WHAT ROLE DID YOU AND YOUR SENIOR TEAM PLAY?
I believe that to truly implement POS, you must be willing to be visible and vulnerable at the same time. If your team thinks you have all the answers to their problems, they will bring you every problem to get an answer. Well, I know I’m not smarter than 1,200 associates, so it really was a case of setting an example in a very public way that it is OK to set positive goals, to look for inspiration around us, and to be open to help from anywhere in pursuit of that goal. As I said, when I took over in 2009, the company wasn’t doing very well. We had lost a lot of money. After taking a small amount of time to travel around to listen to our associates, our clients, our franchisees, and our real estate franchise agents, I laid out my objectives and invited all of our employees to help me. Our objective was straightforward: to reconnect to our core mission to be Welcoming and Welcomed. Simply put, we needed to be welcoming in our approach and welcomed for our expertise, as we helped people who are at very vulnerable times in their lives. They are often disconnected from the near and known as they try to connect to the far and often foreign. And yes, these objectives included the measurable targets such as growing revenues, keeping expenses flat, increasing customer service, and ultimately getting us back on a profitable basis. For us to accomplish any of this, we needed to draw on lots of sources of inspiration. The idea I wanted to communicate was that we could draw inspiration and ideas not just from the biggest and most obvious places but from the small or obscure places as well.