous to take that step.
Farber: It’s always a level of personal decision, without exception. We do talk a lot about culture, and for all the right reasons. It’s a very important thing. If you work in a big company, you tend to think you’re a cog in the machine. But the fact of the matter is that companies large and small also have micro-cultures, subcultures. Each team has its own culture. Each neighborhood, so to speak, in the company has its own culture. And that’s where all of us have an infl uence. If you can prove in your piece of
your company that there is a better way to do things through the kinds of relationships that you create, then you have an opportunity to change things at a grass roots level. Because as business people, we’re interested in results. So it starts to happen. People from other parts of the company start
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looking over the fence at you and saying, “What are you doing over there? How are you getting those results?” That’s leadership. We don’t have to wait for somebody to give us permission to operationalize love in the way that we do business; we just start doing it. There are people doing this all over the place…. It’s not about walking around saying, “I love you, man. I love you, man.” It’s about acting as though I do.
Knowledge@Wharton: Whether you’re a big or small business, are there elements that work for both?
Farber: Absolutely. I know this is going to sound strange, but every company that I’ve met, whether they’re big or small, has one thing in common. They’re all populated by human beings. This is the human element of business, but it’s something that has extraordinary impact. Let me give you an example, because I think I’m speaking a little bit abstractly. One of my favorite case studies is a company in Jacksonville, Fla., called Trailer Bridge. They’re not in a sexy business. They’re in the shipping business, so they ship containers primarily from the mainland to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It’s a toxic place. They’ve been in business now for about 30 years. But a number of years ago, they were spiraling down, they were in bankruptcy. People were dying to get out of there. The customer service numbers were terrible. They burned through four CEOs in three years, four heads of HR in the same period of time, and then Mitch Luciano was tapped by the board to turn the place around.
“I’m not talking about love as a sentiment, but it’s really love as a practice and a discipline.”
Now, Mitch is a love guy. That’s
where he comes from. That’s his leadership approach. He was infl uenced by my fi rst three books, The Radical Leap, The Radical Edge, and Greater Than Yourself, where I fi rst posited this idea and this practice of love. He said to his board, “I’m going to turn this place around, but I’m going to warn you that it’s not going to be the usual sort of thing. … I believe in these people. I want to create an environment that people are going to love working in. That’s how we’re going to aff ect things.” He did a number of things. Some of them were symbolic, and some of them were systemic. Symbolically, he said, “Listen, we’re a small company, 120 people. Everybody’s walking around with name tags on. Why? Shouldn’t we know each other? Let’s start with that.” Then he lowered the cubicles in the common area so people could see into each other’s faces. Then he put in foosball tables and ping-pong tables and taco trucks to bring everybody together. By the way, he did not take the title of CEO because of the baggage associated with it. He said, “I need to earn that title. When you guys see me as the CEO, then I’ll take the title.” Here’s what it looks like from a customer perspective. In the old days, their policy was they would not ship unless their container was 75% full. Let’s say you’re a customer shipping a car to Puerto Rico for your family. You tell them it’s going to be there on such-and-such a date, and then you fi nd out that it didn’t sail because the container wasn’t full enough. Your car is still sitting there. They asked this question: “If we
loved our customers, what would we do?” And the answer is really obvious when you put it that way. “We would sail. It’s not the customer’s problem that we’re going to lose money on it, but we should sail.” They started sailing, and they started taking care
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