http://www.slapcompany.com Three groups are deciding the success of your business while you read this sentence: your manager, employee and customer cultures. You already know you have managers, employees and customers in your business but it is only when they’re uniquely understood as cultures that chronic problems are finally resolved and unattainable opportunities are finally realized. How to gain maximum commitment from these three cultures is what this talk is ostensibly about but Stan’s real purpose is to make the business case for humanity. When we lose humanity in business we’re all doomed. When we save it – company-by-company and manager-by-manager, we’ve saved ourselves. This is not soft stuff; it is also the stuff of hardcore business results. Stan is a New York Times bestselling author and the president of the international consulting company SLAP, which is renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures. He created the brand strategies for companies ranging from Intel to Viacom that have achieved legendary impact in highly competitive markets. He designed the plan that helped Oracle sell their strategic intent to an employee population in 167 countries. He reversed attrition of top sales talent in McAfee from 35% to 5% in a single year. He created employee reengagement plans for HSBC, Europe’s largest bank. Hewlett Packard credits him with helping to achieve their coveted channel partner relationship, considered the model for market domination. TAKEAWAYS: 1. How to gain emotional commitment from your manager culture, worth more than managers’ financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. 2. How to gain dependably fierce support from your employee culture for any strategic or performance goal. 3. How to become branded by your customer culture, not just for what you sell but also for how and why you sell it.
A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success;any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers. This video explains what to do when values conflict.
On the IdeaFaktory podcast, guest Stan Slap confirmed my findings. (Slap is a corporate culture guru and fellow speaker at the BusinessNext conference.) According to slap, “Most companies misperceive intellectual engagement for emotional engagement. It’s the emotional engagement that’s critical.” And when it comes to achieving change, slap agrees, “If you want the culture to buy it, you have to know how to sell it to them.”
The point is: That I recently gave a keynote in Jamaica to the heads of all the Caribbean credit unions and grabbed the opportunity to spend a couple of weeks at Goldeneye, site of Ian Fleming’s former house. It’s now now owned by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records and the guy who brought Bob Marley to the world. In Fleming’s house is the original desk where he wrote all 13 James Bond books — James Bond did not exist until he was created at that very desk. I set my laptop right where Fleming sat his typewriter and used the peace of the private Jamaican beach and the inspiration of that holy desk to work on my second book. Haven’t figured out how I’m going to get the girl in the gold paint worked into a book about employee culture. S. www.slapcompany.com
Stan Slap talks about real leadership for just a couple minutes. If you go back to those 389,000 books about leadership on Amazon.com and read them, they will all tell you pretty much the same thing about the purpose of leadership. They will tell you that the purpose of leadership is to increase shareholder value and team productivity. Okay? That's not true. That is not the purpose of leadership. That has never been the purpose of leadership. That will never be the purpose of leadership. It will do those things, coincidentally when you apply it in the enterprise, but the irreducible essence of leadership is leaders are human being who live their own deepest values without compromise and they use those values to make life better for other people. That's why people become leaders and that's why people follow leaders. So the question today, and for those who are watching this online I ask can you become real leaders?
Controversy surrounding slap.com and slapcompany.com over the years needs to be explained. Stan Slap set's the record straight in this epic hilarious video blog.
Stan Slap discusses how strong managers can lead organizations to success by fulfilling their own values.
Your Goal: BECOMING BRANDED IN A COMPETITIVE MARKET The Problem: A brand is the creation of faith in two groups that absolutely cannot be fooled: your employee culture and your customer culture. The reason branding strategies don’t work is they don’t look where these cultures look to decide whether to grant the leap of faith required to become branded. Branding is a tribute, not a verb. Your company can’t just claim or demand to be branded; it has to be given to you. There is nothing you sell that a customer can’t choose to buy somewhere else or do without—except an intimate, values-based relationship between customer and company. That relationship can’t easily be deconstructed by your competition and competitors can’t use price, size, marketing or sales to bust it apart. To be a successful brand you must be branded not only for what you sell but for how you sell it.
This is not soft stuff. This is the stuff of hardcore results. The companies that bring us in to do this work either to build a brandable customer experience or transform and protect their employee and manager cultures. We like to say they don’t have patience as a value, they are high demand organizations. They have gone through the times of making managers millionaires just by virtue of them showing up and fogging up a mirror they still became day traders with their own career. There has to be something else. There is something that is worth more than financial intellectual and physical commitment and that’s emotional commitment. The opposite of emotional is not irrational the opposite of emotional is detached. There isn’t a strategy or performance goal that is weight bearing if its placed on a platform of detached culture.
Understand your employees personal values. Make it clear they are working in a hosted environment and the company has certain priorities and they have to deliver on those. But the other side of the equation is we allow you to be yourself by living your values at work and at home without separation. This is the equation for fulfillment. Humanity is only dangerous and unpredictable when you don't start from Humanity in the first place.