Chapter 1
Is Your Organization High Performing?

Don Carew, Fay Kandarian,
Eunice Parisi-Carew, Jesse Stoner,
and Ken Blanchard

Marksmen will tell you that when you aim at a target, you should go for the bull’s-eye. The reason is that if you miss the bull’s-eye, you’re still on the target. But if all you do is aim for the target and you miss, you’re nowhere. Don Shula, who coauthored Everyone’s a Coach¹ with Ken Blanchard, always told his Miami Dolphins football team that the target they were aiming at was to win every game. Was that possible? Obviously not, but if you don’t shoot for excellence, you never have a chance of getting there. That’s probably why Shula’s teams won more football games than teams of any other coach in the history of the NFL. His 1972 Dolphins is still the only team in history to go undefeated for an entire season. So the target you aim for has a lot to do with your performance.

Wall Street and the pressures of business today make many people think that the only target that counts is financial success. Yet few, if any, businesspeople would want their epitaph to include their company’s bottom line—their stock price or profit margin. They might, however, want people to remember their contribution to the creation of a high performing organization.

Those who want to lead at a higher level need to understand that to create a high performing organization, they need to aim for the right target.

In Raving Fans^®: Satisfied Customers Are Not Enough,³ Sheldon Bowles and Ken Blanchard argue that to keep your customers today, you can’t be content just to satisfy them. You have to create raving fans—customers who are so excited about how you treat them that they want to tell everyone about you. They become part of your sales force. Let’s look at a simple yet powerful example.

What’s the most common wake-up call that you get in a hotel in America today? The phone rings at the allotted hour, but when you pick it up, no one is there. At least they got the machine to call your room at the designated hour. The second most common wake-up call greets you with a recording. But again, no one’s there. Today if you pick up the phone on a wake-up call and a human being is on the other end—someone you can actually talk to—you hardly know what to say. A while back, one of our colleagues was staying at the Marriott Convention Hotel in Orlando. He asked for a 7:00 wake-up call. When the phone rang and he picked it up, a woman said, “Good morning; this is Teresa. It’s 7 o’clock. It’s going to be 75 and beautiful in Orlando today, but your ticket says you’re leaving. Where are you going?”

Taken aback, our colleague stammered, “New York City.”

Teresa said, “Let me look at the USA Today weather map. Oh, no! It’s supposed to be 40 degrees and rainy in New York today. Can’t you stay another day?”

Now where do you think our colleague wants to stay when he gets to Orlando? He wants to stay at the Marriott so that he can talk to Teresa in the morning! Raving fans are created by companies whose service far exceeds that of the competition and even exceeds customer expectations. These companies routinely do the unexpected and then enjoy the growth generated by customers who have spontaneously joined their sales force.

You will get little argument today if you tell managers that people are their most important resource. Some even argue that the customer should come second, because without committed and empowered employees, a company can never provide good service. You can’t treat your people poorly and expect them to treat your customers well.

Several years ago, a friend of ours had an experience in a department store that illustrates this point well. He normally shops at Nordstrom but found himself in a competitor’s store. Realizing that he needed to talk to his wife, he asked a salesperson in the men’s department if he could use their telephone. “No!” the salesperson said.

He replied, “You have to be kidding me. You can always use the phone at Nordstrom.”

The salesperson said, “Look, buddy! They don’t let me use the phone here. Why should I let you?”

Another reason that your people are so important today is because these days your organization is evaluated on how quickly it can respond to customer needs and problems. “I’ll have to talk to my boss” doesn’t cut it anymore. Nobody cares who the boss is. The only people customers care about are the ones who answer the phone, greet them, write up their order, make their delivery, or respond to their complaints. They want top service, and they want it fast. This means that you need to create a motivating environment for your people and an organizational structure that is flexible enough to permit them to be the best they can be.

If an organization’s financial success is a function of revenue minus expenses, you can become more sound financially either by reducing costs or increasing revenues. Let’s look at costs first, because in today’s competitive environment, the prize goes to those who can do more with less. More organizations today are deciding that the only way to be financially effective is to downsize. There’s no doubt that some personnel reduction is necessary in large bureaucracies where everyone just has to have an assistant, and the assistant must have an assistant. Yet downsizing is an energy drain, and it’s by no means the only way to manage costs.

There’s a growing realization that another effective way to manage cost is to make all your people your business partners. For instance, in some companies, new people can’t get a raise until they can read their company’s balance sheet and understand where and how their individual efforts are impacting the company’s profit-and-loss statement. When people understand the business realities of how their organization makes and spends money, they are much more apt to roll up their sleeves and help out.

Traditionally, managers have been reluctant to share financial information. Yet these days, many organizations are responding with open-book management. That’s because they realize the financial benefits of sharing previously sensitive data. For example, in working with a restaurant company, one of our consulting partners was having a hard time convincing the president of the merits of sharing important financial data with employees. To unfreeze the president’s thinking, the consulting partner went to the firm’s largest restaurant one night at closing time. Dividing all the employees—cooks, dishwashers, waitstaff, bus people, receptionists—into groups of five or six, he asked them to come to an agreement about the answer to a question: “Of every sales dollar that comes into this restaurant, how many cents do you think fall to the bottom line—money that can be returned to investors as profit or reinvested in the business?”

The least amount any group guessed was 40 cents. Several groups guessed 70 cents. In a restaurant, the reality is that if you can keep 5 cents on the dollar, you get excited—10 cents, and you’re ecstatic! Can you imagine the attitude among employees toward such things as food costs, labor costs, and breakage when they thought their company was a money machine? After sharing the actual figures, the president was impressed when a chef asked, “You mean, if I burn a steak that costs us $6 and we sell it for $20, at a 5 percent profit margin, we have to sell six steaks for essentially no profit to make up for my mistake?” He already had things figured out.

This is particularly important in uncertain times. If you develop committed and empowered people, not only will they help manage costs, but they’ll also increase your revenues. How? By providing legendary service that creates raving fan customers who will want to brag about you. These customers become part of your unofficial sales force or PR department, which increases your sales and/or visibility and makes your organization more attractive as an investment. Now you are a leader of a high performing organization.

To answer these questions, Don Carew, Fay Kandarian, Eunice Parisi-Carew, and Jesse Stoner conducted an extensive research project to define and identify the characteristics of a high performing organization.⁴ Their first step was to define a “high performing organization.” While many organizations rise quickly and then plateau or topple, some continue to thrive, somehow reinventing themselves as needed. The researchers focused on these kinds of organizations, creating the following definition:

Because of their flexibility, nimbleness, and responsive systems, high performing organizations (HPOs) remain not only successful and respected today but also are poised to succeed in the future. HPOs demonstrate results consistently over time.

Figure 1.1 The HPO SCORES™ Model

In high performing organizations, the role of formal leadership is radically different from traditional organizations. High performing organizations rely not on cultivating a great, charismatic leader, but on building a visionary organization that endures beyond the leader. The role of leadership shifts from privileged status and power for its own sake toward a more complex, participative, long-term process. As this book will continually emphasize, once leaders establish the vision, they assume the attitude and behavior of a servant leader.

In high performing organizations, leadership practices support collaboration and involvement. Leadership is assumed at every level of the organization. Top leaders live the organization’s values. They embody and encourage a spirit of inquiry and discovery. They help others think systematically. They act as teachers and lifelong learners. They are visible in their leadership and have the strength to stand firm on strategic business decisions and values. They keep everyone’s energy focused on the bull’s-eye of excellence.

In high performing organizations, leadership is not the province of formal leaders or a few peak performers alone; leadership emerges everywhere. Individuals with expertise come forward as needed throughout the organization.