First, Break All the Rules

by Marcus Buckingham

  Most of us haven’t spent much time mulling over the details of housekeeping. But consider, for a moment, what hotel housekeepers do and how often they have to do it. Put yourself in their shoes.

  Okay.

  Two things might have occurred to you: first, that this is an easy job anyone with a modicum of responsibility can do; and second, that this is a terrible job that everyone, including housekeepers, must hate to do.

  If these thoughts crossed your mind, then you would be wrong on both counts.

  We shouldn’t devalue housekeepers. Anyone can probably clean a hotel room once in a while, but great housekeepers are special. Every day they vacuum themselves out of each room knowing that the next day they will return to find the room hit by the usual tornado of towels, toiletries, and bed linen. It is enough to make Sisyphus weary, endlessly pushing his rock up the hill. But great housekeepers don’t get weary. They get stronger. They are not beaten down by the relentless grind of their work. On the contrary, they seem to be energized by it. In their mind, their work asks them to be accountable, to be creative, and to achieve something tangible each and every day. They want to come in and attack their section of rooms. The challenge gives them strength.

  All this is so because great housekeepers possess a certain special set of talents. Does this sound incongruous? What follows may give you a clearer sense of some of the talents needed to be a great housekeeper.

  Gallup was asked by a large entertainment company to help them find more housekeepers like their best. This company already knew how special housekeepers were. Leaders in service quality the world over, they had over fifteen thousand hotel rooms, cleaned by over three thousand housekeepers. But to maintain their edge over competitors, they wanted to learn more about what made their best the best.

  Sitting around the table we had assembled eight of this company’s best housekeepers. Some were shy, perplexed by being asked to talk about their work. Others were completely relaxed, chatting away in English or Haitian Creole or Portuguese. One of them had been a housekeeper for only eighteen months, while another had cleaned the same section of rooms in the same hotel for twenty-three years. They were of different races, sexes, and ages. But they were all great housekeepers.

  Our goal was to encourage them to talk about their work to see what, if anything, these eight great housekeepers had in common.

  “How do you know if a room is clean?” we asked them. They said that the last thing they did before leaving a room was to lie on the guest’s bed and turn on the ceiling fan.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” they explained, “that is the first thing that a guest will do after a long day out. They will walk into the room, flop down on the bed, and turn on the fan. If dust comes off the top of the fan, then no matter how sparkling clean the rest of the room was, the guest might think it was as dirty as the top of the fan.”

  We asked them if they were front-of-house or back-of-house. (In many hotel companies housekeepers are considered back-of-house staff.)

  “Front-of-house. I am always on stage, always, always.” A grumpy chorus of English, Creole, and Portuguese.

  “Why do you say you are on stage?”

  “Because we make a show for our guests. Unless the guests object, we will take the toys that the children leave on the bed and every day we will make a little scene with them. We will put Pooh and Piglet on the pillows together. Pooh will have his arm in a chocolate candy box. Piglet will have his on the remote control. When the children come back, they imagine that all day long Pooh and Piglet just hung out on the bed, snacking and watching TV. The next day they find Donald and Goofy dancing on the windowsill. We make a show.”

  These eight great housekeepers were not just trying harder, nor did they simply “take more pride in their work.” These great housekeepers had talent. They shared a unique filter. Seen through this filter, a hotel room wasn’t just another chore to be completed. It was a world, a guest’s world. When they cleaned the room, they looked through the guests’ eyes and imagined how the world should look. Making each guest’s world just right brought them strength and satisfaction.

  No one told these housekeepers to behave like this. But for some reason their mental filter drove them to these behaviors and to gain enduring satisfaction from the outcome. These individuals were probably some of the best housekeepers in the world.

  The managers of these housekeepers knew that the best way to recognize these Michael Jordans of housekeeping was not necessarily to promote them out of it. They looked for other ways — more specific praise, better compensation, tighter selection criteria for aspiring housekeepers — to highlight these superstars. Guided by the knowledge that great housekeepers possessed talent, they did everything in their power to make excellence in housekeeping publicly revered and a genuine career choice.

  In the minds of great managers, every role performed at excellence deserves respect. Every role has its own nobility.

  Talent: How Great Managers Find It

  “Why are great managers so good at selecting for talent?”

  Even if you know to select for talent, it is not always easy to identify those who have it. First off, many people don’t know what their true talents are. They may be experts in their chosen field, but when it comes to listing their unique set of talents, they are stumped. As Peter Drucker, the elder statesman of management wisdom, says:

  “Even today, remarkably few Americans are prepared to select jobs for themselves. When you ask, ‘Do you know what you are good at? Do you know your limitations?’ they look at you with a blank stare. Or they often respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.”

  This confusion is understandable. Your own skills and knowledge are relatively easy to identify. You had to acquire them, and therefore they are apart, distinct. They are “not You.” But your talents? Your talents are simply your recurring patterns of behavior. They are your very essence. It takes a rare objectivity to be able to stand back from yourself and pick out the unique patterns that make you You.

  Second, when someone applies for a job, he naturally wants to impress. Therefore those few recurring behaviors of which he is aware will be painted in as rosy a hue as possible. In the job interview he labels himself “assertive,” not “aggressive.” He describes himself as “ambitious” rather than “pushy.” More often than not these are not deliberate misrepresentations. They are genuine attempts to describe himself to you positively. But whatever his true motivations, his instinct to try to impress you makes your job — the talent scout — that much more difficult.

  These barriers to talent scouting are a fact of life. Human nature being what it is, people will always struggle to know themselves, and they will always sell themselves in job interviews. Despite these barriers, great managers still do much better than their colleagues at selecting people with the right talents for the role. They have discovered some simple techniques to cut through the barriers and so find the match between the person and the role.

  KNOW WHAT TALENTS YOU ARE LOOKING FOR

  In the early nineties Gallup began work with two of the largest retail brokerage firms in the United States. Both companies wanted help in selecting brokers. And both of them defined the role in exactly the same way — the broker was not paid to be a money manager, doing financial analysis, picking stocks. Instead he was paid to be a money gatherer, identifying high-potential prospects and then persuading them to invest their money with his firm. He was a salesperson.

  Although the definition of both roles was the same, each company organized itself differently. One was extremely structured. Each broker spent months learning how to represent the same suite of meticulously packaged products, and regular refresher courses helped keep him from straying too far from the company’s mandate.

  By comparison, the other company was wildly entrepreneurial. Licensed brokers were told, “Here’s a phone
, here’s a phone book. I want to see $500,000 in assets under management by this time next year. Best of luck.”

  Both strategies had their strengths. And as it turns out, both strategies have proven very successful. However, both could not be executed by the same kind of person. Although the job title was the same — “broker” — and the job description was the same — “gather money” — the talent profiles were significantly different.

  For the structured company, the critical striving talent was achiever, the burning inside-out push; in this environment of frequent supervision, other striving talents, like the need for independence, were actually weaknesses. The critical thinking talent was discipline — an ability to work in a highly regimented environment. Thinking talents like focus or strategic thinking were much less important because the company, not the broker, set the direction and determined the best routes forward. Any broker who wanted to do this for himself would quickly start to butt heads with the company. He would lose.

  In the entrepreneurial company, the opposite was true. The critical striving talent was desire — a burning need for independence — and the critical thinking talent was focus — the ability to pick out a genuine prospect from the phone book, to sort out whom to call from everyone who could be called. Lacking these talents, the unfortunate broker would feel lost and lonely, a company man in an entrepreneur’s world.

  A broker with lots of desire and focus is not necessarily a better broker than one with lots of achiever and discipline. But she would certainly fit better in the entrepreneurial company, just as the broker blessed with achiever and discipline would be better cast in the more structured company. Lacking this knowledge, both companies might have ended up hiring each other’s brokers, with disastrous repercussions.

  As a manager you need to know exactly which talents you want. To identify these talents, look beyond the job title and description. Think about the culture of the company. Is your company the kind that uses scores to drive performance and makes heroes out of those with the highest scores? If so, make sure that the striving talent competition is in your profile. Or maybe yours is an organization that emphasizes the underlying purpose of its work and confers prestige only on those who manifestly live the values of the company. If so, search for people who possess the striving talent mission, people who must see the greater purpose of which their efforts are a part.

  Think about how expectations will be set and how closely the person will be supervised. Think about who you are as a manager and who will mesh with your style. Do you prefer to set short-term goals and expect to check in regularly with each person to monitor incremental progress? If so, you need to surround yourself with direct reports who yearn for structure and detail and regular updates, the thinking talent discipline. Or are you the kind of manager who likes to hand off as much responsibility as possible, who sets long-term goals and then expects employees to orient themselves toward those goals without much help from you? If so, your direct reports will need the thinking talent focus, which we described previously.

  Think about the other people on the team. Think about the total work environment into which this person must fit. Perhaps the team is filled with solid but serious performers who are in need of drama and excitement — find a person with the relating talent stimulator, a person who can find the drama in almost any milestone or achievement. Perhaps the team is friendly but lacks the ability to confront one another with the truth — look for a person who leads with her relating talent assertiveness, so that you have at least one team member who feels compelled to bring every issue, no matter how sensitive, to the surface. Perhaps your organization has a strong human resources department that can give your managers detailed feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of each of their direct reports. In this case you may not need to select managers who possess the relating talent individualized perception, defined as the ability to identify and capitalize upon the uniqueness in people. Or perhaps your organization offers no HR support at all. In this case relating talents like individualized perception, or relator — the need to build bonds that last — or developer — the need to invest in other people’s growth and to derive satisfaction from doing so — will need to serve as the cornerstones of your desired talent profile.

  Pondering all of these variables can become overwhelming. So simplify, bring things down to size. Try to identify one critical talent in each of the three talent categories, striving, thinking, and relating. Use these three talents as your foundation. Focus on them during the interviewing process. Mention them when asking people for referrals. Do not compromise on them, no matter how alluring a candidate’s résumé might appear.

  STUDY YOUR BEST

  If you want to be sure that you have started with the right three talents, study your best in the role. This may sound obvious, but beware: conventional wisdom would advise the opposite.

  Conventional wisdom asserts that good is the opposite of bad, that if you want to understand excellence, you should investigate failure and then invert it. In society at large, we define good health as the absence of disease. In the classroom, we talk to kids on drugs to learn how to keep kids off drugs and delve into the details of truancy to learn how to keep more kids in school.

  And in the working world, this fascination with pathology is just as pervasive. Managers are far more articulate about service failure than they are about service success, and many still define excellence as “zero defects.”

  When it comes to understanding talent, this focus on pathology has caused many managers to completely misdiagnose what it takes to excel in a particular role. For example, many managers think that because bad salespeople suffer from call reluctance, great salespeople must not; or that because bad waiters are too opinionated, great waiters must keep their opinions in check.

  Reject this focus on pathology. You cannot infer excellence from studying failure and then inverting it. Why? Because excellence and failure are often surprisingly similar. Average is the anomaly.

  For example, by studying the best salespeople, great managers have learned that the best, just like the worst, suffer call reluctance. Apparently the best salesperson, as with the worst, feels as if he is selling himself. It is this striving talent of feeling personally invested in the sale that causes him to be so persuasive. But it also causes him to take rejection personally — every time he makes a sales call he feels the shiver of fear that someone will say no to him, to him.

  The difference between greatness and failure in sales is that the great salesperson is not paralyzed by this fear. He is blessed with another talent, the relating talent of confrontation, that enables him to derive immense satisfaction from sparring with the prospect and overcoming resistance. Every day he feels call reluctance, but this talent for confrontation pulls him through it. His love of sparring outweighs his fear of personal rejection.

  Lacking this talent for confrontation, the bad salesperson simply feels the fear.

  The average salesperson feels nothing. He woodenly follows the six-step approach he has been taught and hopes for the best.

  By studying their best, great managers are able to overturn many similarly long-standing misconceptions. For example, they know that the best waiters, just like the worst, form strong opinions. The difference between the best and the worst is that the best waiters use their quickly formed opinions to tailor their style to each particular table of customers, whereas the worst are just rude — average waiters form no opinions and so give every table the same droning spiel.

  And the best nurses, contrary to popular opinion, do form strong emotional relationships with their patients. The difference between the best and the worst is that the best nurses use their emotions to take control and smooth the patient’s world as far as is possible, whereas the worst are overwhelmed by their emotions. Average nurses? Average nurses protect themselves by keeping their distance. They are emotionally disengaged.

  Tak
e time to study your best, say great managers. Learn the whys, the hows, and the whos of your best and then select for similar talents.

  In the end, much of the secret to selecting for talent lies in the art of interviewing. When interviewing for talent, most managers are aware of the more obvious pitfalls: don’t put the candidate under undue stress; don’t evaluate people on their appearance alone; don’t rush to judgment. Avoiding these will certainly lay the foundations for a productive interview.

  However, if you want to excel in the art of interviewing you will need to do more. In chapter 7 we will describe in detail the interviewing techniques that have enabled great managers to select for talent so unerringly.

  A Word From the Coach

  “John Wooden, on the importance of talent.”

  Selecting for talent is the manager’s first and most important responsibility. If he fails to find people with the talents he needs, then everything else he does to help them grow will be as wasted as sunshine on barren ground. John Wooden, the legendary coach of the UCLA Bruins, puts it more pragmatically:

  “No matter how you total success in the coaching profession, it all comes down to a single factor — talent. There may be a hundred great coaches of whom you have never heard in basketball, football, or any sport who will probably never receive the acclaim they deserve simply because they have not been blessed with the talent. Although not every coach can win consistently with talent, no coach can win without it.”

  According to everything we have heard from great managers, the coach is right. But he is also a little humble. What made John Wooden so successful was not just the talents on his teams, but also his own ability to create the right kind of environment to allow those talents to flourish. After all, talent is only potential. This potential cannot be turned into performance in a vacuum. Great talents need great managers if they are to be turned into performance.