There’s No Magic Pill!

Even when we come to terms with the fact that it will always require more than just words as well as the fact that someone on our team will ALWAYS be watching, there’s one more thing we have to accept as a harsh reality: there’s no magic pill for getting our team members to follow us in lock step immediately! Leading by example in the workplace is never a one-and-done task. It will take time, even when we’re exceeding expectations by leaps and bounds, but we can (and should) expect to see results from this over the long haul.

Since I’ve referenced our friend Jeff Henderson a few times here already, I’ll share one more story he told us. A significant portion of Jeff’s career was with Chick-fil-A so he knew just about all there was to know about God’s chicken sandwich. He also had the inside scoop on a few other things their culture was built on… Today, it would border on blasphemy to be told “You’re Welcome” after thanking the person at the drive-through window for our food. In fact, it’s not hard to tell when someone at any other drive-through had a previous tenure at Chick-fil-A because saying “my pleasure” apparently becomes part of their DNA. It’s almost like Chick-fil-A has some sort of voodoo woven into their orientation process that automatically switches the phrases in each of their employees’ vocabulary!

But it wasn’t always that way… Jeff explained that Truett Cathy initially had the idea of telling each customer “my pleasure” during a stay at some high hotel. Truett recognized how nice it made him feel and believed that feeling didn’t have to be exclusive to pricey lodging; why not feel just as good about being handed our lunch! He immediately started talking about this with his executive team and with the team members of each store he visited - and the rest was history, right? Not at all! Even with this being an initiative of the company’s founder, it took YEARS to become the part of culture that we know it as today. And if changing a simple response took that long for Truett Cathy, how much more effort should we expect to exert to drive behavioral change around the values in our organizations?

In case you didn’t realize it, that was a rhetorical question… It will require significant effort for a long time, but the juice is worth the squeeze - especially when the situational leadership examples we provide are tied directly to the values we hold most dear. When we commit to providing an example we’d love to have emulated by everyone on our teams, and we do it over and over and over again, we should absolutely expect to see that example (and the values behind it) become just as much of a part of our company’s DNA as “my pleasure” has become for Chick-fil-A!

With all that in mind, I’ll wrap this all up with a word of caution for leaders… Just like there’s no magic pill to make any of this happen overnight, there’s also no time that we can drop the ball. Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” I heard my dear friend Rob say something similar once; “You can build 1,000 bridges before you’re known as a bridge builder, but if you ______ just one donkey, you’ll be forever known as a donkey-_____.”

Is leading by example in the workplace tough at times? Most definitely! But that’s the price of accepting leadership responsibility. And if we do this well, over time, the impact we make and the lives we touch through what we do will be so worth it!