In my book “What Matters – Leadership Values that Just Might Save America”, I wrote about many leadership values that I felt were important, this article is about the most important one: LOYALTY.
In American business today loyalty is not a value that you hear talked about much. Companies will do what is best for their business and employees will do what is best for them and their families. Everybody seems to be looking at the bottom line and/or is just trying to survive in today’s business climate. But, what if you could make those best practices (bottom line and loyalty) coincide? What if loyalty truly increased your bottom line. Lowering turnover, less money spent on hiring, less money spent on training new people could go a long way in accomplishing that goal.
All employees working to their maximum potential, striving to do their best all of the time would help in that goal. Employees coming up with ways to save money, innovate new products and services would help any companies bottom line. The question is, how do you get your employees to do that and do it on their own volition, because they choose to? The answer is very simple: LOYALTY. If your employees feel you are loyal to them, I mean really feel it; you will get it back ten-fold. You will have an unbeatable team that will move mountains for you.
Now, how do you go about doing that; showing and proving your loyalty so that the employees feel compelled to return it?
How you can do this, “build loyalty” or “esprit de corps” is obviously different for every company and every business owner but I will give you several examples.
In 2002 during the Iraq war my head butcher Don had to take a few days off because his nephew was killed in the war and he was in charge of the funeral arrangements. On a day that he was out the salesman from our pork supplier came by to see Don, he had an appointment. When he found out that Don was out he became very irate and said many derogatory things about the military, the war etc. All of a sudden I get a call, “You better come back here now.” So I go into the warehouse area and ask what is the matter. The pork salesman gets rude with me and I explained the situation again. He said that he didn’t care, it is a stupid war and the kid volunteered. I then said to the warehouse/butcher crew, “Throw him out the back.” I then walked back to the front and had our purchasing agent cancel all orders pending with that pork supplier and get us another one. The problem was that pork supplier was 10 cents per pound cheaper that anyone else, so I had to live with a $3000-$5000/month increase in pork costs. A couple of days later Don came back and walked into my office. He said, “I heard what happened. How much is this going to cost you?” I said, “10 cents per pound, $3000-$5000 per month. He then told me that I (the company) will not lose any money. He and his crew spoke and they will now cut all the pork off the clock so we will save 17 cents per pound or a net of 7 cents per pound. He said loyalty is a two way street and he had never had a company or CEO show it the way we did. Does anybody think that anyone from the back operations ever left the company except for retirement?
I am also a Doctor in Nutritional Science and Naturopathic Medicine, so healthy living is important to me and the company. What we have done though is showed every employee that we care. We started bringing in health professionals to give free seminars on different health topics, held smoking cessation classes, ran healthy lunch contests and biggest loser contests etc. We explain how healthy it is to drink water and put a reverse osmosis filter in every office. We opened up all classes to employee’s family members. We provide all-natural food at cost to make sure everyone eats healthy. Then when someone loses 30 lbs, lowers their blood pressure or cholesterol or better yet, a family member does, they feel the loyalty. When I walk around and ask someone if their blood pressure is down they know I care. When you show and prove you care about your employees and their family’s health, it proves that loyalty and I guarantee you will get it back ten-fold.
This article was written by Dr. Keith Kantor and is soon to be published in the Atlanta Business Chronicle.