FIRST OFF TODAY….save the date for the best event in the Industry, the Seena Magowitz Charity Golf Classic on November 1-3, 2019. If you haven’t been you really should go, we promise a great experience and you can help us fight a really horrible disease!

Kinsley and I had a great conversation in this episode of the Dos Marcos Podcast about my recent trip to see the good people of Badcock Furniture. These guys are awesome and so was the keynote speaker from Chic-Fil-A, David Salyers who shared some stories about how they turned fast-food restaurants into Leadership academies. Tired of giving away adjustable beds? Maybe you don’t have to anymore.

In the past, I have written about creating a Kick-Ass Culture, but after listening to THIS podcast from Andy Stanley I was inspired to share a few additional thoughts. If you don’t know about Andy, he is the lead pastor for the North Point community church which is now responsible for over 90 churches worldwide and his life and leadership podcast/television broadcast are heard over 7 million times a month. In this particular episode, Andy talks to Horst Schulze, former President and COO of the Ritz-Carlton about customer experience.

Horse covers a lot of great stuff here but what I want to key on is the idea that you really need to understand what your people are thinking and feeling about you. If you’re running a company or if you are the manager of a group of people, it is critical that you are in touch with how your team looks at their work experience under your leadership. Are you doing surveys with your team on their job satisfaction? Here are some things you should understand about your people because if you do and they are happy; they will give YOUR customers a first-class experience:

• Do they tolerate coming to work, or is their career something they feel great about?
• Are they coming in every day just working for a paycheck, or do they understand and feel connected to the purpose behind what you do?
• Do you really understand what is important to the people on your team and can you rank them in priority?
• Are you intentional about using that information to drive a better experience at your company?

If you think that your top/bottom line is really the only metric you need to be paying attention to, then you have some rough waters ahead unless you’re only concerned with short term success.

Are you buying all of this? If not just look around this industry because it is really easy to see which companies get it and which ones don’t. Show me a consistently bad customer experience and I will show you a company that does not value their own people the way they should. Think that’s harsh? Then you are probably one of the companies I’m talking about.

If you understand what’s important to the people on your team, create a culture that delivers on those things and connect them all to your purpose and mission, then you are going to be incredibly hard to beat. The best leaders in any organization understand that they are there to serve their people, not the other way around. What kind of leader are you?

***Today is a gift. What will you do with it?