CHAPTER 13

Enabled Employees Are Trusted

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

—Booker T. Washington

In Chapter 6, we wrote of what we called a “truth recession” that both predated and accompanied the 2007–2009 worldwide financial recession. It seems accurate to say that the workforce’s trust in their management has sustained damage that is at worst irreparable and at best will require a long rehabilitation. No less significant in the way that institutions function is the degree of trust that travels in the other direction—the trust that organizations vest in their people.

Think about it: in their private lives, your employees (and ours) are heads of families, civic leaders, military reserve officers, mortgage holders, and a host of other things. They somehow manage to feed themselves and their families every day, pay their bills on time, stay out of jail, and behave normally by most standards. In short, they tend to be rather competent individuals who clearly understand the difference between right and wrong.

Why is it, then, that these people face a continual barrage of not so subtle signs of our mistrust in them when they come to work? We seem to find new ways every day to treat them like children, or worse. If you disagree, consider this: if you offered to pay a neighbor’s teenager to pick up some groceries for you at the store, which of the following—if any—would you do when they returned with the groceries:

• Ask to see their time card, signed by a parent or supervisor.
• Check their odometer readings and each item’s price tag.
• Read them your eight-page policy on grocery purchases.
• March them through a metal detector at your front door.
• Double count your change.
• Demand a receipt.

We didn’t think so. Now, if you’re not going to require such an accounting from the kid down the street, why would you think of doing so with someone who has presumably passed your panel interview process, had their employment and criminal references checked, completed a personality profile, and successfully peed in a bottle? After all, this is someone you have an opportunity to observe working for 8 hours a day.

Trust, integrity, call it what you will, but whether it’s as a customer, supplier, or employee, it is one of the key factors that differentiates the Contented Cows from the also-rans. What really distinguishes trusting from distrusting relationships—and there is no middle ground—is the ability of those involved to make a leap of faith. In short, they believe that each party is interested in and committed to the other’s welfare and that neither will act without first considering the action’s impact on the other.

We’ve had an extraordinary year, despite major inflation of raw materials, and I can say that the single biggest contributor has been an increase in trust. We now move through enormously complex decisions at breakneck speed.

—Al Carey, CEO, Frito-Lay1

Nordstrom Trust—As Simple as It Gets

Seattle-based department store Nordstrom has become synonymous with legendary customer service. Something must be working, because in a cutthroat industry with competitors entering (and exiting) the market almost every day, this company doubled sales between 2002 and 2011 (arguably some of the bleakest years in U.S. retail history). This gave it the highest revenue growth of any department store in the country.2 Patrons keep coming because what everybody says about Nordstrom is true: they have outstanding customer service and great merchandise.

We get one clue as to how they’re able to get their 52,000 employees to render such outstanding service via the simple “Welcome Card” that every new Nordstrom employee receives on his or her first day:

For years, this card was proudly called the “Nordstrom Employee Handbook” and was described as such in the first edition of this book. In the meantime, apparently someone with a law degree got ahold of it and decided that every employee should still receive it—since it is, indeed, the way the company works. However, it now accompanies a real book, complete with rules and regulations. We would respectfully suggest that they should have left well enough alone.

Nevertheless, unlike so many of the rest of us, Nordstrom apparently believes they made the right choice at the outset—by hiring adults with some modicum of good sense and judgment. The simplicity of the two rules—which causes them to treat their people as mature, competent professionals—is simply an extension of that faith.

We’ve found that people tend to base trust as much on the personal (i.e., manager-employee) relationship as on the organization’s policies and practices. This seems clear from the fact that one can still find pockets of high morale and productivity, even in organizations where some very bad things are going on. It may be analogous to the underpinnings of motivation long understood and taught by the military—chiefly, the notion that when push comes to shove, people don’t fight for the flag or Mom or apple pie. Instead, they fight for the guy standing next to them. Their trust is based not on symbols or feelings but reality.

Rethinking the Break Room

As with so many other things, we demonstrate trust in small, seemingly infinitesimal ways. SAS Institute, for instance, apparently believes that “well-fed cows give better milk.” Every floor of each of the 18 buildings on its sprawling Cary, North Carolina, campus has a well-stocked break room with a veritable cornucopia of stuff to eat and drink—“everything from crackers to M&M’s,” according to one employee—all of which the company pays for. There’s nothing to stop someone from shoving three boxes of Cracker Jack in their bag and schlepping them home for those nights when they’ve got the munchies. Well, maybe there is—the fact that they’re trusted not to.

Let’s not be naive. There are absolutely some untrustworthy characters out there and a few others who just don’t get it. In a nutshell, our advice is simple. Get rid of them, now, or whenever and wherever they pop up. We also realize that we live in a post–Oklahoma City, post-9/11 world that has sadly become nearly obsessed with security. We’re not talking about sensible measures that everyone must take to ensure that our assets, human and otherwise, remain safe. We’re talking about the small proportion of people who somehow manage to find their way inside organizations but who don’t have the organization’s interests at heart. But trust us on this one: the answer to this is not to try to bring these people into line by enacting dumb policies and other measures. This does little more than frustrate the efforts of hundreds of capable, hardworking, honest people who are simply trying to get their work done—and it just won’t work. The only thing you’re going to get from spending precious time and energy building bigger and better mousetraps is smarter mice. Or as FedEx founder Fred Smith is fond of saying, “We’re not going to lower the river—we can only raise the bridge.”

Consider as well that enacting such measures can make them self-fulfilling prophecies, due to the crystal clear message they send to every affected person: “We really don’t expect you to get it right.” For that reason alone, they probably won’t. It’s really not unlike the experience so many companies have had with their quality efforts. The moment they install QC inspectors, quality goes down the tube as people begin to relax, falsely secure in the hope that someone else will now catch all their errors.

HP’s David Packard recounted such an example from his work at General Electric in Schenectady in the 1930s:

The company was making a big thing of plant security. GE was especially zealous about guarding its tool and parts bins to make sure employees didn’t steal anything. Faced with this obvious display of distrust, many employees set out to prove it justified, walking off with tools or parts whenever they could. Eventually GE tools and parts were scattered all around town including the attic of the house in which a number of us were living. In fact, we had so much equipment up there that when we threw the switch, the lights on the entire street would dim.3

In later years, Packard and HP cofounder Bill Hewlett took pains to ensure that their company learned from GE’s mistakes by insisting that lab storerooms remain unlocked. Said Packard, “the open bins and storerooms were a symbol of trust, a trust that is central to the way HP does business.”4

If you assign people heavy responsibilities, that implies confidence in them, and belief in their ability to deliver the goods. Such a move stimulates their desire to prove your faith is well-founded.

—Price Pritchett

Opening the Kimono

You can measure the degree to which an organization trusts people by the amount and nature of the information it chooses to share with them. We’ve all seen internal company intranets, and frankly, many of the ones I’ve seen are hardly more useful than a tissue is for scraping ice off a windshield. Many contain indecipherable data throughout a system of unnavigable pages, and some are more internal marketing than anything else.

Plamexnet, the intranet used by Tijuana-based manufacturer Plamex, is different. I was amazed at the brilliantly organized plethora of information that’s available to all Plamex associates via any of the dozens of screens placed conveniently around the plant. “Everyone can have access to everything,” company president Alejandro Bustamante told me, and then demonstrated. “The only exceptions are patents, salaries, and anything restricted by Plantronics corporate.” After being logged into the secure system—and without receiving further instructions—I was able to easily access Plamex’s strategic plan and observe how the plant was performing against it. I could see sales, cost, scrap, and all sorts of other production data expressed with illustrative graphics and in crystal clear terms that anyone—even I—could understand. Anyone who wants to know what the big bosses talked about in the weekly staff meeting can easily access each meeting’s minutes—right there for all to peruse.

Raise Discretionary Authority and Spending Limits

One of the first areas we’d suggest you look at is the amount of discretionary authority you vest in your employees, since it is woefully inadequate in virtually all cases. Get them involved in the hiring process—not as mere bystanders, but as decision makers. Better yet, put them in charge of it. Involve them in promotional decisions, especially those involving frontline management positions. Put them in charge of manpower scheduling. Permit them (no, require them) to be personally involved in and responsible for some spending decisions. Levi Strauss, for example, has been known to involve its forklift drivers in the purchasing of new forklift trucks.

At a minimum, afford your employees unquestioned authority to commit an amount of resource equivalent to at least one week’s pay to improve their ability to do their jobs or to satisfy a customer. Managers (or team-based units) operating with their own cost center or profit and loss statements should have at least four to five times that much discretionary authority.

He’d Give You the Pants off His Legs

On his delightful blog (http://www.blogs.marriott.com/marriott-on-the-move/), Bill Marriott shared the unique story of a guest at the Marriott Residence Inn in Mississauga, a Toronto suburb. This gentleman had presented himself at the hotel’s front desk one morning with a look of panic on his face. In his haste to make his trip, he had accidentally packed his wife’s slacks instead of the dress pants he’d intended to wear to a meeting that was to take place very soon in the hotel. He was hoping there might be an extra pair in the hotel’s lost and found or that someone could direct him to a store very nearby.

The lost and found yielded nothing, but one of the hotel’s front desk associates, a man named Krasi, noticed that he and the guest happened to be about the same size and offered him the trousers he was wearing—thereby saving the day. Fortunately, Krasi had a spare pair of casual slacks that he could wear while his more formal trousers were on loan. As Marriott said, “While he didn’t exactly give him the shirt off his back, he sure gave him the pants off his legs.”

This incident clearly shows that Marriott trusts—encourages, really—its people to look for opportunities for service and make whatever decisions they deem necessary to serve their guests. There’s no rule requiring associates to lend clothing—or anything else, for that matter—to guests. But, and this is perhaps more significant, there’s no rule that prohibits it.

Powerlessness corrupts. Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.

—Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Chapter Summary

Better Practices:

Notes

1. “At Work, Are You Trustworthy?” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2009.

2. “Nordstrom Authorizes $800 Million Stock Buyback and Increased Dividend,” Y-Charts, February 2012.

3. David Packard, The HP Way (New York: HarperBusiness, 1996), 136.

4. Ibid.