What to Do When Things Go Wrong by Frank Supovitz

Author:Frank Supovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2019-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

MODELING BEHAVIORS

Influencing the actions of others by modeling behaviors is apparent to anyone who has ever watched the long-running children’s program in TV history. Sesame Street teaches youngsters the values of friendship, kindness, honesty, and learning, among other values, by modeling socially desired behaviors observed in adorable, childlike puppet characters. No one on my team, including me, was as warm, fuzzy, or charming as a Muppet, but I believe that modeling the behaviors we wanted our teammates to present to our customers, our fans, contributed significantly to better service and a stronger, empowered team concentrated on keeping things going right. To ensure that our team focused on the experience of our fans, our leaders, managers, and supervisors needed to be attentive to the experience of our teammates. How we treated them, we believed, would have a direct bearing on how they treated our guests. It would also have a direct impact on engaging them enough to share our interest in running a smooth event, especially when they saw something going wrong.

The large “Fans First” rallies were the last in a series of training sessions designed to transform our philosophy into a more engaged, problem-solving culture. We first staged a more immersive and interactive training session for our core leadership team of approximately 50 key event operations staff and contractors. Their feedback and buy-in helped to inform the content for the next gathering held one month later, where they were joined by the 300 additional teammates that they managed directly. By the time of the final “Fans First” rally for 7,000 teammates, the leadership and management groups who had been empowered to help develop the rally were already engaged and invested, and modeling what we were trying to establish—a working environment in which everyone was focused on shared success and on guard against contributing factors to failure.

We wanted to model a collaborative, communicative, and accountable culture. One way we conveyed this was with the use of first-name-and-hometown name tags. I’ll be honest. The original reason we included the teammate’s choice of hometown was to avoid having visiting fans ask someone from New York for restaurant recommendations in Indianapolis. What it did, however, was break the ice between teammates who first met in a restaurant, hotel elevator, at the stadium, or on the street. Once someone noticed a fellow teammate’s hometown and shared that she “had an aunt in San Antonio,” what usually followed was “what job do you have at the Super Bowl?” Thus, an usher could initiate a conversation with a television producer, and a team services liaison became the acquaintance of a greeter. Our name tags leveled the playing field, freely opening communication and reinforcing the concept of a team of collegial equals. Everyone, after all, no matter their position, had a first name and a town they call home.

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