The Power of YES!!

(VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION):

Hi, Blair here with MXM. I've been talking about our Member Experience Manual and the education that we do around it and the whole point of all that education and teaching what I've called is the Core Logic of the organization, Vision, Mission, Values. Now we're going to start talking about Freedoms and Obligations.

If people really understand those pieces in an abstract way, they can apply them in real life and make decisions that are aligned with the companies purpose and service strategy. You can really empower them which is a wildly over used word. The way I want you to think about empowerment is giving people the right to say yes, not just a more elegant way to say no. In fact, I think in the first writing of this manual, maybe 15 years ago, we were talking about how do we get people to just take stuff on. So we did an experiment.

At the time we had one club and we said, OK, let's get the front desk together and we said, ok you guys, from now on...because what was happening, was every time a member asked for something the team would come to management (by the way it's always a leadership problem, it's never a frontline problem. Always the leaderships problem.) Anyway, they would come in and say, this member wants this...and they would wait for the answer then we would give the answer. That was the process, somebody came to you for the answer. So we finally did this experiment and we said, you guys can only come to us to seek permission to tell the customer no. Whatever the customer wants/needs you have to deal with it. Only seek permission if you want to tell them no. So we kind of held our breath and hoped and we were blown away by the decisions that the frontline was making with very little training on how to do this.

Just simply understanding what we were trying to accomplish as a business, what our service strategy was and what's best for the member as well. It was really quite amazing. We then came up with a section called "Freedom's and Obligations", we have nine of those and as we teach those, people start to understand their guide rails. They realize they can kind of bounce between those throughout the day. The way we talk about Vision, Mission, Values, Freedoms and Obligations is that, the vision is where we want to go, mission is why we get out of bed in the morning and the values are kind of the rules of the game. Then we say these nine freedoms and obligations, one and nine are sort of the ends of the field. 2-8 are the side lines. Take the values and go play.

But you have to understand so I'm going to just read to you the first one today. The first one we call, "You Decide". You are free to do whatever you see is reasonable to make the member happy. You are obligated to show discipline to our principles and values. Those are pretty good guide rails, I can do whatever I think is necessary to make the member happy, I'm obligated to stay within the principles and values, but I better understand the principles and values and the objectives of the business.

Then in training them we do examples of that. So imagine you are training on that. You could so easily create a case study, or a mini/micro case study that says ok, lets just apply that one freedom and obligation, here is the scenario. Mrs. Jones comes in, how would you apply this? Then get the group to talk.

That's it for today, I'm hell bend on getting more and more sort of experiential learning and education for teams and it's amazing how much more they love their jobs. Remember the biggest motivators are play purpose and potential, you want to lean into those motivators and make sure you are supplying a lot of that.

Until the next one, I hope your reopen is going fabulous. We think we are about July 13th before we can really have members coming into the clubs. That's it for now, you should be using our Reopen Feedback system if you are still shutdown and haven't used our free Shutdown System, you should. Both are free, go to www.mxmetrics.com, alright that's it.