140. Collective Lift: How Leaders Get Teams To Obsess Over Customer and Team Success with Dan Gingiss

Transcript – Episode 140: Collective Lift: How Leaders Get Teams To Obsess Over Customer and Team Success with Dan Gingiss

DAN GINGISS

The way we evaluate people is very functional. It’s very transactional. How many widgets did you sell today? But we don’t measure anything about how you impact other people in the organization. And that has a multiplying effect that the individual contributions don’t have. And this is what I’m referring to as collective lift — essentially, how much do you contribute to lifting everyone around you?

JOE MULL

Welcome back friends to the show that is food for the boss’s soul. Here on Boss Better Now, we talk with leaders, experts, and change makers about their experiences in the workplace. All in the name of helping you understand how to create the conditions at work for people to thrive. Today I am joined by Dan Gingiss, an international keynote speaker and customer experience expert with a 20-year professional career that included leadership positions at McDonald’s, Discover Card, and Humana. Dan is the author of three books, including The Experience Maker, which was ranked as one of the top customer experience books of all time. Now, I’ve known Dan for a couple of years now, and I was really excited to interview him. He is one of these people that you can just listen to for hours. Sharp, thoughtful, conversational. Pay attention to how he talks about his philosophy of building trust with employees, which is as well said as you will hear anywhere. And keep an ear out also for the fascinating concept of collective lift, which is about those leaders and employees who elevate everyone around them. And now here’s our conversation. Dan Gingiss is here. Dan, welcome to the show. Are you excited for this conversation? I know I am.

DAN GINGISS

Joe Mull, I am always excited when I get to talk to you, but when we get to talk for the benefit of all of your listeners, it’s even better.

JOE MULL

Right on. Okay. There is no other first question that I can ask you. It says in your bio that your first job was at Domino’s Pizza and that you once delivered a pizza to Michael Jordan. How do I not start with that question? That has to be the first thing I ask you about. Tell us that story. You delivered a pizza to Michael Jordan.

DAN GINGISS

Well, thank you for not asking if it was the flu game pizza because it was not. It was not my fault. And oftentimes that’s the first question I get. But yeah, it’s actually a fun story because it was probably the first real customer service, customer experience activity in my career. I knew that Michael ordered quite often from Domino’s because the other drivers of course knew, and we all wanted to get that delivery, and it was a rotational system. So it just — whether you when you drove up, you got the next delivery. So it’s kind of luck of the draw. And the guys told me ahead of time that if you asked for an autograph, he would give you one, but then he wouldn’t tip you. And if you didn’t ask for an autograph, he was a very generous tipper. Now I already knew I wanted the money. I didn’t want the autograph. And so that was my plan going in. But what was fascinating is that when he opened the door — and he was wearing, I will never forget, he is very, very tall — he was wearing Bull shorts and a white kind of undershirt on top. The first thing he did was look over my head behind me to see if anybody else was out there. And I realized at that moment that he must have had some issues with privacy — with camera people or journalists or whoever. And my instant gut reaction was: treat this guy like any other customer. Just let him have his privacy. When he wants to order a pizza, he should be able to order a pizza in peace. And that’s exactly what I did. I just was very friendly. He was friendly back, but I wasn’t fangirling or anything like that. And he did give me a great tip. And the best thing is, this is 30-plus years ago and I still get to tell this story. So it was well worth the experience, right?

JOE MULL

And what a perfect orientation to the humanity of the person standing in front of you. It’s really funny — my wife and I have had experiences where we’ve seen a couple of famous Pittsburgh Steelers and things like that where we live, and I’ve always had this orientation of, of course I’m not going to go up and talk to them. They’re out with their family, and they get that all the time and I don’t want to be that guy. And it’s for the same reason that you talked about.

DAN GINGISS

Exactly. And by the way, pepperoni and sausage is his preference if you ever want to send him a pizza.

JOE MULL

Good to know. We’re going to make note of that. Well, you know, we heard in the introduction about this incredible career path that you’ve been on and all of these amazing organizations that you’ve worked with. And I know just from our past conversations that your early jobs included working as a camp counselor, as a lifeguard, as a swim instructor, at a mail-order collectibles company, and as a bartender. So I’m curious — what kind of worker were you in those early jobs? Were you an overachiever, a class clown, something else?

DAN GINGISS

That’s a really good question. I want to actually start with the collectibles company because that was my first real job right after graduating college. And interestingly, I was assigned four people reporting to me from day one. So from the moment I entered corporate America, I was always managing people. And it’s interesting now that I can look back at how questionable of a decision that is, given that I had no management experience. But I started as being the guy — there’s always been a passionate part of me that leans towards being a bit of a cheerleader. Like when I worked at Discover, their color is orange, and I had more orange in my wardrobe than I care to think about today. But I just was always very proud of where I worked. And early on in my career, I was that guy they used to refer to as the cruise director because I was making the plans on the weekend for people to hang out. There was a guys’ trip we took — seven of us went to Vegas every year for March Madness. And our building was next to a bowling alley, so one day I went into work and said, “Hey, anybody want to join a league?” — just trying to get four people — and 30 people raised their hands. So I ended up creating a league just for us, with 10 teams, and we bowled on Monday nights. And I’m telling you, Tuesday morning everybody — whether they were in the league or not — wanted to know how it went the night before. And as I evolved in my career, I became more passive, but also certainly willing to participate, and not offended at all if they wanted to go out without me. And even today — you’ve seen this — when we go to National Speakers Association events, I’m probably going to be the guy helping to close down the bar, but only because that’s where the best conversations happen, and that’s where I learn the most and make the best friends.

JOE MULL

I love that. The humility in that. We talk a lot in some of our leadership development work about how there’s no version of being a leader where your people don’t talk about you. You have to respect the right that your people are going to have conversations about you when you’re not in the room. And the degree to which those conversations are flattering or not really depends on the quality of the relationship you have with each of those people. That’s coming through loud and clear. I’m interested — if you could go back in time, when you think about stepping into that role for the first time and getting those four direct reports without any support or training, what advice would you give yourself now that you know what you know?

DAN GINGISS

Yeah, I think it’s two things. The first is: have the humility to surround yourself with people who know more than you do. You can’t be all-knowing. I remember much later in my career, I took over a role in digital marketing and I was overseeing social media, email marketing, and SEO. I did not know a thing about SEO. So I sat down with that person on day one and I said, “You are the SEO expert. I’m going to need help. I’m never going to know as much as you know, but I’m going to depend on you to be our expert.” And I think he really appreciated that, because he was probably up for the position that I got and didn’t get it. It could have started off poorly, but he respected that. The second thing I would say is: understand that every employee is different in how they experience work — how they like to be communicated with, how they like to be appreciated. You and I love to be on stage. We love the spotlight. But for some people, that is their biggest nightmare. If you’re going to give them an award, they want it in private, not in front of everybody. Once you get to know that about people, you can be a better manager because you don’t manage everyone the exact same way.

JOE MULL

Perfectly said. And there are so many through lines here about human connection — what you did with that SEO leader was treat him as an expert. You treated him as capable, sat down, and immediately made it clear that he was going to be relied upon. We have a boatload of social science research that tells us people will part with more effort in the workplace when they’re given an opportunity to feel those kinds of things. So you were doing the right things even if you didn’t know they were the right things.

DAN GINGISS

Exactly. And I’ll add one little coda: the other thing I would always say when I joined a new team — and I joined new teams often, because at Discover they had a generalist formula where if you were in any role for more than two years you were considered ancient and they wanted you to go do something else. So as a leader over 10 years, I led five different teams. And every time I joined a new team, one of the first things I would say is: “You do not have to earn my trust. You have it. Don’t lose it.” I wanted to set that up from the beginning so people didn’t feel like they had to earn something. I was the one coming into their team. I wanted to show them I respected that. But I also expected them to keep my trust, because once you lose trust, it’s awfully hard to get it back. And I felt like that made people just relax on day one. Everybody’s nervous when a new boss comes in. Only once in my career did somebody refer to me as intimidating, and I was really upset about that because that was the last thing I wanted to be. I realized it was based on title, not anything I was doing. So I really tried on day one to always make people relax — I’m not here to intimidate you. I’m here to make us all better. And that trust thing was really important to me.

JOE MULL

Amazingly well said. I want to talk about your work now. You eventually got an MBA and worked for years in progressively more accomplished roles — first in financial services, then Discover Card, then Humana, then McDonald’s. How does someone go from that path to becoming an international expert in customer experience? Was there a milestone moment?

DAN GINGISS

There was a milestone moment. I spent most of my career as a marketer. I basically came out of college not knowing what I wanted to do, but I had majored in psychology and communications, and it turns out that pretty much is marketing — I just didn’t know it at the time. At Discover, I got a call one day from the chief digital officer. He wanted to recruit me to a role called Head of Digital Customer Experience and Social Media. Now, at this moment in time — around 2012 — I didn’t know jack about social media, and I had never heard of customer experience. So I said, “I am flattered. Can we go out to lunch so I can ask you a couple of questions?” And the first question I asked was, “Why did you pick me?” What he said to me changed my entire career path. He said, “Dan, I’ve been watching you in business meetings, and you are always wearing the customer hat. You are always thinking through business problems through the lens of the customer. We need to start doing that in the digital space now, and that’s why I want you here.” And I thought about it and said, “Oh my gosh, he’s right.” But I never would have said that about myself. It’s just how sometimes people see us differently than we see ourselves. So that was a huge eye-opener. Then I got into that role, fell in love with social media — not as a marketing channel, but as an engagement channel. Discover was one of the very first companies to start performing customer service in social media, which turned out to be the topic of my first book. But then the whole customer experience thing blew my mind, because I realized very quickly that making small changes to the customer experience was far more powerful than any marketing campaign I had ever done. If I have an extra thousand in budget, I’m putting it towards CX before marketing every time — and this is spoken as a marketer.

The other thing that was really interesting: it came time to do an annual personal development plan, and I used to hate that stuff. I walked into my boss’s office and said, “What do you want me to put for this?” And he said, “Gingiss, your development plan is simple. I want you to become a recognized expert in digital customer experience.” I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “We’re doing some really cool stuff in the digital space but nobody knows about it. I want you to go out and talk about it. Get on panels. Get on stage.” And I had no idea how to do that. But what I learned very quickly is that when you have a logo like Discover or McDonald’s on your business card, you can speak almost anywhere — you’re not asking for a fee, they just want to be able to say that Discover or McDonald’s is in the house. So I started by begging my way onto some panels, then started getting asked onto panels, then begged my way to my first individual speech, and then started getting asked to do those things too. And one of the things that always made me laugh: the goal was not to get people to sign up for a Discover card, but people came up to me afterwards and said, “I never once thought about applying for one, but after hearing you talk about the company, I’m going home and doing that.” That gave me a little hint that maybe I was okay at this.

JOE MULL

And you were a representation of their values — how they’re thinking about customers, what their organization exists to do. When we get an authentic viewpoint from someone inside the organization who is not there to pitch us, it lands in a completely different way. That’s the whole reason you’d put that extra thousand into CX — the happy customer creates more customers than the marketing campaign ever will.

DAN GINGISS

Very well said. Yep.

JOE MULL

Well, there’s such a connection between leadership and the customer experience, isn’t there? We don’t always create that line of sight very well — that outstanding customer experiences typically only occur when customers encounter engaged, prepared teams, and engaged, prepared teams come from better bosses. How do you want leaders listening to this program to think about their role as it relates to customer experience?

DAN GINGISS

You’re definitely right. Often in the CX space we say happy employees equal happy customers — and as you know in math, an equal sign goes both ways. Because happy customers also make employees’ jobs easier, which makes them happier, which makes them better, which improves the customer experience. I actually think instead of an equal sign, it should be an infinity sign, because it’s constantly moving and they’re constantly feeding on each other. But the way I would think about it as a leader is this: every single employee — I don’t care what your title is, what your job description is, where you are in the org chart — every single employee is in the customer experience business. And once that gets built into the culture, you start to see the companies that are doing experience really, really well. It’s because the custodian understands their role. The administrative assistant knows their role. The person in accounting who never even speaks to customers knows their role. The CEO knows their role. Everybody has a role in experience.

Let me give you a quick example. There was a fast casual restaurant in Chicago — order at the counter, sit down. One day they put up a sign that said “We’ve gone cashless,” and it listed all the great business reasons: it’s cleaner, safer, faster, easier for employees. All of those are correct and great business reasons. But this restaurant made a business decision without thinking about the customer. Because in Chicago, there is a very large unbanked population — people who walk in and the only way they can pay is cash. And you just told all of those people they’re no longer welcome. You didn’t mean to, but it was a result of not thinking that customer experience was at play — and it absolutely was. My guess is it was someone in the finance department who came up with that idea. That person is in the customer experience business even though they never speak to customers.

JOE MULL

So what is a small shift that leaders listening could make tomorrow to help people think about their roles that way and get excited about the influence they have?

DAN GINGISS

The exciting part — where I often come into play, because I understand this is fun and exciting for me maybe more than others. One of the best compliments I get when I get off stage from a keynote is when somebody says, “You really love what you do, don’t you?” Because hopefully that means not only did you see it, but you felt it too. But what I would say — there are two simple things you can do.

The first is: just before you make a business decision, whatever it is, ask the question, “How does this impact our customers?” If the answer is it benefits them, makes their lives easier or better — go for it. If the answer is they’re going to hate it, then come up with a different answer. I promise you, a hundred times out of a hundred, if you make a business decision with the customer in mind, it will be a better business decision. Look at the industries people love to hate — take the airline industry. For 50 years, we checked our bags for free. Then somewhere along the line, someone walked into their boss’s office and said, “I’ve got a great idea that’s going to make us billions — we’re going to charge people to check their bags.” And that’s how we have baggage fees, which provide us with zero additional value. We hate them. There was a way to add baggage fees and provide more value to the customer at the same time. You can do both — and in doing that, you maintain loyalty and keep trust.

The second thing — and this is my biggest tip for leaders on how to enhance customer experience: become a customer of your own business. It is shocking to me how rarely this happens. If you have a website that you ask people to log onto, create a login for yourself, log in, then forget your password and go through that process. If it’s frustrating to you, it is frustrating to your customers. One of the places I worked, the CEO had a special phone number they could call to bypass customer service and get to a supervisor. That is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You are a busy person, but you call the number like everyone else. If it’s a terrible experience, now you know what your customers feel. And you have a problem to solve.

If you truly cannot become a customer — say you sell jets — then shadow a customer. Spend a day with them in their shoes going through the process. When I spoke at the Taco Bell franchise convention a couple of years ago, the CEO spoke before me, and I was so impressed. His whole talk was about how he had gone through restaurant training. He showed videos — and the laughter in the room told me he wasn’t making the tacos the right way — but he did every role. He said on his first day, someone handed him a mop and said, “Go clean the bathroom.” That is how you gain the trust of your employees and understand the experience your customers are going through.

JOE MULL

Love it. Love it. You told me recently about a new program you’re writing about those employees who lift up the entire team versus just themselves. Tell us more about that.

DAN GINGISS

Yeah. Being very honest, one of the reasons I left corporate America was that I felt like I had hit a ceiling — I had gone as far as I could go with the skills that I had. I sort of figured this out later in life. I was working with a positioning coach to help me with the words I use to position myself in the customer experience space — because there are so many other speakers talking about the same topic — and he went through my LinkedIn with a fine-tooth comb. He looked at every single testimonial and reference I had gotten. And what he found — again, just like that boss who saw something in me that I didn’t see — was that I have a whole lot of recommendations from people who used to work for me. And they say things like, “Dan is a guy that I would change companies and follow him just so I could continue working with him.”

And I kind of took a step back. The reason I felt I wasn’t getting promoted further than I had was that my biggest skill was people leadership. Was I a good marketer? Yes. Did I have the skill set to do my job? Of course. But my actual secret sauce was that I was a boss people wanted to work for. Unfortunately, I don’t believe corporate America valued that. And in fact, in almost every company I went to, as I looked at who got promoted and who was in leadership positions, they were exactly the wrong people. They were the people that employees didn’t show up to work hard for. They were the people that made employees’ lives miserable, that made people want to quit. They were not good leaders.

So I started peeling it back and thought: the way we evaluate people is very functional, very transactional. How many widgets did you sell today? Did you hit your quantitative goal? But we don’t measure anything about how you impact other people in the organization. And that has a multiplying effect that individual contributions don’t have. This is what I’m referring to as collective lift — essentially, how much do you contribute to lifting everyone around you?

I’ll give you an example. I used to encounter managers all the time in calibration sessions who would refuse to promote somebody because they didn’t want to lose them. And I’d ask them, “What if someone did that to you? You’d be furious. How dare you do that to somebody’s career?” My view was always: if somebody underneath me got promoted to my level, which would mean they’d have to leave the team and go lead some other team — that was a good reflection on me. I played some role in their success. Hooray for them and hooray for me. And anytime I lost somebody — they quit, we had to let them go, they got promoted — I always looked at it as an opportunity to bring in a new all-star, fresh blood, new thinking.

So as I look at collective lift, I’m trying to focus on really three things. First: how do you help your individual team members grow, and can we measure that? Where do people that Dan hired go in the organization, even after they leave? Can we track his hiring record and give him some credit for bringing in quality people who continue to rise? The second is team multiplication — how do we get everyone on our team, whether it’s a team of four or 400, working together, helping each other out, cross-functional education. I used to tell my teams to “know enough to be dangerous.” At Discover, for example, we also had a student loans business. I’d say, “If you’re at a cocktail party and you meet a college-age kid who mentions Discover student loans, you can either say, ‘Oh yeah, we totally do that, and I know Sally who runs it, I’d be happy to introduce you’ — or you can say, ‘Student loans? I don’t know.’ What’s a better look for the company?” Obviously we want you to know enough to be dangerous. And then the biggest one is what I’m calling organizational impact — how do you affect the entire company from wherever you are in your leadership role. And by the way, this applies to everyone, not just people in management. Think about a fast food restaurant — it might be the cook who rallies the whole team every day and gets everybody pumped and excited to come to work. That person is a collective lifter. We want to value that person for way more than just being a burger flipper.

The other thing I see after researching so many companies: the best example is the sales department. You almost always take the best salesperson and make them head of sales. The problem is twofold. Number one, you just lost your best salesperson — that’s tough to replace. Number two, if that person has no business managing people, you are now going to ruin the lives of all of your other salespeople. It’s a compounding bad decision, done for the right reasons. I get it — they’ve performed. But performing doesn’t mean they’re going to be your best leader.

JOE MULL

Right. All right. We’ve got some signature questions here on the show, and we’re going to do these rapid-fire style. What was the most absurd or unnecessary rule you ever encountered at work?

DAN GINGISS

When I was in the healthcare space, I was told that I could not respond to people on social media on behalf of the brand if they mentioned anything about any illness because it would be a HIPAA violation. And I said, “That is not true, because they just announced to the world that they have this — so we’re not actually protecting any privacy.”

JOE MULL

Interesting.

DAN GINGISS

And by the way, I won that battle eventually with the chief legal counsel.

JOE MULL

I bet you did. Okay. If you could ban one workplace phrase forever, what would it be?

DAN GINGISS

This is an easy one. “Because we’ve always done it that way.”

JOE MULL

That’s it, man. That’s it. Because we’ve always done it this way. Okay. And what is one piece of professional advice or wisdom that has stayed with you throughout your career?

DAN GINGISS

Be yourself. Don’t feel like you have to change yourself in order to fit in and be like everybody else. Be yourself because you’re unique and you bring unique skills to the table. My personality is one that maybe some people like and other people don’t — but that’s okay. That’s my personality, and that’s the same for most people. Just be yourself. That’s how you show up to work in the best way.

JOE MULL

Amazing. I am so grateful that you took time to visit with us today. Where can folks learn more about you, your programs, your award-winning books?

DAN GINGISS

Well, lucky for me, I’m the only Dan Gingiss out there. So if you Google my name, you’ll find all the sources. My website is dangingiss.com. I’m very active on LinkedIn and Instagram — would love to connect. And email is dan@dangingiss.com. I try to make it as easy as possible.

JOE MULL

Well, there you have it, folks. My deepest thanks to Dan for this amazing conversation. And if you liked this conversation, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss an episode of our show. I am always grateful for your reviews, your shares, and your feedback. Tell me what you thought of this conversation by dropping a comment in the box below our episode here on YouTube, or you can email me at any time at bossbetter@gmail.com. In the meantime, don’t forget — commitment comes from better bosses. Visit joemull.com for more information. See you next time.

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