Distill the Right Attitudes—and Make Them Stick

Core people who have been around for a long time don’t really need a list of rules to keep them on track. They already know what your company attitudes are; likely, they played a big part in creating your culture. You only need to formally define them when you start growing, because people who are new to the team have no idea what makes your company special. They need someone to tell them how “things are done around here.”

These expectations of behavior go by all sorts of names, including core values, rules of engagement, house rules, shared values, company pillars, and more. Don’t get hung up on the terminology. Focus on discovering the behaviors that make for successful hires in your company. We’re going to use the term right attitudes, but please customize this to whatever works for you.

Think of your company’s right attitudes as the circular ripples created when a rock is thrown into a still pond. The first few rings of ripples are very clear. The 10th ripple though, is faint. And the 20th, well, it can hardly be seen. That’s why the new people need the attitudes to be spelled out: because they weren’t around when the rock was first thrown and the initial ripples were made.

Having these attitudes formalized for everyone to see is important, because adherence to them is the biggest indicator of whether an employee will succeed or fail at your company. “Hey!” you cry. “That’s totally subjective! It’s not fair! It should just be about getting the work done, not about living by some subjective list of attitudes!”

If we were all robots, that would be a fair critique, and people would be judged only by completely objective criteria. But here in the human world, when an employee’s attitude isn’t right, that person doesn’t work out. The absence of the right attitude isn’t as subjective as you might think, either. Bad attitudes are quickly and easily sniffed out by you and everyone else on the team.

We’ve all observed this to be true from first-hand experience, but it’s also borne out by hard data. Leadership IQ, a global leadership training and research company, studied 5,247 new hires made by hiring managers from 312 public, private, business, and healthcare organizations. Collectively these managers hired more than 20,000 employees during the study period. The study showed that 46 percent of new hires failed within 18 months; 89 percent of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11 percent of the time for lack of skill.¹

Why Defining Right Attitudes Is So Important to Your Company

Functioning in today’s workplace is like white-water rafting, not sculling in a placid lake. Sculling is orderly. A perfectly unified team sits politely in their tiny craft, rowing in perfect synchronization. The coxswain sits at the back and shouts the orders. There’s no talking back. Everyone listens and does precisely what they’re told to do.

This is the perfect picture of what ideal work cultures of the past aspired to look like. Executives of the 1980s wept with joy reading about Japanese 20-year plans in which every possible permutation of the future was anticipated like a beautiful business ballet. Each member of the troupe did what he was told. Then the Japanese economy went into a 25-year tailspin, and the gurus began to think again.

White-water rafting is something quite different. Everyone is holding on for dear life as the zodiac careens madly, occasionally giving one person a blast of ice cold water in the face and bucking off that unlucky passenger in an unexpected lurch to starboard. There’s no way to shout every order, and in any case, no one could hear them if you tried.

Our workplaces today are a bit like white-water rafting. Things are changing so quickly, and business is happening at such a break-neck pace that in today’s white-water work environment, everyone needs to know the rules before getting in the boat so they’ll know how to behave when the confusion hits. Here’s a famous story from the past that illustrates this concept.

In 1805, the English fought the combined Spanish and French navies in what became famous as the Battle of Trafalgar. The English had fewer ships and poorer armaments; what proved to be Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson’s winning strategy was his adoption of what was, at the time, a radically unorthodox culture. He built the original “Band of Brothers.”

The Spanish and French built a culture of obedience. Ship captains were ordered to enter the battle and look to the all-knowing admiral’s flagship for the signal flags that would tell them what to do in every circumstance. Nelson, on the other hand, built a culture of mutual respect and devotion. Although he had a carefully planned battle strategy, Nelson knew that everything would change once the enemy was engaged, so he remarked to his men, “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy,” freeing his captains to use their own judgment once combat began.

The battle proved to be a deafening, smoke-filled scene of carnage and destruction. Trying to glimpse a faraway flag on the peak of a distant mast was impossible. The French and Spanish were confused, and the English capitalized on the chaos. The battle ended with every single Spanish and French ship burned, destroyed, or sunk, while the English didn’t lose a single ship. Nelson secured the seas for the English for the next 100 years, and won his place in history at the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square in the heart of London, surrounded by four lions sculpted from the melted metal of his enemy’s guns.

If your team is clear on what attitudes are expected from them, and all are rowing in the same direction, you will dominate any industry, anytime, anywhere.

How to Identify Your Right Attitudes

The first step is to define exactly which attitudes are important in your workplace. These will relate to what your company does. A company that offers grief counseling will obviously have right attitudes that are different from those chosen by a machine shop. An accounting office will be different again. Here are some simple suggestions for discovering them.

List the Traits of Your Best Employee

Think of a real-life employee. What is it about her that makes you and others love her performance? What are the qualities that make her so special? Is it her cleanliness or the way she treats her coworkers or the amount she’s able to get done? Maybe it’s the passion she brings to her work or her accuracy and thoroughness. Write a list of these qualities, and be as specific as possible in your description.

Now ask yourself if the things you love about this person have wider application to your work force. Are these the attitudes that many or perhaps all of your most successful employees share? If so, you have found one of your company’s right attitudes.

The fact that you love the behavior of these stars suggests that they’re living out something that’s important to you on a deeper level. When you examine what they’re doing right, you’ll find valuable clues to outline your company’s important right attitudes.

Reflect on What Makes You Angry

You’ll know you’ve hit on a right attitude when the thought of someone violating it makes you angry. Think back to the times that you’ve felt angry at work over the last six months. Was your anger sparked because a right attitude was being violated? If so, your anger can be a major clue to finding what your right attitudes are.

I learned this principle one hot summer afternoon from the management team of a very successful company as we tried to puzzle out the company’s right attitudes. We’d agreed on two, but still, something was missing, although we couldn’t put our finger on just what it was. As the afternoon wore on, the group was slowly going numb, so in desperation, I turned to one of the owners, and asked her, “When was the last time you got really mad at someone?”

Without hesitation, she described how she went on a tear with a leader over his treatment of one of his reports. “He had no respect, and I will not stand for that in this company,” she emphatically declared. Her passion around this issue was real and raw, and caused light bulbs to turn on all over the room. “Respect for all” became their final right attitude.

Some clients are furious when they hear a customer has been treated with indifference, see a poor-quality product being sent out, or observe an employee who shows no passion for the job. Look to your anger for clues about what your right attitudes are.

Identify the Attitudes That Are Currently Being Lived Out

You don’t make up right attitudes out of thin air. They are behaviors that are already being lived out every day in your company. Your right attitudes define what makes your culture special and unique. They aren’t aspirational; they’re living and real. You shouldn’t have to search far to find them because employees should be displaying them on a regular basis.

Typically, though, that’s not how this exercise is approached. Usually official statements are put together by a committee because someone at the top fell for the latest management fad. Usually they’re wordy and lofty—and meaningless.

Here’s how official statements often function in real companies: A few years ago, I was a groomsman at a friend’s wedding. As a thank you, he gave me a watch that was privately labeled with the name of a popular retailer. It stopped working within the month. When I brought it to the store, the salesperson glanced at it indifferently and said in his most off-putting manner, “Yeah, lots of those have broken, but we don’t take them back, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

We debated the merits of this line of thinking for a couple of fruitless minutes, until a corporate plaque above his head caught my eye. It read: “Our Creed: To give you such outstanding quality, value, service, and guarantee that we may be worthy of your high esteem.”

Wow. How noble. I almost teared up. I drew my new friend’s attention to his company’s creed, and remarked, “I’ve got to tell you, the quality, value, service, and guarantee that I’m experiencing right now is not evoking my highest esteem.”

Without blinking, he gave me a customers-are-so-dim look, shook his head, and shot back, “That’s just a sign!”

You’ve seen official statements like these hanging on the wall. They’re meant to be inoffensive and make everyone happy, and, as a result, they have no teeth. It’s not that any of the values proclaimed on them are wrong. They’re all good things. They’re just irrelevant. These statements could be hung in the boardrooms of any competitor, and no one would blink an eye. They would be just as vanilla, unnoticed, and meaningless there.

Everyone knows these framed statements have nothing to do with their actual lives. People don’t care about what’s written on the walls, but about what happens in the halls.

Your right attitude statements, however, are going to be different, because they’re going to be specific, short, and memorable, and have real teeth. They’re going to be one of the main HR tools for your whole company. You will hire, onboard, evaluate, praise, and discipline based in large part on your right attitudes.

These attitudes will make your stars happy because good behaviour will be enforced and rewarded, and help your non-stars get better because bad behavior will be called out, too. In short, they will become the measuring stick that everyone will live by, and be evaluated by, whether it’s the CEO or the newest entry-level hire.

If you were to interview your best people about what they value in the company, they would likely touch on some of the attitudes that already exist that make your company special. Your company’s right attitudes are being lived out every day. It’s your job to identify them. Ask yourself, “What has made us win up to now?”

Analyze the Attitudes That Have Been Violated

A good employment fit can be thought of as the three legs of a stool, represented by competence, character, and chemistry. All three components are important, but the main reason—by a country mile—that people don’t work out is chemistry, which is another way of saying right attitudes.

Think of someone that you let go in the past year or two. What offense did he commit that led to his termination? Was it a question of competence or character? Or was it something else?

If you have chemistry with someone, he “gets it.” He already shares your way of thinking, and he values what you and your team value. He just feels like a fit.

Skills can be taught for the most part, but it’s very difficult to teach attitudes to people, because attitudes represent what they really believe. The challenge is to find people who already share your attitudes—not find people and then try to teach them to believe what you believe. Attitudes can be shaped in young people to some degree, but if a person’s been on the planet for a while, their attitudes are usually set.

Thinking about people that you’ve let go in the past year or two will help you discover what your company’s right attitudes really are. If you’ve let someone go because he wasn’t a good fit, but you can’t point to the attitude from your current list that he violated, you may need to go back to the drawing board to find out which right attitude has not been discovered.

You can approach this dynamic from another direction. Ask yourself, “If a person was to repeatedly violate one of our right attitudes, would I eventually fire him over it?” This is a pivotal question, because it forces you to ask what attitudes are really important to you, which parts of your company culture you’re willing to defend and which parts don’t matter as much to you. You know you’re serious if you’re willing to fire over it. If not, it’s probably not an attitude that’s critical to success for you.

Your commitment to firing over repeated “soft skill” violations transforms your right attitudes from meaningless words into ideas that people believe in, commit to, and strive to live up to.

What Right Attitudes Do You Want Your Company to Retain a Century From Now?

Attitudes that are important to you don’t change over time. Your strategy will evolve, as will your products, services, and customer base, but those attitudes should be the same forever. For that reason, give yourself some time to discover them.

When you choose your right attitudes and put them to paper, write them in pencil. Once you’ve lived with them for six months to a year, you’ll have a good idea if they’re really core to your business. There’s a good chance that some will feel like duplicates, or upon reflection, some won’t feel as core to you as they did when you wrote them down. It takes time to sort out right attitudes. Once you’ve tried them out for a few months and everyone agrees that they are the right ones, carve them in stone and strive to embody them. Nothing is more important to your culture than leaders who “walk the talk” all the time.

How to Make Your Right Attitudes “Sticky”

When I brought up the idea of developing right attitudes with one client company, the leadership team objected on the grounds that they had already completed a values-discovery exercise; in fact, they had identified 10 core values, and had them beautifully written (in calligraphy), framed, and hung on the wall of the very boardroom in which we were having our discussion. I calmly walked to the framed statement, removed it from the fastener that held it in place, and set it down, facing the wall. Then I turned to the team and asked them to recite the values.

Crickets.

The silence hung heavy in the air until one person remembered something about being stewards of the environment. After another pregnant pause, someone else remembered “giving back to the community.” There was another lengthy silence as the top leaders of the company exchanged glances, straining to remember just one of the 10 things that they all had agreed were the most important values to the business.

I’m sure they were deeply committed to the values, they just couldn’t remember what any of them were! After sharing a good laugh, we proceeded to re-shape their values statement to a format that was a bit more real—and a lot more memorable.

You may absolutely nail the right attitudes that are alive in your organization, and still find that people struggle to remember what they are. If they aren’t memorable, they aren’t going to be of much use to anyone.

The acid test for memorable or “sticky” right attitudes is this: will your newest, youngest employee remember them after hearing them only once?

Don’t be worried about wordsmithing these statements until they’re grammatically perfect. You aren’t trying to get a checkmark from an imaginary business professor, and grammatical perfection isn’t the goal; it might even hamper the stickiness of your values. Instead, worry about how to make the attitudes simple so that everyone can easily remember them. Following are five useful tricks.

Remember the “Rule of Three”

The human brain has an ability to hold three things in focus at one time. When there are four or five or 12 things to focus on, clarity melts into confusion. If your company attitudes are going to be used in daily life, they need to be sticky, so focus on discovering no more than three right attitudes. Usually these involve something about work ethic, something about interacting with the team, and something about the frame of mind they show up with each day.

Thomas Jefferson used the Rule of Three in writing the Declaration of Independence: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are among the most important words in all of American, perhaps human, history. The U.S. Air Force has three laws for surviving captivity: fellowship with other prisoners, survive, and return with honor. Steve Jobs used the Rule of Three in almost every public presentation he made at Apple. For instance, he proclaimed that the iPad 2 would be “thinner, lighter, and faster” than the original. Movie theaters and restaurants have built businesses based on food choices of “small, medium, and large.” The Rule of Three is all around us.

Consider an Acronym

Acronyms can help make your right attitudes sticky. Maybe the name of your company can be used to build the acronym. Once you have chosen your values, you may be able to find a way for them to spell a word that’s easy to remember. CREW Marketing Partners did this in reverse and used their core values (character, relationships, execution, wow) to name the company.

Resist the temptation to shape your right attitudes around a cool word that seems like the perfect fit. The attitudes are more important than how they are presented.

Attempt Alliteration

Starting all of your attitudes with the same letter isn’t a guaranteed recipe for stickiness, but it doesn’t hurt.

A client who runs a chain of restaurants worked hard to make his right attitudes memorable, or “sticky.” Finally, he chose three words: win, wash, and wow.

Win referred to winning together. If something worked for a franchisee but not the home office, it wouldn’t pass the right attitudes test. If management was happy and employees weren’t, things had to be re-examined.

Wash was a short way to remember the axiom “No one is too good to wash toilets.” That meant that when the restaurant closed for the day, every person helped clean until the job was done, regardless of rank. Managers might wash dishes or scrub toilets, or servers might clean greasy stovetops. This contributed to an egalitarian, team-based culture.

Wow referred to the goal of having every customer say “Wow!” about all aspects of their experience in the restaurant. That included the cleanliness of the premises, the friendliness of the staff, and the presentation and taste of the food.

Best of all, a new employee could remember “win, wash, wow” after hearing it the first time. It was really sticky.

Adopt Common Sayings

Adopting phrases that are already in common use in the business is a really great way to communicate shared values. The fact that they’re already well known is an indicator that they may express something that’s really important. Phrases like get ’er done, watch the pennies, and don’t let the rules make you stupid convey meaning that everyone already gets. If a saying is already in use and it reflects something that’s core, by all means use it.

At the end of this chapter I’ve included some real-life examples of right attitudes used by real companies, many of which are sayings that were already alive in their businesses. Look at these to spark your thinking.

Tell Company Legends

Stories are the best way to make right attitudes sticky. Rather than just telling employees to “keep your promises,” share a story about the lengths a real person has gone to in order to keep a promise. A story is memorable, conveys emotion, and illustrates how you want your employees to act. Reason (the words you hang on the wall) persuades, but emotion (the attitude stories you tell) motivates. A powerful story teaches your right attitudes better than any other method you can use.

Imagine a Nordstrom employee hearing the following story (which I heard from a participant in a business class I was teaching):

Telling this story to a new employee would teach her everything she would need to know about Nordstrom’s above-and-beyond customer service. Plus, this story has a built-in bonus, as explained by my class participant when he concluded the story: “The great thing for Nordstrom is that I’ve told that story over and over and over again. They really got their money’s worth in advertising!”

Time to Brainstorm

Attitudes are different for every business. Here’s a list of some real-life right attitudes used by real clients. Pick the three that resonate with you, and then customize them, or invent your own:

• Get ’er done.

• Work passionately.

• Respect others.

• Continuous improvement.

• Professionalism.

• Do more with less.

• Win together, not alone.

• Tidy and clean.

• Open and transparent.

• No surprises.

• Own it!

• Raise the bar.

• Always positive.

• Trustworthy—do the right thing and do things right.

• Obey the golden rule.

• Think win-win.

• Fanatical customer service.

• Invest wisely.

• Focus on results.

• No one’s too good to wash toilets.

• Keep our promises.

• Be a lifter, not a leaner.

• Relationships first.

• Your attitude determines your altitude.

• House of “Yes” (as long as it’s not immoral or illegal, make the customer happy).

• Watch the pennies.

• Make everything a “WOW.”

• Always do the right thing.

• Accountable for our successes and setbacks.

• Do it now!

• G-rated culture.

• Make a customer’s day.

• Always be busy.

• Think it through.

• Customer relationships first.

• Find a better way.

• Superb quality work.

• Salary maker, not salary taker.

• High performance.

• Trusting relationships.

A retail store is likely going to have different right attitudes from a professional services firm or a quick-serve restaurant, but defining them helps each employee know what behaviors are expected of them and which ones will get them in trouble.

People Action Steps

• Assemble your leadership team and work through the previous list of attitudes.

• Choose and/or customize three of them that describe your company’s right attitudes.

• Test them out for six months by telling stories that illustrate them, using them in hiring interviews, and referring to them when giving praise or correction.

• Once you and your team are sure they’re on point, put the right attitudes on the wall and “walk the talk.”

In Summary

When your company is growing, you need to discover and define your three right attitudes. They are the behaviors that employees live out that make your company special and different from your competitors; they define which behaviors are and are not acceptable at your company.

You discover them by:

• Making a list of the behaviors that typify your very best employees.

• Reflecting on what makes you angry. Your temper is ignited when right attitudes are violated.

• Looking for those right attitudes that are lived out in your company every day. Values are discovered, not invented.

• Reflecting on those people who haven’t worked out. What attitudes did they violate that ended in their termination?

• Anticipating what attitudes your company will retain in a century.

Here’s how to make the attitudes sticky:

• Obey the Rule of Three. People can’t hold more than three things in focus, so limit the number of attitudes you choose.

• Consider an acronym. Spell out a word using the first letters of your right attitudes.

• Attempt alliteration. Have all of your attitudes begin with the same letter.

• Adopt common sayings. Use sayings that are already in common use that everyone already understands.

• Tell company legends. Think of stories that illustrate your attitudes better than any words ever could. Tell the stories over and over again.

• Choose and/or customize your company attitudes from the list provided in the chapter.