Leading from the Middle

Amazon has been up to some tricky stuff lately according to the Wall Street Journal.
Their story details Amazon's efforts to suborn a former employee of the Trader Joe's chain into revealing corporate secrets. Also, the article details how Amazon's competitive and cutthroat culture can lead to undesirable overreach.
My cheating allusion in the title comes from auto racing, NASCAR in particular, where it is oft twanged, If you ain't cheatin' you ain't racin' .
That is why each race car is inspected minutely for any deviation from the required standard prior to lining up. And, it is why at each pit stop at least two NASCAR umpires observe what is done while the car is stopped for new tires and gas, etc.
A decade ago when I was living in NASCAR country, in North Carolina, I wrote about the Chapel Hill TJs and their tendency for taciturnity when asked how they do so well what they do so well.
Secrecy aside, TJs offers an envious level of customer service and I can say that the Salem, Oregon TJs, offers even better customer service than did the store in NC, 3000 miles away.
Why?
I attribute part of the difference to the Oregon Way, an elusive cultural tendency to help others. Likely it stems from pioneer days and early agricultural communities.
Many Oregonians genuinely help others. It is not a corporate mandate; it just happens from the way people are brought up in Oregon.
Nor is that spirit exclusive to the Salem TJs; I find it at WalMart, at Winco, and several other stores I frequent, even on occasion at Costco.
Yes, there are exceptions (Californians moving north! and easterners moving west!) but for the most part, people of all ages see nothing wrong in going the extra mile.
So, it is interesting to read of Amazon (no slouch in regard to excellent customer service) and its sneaky efforts to uncover TJs trade secrets. Several comments to the WSJ story point out that ?everyone does this? and that there is ?nothing illegal? about trying to work a fast one on your competitor.
Still there?s an ethical plenty to think about.
Anyway, here is my revised and updated 2013 take on TJs service tradition, Customer Service Secrets from Trader Joe?s
Because of its tight-lipped ways, Trader Joe's can make for the wrong kind of story, all about the covertness of its new German owners. For example, this headline from a 2010 story in Fortune: Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's
It is true, TJ managers will not talk about the business side of the business, but the crew, as the staff are known, offers just about the best service in the retail grocery business. You won't get TJs kind of love at the Piggly Wiggly.
A TJ crewmember interacts with you more like a person than a consumer. TJ staff appear to understand the fundamental truth about retail: if you help people find what they are looking for, and make them feel good in the process, they will spend money in your store and they will come back.
The money from the sales, the profits, then can be used to further enhance the enterprise for staff and customers.
When I called the nearby TJs, inquiring about a discontinued item, I was put straight thru to the store manager. I told him about my dismay. When would the product be back? He expressed surprise, but in the time it takes to check a computer inventory, he confirmed the sad news. Both of us commiserated about the situation. However, when I asked him if I could come by and interview him about their excellent customer service, his tone became wary.
He?d have to check with headquarters. I offered to write a letter explaining my interest, who I was, and how I worked, but he said no, that was not necessary.
He would get back to me in a week. He never did.
So, as you can see, TJs strength is not in talking about the organization but in doing service better than most other food stores.
TJs plays its cards close to the vest, perhaps for their own right reasons when you have Amazon spying.
Still, you can derive much about a business by how you are treated. TJs staff have an obvious interest in what the customer thinks. Is this an inculcated empathy? Or, maybe that empathy is in the corporate DNA, an inherited gene from TJs California culture that new leadership has the smarts not to re-engineer.
Well, how does an organization establish a uniform friendliness toward its clients? Somehow, TJs staff can be spontaneous and not worry about getting yanked by corporate policy.
As much as I like Costco, the staff on the floor all too often avoid eye contact with customers. If the customer makes the effort and asks a question, the response is usually positive, but it is up to me to take the initiative.
TJs apparent policy is to look people in the eye and ask how to help.
Better, the policy seems to say, if you see someone who might need help, you help. You stop re-stocking the shelf and help the customer find what she is looking for.
You take the customer in hand, figuratively.
You do not leave me wandering around hoping for serendipity to come to my rescue.
I was pushing one of TJs tiny grocery carts - with several bottles of wine and olive oil rolling around - when one of the crew commented about the party I must be having. Then she asked if I could use a box for the bottles. Actually, she did not ask me, she got the box and put the bottles in it so I could continue do my shopping.
Nearby, a boy, age three or four, was imitating two TJs crew re-stocking a bottom shelf. This was fun for the little boy. Work as fun. Imagine that.
It is remarkable to me that the staff were OK with the little boy's playful interest instead of telling the parent TJs insurance does not permit children playing with the merchandise.
I wonder what TJs policy manual looks like? Is it hundreds of pages of detailed direction or is it one page with the simple statement, Help the customer!
I cannot confirm that, I can only admire how TJs helps their customers.
An outsider with some inside info might conclude that TJs good staff benefits package makes for good customer relations. No doubt it helps, but good pay is hardly the only reason. It is in the corporate culture. It is what is transmitted and demonstrated reciprocally to every crew member by every crew member.
When someone needs help, you help.

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And, for examples of effective workplace collaboration with clients:

Leading from the Middle, is available at Amazon.
Copyright all text John Lubans 2024

Roger(the gentleman sleuth, Roger Sheringham) sat through the first part of lunch. It was not until the necessity for consuming a large plateful of prunes and tapioca pudding, the two things besides Jews that he detested most in the world, began to impress itself upon his consciousness, ...
This out-of-nowhere, gratuitous display of prejudice, comes from The Layton Court Mystery (1925) written by Anthony Berkeley.
In my reading of early English detective fiction and other literature (1890s to the 1930s) I often come across racial slurs and other slings and arrows against groups of people.
Our contemporary culture no longer tolerates - rightly so - such insults. I like to think my generation has improved in respecting others. We may think nasty thoughts but most of us are
ashamed to express or act upon them.
I am not a fan of Berkeley's fictional detective, the prissy Mr. Sheringham, but I believe there is value in seeing what previous societies permitted.
Censoring that book would be wrong. However outrageous, that was part of the culture at that time. We need to see it and learn from it.
The second point is that there is value in confronting these cliched aspersions and understanding how they affect each of us. Do we empathize? Do we laugh? Do we cringe?
What was the author, Anthony Berkely, thinking? Was this an attempted witticism?
For whom?
Regardless, the editor, the publisher and the contemporary reader had no objections, as far as we know.
Consider the book's date, 1925.
What was happening in Europe? According to sources, in the nine years between 1924 and 1933 the Nazi Party developed and became ascendant in Germany. Hitler came to power in 1933.
Germany hosted the Olympics in 1936 and much of the blatant persecution of Jews was kept hidden from visitors.
Shortly after the Olympics, the killing began but the world largely turned a blind eye.
Some of that intentional blindness was due to ugly stereotypes popularized in popular literature.
Russia's brutality toward Ukraine is similar; it seeks to eradicate a sovereign nation by using mass murder as a means to that end.
Speaking of the Olympics, should Russia be allowed to send its athletes to Paris? Of course not.

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STEAL THIS BOOK, if you can: As Andrew Lang has it
And in the lion or the frog---
In all the life of moor and fen,
In ass and peacock, stork and log,
(Aesop) read similitudes of men.?
:

And, for examples of effective workplace collaboration:

Leading from the Middle, is available at Amazon.
Copyright all text John Lubans 2024

Caption: My Salem Shoe Repair Shop

While I have never been to a Timpson store - there are 2000 of these diversified repair shops in the UK - I am on their weekly e-mailing list. Back in 2017 I blogged about their unique approach to screening job applicants: Recruiting the Best. It appears below, recast.
Timpson, a family owned business, offers a diversity of services in each store, from shoe repair to dry cleaning to locksmithing to watch repair.
Recently, I was looking for a shoe repair shop in Salem, Oregon. My location is 5000 miles (or 8000 kilometers) from England so there was no going to a Timpson.
I did locate a shop (depicted) within walking distance, High Street Shoe Repair.
It's tiny, and one enters through a narrow door into a narrow space (picture a deep walk in closet). George, the cobbler - a tall thin bespectacled man - comes from the back and greets me.
I hand over the shoes and he examines them and nods, "Yes, I can repair these."
Looking around, I tell him I admire the compactness and the tidiness of his store.
Then, for some reason, I ask him if he has heard of Timpson in the UK.
To my surprise, he had and knew more than I did about the company!
He referred me to a 2010 book: Upside down management : a common sense guide to better business by John Timpson.
And George told me that another Timpson, James, used to write a column on business and leadership for The (London) Sunday Times which led to another book The Happy Index: Lessons in Upside-Down Management.
Apart from the innovative approach in centralizing all consumer repair services, Timpson offers a different way to treat employees: Their Upside Down Management style means that the people one meets in the store run the business, everyone else (in the corporation) is there to help them do their job.
As my 2017 blog noted, Timpson pays great attention to whom they hire. They avoid "drongos". That's Australian slang for someone "who may not be completely useless, may even be intelligent, but is nevertheless a fool and not to be taken seriously."
Timpson states that "if you don't deal with drongos you will affect performance and find your team more difficult to manage. Drongos rarely improve. Help them find their happiness elsewhere as soon as possible."
I would say drongos are akin to jerks in the USA and to dickheads, another bit of dead on Aussie slang.

My 2017 column follows:


Caption: Little Miss Brainy: Talking a pig out of a tree.

A BBC article, Happy Hiring, describes a technique one company uses to recruit staff. Timpson is the featured company. It sums up each recruit by applying the Mr. Men/Little Ms. characters (e.g. Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Chatterbox, Mr. Clever) to the interviewee.
Suzanne Bearne, the BBC writer, told me that each of the Timpson recruiters/managers has a page of Mr. Men characters in front of them, and they circle which one (or possibly several) the applicant is like.
I suspect I was drawn to this since I use kid books to help my students identify types of followers. Simplistic! you might mutter. Could be, but using kid books has proven to be a helpful way for students to learn more about themselves and their work colleagues.
The BBC article brought Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher to mind.
When asked how he finds the right people for his airline, he replied, "Hire attitude, train for skills."
In my profession, we mostly did just the opposite. We hired for skills and gave attitude/personality a pass except in the most egregious cases of jerkitude.
I agree with Mr. Kelleher, you cannot train for attitude, you cannot train for compassion, and you cannot train for emotional intelligence. Asking for an attitude adjustment is akin to P.G. Wodehouse's story of a nervous after-dinner speaker being yelled at to speak louder. Shortly after, another voice pipes up, "And funnier!"
If you excuse a weak attitude/personality at the interview then you will have a full time job repairing poor hiring decisions.
Worse, if after the hire you avoid the drongo, you will soon have a miasmic pool of legacy employees (drongos) dedicated to undermining every change initiative and improvement, and chasing off your star employee, your Mr. Good, the kind of person that courteously "will always open a door for you".
I have long thought that the person that makes the feckless decision to hire a Mr. Grumpy or a Mr. Fussy or a Little Miss Splendid should be counseled not to do it again. Better, he or she should be assigned the constructive disciplining of that variety of drongo.
Mr. Men characters are not exactly The Myers-Briggs Types (MBTI)! Nor are they like any other of the swarm of personality tests, all promising to separate winners from losers.
But, the testing industry should take notice. Results at Timpson seem mighty good: an innovative organization, strong return on investment, and considerable freedom for each worker.
I have taken the MBTI more than once; but I can never recall my score, an obviouls personality flaw!
One friend who swears by the MBTI can recite the long list of characteristics for each type and knows who to mix with whom on task forces.
Another friend was able to score the type his boss wanted him to be. In other words, he gamed the test.
In any case, the MBTI lumbers on under the HR aegis. I suspect using the Mr. Men/Ms.Little characters may be quicker and more effective in identifying the people you want to work with.


Caption: Mr. Fussy dusting flowers.

***********
STEAL THIS BOOK, if you can: As Andrew Lang has it
And in the lion or the frog---
In all the life of moor and fen,
In ass and peacock, stork and log,
(Aesop) read similitudes of men.?
:

And, for examples of effective workplace collaboration:

Leading from the Middle, is available at Amazon.
Copyright all text John Lubans 2017 & 2024

Caption. WSJ March 16, 2024.

How to avoid layoffs when the sizzle (demand for one's product/service) fizzles?
It's axiomatic: leaders are supposed to anticipate and plan for bad times especially during good times.
Let me give you a failed example on what to do when work fizzles.
A Systems Analysis class (in which I was a student) took a tour of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, not unlike this photo from the 1950s
.
Our professor led us into a cavernous space with hundreds of desks in perfect rows, as far as the eye could see - an all too real caricature of a bureaucracy. I noticed (unlike this photo) that most of the seated workers were reading books.
When I inquired, our professor explained, candidly, it was past tax season. They had no real work to do.
Today, many of the layoffs among tech companies can be attributed to over-hiring during their good times resulting in morbidly obese corporations.
Now, with a different economy, lots of folks are being discharged (or asked to pretend to work, to make do, like in my tax department).
Unlike the techs, Hologic - a 7000+ employee health care company - took and takes a different approach to avoid employee glut.
During Covid, and now, managers had to vigorously defend a need for a new hire. And, existing workers were and are expected to help in other areas when business is booming or fizzling.
Workers are not laid off.
Instead, because of wise stewardship, full time workers do real work.
Some might term this type of management as mean and lean.
But is it really mean to wisely budget resources so that the organization can thrive and survive in both good times and bad?
An article in the Wall Street Journal gives the details:
How One Company Navigated a Boom and Bust With No Mass Layoffs.
One quote rang the proverbial bell for me: "When (Hologic) employees leave, positions aren't necessarily backfilled. Instead, managers ask whether another part of the business needs the position more?"
That was similar to the radical approach I took when charged with getting a traditional organization out of a decades-long funk. In cowboy terms, I was asked to herd the organization's sacred cows and head them all in the same direction.
The organization had found, over decades, excuses to avoid streamlining and improving production.
While not incompetent, we could have been doing much more with less.
In that environment, temporarily giving up a worker to help in another area was risky. If you sent one of your staff to help another unit, why, maybe, your position was not really needed?
So, while a unit's morale and production could be high and workers would help each other, helping an outside unit was taboo.
Now, a hard-nosed manager might have a quick solution to what I describe - quit pussy-footing around and order workers to help other units.
In my world, "Surely you jest!?" would have been the most likely response. And, if I were to persist in my folly, multiple other reasons as to why this was a bad idea would be invented including that I did not understand.
The prospect of such a negative response is enough to cause most managers to retreat.
Interestingly, Hologic states that, "(m)ass layoffs (due to overhiring) are a failure of leadership."
I don't think it is bizarre to state that in many bureaucracies or any rigid, nonporous organization staff are prohibited by management and union policy from helping out in other units.
Well then - besides the short-term motivator of a kick in the ass - how do we get employees willingly helping their fellows, willingly crossing turf boundaries and doing what is best for customers and the organization?
People want real work to do, meaningful work. When wasting one's day is seen as normal the staff and the supervisors' behavior becomes pathological - a Soviet socialist reality: "We'll pretend to lead while you pretend to work."
Instead, leaders at all levels ought to work toward a new collaborative and supportive mindset.
How?
Hologic offers us some clues. They incentivized stepping up with bonuses 10-15 times more than the annual average.
And, they hired temporary employees to help with ramped up production demands.
What about creating one's own temp service? Not everyone will want to participate, but many will if that participation leads to more money and prestige, not to mention resume enhancement.
Of course, the bosses have to be on board.
What do they get out of it? In my case, I promoted the managers who had the ability to see beyond their turf. My success in bringing about long needed change was attributable to three or four department heads who shared my vision and my peculiar, if you will, ability to let go.
I was fortunate in my situation because I followed a generation of micromanagers who had stifled staff creativity. So, my unleashing that innovative spirit almost immediately resulted in productivity gains.
Another significant motivator was my policy to permit a unit's salary savings to be used by that unit to enhance operations. And, organization-wide, some of those savings were made available to provide relief in understaffed areas. I made a point of publicizing and recognizing where that money came from.
My recent blog on the Un-DMV gives additional ideas for keeping an organization flexible and nimble.
Leaders at all levels could make a meaningful difference by facilitating and protecting managers and staff, however few to start with, who want to collaborate with other agencies, who want to help out where needs are greater. Without that support, my reform efforts would have faltered.

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BUY THIS BOOK: Fables provide ancient wisdom for today's workers and managers :

And, for examples of collaborative teamwork in the workplace:

Leading from the Middle, is available at Amazon.

Copyright all text John Lubans 2024