Platinum Rule

[00:00:14] Greeting: Welcome to Momentum. Your inside track to the strategies, mindsets, and the how they did it stories behind world Synergy's continued success. Let's unlock new levels of achievement together and join today's podcast. [00:00:28] Matt: So welcome. We're starting a new series here internally for our employees. Part of this series is kind of starting out here, talking about all of our different core values. So first, let's welcome, everybody. Glenn Smith is here with us, of course, our CEO. [00:00:45] Glenn: Hi, Matt. [00:00:50] Glenn: Hi, Charles. [00:00:51] Matt: We've got Charles here, engineering behind the glass. And I'm Matt Jones, our president. So, for this internal one, we're going to start talking about our core values, and we're going to start hitting each one individually. And today's topic is our very first core value. And that's our platinum rule. Right. So, I guess, to start off, let's talk about what is the platinum rule? How do we define it? Can you define that for us, Glenn? [00:01:25] Glenn: Sure. So, it was based on the concept that we probably all grew up with of the golden rule is treat people the way you want to be treated. And I always thought that was kind of odd because everyone has a different way of how they want to be treated. So if I treat an individual the way I want to be treated, that's not really taking their uniqueness in. And so I wanted to have a core value that spoke to the individual that I'm working with or having a conversation with, engaged with to treat them the way they wanted to be treated. So find the uniqueness in how they communicate, how they conduct themselves, so that we can kind of have a more of effective communication and effective engagement. [00:02:12] Matt: Yeah. And so walk us through maybe some effective ways on how we can truly live that out to others, because there have to be some guidelines, some rules about how we conduct that as well within the business, not just internally with our employees, but with our clients, too. So, can you kind of walk us through maybe some examples of how that functions in real world? [00:02:46] Glenn: Yeah. So let's first step back and talk about why core values are what we're talking about today. And why is it so important for world synergy is we hire and fire on core values. We want people to embody the core values that we believe, and hopefully, we want to engage with customers and vendors that believe very similar core values or appreciate the core values that we have. So core values are critical to our culture and how we build it. And so we want to make sure that when we bring people on the core values that they have kind of embrace similar core values. And I believe core values are really difficult because they're based on kind of mores or your ways of thinking about life and how you want to conduct yourself. So it's important that we make sure that when we bring people into our culture, that they embody a very similar characteristic. So examples of the platinum rule. And I go back to a really early stage of a gentleman sharing in an executive meeting with me, that he walked into a prospect meeting, and he was training his new salesperson, and this new salesperson was going through what's called shadowing. And so he was trying to teach this person how to conduct a kind of a presales meeting. And so this woman was sitting at the table, and she was a CEO of a relatively large company, and she had on this sweatshirt, and it had the picture of her granddaughter on there celebrating her first birthday. And there's a card on the desk behind us that had something in effects of the daughter's first year birthday. And you could just clearly tell that there's something happening here. And so the individual that he was trying to teach how to do a presales meeting, he was just going through the motions. He was just talking about her business and about her goals and what have you. And so at the end of that meeting, and this is what he's sharing in his executive session, he talks to him, and he says, hey, bob, what were you thinking? He goes, what? I did all the things you told me to do. I went through that. I checked off all these little things you told me to go through, and we got through that pre sales kind of flight checklist. He goes, yeah, but you didn't say anything about our granddaughter. He goes, well, I think that was relevant. And this woman was beaming, wanting to talk about, clearly wanting to share the life that she has, this excitement that's going on, and he just missed it. And when you talk about the platinum rule, it's treating people they want to be treated. Well, here's a perfect example of someone that relatively high up. I mean, the CEO of a company is sharing in a sweatshirt that she's celebrating her granddaughter's first birthday, and this gentleman just overlooked it, just didn't even see it. And so she was actually giving you clues of, hey, this is what I want to talk about today. This is pretty exciting to me. And he just missed it. And that's a really small example, but a really obvious example of talking about, how do you treat people the way they want to be treated? If people want to share something very personal, let's talk about it. And so those are some of the, I guess, social cues I would talk about in a platinum rule that somebody wants to openly talk about their personal life. And so that's treating people the way they want to be treated. So you have to learn some of these characteristics about individuals. Some people are the opposite. Some people are very guarded, don't want to share their personal life with anyone. But here's an perfect example where someone does. And so the example he used is that his new salesperson he was training was treating people the golden rule. He was treating people the way he was told he should be treating them. He was going through a checklist of how I should conduct kind of a presales prospect, first flight guideline, if you will. And he just completely missed the obvious that this person wanted to have a personal engagement with somebody. [00:07:27] Matt: I think one of the keys is being perceptive to what you see in people's mannerisms, in their environment, what you were talking about with understanding how they're working with you, how they're conversing with you. And perception can sometimes be overlooked. Some people might say, I'm not really good at that, but I believe it's like anything else. It's a muscle. You've got to practice it, you've got to work at it to be watching and perceptive about what's going on. Sometimes we tend to get caught in going through the motions, going through the checklists, because we're trying to just go to the next thing, right. And so sometimes we need to slow ourselves down to be able to see what's going on around us and understand, as opposed to just checking that box and, okay, I'm done. I did the thing I was supposed to do, and now I'm moving on to the next thing I'm supposed to do. And you take the people element out of it, and it's more transactional, right. [00:08:42] Glenn: In business. And we're just as guilty as we want to create best practices and processes of how we gain efficiencies and how we grow someone's business and how we do certain tasks. And those things are really important. And so we don't want to negate that. So we're not changing the way we conduct ourselves from a delivery of a product perspective. But it's, the wrapper around it is that there's probably 1000 different ways to make a hamburger. But if someone prepared it the same way, but then all smashed it up and served it to you, you probably look at that with a different light than somebody taking the time to put in a nice clean plate and package it nicely just because they took the time to do that. Right. And so it's so often that you talk about, you get stuck in these patterns. Well, we need to build things into our processes that kind of catch us so that we see certain things that we don't get caught up in the process and that we acknowledge the fact that, yep, somebody's having a one year old birthday. To take it a little step further is you have to learn about the individuals or customers or companies preferences. So another example from the platinum rule is how do certain people like to communicate? I know there are certain customers that hate email, some love phone calls, some love text messages, some love chat. Right. And so we try to learn what is the most effective communication and what do they prefer, what's their preference? And so we've talked about this before, Matt, that we have some employees that hate talking on the phone. Now that's a challenge when customers love to be communicated via phone, but we have to work through that, that if someone is very talented, but yet they're just not comfortable for whatever reason, they don't want to continually communicate over the phone. Maybe that's not the right position if they need to be answering phone calls. Right. So we got to look at those preferences of those individuals and then find out what talents they have. And then let's focus on what they're really good at doing. And let's deemphasize the things that they don't want to do. [00:11:10] Matt: Yeah. And in order to do any of that, one of the things that we like to stress to our employees and to our clients, like how we deal with you, is we learn who you are. And so it's not just being perceptive, but it's also taking the time to know what people like. How do you want to be communicating? We got to ask those questions. Right. It's not just, again, there's no process that we're going to write that's so specific, but yet is a one size fits all, right. The process is going to be ask the questions, figure out what they like. For example, when we onboard a new client, one of the things we ask them is how do you want us to communicate with you? Right. If we don't ask those questions, we don't learn who they are. We're not going to learn everything day one, but we will over time. We had an employee here in the past that we used to joke that if he walked into a room with you and if somebody called him, let's say he was on the help desk at one point, if somebody called him, by the time he was done with the call, first time he talked to this person, he'd know who their aunt's dog was because he spent the time to talk to them while he was following the process of fixing their issue. Right. That's what it the. You've got to know people in order to know how to follow this rule. Like, if you don't know people, if I didn't know you, Glenn, I wouldn't be able to help you with the platinum rule. There's no way. [00:12:46] Glenn: Right? [00:12:46] Matt: So that's the other key, is it just takes time to get to know people. If we don't spend that time, then we're never going to be able to follow our own rule. [00:12:57] Glenn: Right? It's that old adage, no one really cares about what you know until they know how much you care. Right. And so you got to build that relationship. And again, everyone's different. So we want to kind of encourage that we find out the differences of individuals as well as customers. And then there's ebbs and flows to life isn't just a static line. Right. There's lots of influxes. So you got to learn about those different behaviors. And someone especially like me, which I don't necessarily pick up on all the social cues, I have to have certain types of tools and tricks, and I have to surround myself with people that do see those things and then can, hey, dudge, you know, this person's looking kind of sad, or this person just did something great and you didn't say anything to them. Sometimes we need help, right? [00:13:54] Matt: And I don't want to speak to. [00:13:56] Glenn: You, Matt, or speak for you, Matt, but I think we're in the same boat or similar boat on that. And so we need certain things. So again, the platinum rule is there are people that like to receive acknowledgements, some publicly, some privately. We used to do birthdays. Remember that? We used to have a birthday cart. We used to go around. This is back in the day that when people came to work and came in an office. So pre Covid, right. And we had a birthday cart, and we'd went around and we'd celebrate people's. [00:14:29] Matt: Birthday, and we would make people stop working. [00:14:33] Glenn: Yes. [00:14:33] Matt: To go celebrate the birthday with everybody. It wasn't just, well, whoever's available, come celebrate the birthday. It was like, no, we're going to stop and we're going to all come in and celebrate this together. [00:14:44] Glenn: Right? And we thought from a culture perspective, we wanted the employees to know, hey, we care. And some people thought that was really a cool idea. Others came to us in private and said, I hate this. I hate celebrating my birthday. If you want to send me a card, fine, but don't celebrate it. I don't do it at home. I don't like it. I don't like cards. So we change that. So we don't do it quite the same way that we used to. And sometimes that makes it challenging because then it's kind of hard to create a process for a company or a culture and then have certain types of exclusions like that. But you got to think of it that way. And so again, the platinum rule is treating the people, the individual, the way they want to be treated and understanding certain types of preferences that they have. And so we try to do that in almost everything that we do, from how we conduct our services, how we communicate to employees. And it's important that people pick up on those things. [00:15:50] Matt: The number one thing really is, do you care? Do you actually care? And we try to show that in different ways, different things that we do. But when an employee is struggling with something in their life or a big life event happens, we like to either we celebrate with them, we mourn with them, and we don't do it just because we read a book one time that says we should do these things. We do it because we care. And that's the key. We want to instill, and we try to interview for that. When we're interviewing people as part of our core value, we want to know that you truly care, not just that you care about making money or that you care about whatever, but we want you to care about treating people properly, about treating them the way they want to be treated. And you can only do that if you genuinely care about people with our clients. We don't just do this with our employees. When a big life event happens, we do it with our clients, too. Right. When a client has maybe a death in their family, we send them flowers, sometimes to the funeral home, depending on the situation. Right. We try to find out what is best for them. Sometimes they're asking for donations to whatever charity. But we try to do that with everybody because we actually care. And we want our employees to be the same way. We want you to actually care about our clients as well as care about each other. [00:17:26] Glenn: Right. And we're not doing this just because we think this is just a cool core value. We're doing this because we believe that this makes you a better individual. It makes it for a better relationship with your employees with your customers. And because just like as we said, life isn't linear, it's not flat, nor is business. So when you combine people and business in their life, there's going to be these ebbs and flows and these cues kind of help us kind of navigate how do we still achieve the right result or the best result in certain tough situations, right? And so we embrace this platinum rule in a variety of different things. And we talked about, as an example, individual preferences of how they want to communicate. But also, and if any of you remember us bringing in Eric that talked about these different ways of providing feedback to individuals. And so most companies provide feedback in a very private setting. Right? It's safe, it's one on one. Not a whole lot of other feedback is going to happen. And that mechanism is those individual performance reviews or annual reviews or whatever. But when we had Eric Coriel come in, speak to how the best deliver feedback is done in a team environment. In most environments, like sports teams, where you're providing feedback, you give the feedback to everybody, good or bad, and everyone gets to see it and everyone gets to understand, okay, this person needs some help here, this person is excelling over here. And you're doing it in a way not to demean anyone, but kind of saying, hey, we're all in this together. I want to share some developmental need that somebody has, maybe we can all help encourage. And so we have to navigate that, because not everyone. First of all, that's a very tough thing to do, to give feedback to an Individual in a team environment or a group environment, but it's the best feedback when it's done. I think as you said it, matt, in a very purposeful, in a very caring, in a very thoughtful way. So we took the time to bring Eric in and we're not 100% there. We're trying to do it, but it's a difficult thing because we have to help individuals be able to deliver that effectively. Right. So you got to be able to not scream at somebody when they get off the field or off the mat or whatever the sport is. Right. But you want to be able to provide it in a way that's going to be the most meaningful for that individual. [00:20:24] Matt: Yes. I want to spend just a few minutes here just discussing maybe some of the limitations here. And what I mean by that is the platinum rule at face value says do to people as they want done to them. Right. But there are some limitations. Right. You have to be within our moral code. You have to follow the rest of our core values with that, for example, let's take the sports analogy. If you've got somebody out there on the team that on the football team and they're alignment and they kind of just want to sit down, that's really like how they want to play, that's not going to work, right. We can't treat them. We can't just say, okay, you can do that thing because I know that's how you want to be treated. Right. We still have to do our jobs properly. We still have to work. We still have to embody the rest of our core values. Right. We don't want to go outside of our moral fiber in that too, because in some cases we might be talking to a client who maybe doesn't. They're not a great person, because not every person that works for every one of our clients may have great values. And so I just want to make that note because sometimes people maybe forget or for example, maybe somebody just wants to work 3 hours, but we really, really need somebody who's working 8 hours a day, right. There are some limitations to this at face value, what you hear, right. [00:22:10] Glenn: Well, I think that's why you have multiple core values and you have other things that embody your company, right? So it's not just one core value that you have. You have multiple core values, but you're right. You got to look at it in its entirety. And so, perfect example, as you said, if you have someone that is here to answer the phones, but they only want to answer the phones 3 hours a day, well, that's not a fit, right. You have a certain responsibility to the job that you have to do. And so there are limitations is that you can't do that. But in other instances, is that if you have a unique way that you want to try to accomplish a goal, there's nothing to say that we're going to be against trying something different, because we know the economy, the industries, they're changing rapidly, so we don't necessarily know how to dictate where a particular process might need to change. So we're open to that. And that's, again, part of the platinum rule is we don't know all the answers, but we know that we want to deliver world class customer service. We want to deliver services that help clients not just grow, but thrive. Right. And so we got to make sure that the end goal is being achieved. So another example, you might have an employee that wants to work 100% remote and doesn't want to come in for client meetings or doesn't want to come into the office when we need to have a special meeting, that's not going to work. [00:23:46] Matt: Right. [00:23:47] Glenn: The job is the job. And we get that there might be limitations in how transportation, all that stuff, but you got to explain those things up front and you got to make sure that things are really clear, is that, look, at the end of the day, we're here to deliver the best solution we can for our clients. And that means that there's some ebbs and flows, give and take, but the platinum rule doesn't apply to any individual. It applies to our whole company. And so we get to look at that and saying a certain preference of an individual may not fit the whole company because it's not going to fit the needs. [00:24:21] Matt: And I think the key to all of that, too, is communication. If you're an employee who wants to be treated a certain way or wants something. That's why we have our quarterly conversations and our annual reviews and our weekly touch bases and biannual touch base with Jody, with HR. Right. That's why we do those things, because we want to also give the avenue to communicate your needs to us. But at the same time, that doesn't mean you should just assume prior to having a conversation with maybe your supervisor, with whoever, that it's okay to do a, B, and C, have a conversation, talk about it, right? And then we can talk about how that might work, how we might treat like, hey, I only want to answer the phones for 3 hours a day. Maybe there's a world where that does work, maybe there's not. But at least we're having the conversation and communicating together as opposed to just acting on it. Right. That comes back to two, understanding and learning about each other and knowing who we are. Right? That's why we have all these touch points. [00:25:32] Glenn: Yeah. And the platinum rule helps at least set the stage of a thought process. So you often heard that adage about, you heard people say, well, the ends justify the means. Well, we actually think different. We want the same means, but we think the way and journey in which you get there is important. Right? And so you don't want to hire prima donnas that are really good at certain things, but they're cancerous in everything else that they do for their teammates and for the customers. So you got to be cognizant of, again, that's why you come back to these core values of understanding what the individuals, how they tick, how they work, most effective. And so often when we communicate internally inside of world synergy, we're talking about working genius. There's a reason why we went down this particular path of using this methodology. And we use disk and we use other types of tools to say we need to understand as much as we can about the individual, about what makes them tick. And it's not a manipulation. It's really about really celebrating the best of everyone that is here and understanding what makes them happy and what makes them effective. It's really understanding them as an individual, again, which complements the platinum rule. [00:26:54] Matt: Absolutely. [00:26:57] Glenn: Let me add. So when we're talking about the platinum rule, we're talking about feedback because we just covered that. Also recognition, not just birthdays, but accomplishments. Right. And so we have lots of ways of providing recognition, not just financially, of someone developing a good PNL or better margins, but it's also about providing feedback mechanisms. And we use a tool called kruhu internally, and that allows everyone to give each other feedback, and that is executives to team members and team members of team members and what have you in all sorts of different types of things. It's not just on a job done well, it's on core values, it's on great customer service, and it's on a variety of different types of things. And yeah, there's a little financial reward to that. You get points and you get to buy certain types of gifts and what have you. But it's really about an acknowledgment that we have. And it's done in no particular process, if you will. We're not forced to do it on a daily basis. It's done whenever you see fit. And so that's a great tool that we use as a team here because it allows us to provide feedback. And yes, it's somewhat in a group setting. Everyone can read each other's, but it's really kind of done on a one to one environment. Like, it's one individual giving it to another person. They can make it public and they can let other people see it and comment on it, but it's a great way of providing feedback that, at least for our team, has gone well and hasn't got over the top and call anyone out to kind of embarrass them from a job well done. Because we actually have people that don't like to be called out when they do something great. They just like to just keep moving forward and say, I don't need the accolades. I don't need any of those things. I just enjoy doing what I do. [00:29:10] Matt: Yeah. And conversely, we have some people who have said out loud, just pay me in crew who points. Right. That's how they want to be recognized. Maybe not the public side of it, but the point side of it. They like getting those points, right and then being able to use them and turn them in for things. And some people get the points and never turn them in for anything. They just like the accolade. [00:29:30] Glenn: Right. It's unique. I think it's so interesting that it doesn't matter who you are or how much you make or what level of status you have. People like to feel appreciated, right. And it doesn't matter what walk of life you're from, if someone is genuinely giving you a gift, no matter what it is, you're appreciative of that. It is so interesting about the psychology of how that all works, whether it's you're giving somebody a sticker or a star on their paper or you're giving them a trophy or you're giving them an Amazon gift card, whatever that is. It's not the gift, it's the acknowledgement. It's the, hey, nice job. Thanks for working hard. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for going above and beyond whatever that is. And again, that's another mechanism inside that platinum rule is we're trying to put all these different types of tools and methodologies in place so we don't miss anything. [00:30:32] Matt: Maybe we'll go back to the old star chart from elementary school. We'll put a chart up here and give people stars during the company meetings. [00:30:40] Glenn: Well, that could work. That could work. But as I've learned in certain sports, is giving those types of stars and feedback, and then there are individuals on the team that are working as hard as they can. They're just not able to achieve those stars. And actually, from a public setting perspective, it actually hurts those individuals. So you got to be careful about sharing those stars on a chart. Right? [00:31:09] Matt: Yeah, maybe we'll stay away from it. [00:31:12] Glenn: Well, it's a reason why we don't have, like, a salesman of the month out in our lobby or the top employee of the month. Well, first of all, no one would see it because no one comes in the office anymore. Right. But you got to make sure that you're, and we'll explore this in another day that you're being thoughtful in how you present things, which is another core value called think that we have. So it's important that you communicate it in a way that is going to come across, that you're coming from a caring place. [00:31:47] Matt: So that's our core value. Platinum rule. I think we've hit all the finer points of platinum rule. So thank you very much, Glenn, for your time. [00:31:59] Glenn: Thanks, Matt. Thanks, Charles. [00:32:00] Matt: Thank you, Charles. [00:32:02] Glenn: Thank you, guys. [00:32:03] Matt: Yep. Next time we'll get into another core value. Have a great week. [00:32:11] Closing: Thank you for joining us on Momentum today.