Blabbermouths

The car buying experience, and the car salesman, has become the stereotype of all that is wrong with sales and selling in the eyes of the American public.

As with many stereotypes, there is a basis in fact and deed.  Manipulation, high-pressure, duplicity lying are words that consumers associate with buying automobiles specifically and sales in general. 

As a result, car salespeople rank dead last in a recent survey of most trusted professionals.  They managed to beat members of Congress in this race to the bottom, which is quite a telling performance.  

Speaking of performances, the Alec Baldwin sales "training" in Glengarry, Glen Ross, and William H. Macy's salesman in Fargo are two star-turn portrayals of the prototypical noxious sales professional.

Movies, you mock?  Well, art imitates life, as my experience this weekend in a local car dealership attests. In a 15 minute conversation bludgeoning encounter, the salesman spoke for 14 of those minutes.  He was trying to build trust, by telling me stories about himself: 30 years in the business, that most of his sales were through referrals by satisfied customers, that he opens the dealership on weekends to get ahead of his colleagues, that he works all the time getting great deals for people like me because he doesn't have a family.

Maybe this approach works for him.  Maybe I don't meet the profile of his typical customer.  Maybe he thought that I wouldn't notice all of the pictures of his wife and kids (maybe they left him because he never shut up or paid attention to them.)  As a consumer, maybe I could have cared less about him.  Nah.

But, if he had just made a minimal effort to really engage me, maybe by asking just a few questions, maybe he would have learned that I had done my homework, and maybe he would have learned that I was ready to buy if my specific terms were met.  And when he lied was misinformed about the price of the car that I was interested in, and the current financing rate that was being offered by his finance company, any trust that his approach may have engendered popped like one of the helium balloons festooning the showroom. 

To serve whom?

Even if you are just a casual fan of the original Twilight Zone series, you are probably familiar with the 1962 episode titled, "To Serve Man."

Considered one of the classics of this seminal series, it tells the story of a visit to our small planet by an alien race that offers to eradicate strife and enrich the lives of earth's inhabitants.  The payback for consequences of this largesse, are, for the earthlings, unappetizing.

The show came to mind following a conversation I had this week with Sam Silverstein, author, lecturer and expert on building cultures of accountability.

I am a big fan of Sam and his concepts and have enrolled in his "Accountability Academy," as  have several of the companies with whom I work. However, despite the absence of accountability being a frequent lament,  an affinity for accountability is not universal. That's what Sam and I chatted about: where accountability cultures thrive, where they don't and why.

Two nuggets emerged from our talk:

• Many individuals and organizations confuse responsibility and accountability.  "Responsibility is about things; accountability is about people," Silverstein believes.  Ironically, though, when you have a culture where individuals accept responsibility for helping others, accountability is the result.
• Not surprisingly, organizations and individuals that practice servant leadership, are generally more successful because the concept of personal responsibility and accountability is ingrained and/or embraced.

Servant leadership is not about training a staff of business butlers, or a boss who makes sure that coffee is brewed and hot when the staff arrives.  It is a management philosophy that is people-centric, where leaders accept responsibility for enabling team performance through their own actions.



As author Bill Treasurer says:  Leaders Open Doors.

In the Washington Post, Professor Edward Hess of the University of Virginia recently noted:

"Many people think that you cannot be people-centric and maintain high standards, because employees will take advantage. That’s another leadership myth.

These high-performance organizations show that people-centric environments and high performance are not mutually exclusive. Employees in these companies have high emotional engagement, loyalty and productivity, and outperform the competition on a daily basis over long periods of time. In fact, the relationship between high performance, high employee engagement and how you treat employees is compelling. My research clearly demonstrates that employee satisfaction drives customer satisfaction and loyalty."

The lesson?  If you can't grow beyond yourself, you have a job, not a business.  In a small business especially, the ability to motivate and manage your team to achieve a consistent high level of performance is the critical factor of growth -- and survival.

In a review of the new book, Give and Take, Harvard Business School Professor James Heskett writes that research "suggests that servant leaders are not only more highly regarded than others by their employees and not only feel better about themselves at the end of the day but are more productive as well."

Like the ironic ending in the To Serve Man Twilight Zone episode, there's also a surprising twist to the familiar servant/teacher cliche:  it seems that those that can do, teach.  And those that can't teach, are toast.

Until morale improves

You may be familiar with the term cognitive dissonance,  the "psychological conflict arising from simultaneously holding two incongruous beliefs."

It is a theory that we all seek to "hold our attitudes and beliefs in harmony and balance" and when conflicts arise, we seek to restore our sense of harmony by reducing or eliminating the dissonant. The idea that spawned the theory is that we humans want "cognitive consistency" in our beliefs -- to believe what we believe, in other words -- and that need can lead to irrational and sometimes destructive behaviors.

This pop-psychology lesson is prompted by an interesting week in the pursuit of cognitive consistency in employee-related matters.   It was a somewhat futile pursuit:

• An employer who has bemoaned the quality of applicants for open positions, but who continues to seek candidates from the same talent pool using the same recruiting tools.
• Employees who decry micromanagement, but won't follow simple procedures and checklists designed to make their jobs safer and more productive.
• A CEO who was surprised when a senior staffer left after being passed over for a promotion, but who refused to discuss with the employee why they weren't being considered for the post.

Yup, it sure is hard to be an employer.  But you know what, it is also hard to be an employee.  How do some bridge the gap and remove the dissonance that is endemic in many of the disagreements relationships between boss and staff?  Many organizations are considered great places to work.  Is it as Tolstoy wrote of families, that happy workplaces share common traits, but that unhappy ones are unique?

In _____ we trust?

Trust is on the wane. 

This is probably not a big surprise to you.  Given the economic and social change occurring globally, and the stresses that change induces, a fair amount of dislocation and disconnection is natural.

But it seems deeper than that. Everywhere you turn there seems to be another poll or study showing a dramatic decline in trust and a rise in skepticism.  (Disclaimer: I worked at Edelman back in the 90s.)
 
The state of trust in the world, or rather the lack of trust in our institutions and leaders, is disturbing.  And certainly not without cause:  the breadth of bad behavior is staggering and seemingly all-encompassing.  Type "list of recent scandals" into Google, and you will relive a cascade of misdeeds by corporate, academic, media, sports and religious institutions and individuals. 

The skepticism and lack of trust is bad for business.  Marketing 101 teaches us that for a business to succeed over the long term, it must be 1) known, 2) liked, and 3) trusted.

But it's not just big business.  Some of the worst offenders are smaller enterprises, the mom and pop operations that should know better, because they need every customer.  We all have stories of local businesses that we don't frequent any more because they changed for the worse and broke a trust that had taken years to build.

Trust or consequences?

'Tis also the season of boorish behavior, it seems.  Is it the solstice?

While the perception is that inexcusable behavior rises as we get into ho, ho ho mode, perhaps it's just made more visible because acting badly doesn't jibe with the Joy to the World, Season-of-Light narrative that's all around us.

But hey, neither does crass commercialism.

The silver lining is that there is a considerable, growing and very visible backlash.  With the rise of social media, uncivil behavior is not going unchecked. 

To wit:

• A FedEx employee made an un-Santa like delivery, (both in style and in being caught on video.) FedEx took quick action in a direct and forceful response.

• JP Morgan Chase CEO's Jamie Dimon was called out in Josh Brown's zeitgeist-lassoing letter for his peevishness at being castigated for being "successful."

• As Black Friday brings more and more stories of disturbing behavior among many, people are documenting it and putting pressure on institutions to check it.

It is a good thing -- to borrow a phrase from a convicted felon -- that we're not inured to such bad behavior, even as it seems pervasive. There are still affirming random acts of kindness being undertaken, as with the K-Mart angels making layaway payments across the nation.

The business lesson?  Only those organizations with a deep reservior of trust, rather than a foundation of sand, can withstand the very public backlash that's following these aberrant incidents.

Be Real and Get Real People! (Companies are people too, at least in this instance.)  In 2012, just be trustworthy.  Please don't waste our time and your money trying to manufacture trust.  Invest in earning it.  There's a much better return.  

Marketing guru Seth Godin nailed it in his blog post homage to Steven Colbert, "Trustiness."

 It's incredibly difficult to build a civil society on the back of "read the fine print...." When we have to spend all our time watching our back and working with lawyers, it's far more challenging to get anything done--and it makes building a business and a brand infinitely more difficult.

The question that needs to be asked by the marketer is, "are we doing this to create the appearance of trust, or is this actually something trustworthy, something we're proud to do?"

 The public is watching and they will out the fake, the false and the disingenuous. 

Don't dream it, be it. 

Best of the Season and Happy New Year to all.