Creating organizational cultures based on values and performance | Ann Rhoades | TEDxABQ

[Music] [Applause] have you ever wondered why it is that certain things are very important to us and we become passionate about them for me it's all about values and I know that have individual values we have family values but for me it's about organizational values and it probably started when I was very young and had my first job and actually the job was in banking and my first responsibility was to hire a very experienced teller which I did didn't take that long in fact within a couple weeks she was in the organization and we know

noed within a few weeks that she wasn't just good at being a teller she was obviously also a great Chopper because she constantly was going out of the bank with these beautifully wrapped packages we also noticed we were missing some money from one of our vaults and all of a sudden it struck me that maybe I should be looking for something other than just someone with experience many years later now after having worked for some very high-profile values-based strong organizations I have discovered that there are some certain traits that high performance models that are values-based

have consistently there are five things that they do very well first of all they Define who they want to be around a values model and reciprocal behaviors they also spend the time and effort it takes to hire a players who have the competencies like my teller but unlike my teller they also have the values the third thing they do is they have a very strong model for accountability and the reward people in the organization for doing a good job in a way that's meaningful to them the fourth thing they do is they understand your people

are your brand and last but not least they have a very strong continuous Improvement model about 17 years ago a group of nine people who would be the leaders for a new organization sat in a room at Double Tre hotels in New York City and they defined the values and the behaviors that would be part of this brand new company that they were creating today those values and behaviors are part of the DNA of that organization they also described and wrote a paragraph that they hoped would be written about them in years to come and

that has also happened that company is called JetBlue Airways you see the leaders in that room understood that leaders Drive the values of an organization and those values Drive the behaviors the behaviors collectively become the culture of the organization and I contend that culture drives performance you see culture is really what people do when no one is looking one of my favorite stories is a story that I found in the internet about an individual who lived in Phoenix Arizona and he got a call one morning from his daughter who told him that his grandson had

been in an horrific accident and she wanted him to come say goodbye to the grandson who they felt would have to be taken off life support that day he called the airport and found there was one flight that would get him there it was a Southwest flight and he ran to the airport but if you've ever been in Phoenix you know that sometimes it's difficult to get through and while he was in line he discovered that he might miss his flight he called his wife and told her he got to the gate a little late

and when he got there he saw that there were no passengers in the waiting area and he ran up to the woman who was behind the podium who was obviously a customer service agent and he said to her oh my gosh I've missed my flight and she said are you Mr Smith and he said yes and she said I want to make a call for you and she made a call that he thought was probably to schedule him for another flight which would be irrelevant because he wouldn't get there in time as she completed the

call a door opened up behind her and a captain walked out and he said Mr Smith we've loaded the plane and we're taking you to say goodbye to your grandson you see at Southwest there are 40 some thousand people who live the value of the golden rule every day and that's what that Captain was doing when you want to hire people that actually have the competence and the values a lot of organizations have started using a methodology that actually was perfected during World War II the military started looking at who are the pilots that are

hitting their targets consistently and who are not and they found out that there were behaviors that were significantly different between those that consistently hit their Target and they started hiring people with those behaviors because past behavior is predictive of future Behavior about 90% of the time and what they found out is they changed the outcomes today that methodology called behavioral hiring is being used by a number of high performance organizations in fact they use it a lot in healthcare and in California one of the Health Care Systems there uses it to hire new nurses and

they were interviewing these nurses and they were asking the question can you give me an example of a time when you had a very difficult patient and this young nurse who was interviewing told the story about her having worked as a pediatric nurse in another environment and she told the story about a baby being born with a portion of its brain missing and the young mother knowing she couldn't take care of this child who was not destined to live very long gave the child up for foster care this young nurse took a leave and took

care of that baby until he passed away and today she is a member of that company of that organization because she has the value of caring which is one of their strong values one of the things that's really important is as organizations look at how do we reward people the gr organizations look at rewarding people so that it's meaningful to them one of my favorites is Google and what Google does is they looked at you know every company has this bring your child to workday but Google looked at it and they realized that they have

such a young group of new Engineers that many have not started their families yet so they did something different they do bring your parents to work day and they had 4900 parents who came this year and they came from all over the world because that was important to the people that work there one of my favorite things is to look at why are we loyal to a certain brand and when Bane and Company looked at it last year for a very large company they found out that the biggest part of our decision to use a

brand and fre a brand is because of the people that serve Us in that brand 38% of the decision of loyal customers are all about who serves them you know if you don't have a continuous Improvement model if you really are a good organization but you want to stay great you need to have a continuous Improvement model and the great organizations do that in fact at Double Tree Hotel tells when they found out that they were not um spending not saving enough money in fact what they were trying to do is they found out they

were analyzing why is it we're spending so much money on silverware and they found out in their large corporate um environments and these big hotels the people were trying to do such a good job they were clearing the tables too quickly and so the CEO walked in to visit a hotel at Reagan Airport and he saw that there was a table set with all the silverware and it said there was a sign on it that said we saved the company $11,200 last night by going through the trash because they had gone through to find the

silverware that had been mistakenly thrown away Tony Shay is one of my favorite people Tony Shay is the CEO of Zappos which is a great company and Tony Shay has always said because he used the model that I described to you today he he's always said if you get the values and the culture right success will happen I'd like to leave you with one thought today and that is what are the values the real values of your organization [Applause]