Chapter Five: Now Multiply It All by Culture

“Imagine yourself walking around an empty building. The lay-out is intuitive, each room surrendering easily to the next one. You feel strangely reassured, even optimistic. You sit down on a bench that you hadn't really noticed before, but which suddenly seems to be in exactly the right place. And you find yourself lingering, again an unfamiliar impulse. You feel the volume of the noise in your mind start to lower. That's the feeling of great design. When a service model is designed right, it produces the same sensations among the people who interact with it —energy, reassurance, the sense of calm that comes from being deeply respected as a living being. But like an empty building, a well-designed service model is still missing the critical element that brings it to life on a functional level: the people, or more specifically, how the people interact with each other. When we're talking about organizations, we call that element culture. A great service organization needs to get both right, the service design and the culture that animates it.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organizational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture.

• The right culture is not a universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organization's service model.

• One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. We like Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions. As Schein argues, to change behavior (a company's typical goal), you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.

• Great service organizations tend to do three things well in their relationship with culture. They have deep clarity about the organizational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signaling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations.

Culture not only guides individual decision-making, but also provides the foundation for all other organizational behavior and action. In other words, culture doesn't just tell you what to do — it shows you how to think. We see it this way:

Service Excellence = Design x Culture

Chapter Five: Now Multiply It All by Culture

“Imagine yourself walking around an empty building. The lay-out is intuitive, each room surrendering easily to the next one. You feel strangely reassured, even optimistic. You sit down on a bench that you hadn't really noticed before, but which suddenly seems to be in exactly the right place. And you find yourself lingering, again an unfamiliar impulse. You feel the volume of the noise in your mind start to lower. That's the feeling of great design. When a service model is designed right, it produces the same sensations among the people who interact with it —energy, reassurance, the sense of calm that comes from being deeply respected as a living being. But like an empty building, a well-designed service model is still missing the critical element that brings it to life on a functional level: the people, or more specifically, how the people interact with each other. When we're talking about organizations, we call that element culture. A great service organization needs to get both right, the service design and the culture that animates it.

UNCOMMON TAKEAWAYS

• It's not enough to design your service model right. Uncommon service is achieved when great organizational design meets a culture of service excellence. A basic way to think about it is this: service excellence is a product of design and culture.

• The right culture is not a universal concept. Your right culture is a distinct asset that must be consistent with your organization's service model.

• One way to understand culture is to break it down into its relevant components. We like Edgar Schein's culture framework, which loosely divides a culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions. As Schein argues, to change behavior (a company's typical goal), you have to change the way people think. To change the way people think, start with the underlying assumptions that drive that thinking.

• Great service organizations tend to do three things well in their relationship with culture. They have deep clarity about the organizational culture they must cultivate in order to compete and win. They are effective in signaling the norms and values that embody that culture. And they work hard to ensure cultural consistency, alignment between the desired culture and organizational strategy, structure, and operations.