Touch. Tod Maffin
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his or her own purpose is cemented into the corporate mission.
Former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki laments the amount of his life wasted in mission-setting meetings with dozens of senior leaders. He offers a compelling alternative: a mantra.
A mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.
If I were the CEO of Wendy’s, I would establish a corporate mantra of “healthy fast food.” End of story.
Some other examples of corporate mantras:
Federal Express: “Peace of mind”
Nike: “Authentic athletic performance”
Target: “Democratize design”
Mary Kay: “Enriching women’s lives”
Dan Pontefract, author of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization and head of the Telus department overseeing cultural change in the organization, agrees. “When you are going through an organizational change, your organization needs a mantra and I think you as an individual need one.”
“At Telus, we adopted the mantra “Culture is our competitive advantage.”
It must be working. In the summer of 2007, employee engagement at Telus was 53 percent. Today, it is 83 percent.
Disclosure
But it’s not enough to decide on and communicate these additional KPIs and ultra-short mission statements. For progress toward your organization’s outcomes to be clearly understood by people in the trenches, you need to make sure evidence of progress is clear.
Vancouver digital marketing firm 6S Marketing uses computer screens in its office, displaying real-time metrics like sales targets and public social media mentions to team members. They use salesforce-based software called Hoopla, which “jazzes up” metrics as a kind of running game — including a top-sales-performer scoreboard, complete with virtual awards and a gong sound that plays when a sale is closed. (See touchthebook.com/hoopla for more information on how 6S uses this system.)
Of course, disclosure doesn’t need to have such a highly ratcheted-up cool factor. Something as simple as an internal magazine (physical or digital) that highlights progress toward metrics can suffice. Don’t limit this information to your senior executives and shareholders; sharing it with your people will help increase morale and prove that progress is being made toward clear goals.
Uniqueness
Too many organizations rely on the same customer service responses, the same benefits programs, and the same procedures. There’s nothing wrong with studying and using best practices in your business. Still, to become a more human organization you need to stand above the crowd in all aspects of your business.
In their 1990 book Creating the Service Culture: Strategies for Canadian Business, authors Stanley A. Brown, Marvin B. Martenfeld, and Allan Gould suggest that, at some point, all business offerings will become essentially homogeneous. When that happens, they hypothesize success will be defined less by a product or service itself and more by the experience of the buyer and end-user. Product similarities are the subject of many a patent lawsuit these days. Like in Hollywood, where a studio’s gamble on a penguin movie spawns an entire genre of penguin movies, tech titans and start-ups that launch innovative products spawn entire categories — blue oceans which quickly become bloody red waters of competition.
When innovation winds down, revenues dry up.
Perhaps this explains the emergence of companies with a mission to collect patents and protect them through lawsuits.
Product innovation takes a lot of capital investment. It takes research, development, user interface considerations, quality assurance testing, creative marketing efforts, and is subject to safety standards and other regulatory restrictions. It’s a complex process. And, because these stages have been widely accepted for many years, they’re largely relied upon as the proven process.
The original Star Wars movie was acclaimed for its groundbreaking special effects. But it wasn’t a blockbuster hit because director George Lucas invested heavily in developing new special effects technology to tell his story. As Danny Brown, coauthor of Influence Marketing, pointed out in his TEDxOttawa talk,[3] Star Wars was the highest-grossing film for six years because it was a human-relatable story of overcoming the odds set in gritty conditions, “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” and was released at a time when the sci-fi genre was about the pristine technology of the future. The prequel, released twenty-two years later, was a marvel of special effects technology with an extremely weak story by comparison; all tech, no TOUCH.
Being human should be natural to all of us. After all, we are human. However, we’re often conditioned to suppress our emotions and present a brave, optimistic, and successful face. We’re often taught failure is not an option. For some reason, apologies have become synonymous with admitting negligence (apologies are covered in more detail in the chapter about leadership).
Dealing with suffering is neither unique nor unusual. The death of a parent is unavoidable. However, we often pretend this type of reality doesn’t exist. That’s why the public is bowled over when politicians, CEOs, and community leaders declare their humanity by tweeting an apology for some misdeed, or publishing a blog post about the passing of a relative. Interestingly, the leaders who do this well often earn respect from the people who hear them out — supporters and critics alike.
Authenticity earns respect.
Perhaps you’re the manager of a team of airline staff who proactively rebook all of the connections for passengers of a flight that is delayed arriving at its destination, or a social media manager who responds to customer service concerns with genuine surprise and apology. In real, human tones.
The important lesson here is to offer something your competition does not. And remember that your competition could just as likely be other leadership candidates within your own organization as it could be a tech titan with a superior product.
Clarity
A human organization is clear. It knows how it serves its communities, how it communicates, and how it runs its business.
Every communication effort can benefit from clarity.
Consider how clarity applies to your communications department. Are you using simple language that reflects the way people really talk in your news releases, or are you relying on old “tried-and-true” phrasing like “ABC Corp is excited to announce blah blah blah”?
Clarity is one of the defining qualities of the Creative Commons.[4] Founders James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, and Hal Abelson took the process of licensing creative works, which had become complex from years of legal interference, and made it easier for copyright holders. Creative Commons provides tools and plain language which help copyright holders decide how they would like to license their works, and how they will communicate those licences. The licences are written in a way that facilitates a clearer understanding of the conditions under which others can use those works. Parameters include whether or not attribution is required, whether or not users can make money from the use and sale of the work, and whether or not users must enforce the same licensing parameters to downstream users.
Clarity is not hard to measure. One place to start is to conduct a clarity audit on your outward-facing materials. Can people understand what you’re trying to say? Like a bad joke, if it requires too much explanation to be appreciated, your message was probably not received.
End-user licence agreements (EULAs), community, and privacy policies are frequently criticized for being too long and too legal. At roughly fifty-six pages, the iTunes music store licence is unfathomably long for the average user to read, much less understand. Which is probably why so many people who use iTunes have no