Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can't design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don't get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the out- standing ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn't produce anything else.

The hard part was reframing the certainties in managers' minds as hypotheses that needed confirmation. It turns out that this is the hard part in most organizations. And for whatever reason, this is particularly true for customer behavior. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we would suggest that there's an epidemic of overconfidence in service companies when it comes to predicting the operating behavior of their customers. Fortunately, the treatment is cheap and effective: surface your operating assumptions. Get in touch with whatever conclusions you've reached about the impact of customers on your operations.

Now test your assumptions with data you probably already have.

When they are in constant contact with customers, employees often get a disproportionate exposure to the bad. When things are going great, customers rarely call their car company or cell phone provider to let it know. And what this disproportionate exposure to the bad means is that calcification often sets in. Employees become hardened toward customers and start treating them as two-dimensional entities. But it's impossible to deliver excellent service when you've dehumanized your customer. So cultures not only have to get the norms and values right, but also have to provide for what we call regular decalcification. How much decalcification you're going to need will depend on how much hardening has occurred.

Charismatic leaders sometimes assume that they can avoid this trade-off by sheer force of personality. If they just get everybody fired up, the kinks will work themselves out. But you can't design a system that is based on the faith that all of your employees will perform heroically, all day, every day, for an indefinite period. For a system to work, excellence must be normalised. And you don't get to that point by demanding extraordinary sacrifice. You get there by designing a model where the full spectrum of your employees — not just the out- standing ones — will have no choice but to deliver excellence as an everyday routine. You get there by building a system that just doesn't produce anything else.

The hard part was reframing the certainties in managers' minds as hypotheses that needed confirmation. It turns out that this is the hard part in most organizations. And for whatever reason, this is particularly true for customer behavior. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we would suggest that there's an epidemic of overconfidence in service companies when it comes to predicting the operating behavior of their customers. Fortunately, the treatment is cheap and effective: surface your operating assumptions. Get in touch with whatever conclusions you've reached about the impact of customers on your operations.

Now test your assumptions with data you probably already have.