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

I would love to travel and recently at 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 trip there and to sum it up I would like to tell you a little bit that I am from Zurich and I wanted to fly from Zurich to Australia but there are no direct flights so what I did was connecting through Dubai and the first leg to Dubai everything was great, but upon arriving in Dubai, my flight was canceled, so unfortunately now you have to imagine these four hundred people who are getting off a plane and they are eager to connect to their flights to Australia.

These are large planes that arrive there at the same time they were coming down. headline that our trip had been canceled and as the emotions started to sink, there are different emotions, so for example, when I travel I have an itinerary and it says you know the first leg here, the second leg there. I really believe that and trust that. that's going to work that way. I make plans specifically for when I arrive and that night I had tickets to the Sydney Opera House, so the first emotion obviously angry, angry, unhappy and and that's what I think, what, how many customers experienced and many passengers experienced when they were flying, but What I experienced then is something that I wanted to share with you, which is the behavior of that airline that welcomed us and informed us that our trip had been cancelled, they had already rescheduled and rebooked all the passengers on the next flight. .

I had never heard of that before. I thought it was fantastic, but it didn't stop there. There was not one, but five or six people on the ground welcoming us. those those guests who had arrived from the plane to say hello if you want to transfer to a different connection we will help you with those reservation changes x' and as the flight had continued the next day a hotel was needed those hotels were already reserved As was the service of trans

port

ation from the air

port

to the hotel, I mean, first I was upset, it was the first emotion, but then I was surprised by what is happening 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 during the trip, I thought about this and said, you know what I think I could travel with that airline again and it's not so much because that flight was canceled, that It's not really What I was looking for a lot more was because how they behaved and how they treated that and how they reacted to what needed to be done, things can go wrong, very well if people react in the right way, so from what What I realized then was that the behaviors of the airline, the staff and the people who were there affected my choice about future flights and what I would do in the future, and I suppose this is similar for several passengers who were on that flight and that they also had to make a choice or I will have to make a decision in the future.

I'm not here today to talk about the value of customer service by individuals or a small group of people. I think it is well known what I am here to talk about and what I would like to invite you to think with me about what is the impact of the

corporate

culture

of the sum of all those behaviors on customer choices and then, in turn , in the success of the business. So let's think about behaviors, why do we behave in the appropriate way? First of all, I think we need to realize that behaviors are not something we have and are part of our DNA, they are actually something we have learned and just like a canyon has sediment, layers of sediment, similarly , our behaviors are layers of experiences, so we experience certain behaviors from our parents when we are young and maybe from our immediate circle and from that we learn about behaviors later when we are in a job, we start to experience the behaviors of our colleagues, our superiors, our bosses and from that again we are learning so what we can say is that our behaviors are actually a function of what we are experiencing from the behavior of other people and equally when I was there in Dubai and I experienced those behaviors really good and professional towards me as a customer, are actually a function of the behavior of other people within the airline, so it seems that there is a connection between the behaviors, the company

culture

, my choices as a customer and those of my fellow travelers, and then with business success because An airline needs customers to return to be successful, so if we think about business success for a moment, how can we measure business success in a way that airlines do? publicly traded companies?

That is, they look at their stock price now. What I would like to do now is I invite you to think carefully about what

corporate

culture really influences stock prices. There was a study done by Cotton Heskett where they compared companies that had no specific intention of thinking about corporate culture as part of their company. Special attention was paid to that and it was another set of companies that prioritized thinking about corporate culture and treated it as something important, so if we look at the benchmark, the first set of companies in a given period of 11 years they looked at the stock price increase and as you can see, 74 percent was the stock price increase for that first set of companies.

Now I ask you a question: what do you think will be the second number of companies that paid attention to corporate culture? your head, what's that number you're thinking about? The first bar is quite small, so you could probably expect the next one to be higher. The bar is raised quite a bit and I find that this incredible corporate culture has a huge impact on the value of a company. and we can see in this example from this study that this is a factor of 12, so if there are any investors today who are looking for where to put their money, I mean, they would quickly go on Google to find out what companies are paying.

Pay attention to corporate culture, that has a big impact here now. Business

leader

s should really care about this. This is important. Well, another study confirmed that business

leader

s do care about this issue. Yes, in a study of one hundred board members. More than 80% of culture confirm that corporate culture is important and is a priority for the success of the business they see, who confirm that they say it for themselves that this is important to them, now only a fraction of them actually convert it in part of your daily life and this is simply amazing, if we think about how we understand that something is super important, we are confirming that we say it ourselves, but we are only doing very, very little, very few of us actually do it.

Doing something about it on a daily basis seems incredible to me now, why are those problems? I can't answer that question, but what I can say is what companies typically do with other factors, other

asset

s of their company, so come back. for our airline, what really influences our

asset

s of that airline, one of them would be the cabin, how a cabin is built from the inside, the legroom, all these factors influence us as customers and they also influence the decisions we make when selecting an airline we want to travel with and what the companies do well, they usually hire someone and make them responsible for increasing the value of that taxi and making it more accessible, more interesting and more enjoyable for the passengers. passengers, so someone is hired and has the responsibility to improve and increase the value of that asset, obviously to achieve long-term commercial success.

So I ask you: why don't we do exactly the same thing? With culture, if we recognize the importance and impact that culture can have on our share prices and confirm that this is important to us, why not do the same as with our other assets? Let's put someone in charge, let's make someone responsible for the corporate culture and to get the most value from that for the success of our business, we can even call it a cultural asset manager if we want, now we could say, then okay, let's do that, How is that person going to be successful?

Well, there are actually three things that will make this person successful and the first is that it comes from the understanding that there is no universal culture, it will make all companies successful, it really depends on the business strategy, so a premium airline could define there and its ideal cultures and its ideals. behaviors to be around customer service and addressing special needs of customers and really making them feel valued, whereas a low-cost airline might say our ideal behaviors have a lot more to do with lowering prices, lowering costs for that we can continually be more efficient and offer our airline tickets at a better cost to customers, so different strategies lead to different ideal behaviors and that's really what business executives have to think about what their strategy is and what are those ideal behaviors and this.

That's where the culture comes in that the first time manager needs to work with executives to identify what the ideal behaviors are for that specific strategy and in my experience I'm starting to see companies realizing that as well. What if? When you walk around larger corporations, you can see signs on the 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 this or we like to be responsible for what we do, you could even distribute leaflets where it says in a leaflet this is what we expect from you now the challenge is that if you are in the organization and you're a member of your staff and you receive that and you read it, you might be wondering, but what does that mean to me?

Maybe I'm working at the front. I am responsible for sales. Yes, I can see that customer experience is important, but what if I work in finance or HR? What if I don't have it? immediate clients, what does that mean to me and this is where the cultural asset manager for the second time really comes into its own, so this is the second factor that it plays a role in is working with the organization and the different parts of the organization. translate what the executives have defined, translate it into day-to-day operations, so that in Dubai, have the staff of those five six people who are waiting there to help us passengers with rebooking x' for them, customer experience could mean empathy, correctly understanding that there will be a lot of angry customers who will come to us and be delighted that their flight has been rebooked, so for them you know that being helpful in those moments is what they really have to do, but What about the guys who were booking? hotels to them, customer service is much more about booking the right hotels and maybe doing it efficiently so that when people get off the planes it's done and what about the supervisors?

I mean, if it goes wrong. that they are going to hide, but ideally what are the good behaviors that they are going to have on the floor, they will join the younger colleagues to help them with these angry and upset customers and help them rebook and reschedule their flights for them. It means a lot more supporting your younger members and perhaps dealing with the more difficult cases, so you can see that the same word customer service and customer help can actually mean different things to different parts of the organization and there it is where culture comes into play as a manager. such an important role to translate what it means to different parties and this is by no means easy and especially for large corporations there is no way he or she can do it alone so what they need to do is build a network from other cultural champions that will help them throughout that organization to translate that into the organization, so if we work with the leaders and if we work with the organization, how do we fill that out well, I said there were three things so I've only talked about two is one more and the third comes from the fact that we as human beings were creatures of habit and as such the behaviors that we have learned along the way through experiences we have had.

I let him know, even if we're working with a cultural asset manager to improve and get specific behaviors for that company, for that airline, what can we say? We don't fall back into our old habits once the cultural cement is set. I went and worked with different parts of the organization and this is really where sustainability comes into play so the culture has dementia and you have to work on all the people related issues in that company for example recruitment if in Dubai His front office position is now vacant and open and he is helping with the recruiting thatYou need to make sure that the person hired has those types of behaviors that are relevant to that organization, so in this case it would be empathy to hire someone who does not have the skills, experience and education, but also behaviors like empathy to be able to fulfill that role and equally, if there is someone being promoted in the organization, make sure that they do not promote someone who was the most annoying colleague because those behaviors will be assumed. the younger staff, then someone who really displays those types of behaviors that we're looking for and then can be a role model and the rest of the younger organization can follow that example so they can see all these issues related to the people around to recruitment. promotions around talent management incentives that establish all of that, the culture that a samana has to work with them and usually it's the human resources and human resources function that is responsible for that and the culture, a Cement has to work with HR to address those issues now, if the culture has to match it's working on those three things, so on the one hand, really top down with the leaders and identifying those behaviors and then You also have the opportunity to really succeed in creating a culture that truly affects customer choices and, in turn, the success of the business.

I would like to do a little experiment here, let's all think about the next time we travel, we are in an airport and we experience the behavior of the airline staff and it doesn't matter if it is a check-in or if you are boarding the plane or if you are inside the plane and you are experiencing the behaviors of your flight attendants and flight attendants, you know, ask yourself what happens to my customers and it doesn't matter if you are running a company or the department. a team or just responsible for yourself those people those services that you are providing through those people what are they experiencing and what am I doing to support brilliant experiences to foster the right culture Am I managing the culture as an asset so that whatever ?

What I am doing can be successful and make customers come back again, thank you.