Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Gil: Companies out there take service maybe a little bit more seriously than they are right now because many companies in the world are now thinking about themselves like,  “how do we survive” instead of thinking about how do, the employees feel right now in this stressful time and how does everybody else feel. How can they make service a more integral part of the culture? 

Ron: Well, I like where you started with that whole question set when you said, “we turned to the internal culture of the organization”. And historically if you look,  let’s use the word departments, I mean it could be divisions, it could be teams.  You got the finance people over here, marketing over here, sales delivery. 

Gil: They all fight especially during crisis times. 

Ron: Well, there you go! You’ve already pointed exactly where I’m going to go after. It’s that each of them has sort of risen in terms of their proficiencies, their technology, their responsibilities, maybe it’s even their KPIs. Alright, so you know how are they going to be evaluated, even their compensation formulas can be tied to very specific performance indicators within that if you will silo. So then when you want to have a cross-department meeting, you can get, blaming or pointing the finger or that’s not my job, that’s your job.

But if we take this idea of listening, and we bring it into the culture, then you’d have  a department start by saying, “I want to  take a moment here and listen carefully,  what is it that you guys are trying to achieve?”  “What is it that you want to make sure that  we all avoid?” Let me ask you another question. “What  is it about the way we’re working right now that works for you, and you want to make sure  we do that?” You know we even double down on that because it’s good. But hey, let’s be honest. Is there anything about the way we interact with you that makes it difficult for you? And then when they start to answer that question, you don’t respond with the defensiveness! “Well we do it that way”, “we could…” You go “tell me  more, tell me more!’ 

If you can model that from your department, then it kind of makes sense that they would also want to know in the other direction. And when you get these two departments who start sharing, listening to each other, “this is what we need”, “this is what works”, “this is what you’re doing that gets in our way”, “this is what we like” then you can open up the space. (remember we said humans can design a conversation), and say, “Hey, rather than arguing, let’s have a conversation about other ways that we might work together.” That could be better for both sides. Whoa! Now what you’ve done is you put history in history.  And you said, let’s invent a future by having a different conversation in the present. But you can’t do that without the listening component.