There’s a great deal you can learn from spending time with your strugglers. You can learn why certain systems are hard to operate. You can learn why initiatives are poorly designed. You can learn why clients become unhappy. And over time, you can become, as some managers are, highly articulate in describing the anatomy of failure and its various cures.
Ironically, none of this is going to help you understand what excellence looks like. You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure. Of all the infinite number of ways to perform a certain task, most of them are wrong. There are only a few right ways. Unfortunately you don’t come any closer to identifying those right ways by eliminating the wrong ways. Excellence is not the opposite of failure. It is just different. It has its own configuration, which sometimes includes behaviors that look surprisingly similar to the behaviors of your strugglers.
For example, if you spent most of your time investigating failure, you would never discover that great housekeepers lie on the guests’ bed and turn on the ceiling fan, or that great table servers offer clear opinions, or that great salespeople feel call reluctance on almost every call they make, or that great nurses form strong emotional attachments with their patients. Instead, having found some of the very same behaviors among the very worst housekeepers, the worst table servers, salespeople, and nurses, you might have actually devised regulations or policies to prevent these behaviors from happening.
Gallup worked with one of the largest health care providers in Europe to help them find more nurses similar to their best. As part of our research we identified, using supervisor ratings, one hundred excellent nurses and one hundred average nurses. We then interviewed each individual, searching for those few talents that the excellent nurses shared.
Among the many talents common to great nurses, we discovered one called “patient response.” Great nurses need to care. They cannot not care. Their filter sifts through life and automatically highlights opportunities to care. But if the caring itself is a need, the joy of caring comes when they see the patient start to respond. Each little increment of improvement is fuel for them. It is their psychological payoff. This love of seeing the patient respond is the talent that prevents great nurses from feeling beaten down by the sadness and suffering inherent in their role. It is the talent that enables them to find strength and satisfaction in their work.
When we told their managers this, they replied: “We’re not organized that way, because we don’t want our nurses getting too close to their patients.” They said that patients were moved around all of the time. That it was usual for a nurse to return after a weekend or a day off and find his patients gone, moved to a different ward, transferred to a different hospital, or simply discharged. “There’s a great deal of pressure to make beds available,” they said. “And there’s no way we can organize our.. selves to keep a nurse and a patient together for very long at all. Some of our nurses got upset when they found their patients gone. Consequently we now tell our nurses to keep their distance. We don’t want them feeling any loss when the patient is moved.”
Despite these worthy intentions, their arrangement caused suffering all around. The nurses suffered—the whole setup denied them one of their most potent sources of satisfaction. The patients suffered—many studies have shown that patients will recover faster if they are cared for by a nurse with whom they have established a relationship. And the managers suffered—they had to cope with patients feeling isolated and nurses feeling demoralized.
How should the hospitals have been organized? This is a difficult question. There’s no getting past the fact that in order to keep health care costs down, every hospital feels pressure to “turn” patients quickly so that the beds can be made available. However, although Gallup couldn’t offer them a quick-fix answer to their predicament, we could highlight the best route to that answer: Sit down with your best nurses and ask them to describe how they would balance the needs of patients, nurses, and number crunchers. Whatever solution they came up with, they couldn’t do worse than the assembly-line system that demeans patients and cuts great nurses off from their oxygen supply.
Unfortunately this organization chose to ignore the voices of their best. They could not find the reasons, or perhaps the will, to alter their flawed but superficially efficient system. They are now struggling more than ever with patient dissatisfaction, nurse morale, and rising costs.
Fortunately many other companies have started to realize the wisdom of studying excellence to learn about excellence. Organized business tours of such “gold standard” companies as Southwest Airlines, GE, and Ritz-Carlton have year-long waiting lists, and the Walt Disney Company even packages the secrets of “the Disney Way” as a seminar series.
Doubtless managers can learn something useful from investigating the practices of these companies, but even when focused on external best practices, they often miss the most important lesson: Go back and study your own top performers. That’s what Disney, Southwest Airlines, GE, and Ritz-Carlton did. To generate the material for their tours and seminars, they interviewed, shadowed, filmed, and highlighted their best practitioners. They studied excellence as it was happening every day within their world. They learned from their best.
Every manager should do the same. Spend time with your best. Watch them. Learn from them. Become as articulate about describing excellence as you are about describing failure. Studying external best practices has its merits. But studying internal best practices is the regimen that makes the difference.
How can you do it? The best way to investigate excellence is simply to spend a great deal of time with your top performers. You might start by asking them to explain their secret—although most of them are so close to their own success that it often proves difficult for them to describe exactly what they do that makes them so good.
Instead, many of the great managers we interviewed said they spend a lot of time just observing their best. Sales managers discipline themselves to travel with one or two of their sales stars every month. School principals observe a couple of their best teachers’ classes. Customer service supervisors regularly listen in on their top customer service reps’ calls. The point of this time and attention is not to evaluate or monitor. The point is, as one sales manager put it, “to run a tape recorder in my head, so that back in my office I can replay it, dissect it, understand what happened and why it worked.” Like other great managers, you need to keep that tape recorder running.
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