7. Cheerlead; The “Magic” of M&Ms

Any successful executive must accomplish several tasks. He must pick the right people, give guidance, describe expectations, and provide resources to allow employees to grow. A savvy executive should clear pathways and remove impediments to employees’ success and, yes, even cheerlead.

Like, rah-rah cheerlead? Yes. As embarrassing and potentially undignified as that initially sounds, leaders and managers should stand on the sidelines and say and do something heartfelt, meaningful, and encouraging for their employees and team members. And they should do so with authentic spiritedness. Let the employees know that their actions are in alignment with the organization’s vision; that they are making progress, keeping up, or falling behind; and that what they are straining to do is in sync with the organization’s goals.

What’s so important about that? Well, an engaged workforce needs cheerleaders. Or let me say it another way: You can’t have an engaged workforce without cheerleading. It’s not childish or belittling to let the employees know that they are doing a good job. As stony-faced and tough as some of your employees may seem, you’d be surprised how much they crave a little encouragement and how that encouragement readily translates to redoubled commitment, which produces better and quicker high-quality results. In fact, nothing makes an employee want to do more than to be cheered on and recognized for good work along the way.

Southwest Airlines is all about boosting employee morale, and in the cheerleading department, they have no rivals that I know of. Before I get into specifics, let me ask you: What’s your impression of Southwest Airlines? Do you think that it is a happy and profitable company? Yes. A fun place to work? You bet. A “place of work” where flying around the country day in and day out, dealing with the largely disenchanted traveling public, handing out peanuts and Dr. Pepper doesn’t seem like drudgery to the employees? Yes again. In fact, Southwest Airlines is renowned for its upbeat, engaged employees, more than it is for its financial success that mocks the industry trends, and its aggression when it challenges competitors where they share routes. And did you know that Southwest is largely unionized?

Remarkably, the cheerleading at Southwest is not reserved for a top-down approach. On the day before Thanksgiving in 2007, my bride of 32 years and I left our home in Durham, North Carolina, for a trip to Nevada. For transportation, we chose Southwest Airlines, more for the convenience of a nonstop flight, than for price, or the stellar reputation of the carrier. We were fortunate to be among the first group of boarders. To my reaffirming pleasure and to my wife’s gleeful amusement that morning, each of the Boeing 737’s overhead bins had a hand-crafted paper heart taped to it (it’s worth noting that Southwest planes have painted hearts on fuselages and tails.) that was imprinted with various sentiments of employee thanks—such as, “We are thankful for our customers”; “We are thankful for our jobs”; “We are thankful for our country”; “We are thankful for our fellow employees”; and even “We are thankful for our company.” Cheerleading! I don’t know if it was that airplane and that crew on that day. But this I do know: It was spontaneous. I subsequently asked a Southwest official if what we had experienced was scripted from the PR desks in Dallas or dictated from on high. Her response was refreshing; she knew nothing about it, but she was tickled that a Southwest crew or crews thought of it. It’s a work environment that cheerleads for the organization’s success, for the department’s success, for the individual’s success, and for the successful relationships with customers, vendors, and all comers. And it’s that enthusiasm, that engagement with the job, the company, the service they bring, and with each other that each employee takes to her next task. Oh, and its ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange is LUV. No kidding. (Remember, Southwest’s are the airplanes in the sky with a big heart painted on the side.) No surprise then that cheerleading is an “engaging” strategy, and it’s so much more fun than nit-picking!

Now let’s take a step back and take a look at what motivates people, what genuinely motivates them. One of the best ways to get people to stretch themselves, to exert the illusive discretionary effort is simply to provide encouragement along the way. As a consultant who focuses on employee engagement for large and small companies, I am almost embarrassed to charge my per diem rate only to offer such a common sense solution to such a pervasive problem. But it’s true, and it really is just that simple. (The challenge is how to cheer and encourage and when to cheer and encourage, which we deal with later.)

To appreciate the impact of simple encouragement, imagine how you feel when your boss (if he is genuinely aware of what you’re doing) says, atta boy. Or atta girl. No matter how high you are on the corporate ladder, it’s uplifting. There is no denying it. Sometimes, the response to encouragement borders on euphoria, a euphoria that goes far beyond what you’re paid or what your bonus is. It’s just nice to be appreciated, to be cheered on. Now, imagine this feeling on a grander scale, when a team is cheered on. Or a division is cheered on. Or when the entire company is cheered, applauded, encouraged. Being genuinely cheered, by an aware CEO or senior executive who writes or speaks from the heart and not through some PR or polished corporate messaging, by leaders who are in touch with the task, the effort, the outcome, and the impact, can actually create an air of excitement about the challenges and opportunities ahead. When an organization is encouraged properly, the air of excitement can be sustained over a long period of time, which invariably leads to dramatic productivity rates, outrageous teamwork, and happy customers. So, when I say that cheerleading is important, it should be a given that the manager or leader has a key role to be visually enthused about the person, about the work, about the movement forward, about celebrating milestones.

How does a leader show authentic enthusiasm and not seem patronizing? No matter what industry we are in, whether we are in companies large and small, we all know when a leader is not authentic. That’s because most level-headed adults have high sensitivity to hypocrisy, a BS filter. But we are all just as responsive when someone is authentically cheerleading us as individuals because that’s what cheerleading is, a genuine affection for the individual, the task, and the outcome. Leaders and managers are making a public acknowledgement that a well-done task is of high value, the outcome has high value, and even the process is of high value. It follows, then, that the individual feels he has high value for having accomplished something so important to the organization’s progress.

Back to Southwest Airlines for a moment. An exemplary company like Southwest Airlines celebrates almost every achievement, nearly every milestone. But even Southwest takes care to make sure that the cheerleading and celebrations remain authentic and align with performance against Southwest’s values, mission, and goals.

Think of it more like “just-in-time” recognition. If a manager or leader sees something going well, something accomplished, a result delivered, she should cheer it on in public and recognize the employee or group responsible. Encourage and recognize the individual effort that it took to get to here, and enthusiastically applaud that the people and the organization are on the right path. You might have guessed that I would resort to a sports analogy at this point, right? When a soccer player scores a goal, everyone hugs the player who scored the goal. The player who got the assist gets the hugs too. The team is celebrated by the fans. But it’s not the championship they’ve won. Indeed, it’s just a milestone in the progress of the game, or the season. Much more is expected of the players, but they receive spot recognition, and they are cheered for where they are at that point in time. Soccer teams don’t just celebrate victories; they celebrate the mile markers on the path to victories. And should they lose that particular game, they carry forward the feeling of those small celebrations as an incentive to do even better the next time to achieve more completely. Take the example of the gold-medal winning U.S. Women’s Olympic soccer team, the team that had Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Brandi Chastain as players. Those women celebrated every goal along their way to the ultimate victory, and with every celebration they lifted each other up. As they did so, they believed they could do more and do better, and that synergy along with the “cheering” of an entire nation (their corporation, if you will), certainly helped propel them to their goal. Well, let’s not forget the 2008 women’s team as well, where Carli Lloyd scored in the first extra period to give the U.S. a gold medal over Brazil. Hope Solo was one of those getting constant encouragement from her teammates, like Captain Christie Rampone, when she bailed the team out time and again. Remember this! Mia Hamm, the most prolific goal scorer in women’s soccer history, was cheered the loudest and longest of her entire career, not for a goal—for an assist!

Refer back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The fourth need is “ego stroking,” and there’s no shame in recognizing that need. Indeed, it’s not egotistical to demand a little recognition now and then. When your ego is stroked, you are being sent a message that you are someone important, someone who is valuable. It’s also a message that what you do is valuable. And this recognition is tantamount to the recognition of the core worth of the individual.

Most organizations go astray when they think that what people invariably want is more money, benefits, and bonuses. Sure, everyone wants to be paid fairly. There’s no doubt about that. But I have learned that pay and benefits are just tangible substitutes for warmth, caring, and recognition of worth. If you set up an organization so that the only way it can express its appreciation for an employee’s value is with money, you’ll find it’s just not enough; it’s never enough. And it’s a never-ending cycle, too; each year you have to one-up yourself with more pay and more trendy benefits, because it’s all the “currency” you have with the employee. It’s an especially tough position to be in when you exhaust the opportunity for raises, and the employee looks up and says, “What, no raise? You don’t like me anymore?”

Unless you genuinely and authentically recognize an employee’s value on a person-to-person basis, the warmth and caring will be absent no matter what they are paid. In that case, you should not be surprised when an employee moves on. If you are lucky enough to get a candid exit interview, you may be astonished to hear the employee say, “You never really cared about me or my work,” to which you may naively respond: “What, are you joking? We paid you a king’s ransom!” In fact, the employee may not have been looking for money. It’s actually fairly far down on the list of things that many people want from an organization.

Let’s take another example. I have worked with a company in San Antonio called Rack Space. It is a large, Web-hosting company, and they run a tight ship. Every month Rack Space has an open meeting where the CEO, the chairman, and the entire executive team get in front of employees with sleeves rolled up and hair down. All their employees from all over the world are tuned in to the event, called a Huddle (sports, again!), and the leadership engages in a cheerleading session. It’s not a manic event, and no one breathlessly stomps around the stage. Instead, they tell the employees the status of the business. They explain how they are doing, and what their competitors have been up to. They give a market update, and talk about business performance issues and the solutions required. Then they address the individual departments. They let the department heads explain what has happened recently of major significance and where everyone stands relative to major company objectives. For those of you lucky enough to work in transparent work environments, where financials and accomplishments are shared openly, this may not seem all that extraordinary. But then, at Rack Space, the executive team puts outstanding performers in straitjackets.

Straitjackets? Yes.

The mantra for Rack Space is that they provide “fanatical support.” So, they put only the most fanatical people, the top customer service performers since the last Huddle, into a straitjacket because they have exhibited that fanaticism; they are living the mission and values of the company. They are just crazy about company performance and customer service.

With this ceremony, the leadership team clearly indicates that these people have performed in great fashion, and it is the highest level of cheerleading. It builds enthusiasm. People at Rack Space are eager to be “jacketed.” There is a sense of pride in having worn the jacket, and it helps drive the company employee base to positively fanatical actions that achieve these customer service goals. These employees are well paid to provide service, to perform, with or without the Huddle experience or the jacket, and they all realize that. But this is a fun recognition of an effort as well as of an outcome. It’s exemplary of what cheerleading should do to simultaneously reward and motivate an organization.

When I was at SAS Institute, we worked with intensive focus to make it clear to the management that one of their primary jobs was to create a work environment that was compellingly positive. And we offered the management substantial resources to be able to make that happen. The metric of whether we were successful was not how much work we did, or how much money we spent. The metric of the success was the employees’ response. If the employees wanted to be in the workplace, we were successful in our obligations as leaders. If the work environment was truly positive, we also noted that the workers—when paid good wages and benefits—didn’t focus on wages and benefits as the primary indication of whether they were valued. In the process, we made it part of an ongoing obligation of leadership to stoke the fires of enthusiasm for employees with tangible, visible signs of cheerleading. Nothing hokey or silly. Instead, we encouraged a series of small gestures. It was up to the managers to decide what to do, what was right for their teams. One department manager decided to bring in flowers once a week. Another manager chose to bring in bagels on Friday morning. Now, don’t get me wrong. None of the employees thought that the flowers or the bagels were a substitute for raises or bonuses. People aren’t stupid, after all. But—and here’s the key—these actions were never meant to be a substitute for raises and bonuses, and the employees understood that too. Instead they were put in place as a way for the managers to show that they were not there just to supervise. It was to show that the manager had an equal role in expressing how these employees were valued as human beings. It was a way for the managers to express that their employees were worthy of something special. We expressed this companywide as well, with live music, free M&Ms, quality fresh-cooked and baked goods in subsidized café-style eateries, on-site health clinics, low-cost child care, and much more. But those things were signs of our concern and genuine affection for our employees, not the sole expression of our concern.

In your organization, if you are not doing this type of cheerleading, you are likely to have cynical employees. Their collective antenna is up, and they may (at least initially) see any efforts to initiate celebrating and cheerleading as being inauthentic stunts. Bring in bagels and flowers, and everyone expects you are going to announce layoffs. It would be as though a woman were in a ho-hum relationship yet suddenly she finds her husband coming home with flowers. It’s only natural that she would be expecting bad news. Or at least a request for her husband to go to a bachelor party in Vegas. Accordingly, a cynical relationship between the leadership and the employees is hard to overcome at first. But what if that husband comes home with flowers every Friday, for months, or for a year. And let’s say that in the intervening days of the week, he demonstrates an authentic appreciation for his spouse, which makes it clear that the flowers are just an extra and not the only way he expresses his affection. That’s what it takes to convince organizations that are new to this approach. But if you are consistent, and if you are not leaning on the flowers and bagels as the only means of celebrating and showing affection, then it is only a matter of time before employees are won over.

When I would travel in my role as vice president of HR for SAS Institute, two things consistently amazed me. First, if someone were meeting me for the first time, they would often find a way to express to me that they were surprised to find a tough (I’m told!), bottom-line driven fellow in the HR role at a company that famously treated its employees well and regularly ended up on national best-places-to-work lists. They expected a softer personality; maybe even a touchy-feely guy. What these people didn’t understand is that for everything we implemented at SAS Institute, we had to have a business rationale to get it approved by the top leadership. We didn’t “give away” live music and free M&Ms, nor build café-style eateries, and offer on-site health care only to express our affection for our employees. We did it because their care and commitment to the company and its business goals earned that kind of affection. We did it also because it made the workplace a pleasurable and positive environment. As a result we averaged 3 percent voluntary turnover at SAS Institute for years, which was nearly 20 percent better than the industry average. With 7,000 employees worldwide at that time, this alone saved SAS Institute tens of millions of dollars each year. And that can pay for a lot of extras. (Keep in mind that it costs 150 percent the salary of a talented person to replace that person and train that replacement.) So, although we were genuinely attuned to our employees, cheered them, and treated them decently, fairly, and like adults, we also undertook activities that were saving the organization vast sums of money with expenditures that may have, at first, looked like country club frills.

The second thing that amazed me when I was traveling during my SAS tenure was this: Many people would come up to me and ask, “What’s in those M&Ms at SAS!? How does that type of thing convert into employee loyalty and outstanding business success?” These comments usually spiked in volume when SAS had ended up on one of the best-places-to-work lists. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to make the point, without much success, that it wasn’t the M&Ms. I tried to disabuse one person after another of the notion that we were buying loyalty with candy. For anyone patient enough to listen I would point out that the M&Ms, the family flex time, indeed all the things we did for our employees at SAS were part of a fabric, per se, where each thread was woven into that company fabric that expressed our appreciation for our employees, that cheerlead their accomplishments, that said to them loudly, “You are a valued person. You are important to us, and we want to pay attention to the things that are important to you. We like you and the way you work. We want you to keep doing what you’re doing.”

Believe me, it wasn’t just the M&Ms. Though, to tell you the truth, the peanut M&Ms are slightly addictive.