Corporate Culture – Leader’s Secret Asset | Harald Port | TEDxLugano

[Music] I'd love to travel and recently in the beginning of the year I had a great trip to Australia now I say I had a great trip doesn't mean I had a great travel there and just to keep a long story short I'd like to tell you a little bit about that I'm from Zurich and I wanted to fly from Zurich to Australia but there's no direct flights so what I did is I connected through Dubai and the first leg to Dubai everything was great but when arriving in Dubai my flight was canceled so unfortunately

now you have to imagine this four hundred people are getting off an airplane and are eager to connect to their flights to Australia these are big planes coming in there at the same time when they were getting off there was a headline that our trip had been canceled and as that emotions started to sink in there's different emotions so for example when I when I travel I have an itinerary and it says you know the first leg here second leg there I actually believe that and I trust that that's going to work out that way

I make plans specifically for when I arrive and that night I had tickets to the at the at the Opera House of in Sydney so first emotion obviously anger annoyed unhappy and and and that's I think what what a lot of customers experienced and a lot of passengers experienced when they were flying but then what I experienced then is something that I wanted to share with you which is the behaviors of that airline that had welcomed and and sort of communicated to us that that our trip had been canceled they had already rescheduled and rebooked

all of the passengers onto that next flight out I never heard of that before I thought that was fantastic but it didn't stop there there were not one but there are five or six people on the ground there welcoming those those guests who had arrived off of the plane to say hey if you want to go on to a different connection we help you with those rebooking x' and because the flight had continued the next day there was a hotel needed those hotels were already booked as equally also the shuttle from the airport to the

hotel I mean I was I was first annoyed was the first emotion but then I was surprised like what's going on here I mean this is very rare for an airline to do and I was very positively surprised about that so through that change in emotions that I had there later on during the trip I thought about this and I said you know what I think I may actually travel with that airline again and it's not so much because that flight was canceled that's not really what I was looking for much more it was because

how they behaved and how they they treated that and how they reacted to to what needed to be done things can go wrong great if people react in the right way so what I realized then was that the behaviors of the airline and of the staff and the people that were there affected my choice about future flights about what I would do in the future and I assume this is similar for a number of passengers that were on that flight who also had to make a choice or will have to make a choice in the

future now I'm not here today to talk about the the value of customer service by individuals by small group of people I think that's well known what I am here to talk about and what I'd like to invite you to think about together with me is what is the impact of corporate culture of the sum of all those behaviors on customer choices and then in turn on the success of business so let's think about behaviors why do why do we behave the way we do well first of all I think we need to realize that

behaviors is not something that we've that are part of our DNA they are actually something we've learned and just like a canyon has sediments layers of sediments similarly our behaviors are layers of experiences so we experience certain behaviors from our parents when we are young and maybe our immediate circle and from that we learn about behaviors later on when we're in a job wewe start to experience the behaviors of our colleagues our superiors our bosses and from that again we are learning so what we can say that is that our our behaviors are actually a

function of what we are experiencing from other people behaving and equally when I was there in Dubai and I experienced those really good and professional behaviors towards me as a customer they are actually a function of the behaviour of the other people within the airline so it seems that there is a connection between the behaviors a culture of the company my choices as a customer and and of my fellow passengers and then on business success because a a an airline needs customers to come back to be successful so if we think about business success for

a moment how can we measure business success one way listed companies do that is they look at their stock price now what I'd like to do now is invite you to think about well what actually in what impact does corporate culture have on stock prices there was a study done by it by cotton Heskett where they compared companies who had no specific intention of thinking about corporate culture as part of their firm there was no special attention to that and it was another set of companies who made it a priority to think about the corporate

culture who treated as something important so if we look at the benchmark the first set of firms in a over a given period 11 years they looked at the stock price increase and as you can see 74 percent was the increase in stock price for that first set of firms now here's a question to you what do you think that second number is going to be of firms who paid attention to corporate culture think in your head what is that number that are you thinking of the first bar is quite small so you could probably

expect the next one to be higher the bar grows quite high and I find this amazing corporate culture has an enormous impact on the value of a company and we can see in this example in this study this is a factor 12 so if there's any investors out there today we're looking where to put their money I mean I would quickly get on the on Google inside to find out which companies are paying attention to corporate culture that's a huge huge impact here now business business leaders should should really care about this right this is

important well in another study that actually that theme is confirmed business leaders do care about this yeah so in a study of a hundred board members over 80% confirmed culture corporate culture is important and it's a priority for for the success of the business they see that they confirm that they say it from themselves that this is important to them now only a fraction of that actually make it a part of their day-to-day and this is just mind-blowing right if we think about we understand something is super important we are confirming that we are saying

that from ours ourselves but we're only doing very very little us very few of us are actually doing something about it on a day to day basis it sounds incredible to me now why is that problems I can't answer that question but what I can say is what do companies do typically with other factors other assets of the of their firm so back to our airline what actually influences what our assets of that airline one of them would be the cabin right the way a cabin is is built from the inside the leg room that

you have all of these factors they influence us as customers and they influence also the choices we make when we select an airline which with which we want to travel and what do companies do well typically they hire somebody and make him or her responsible to increase that that value of that cab and to make it more accessible and more interesting and more more enjoyable for the for the passengers so somebody is hired and gets the responsibility to improve and increase that value of that asset obviously in order to make a long-term business success so

I ask you this why don't we do exactly the same thing with culture if we recognize the importance and the impact culture can have as with our stock prices and we confirm that this is important to us why not do the same thing as with our other assets let's put somebody in charge make somebody responsible for corporate culture and getting the most value out of that for our business success we can even call them a culture asset manager if we want now we might say then okay good let's do that how is that person he

or she going to be successful well there's really three things that that will make this person successful and the first one is it comes from the understanding that there is no universal culture it's going to make every company successful it really depends on the business strategy so a premium airline might define there and their ideal cultures and their ideal behaviors to be around customer service and dealing with the special needs of the customers and really make them feel valued whereas a low-cost airline they might say our ideal behaviors are much more around getting prices down

getting costs down so we can continuously be a more efficient and offer our airline tickets at a better cost to the to the customers so different strategies leads to different ideal behaviors and that is really what the with the executives of firms have to think about what is their strategy and what are those ideal behaviors and this is where the culture has it manager for the first time comes into play they need to work with the executives to identify what are the ideal behaviors for that specific strategy and you know what in my experience I'm

starting to see companies realize that so if you walk through a larger corporations you can actually see posters up on walls where it says you know these are our behaviors we put ourselves in our customers shoes I'm sure most of us have seen something like that or we like we are accountable for what we do they might even distribute booklets where it says that in a booklet this is what we expect of you now the challenge is is that if you're in the organization and your staff member and you receive that and you read that

you ask yourself sure but what does that mean to me so maybe I'm working at the at the front I'm responsible for sales yeah I can see customer experience being important but what if I work in finance or HR RIT right what if I don't have immediate customers what does that mean to me and this is where the where the culture asset manager really for the second time comes really important so this is the second factor where he plays a role is to work with the organization and the different parts of the organization to translate

whatever the executives have defined translate that into day to day into day to day operations so in Dubai that staff those five six people who are waiting there to help us passengers with rebooking x' for them customer experience might mean empathy right understanding that we're gonna have a lot of angry customers now coming towards us they're gonna be delighted that their flight was rebooked so for them you know being helpful in those moments that is what really they have to do but what about the guys who were booking hotels for them customer customer support is

really much more about booking the right hotels and maybe doing in an efficient way so that when the people are getting off the planes it's already done and what about the what about the supervisors right I mean if it goes wrong that they're gonna hide but ideally what the good behaviors are they're gonna get down to the floor they're gonna join the more junior colleagues in helping them with these angry annoyed customers and helping them rebook and reschedule their flights so for them it means much more supporting their more junior members and maybe dealing with

most difficult cases so you can see the same word customer support and customer help can actually mean different things to different parts of the organization and that's where the culture as a manager comes into play such an important role to translate what it means to different parts and this is by no means easy and especially for large corporations there's no way he can do that he or she can do that on their own so what they need to do is build up a network of other cultural champion who will help them throughout that organization in

order to translate that into the into the organization so are we done then if we worked with the with the leaders and if we worked with the organization how we completed well I said there were three things so I've only talked about two is one more and the third one comes from the from the fact that we as human beings were creatures of habit and as such the behaviors we've learned along the way through experiences that we've made you know even if we're working with a culture asset manager on improving and getting the the specific

behaviors for that for that company for that airline what is there to say we don't fall back into our old habits once the culture cement is gone and working with different parts of the organization and this is really where sustainability comes in so the culture has dementia has to work on all related people topics in that firm for example recruiting if in Dubai your front office position is now vacant and opened up and he is helping with the recruiting he needs to make sure that the person who's hired is bringing in those types of behaviors

which are relevant for that organization so in this case it would be empathy hire somebody who doesn't have the skills the experiences and the education but also the behaviors such as empathy to to be able to fulfill that role and equally if if there's somebody being promoted in the organization right make sure that not somebody who's was the most annoying colleague gets promoted because those those behaviors will be taken over from the more junior staff so somebody who's actually displaying those kinds of behaviors that we're looking for and then he can role model that and

the rest of the more junior organization can follow that lead so you can see all these related people topics around recruiting around promotions around talent management incentive setting all of that the culture a Samana has to work with those and typically it's the human resource HR function that's responsible for that and the culture a cement has to work with HR in order to address those topics now if the culture has to match is working with those three things so on one hand really top-down with the leaders and identifying that behaviors and then also bottom up

into translating them into the organization as well as with HR in order to make them more sustainable he has the he has a chance to be really successful in creating a culture that truly affects customers choices and in turn the success of business so I'd like to do a little experiment here let us all think about the next time when we are traveling we're in an airport and we're experiencing the behaviors of the airline staff and it doesn't matter if it's a check-in or if you're boarding the airplane or if you're inside the plane and

you're experiencing the behaviors of your stewards and stewardesses you know ask yourself what about my customers and it doesn't matter if you're running a firm the department a team or just responsible for yourself those people those services that you're bringing through those people what are they experiencing and what am i doing in order to support the bright experiences to foster the right culture am i managing culture like an asset so that whatever I'm doing can be successful and get the customers to return again thank you [Applause]