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Peter Smith: What Is the Culture REP?
It’s a term Smith coined and felt compelled to share following a bad experience with an aborted flight and an unfeeling flight attendant.
Peter Smith is an industry consultant, speaker, sales trainer, and author. He can be reached via email at TheRetailSmiths@gmail.com.
My wife and I had a disturbing experience recently when our flight from Florida to Rhode Island had three aborted landings and two diversions to Boston.
I’ll spare you the sordid details as I’ve written about them on LinkedIn, but I bring it up to illustrate the disconnect between what many companies say they value and how they behave.
When I visited the airline’s website, the company cited its values as “Safety, Caring, Integrity, Passion, and Fun,” all rather predictable and basic.
As our plane aborted its attempted landing for the third time that day, I reminded myself, amidst the eruption of cries and profanity from the passengers, that the pilot’s top priority was always going to be our safety. So, check that box in their mission statement.
As for the rest of it? There’s work to be done.
Instead of showing a little compassion for the undoubtedly stressed-out passengers who elected to disembark on the second Boston diversion, rather than return to Providence for a fourth landing attempt, a flight attendant elected to inform them, with just a little edge in her voice, that they could not reboard the plane and their bags would not be offloaded until the plane returned to Providence.
It was hard to see the “caring” in that communication.
I’ll spare you the sordid details as I’ve written about them on LinkedIn, but I bring it up to illustrate the disconnect between what many companies say they value and how they behave.
When I visited the airline’s website, the company cited its values as “Safety, Caring, Integrity, Passion, and Fun,” all rather predictable and basic.
As our plane aborted its attempted landing for the third time that day, I reminded myself, amidst the eruption of cries and profanity from the passengers, that the pilot’s top priority was always going to be our safety. So, check that box in their mission statement.
As for the rest of it? There’s work to be done.
Instead of showing a little compassion for the undoubtedly stressed-out passengers who elected to disembark on the second Boston diversion, rather than return to Providence for a fourth landing attempt, a flight attendant elected to inform them, with just a little edge in her voice, that they could not reboard the plane and their bags would not be offloaded until the plane returned to Providence.
It was hard to see the “caring” in that communication.
“Bad culture is like an odorless gas: invisible, pervasive, and extremely damaging.” – Peter Smith, The Retail Smiths
In “Digital Darwinism: Surviving the New Age of Business Disruption” Tom Goodwin wrote, “While some companies may go to the trouble to describe what their culture is, in reality most definitions tend to be banal stereotypes, cliches, and truisms that result from the collective gathering of sanitized statements and reduction by agreement.”
Company culture is what we experience, not what a company tells us it is.
It is telling to note that the airline sent us two emails asking for our feedback on the outbound flight, which had no delays or issues.
The email for the returning “troubled” flight, you might have guessed, was conspicuously absent. It never came, nor was there any communication from the airline offering an apology, an explanation, compensation, or credit.
Bad culture is like an odorless gas: invisible, pervasive, and extremely damaging.
For many organizations, culture falls between polar opposites: either a hastily constructed list over a working lunch that is framed and hung somewhere in the building, or a few trivial talking points from the boss and/or human resources that rarely reflect the actual experiences and realities for customers or employees.
There have been endless books written on the topic and I’ve read my share of them.
To simplify all this information into a core baseline that might apply across many organizations I’ve coined the term “The Culture REP.”
The “REP” stands for Respect, Experience, and Performance.
There are a great many additions that one could include, but to me, it seems these three ought to be central to the mission, and to the lived experiences of employees and customers alike.
Respect
Respect for your people and for your customers should be the foundation of every culture.
As obvious as that statement seems, the reality is that far too many organizations don’t demonstrate that behavior as a core value, including those that enshrine the language into their own culture statements.
Daniel Coyle, author of one of the best books on culture (“The Culture Code”), wrote, “Words are noise. Group performance depends on behavior that communicates one powerful overarching idea: We are safe and connected.”
The Coyle quote speaks to the power of psychological safety, which is not just the absence of abuse or neglect but an environment that encourages open dialogue and constructive debate, a culture that sees risk not as tolerable, but as desirable so that learning and growth can happen.
Coyle’s quote also infers that while words are cheap, culture is what we tolerate and what we celebrate.
A culture that fails to prioritize respect for its employees and its customers is a culture in chaos and a company in trouble.
Enshrine respect, not just in words, but in consistently delivered behaviors and actions.
Experience
Employees want to work in spaces and with people who make the experience fun and pleasant.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t stressful times and situations, but that employees can confidently overcome those challenges in a group of like-minded people, drawing from each other’s strengths and compensating for their respective shortcomings.
Everyone doesn’t need to be everyone’s best friend—although research shows that having a best friend at work is a huge plus—but it does mean we believe each member of the team brings their own unique skillset and attributes to making the whole greater than the sum of its parts and that everyone has a role to play.
In “Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection,” Ben Rein wrote, “Our brains’ chemical systems were etched so that interacting with others would feel pleasant.
“Thanks to this, humans were naturally inclined to stick together. While this adaption may have happened many millennia ago, these social reward systems remain in our brains today and continue to play a key role in shaping today’s societies.”
Whether it is the occasional hosted lunch, a little surprise treat on a long winter’s afternoon, or the care you bring to the sensory experience of music, scent, and lighting in your store, be intentional about the environment you create for your team so that they enjoy the experience.
That energy and positivity will often transfer to your customers.
Performance
In “The Advantage,” Patrick Lencioni wrote, “No matter how good a leadership team feels about itself, and how noble its mission might be, if the organization it leads rarely achieves its goals, then, by definition, it’s simply not a good team.”
Lencioni hit the nail on the head.
The choice does not have to be between a low-stress culture where we occasionally hit the numbers, or a high-stress environment where every month-end is a painful, Groundhog’s Day-like exercise (I’ve been there and that’s no fun).
We can and should have a respectful and fun environment where the team never loses sight of the very reason for being in business. A company that is not profitable will struggle to provide great experiences for its customers and its employees.
In “Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End” Rosabeth Moss Kantor wrote: “Winning becomes an ingrained tradition, embedded in the culture and supported by powerful external networks, even if individual talent comes and goes.”
A healthy culture feeds on success and promptly recalibrates to correct for under-performance or misses.
It does so while creating a psychologically safe environment for its employees and a clear sense of purpose for what the journey entails and what is expected of each of them, even when there’s an occasional aborted landing.
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