Catch People in the Act of Doing Things Right 5/8/20, 9:32 AM

MANAGING PEOPLE

Catch People in the Act of Doing

Things Right
by Bill Taylor
October 10, 2012

I’d like to say I was surprised by the wave of commentary triggered by my most
recent HBR post, but I had a feeling it would get a big reaction. In the post, titled
“It’s More Important to Be Kind than Clever,” I told the story of a touching gesture
by a store manager at Panera Bread toward a customer undergoing chemotherapy,
described the huge social-media phenomenon the gesture unleashed, and posed
two simple questions: “What is it about business that makes it so hard to be kind?
And what kind of businesspeople have we become when small acts of kindness feel
so rare?”

Those questions obviously struck a nerve with readers, who spent weeks
discussing why and how we’ve drummed basic emotions, and simple acts of
decency, out of so much of day-to-day business life. As I argued in my earlier post,
“In a world that is being reshaped by the relentless advance of technology, what
stands out are acts of kindness and compassion that remind us what it means to be
human.” Now it’s time to raise the obvious next question: How do we as leaders

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encourage, spread, and make more “ordinary” ways of behaving that today seem
extraordinary? Are there clever ways for leaders to help their organizations become
more kind?

Those are huge questions, of course, but my basic answer is for leaders to think
and act in ways that are designed to bring out the best in whomever they
encounter. That is, to spend less time scoring, critiquing, and correcting colleagues
who make mistakes, and to spend more time identifying and rewarding colleagues
who behave the way we wish everyone would behave. Leaders who engage in
relentless fault-finding can’t help but lead to a culture of bloodless execution.
Leaders who celebrate small acts of kindness, who reward moments of connection,
give everyone permission to look for opportunities to have a genuine human
impact.

I first learned this lesson when I studied the intensely human service culture at
Commerce Bank (now TD Bank). It’s hard to think of a less emotionally charged
business than retail banking, but TD Bank has built a legendary brand by
persuading tens of thousands of front-line people to think of their jobs as
“retailtainment” — not just providing technically adept service, but keeping
customers engaged, surprised, entertained. This is truly an organization where
small acts of kindness have become an everyday reality, a warm-and-fuzzy culture
that attracted the attention of the famously no-nonsense editors at The Economist.

How does TD Bank maintain its human-centered ways of working? In large part by
defining the work of leadership as reinforcing positive behavior rather than
correcting behavior that falls short. Front-line employees carry a kind of “pledge
card” that lists the company’s principles of great service. Bank managers and

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officers, as they visit locations and make the rounds, carry rolls of stickers. They
slap these stickers on the back of an employee’s card whenever, as one senior
executive puts it, “we catch somebody in the act of dong it right.” As their card fills
with stickers, employees become eligible for prizes.

“It’s too easy to catch people screwing things up,” this executive told me. “What
fuels this company are the high-fives, the wacky stuff we do to engage people in
the business, to make them feel good. It’s the job of every manager and officer of
this bank to go out and catch people doing it right.” (TD Bank managers distribute
about 100,000 stickers per year.)

Ward Clapham is a leader whose very business involved catching people screwing
things up. When he took command of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police force in
Richmond, BC, the third largest force in the country, he faced a problem with
juvenile delinquency and misbehaving young people. His response to the problem
was an innovation he called “positive tickets.” Of course his officers cited and
arrested kids for breaking the law. But they also went out of their way to find at-
risk kids who were staying out of trouble, who were doing small things at a skate
park, or in a school, that were making life a little better. At those moments, he and
his officers issued “positive tickets” — citations that entitled the recipient to a meal
at a restaurant, or admittance to a movie or a theme park. “Instead of catching kids
doing something wrong,” he explained in a book he wrote about the experiment
called Breaking With the Law, “positive ticketing is about catching kids doing
something right.”

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Clapham and his colleagues issued 40,000 positive tickets per year — three times
as many citations as they issued for violations. As a result, he reports, youth-
related service calls dropped by 50 percent, and an estimated 1,000 young people
stayed out of the criminal-justice system. More to the point, the very nature of the
relationship between the police and the community changed: “The part that makes
it worthwhile is pulling into a parking lot full of kids. Instead of running away from
me, they swarm me…Kids don’t feel I am hunting them anymore; they see me as a
friend.”

Ultimately, whether the setting is a fast-growing bank or troubled neighborhoods,

the lesson is as simple as it is powerful. If we are eager to create environments
where people routinely act their best, it’s up to leaders to bring out the best in
everyone — to focus less on fixing what’s going wrong, and to highlight and
celebrate what’s going right. That’s how we get humanity back into business.

Bill Taylor is the cofounder of Fast Company and the author, most recently,
of Simply Brilliant: How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary
Ways. Learn more at williamctaylor.com.

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