Episode 83 Asplund Transcript | Becoming Referable

Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Jim Asplund

Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to Becoming Referable. The podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild and today, Steve and I are talking to Jim Asplund. I think you’re going to love this conversation. Jim is chief scientist of Gallup’s strengths-based development and performance impact consulting practices. That is a mouthful. He’s also the co-author of Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter. And it’s a book that I highly recommend for anyone thinking about client or team engagement.

Julie Littlechild:
We talked to Jim about the concept of Human Sigma, which is all about the inextricable length between employee and team engagement. He tells why satisfaction isn’t enough and how we need to be thinking beyond rational satisfaction and toward emotional connection. Through this lens, you’ll have a new view into what it takes to stand out and truly differentiate your business. We talk about measuring engagement, as well as driving engagement and I think you’ll get a lot from the discussion. With that, let’s get straight to the conversation with Jim.

Julie Littlechild:
So Jim, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. So happy to have you here.

Jim Asplund:
Thank you. Great to be here-

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, welcome Jim.

Julie Littlechild:
I have to confess, I’m a bit fangirl with this stuff because I’m a supreme geek and I read a lot of books and I have referenced your book and quoted you many times over the years. Full attribution, I promise but there was so much sense in the book you wrote and it was so practically and fairly written that I’m going to recommend that to everybody right off the bat but we’re going to go in a little deeper and talk about some of the concepts.

Julie Littlechild:
And one of the things I’d love to start with you is your bio describes you as leading Gallup’s research on a science of human strengths, which I think sounds pretty cool and then how to apply them to improve performance. Can you tell us just a little bit about the work that you do?

Jim Asplund:
Yeah, I’d love to. Thanks for the introduction. I’m going to make sure my mom hears that later in the day.

Julie Littlechild:
Sure. Somebody loves me mom, they really do.

Jim Asplund:
Gallup’s been studying sort of human potential human strengths for a long time. Our former chairman Don Clifton started researching this in the ’40s. He was one of the earliest guys in this sort of the field that’s known as positive psychology, in terms of a flipping the sort of usual medical model that a lot of us learned in university and in terms of psychology. And then studying more what are people like when they do well as opposed to when things aren’t going so well. What’s a dysfunction?

Jim Asplund:
The strengths research then comes about sort of how do we identify what our greatest opportunities for success are, when we identify and apply our individual talents in optimal ways? And so we developed this assessment that a lot of people might be familiar with called the Clifton StrengthsFinder, Clifton Strengths assessment that it’s been around about 20 years now.

Jim Asplund:
And about 23 million people have taken it so far and we identify these sort of core set of 34 talents or strengths and so there’s a little bit involved in terms of how do you turn, what is sort of your natural inclination or preference or talent into a strength by adding skills and knowledge and behaviors that experience that help those things do but the idea essentially is that we all have things that we’re better at than others, which is I think is a non-controversial position.

Jim Asplund:
We tend to think that your time is better spent in those areas to the extent possible, and those are the things at which you’re going to excel and be repeatable at. And so the way I am most successful as say a financial planner, would be different than how you would do it because we’re different people. And so how do we be honest about that and help people develop that to their best potential? So that’s what the strengths research is really about.

Jim Asplund:
And we’ve done a lot of research to show that not only do these things exist and that they’re easily identifiable through this assessment, but that in fact, that when you do learn these and learn to develop them about yourself, your performance is higher and the performance of the teams you’re on is better. And you get along with each other better and you’re more inclusive, and all these good things that we want in our workplace today. And so it’s a really fun area of research to work on.

Steve Wershing:
And if I could jump in, Jim, so I can imagine that a lot of our listeners hearing that would love to be able to participate in that and I will put some stuff in the show notes but just since we’re just talking about it, can people access that and take that assessment?

Jim Asplund:
You bet. I should be really facile with the website, which of course, I’m not. You know that something like, let researchers loose, they don’t always let us tell these things. But yeah, it’s very short assessment. We say it’s 30 minutes but most people it takes less time than that. If you go to the Gallup.com, it’s pretty easy to find. We have written a lot of books. My former colleague Tom Rath wrote this book called StrengthsFinder 2.0, which is I think the best-selling business book of all time. The assessment’s in there.

Jim Asplund:
Now we have an upgraded version. If you go straight to the online site, you get more information if you take that version of it rather than the book, but it’s available in a lot of different places. And so if you look for StrengthsFinder or Clifton Strengths you’ll find it very easily.

Steve Wershing:
Great, thank you.

Julie Littlechild:
And it is. So I am one of those 23 million people.

Jim Asplund:
Wonderful.

Julie Littlechild:
And I’m proud to say we did this a number of years ago and we went the book route. So it’s good to know that there’s an upgraded one. And what I love about is that your comment about taking your natural inclinations and adding skills because I think so many of these assessments that we do almost suggest like this is who you are and it feels almost immovable. And maybe that’s helpful but this speaks to change as well.

Julie Littlechild:
Now, one of the book that you were involved with writing Human Sigma came out some time ago but is really evergreen in my mind. What was particularly intriguing to me about that book is this connection between client engagement and team engagement, I’ll call it, and the way in which those two things work in tandem. So I’d love to dig in on some of that but maybe you can just start with a definition of what Human Sigma is.

Jim Asplund:
Sure. The book was written sort of as a compendium of some research we’ve done. It’s sort of a bit of research on that employee-customer encounter if you will. There’s sort of a management approach that’s in the book, as well as sort of a measurement model that gets at how do you best measure and also manage those encounters. Employees, team members have with their clients or customers and how do you do that in a way that’s productive, that’s easier perhaps than what you’re trying to do now.

Jim Asplund:
And when you do those things, in fact, there’s significant operational and financial benefits to that as well but another thing we found is that when you do it right, it’s actually more natural for people than some of the other things people try to get him to do so. So the good news is that it might be easier to do better.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. What just struck me, I think, in reading it is that so often we look at customer or client process and experience and then in some separate silo, we look at team experience and engagement but it was the way in which those two things came together that I thought was really interesting. I mean was that something that for you was kind of an obvious thing or did you discover the connection through the research?

Jim Asplund:
A little bit of both. I grew up in a really small town on a farm and so you learn that things have memory. And that you meet people who wear very different hats. The idea that I might be your employer and then the next day you might be my little league coach. These are things that happen in a small town, right? So in that sense it was not unusual to me but when you get the data and you work with clients, sometimes as you mentioned, these things get a little vulcanized or siloed where the people who operate on the employee experience in a large organization, there’s a lot to do.

Jim Asplund:
How do we know when things are going well? How do we know they’re not going well? What we do about it, and then by the same token, you got people at market research or in operations studying the customer, what operations, what procedures that we need to make that right, what offerings do we have that help as a track business and how do we make sure that the customers are pleased with that and want to come back and all that.

Jim Asplund:
And then when you hand these, oftentimes we found that the poor person operating to make it simple like a store out in any town USA or North America, the manager and the people working the store get these two things to do and it’s not often a lot of sense is made between the two of them. And so they have to kind of work that out for themselves. And the way they’re managed often is as independent entities, which of course, we all know they’re not and yet the demands that are placed on them sometimes could be at odds with each other.

Jim Asplund:
And then if you back that up into the sort of the corporate environment where those initiatives or instructions were made, we often found that those people that were given these instructions had never met, which is a little strange. Or didn’t know each other very well were working in consort. And so the idea of sort of organically emanated out of our own experience, how do we make that easier for people on the front line to do this, but also as we collect the data from various places where we were doing work on both of these things, we found in a lot of examples that in some of which they appear in the book where people had managed to kind of get it wrong where they focused …

Jim Asplund:
So sometimes in the employee experience, it would be sort of communicated that if you get this right it fixes everything. And that sort of narrow point of view, yes, engaged employees will be more productive and will treat your customers better. But they also do a lot of other things that maybe need to be steered a little bit. And so we found workplaces where employees loved working there but where customers were almost sort of a distraction from the joy of working. Of course, obviously defeats the purpose of some of that in the first place.

Jim Asplund:
And similarly, we found environments that were less common but similarly, we found environments that kind of paint a cartoonish picture here where the customers or the clients were loving to work there but they were eating up the employees to get them there by the way they were doing it. And so what we found statistically in terms of examining millions of employees and customer interactions, really if you do the employee part right in service of the customer where you’re good at both of these things, which sounds, again, sort of tautological almost but where you kind of manage them together, the benefits are orders of magnitude sometimes even higher in terms of financial growth.

Jim Asplund:
And also you have a healthier sort of long-term ecosystem in terms of them supporting each other. So the book kind of gets into why of all that and how the measurement of that works but I think more importantly gets into unbundling some of the things that people have done that kind of steered them in the wrong direction.

Steve Wershing:
I can totally relate to what you’re saying. I used to work at a university a long time ago and there would be times when there would be a break or summer or something like that, and we used to joke around that, “Geez, you can get an awful lot done without all these students running around.” I’d like to shift this a little bit from the employee to the client side and you had said, “How do you create an experience that people enjoy and want to come back for?” And one of the things that a lot of people in our industry are sort of obsessed with is client satisfaction.

Steve Wershing:
And in your research, one of the findings is that satisfaction isn’t the whole story. There’s not enough there. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean by that and where we need to go from there?

Jim Asplund:
Sure. We were measuring satisfaction a lot in the early ’90s like a lot of people and finding that obviously it’s better to satisfy your customers than not to but we started to discover that was pretty low bar really. I mean a lot of interactions, it’s actually not that hard to do. And in fact, not doing it usually it was the functional equivalent of making a mistake.

Jim Asplund:
As we kind of got into this, we went into it very intentionally, try to decide because a lot of our clients had really high scores. After we worked with them for a while, you got nothing to say if you’re pegging the meter or using, right? So the measure of which we were using this identify as good was maxing out. And we said, “Well, obviously we’re still seeing areas where they could be doing better so how can that be?” And so we did a very intentional sort of bit of literature review and research of our existing clients and some other companies and talking with a lot of customers, thousands of customers.

Jim Asplund:
We identified some things that I think, I’m sorry, this answer is a little long but we-

Steve Wershing:
It’s okay. It’s a 30-minute podcast go ahead.

Jim Asplund:
But again in retrospect, are a little bit obvious that there are circumstances where you could actually find where the general things you look at in terms of satisfaction, how long did you wait in line and what did it cost things like that. And then you ask people if they’re ever going to go back again, those answers didn’t line up.

Jim Asplund:
I mean the classic example that’s in the book is taking your kids to Disneyland and the lines are long and it was super hot. So the answers all sound like you didn’t have a good experience and then when you ask people if they’re going to go back, they go, “We go every year. It’s the greatest place on Earth.” And how could that be? Well, it’s the emotional payoff in their children’s eyes was worth all of that stuff.

Jim Asplund:
And so we started to understand and my colleague in the book, John Fleming is a social psychologist so he had a little insight into this maybe before I did. And so kind of studying, how do you create that sort of emotional relationship that if you look at … And neuroscience has become much more common parlance now than it was when we’re doing the research, let alone when we wrote the book but people are more familiar now that we have kind of an emotional part of our brain that in fact, frames a lot of the way we make decisions. And in fact, the decision is often a rationalization after our emotional part of our brains where we decide what we’re going to do.

Jim Asplund:
And so we found that there’s a sort of two stages of satisfaction or sort of a rational satisfaction, which is what everybody was measuring. And there’s a sort of emotional satisfaction for lack of a better word at the time, that actually is on top of that in terms of how we make our decisions. And so we kind of went back to the drawing board and said, how do we discuss how people form these sort of emotional attachments with brands and with experiences? And did a lot of research to come up with what’s in the book.

Jim Asplund:
And in fact in the end, we actually, in an attempt to prove this, life is interesting sometimes. We had a colleague in Japan who said, “Hey, some friends of mine have an fMRI machine at the University here. Would you like to use it?” And we said, “Sure!” before we had a clue what we were going to do.

Julie Littlechild:
Sounded cool.

Sounded like fun. Yeah.

Jim Asplund:
… Actually get customers of a department store chain in Japan to put themselves in this machine, I think essentially because they got a picture of their brain that was kind of the payoff for everybody. Luckily, we had partners there at Nihon University who knew how to do this stuff and how to do these studies. And we found out that not only were the questions we asked about emotional attachment predictive of kind of how your brain acts, it helped explain a little bit of what was going on. It turns out that these people’s impressions of their experience at the department store and we checked against other things to kind of make that research work, the brains were making associations and judgments really faster than they could compute the information.

Jim Asplund:
And so the way we interpreted that was if you’re really fond of an experience, your brain can communicate that very quickly and you can imagine all the feedback systems in your brain, the dopamine and the endorphin system that tell your brain that you’re happy. And then also the on the negative side, it was happening even faster and essentially faster than you could compute the information. So if you think about this in the right way, if a customer is emotionally very dissatisfied with you, they don’t take your information in. They’re ignoring you. The worst thing you can do as a human being is ignore another human being.

Jim Asplund:
It’s usually worse than actually yelling at somebody in a lot of circumstances. And you see this in parenting and in manager situations and the client situations. If you think about what that means in terms of getting clients or getting customers, how do you get your advertising be perceived by somebody who hates you because they don’t even see it? Their brain does not register it. So anyway this is a long convoluted story but these emotional parts of our brain and it’s all walks of life by the way. It’s not our commercial decisions. It’s everything we do.

Jim Asplund:
Really trump the rational part of our brain because if you think about sort of a classical rational actor in a lot of these old economic studies, our brains actually don’t have the computing power to do what we’re supposedly doing when we make decisions. Most of what we do if you had to think about taking every step and lifting your hand to drink a cup of coffee, you’d be exhausted.

Jim Asplund:
A lot of this stuff’s very automatic and so how we relate to people and how we relate to our experiences around us, these are very fundamental everyday things that our brain have to do millions of times a day, and well, maybe not millions, thousands of times a day. And a lot of that’s on automatic and very fundamental to human nature and so what we’re getting that in the book is how do you take advantage of that instead of flying in the face of it by trying to make people think when they really don’t want to.

Julie Littlechild:
And well so let’s talk a little bit then about how we measure this stuff because, so you could argue at one end of the spectrum we give every client an MRI. Let’s say that’s not entirely practical, and maybe at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we come up with a single question like say Net Promoter Score to try to capture all of that. Net Promoter is something that has sort of taken over it seems the imagination certainly in our industry and others. I have some reservations about it but what’s your view on Net Promoter and like when did you see it work, when do you think we need to be cautious about it?

Jim Asplund:
Sure. Well, to your point, when we put people on that fMRI machine, we found that the questions we did ask people about their emotional experience were highly predictive of those brain access. So there are a set of questions you can actually ask. It’s not just one. I’ll get to that in a minute but Net Promoter, it’s a kind of thing where there’s layers to this. You understand the appeal, right? I think we all do. It’s simple. It’s intuitively understandable that if people will tell other people that they like my watch or my beer or whatever that that’s a good thing but I’m always … There’s a quote I always liked which was I think it was Alfred North Whitehead. He said, “Seek simplicity and distrust it.”

Julie Littlechild:
I love that.

Jim Asplund:
Simplicity is good and a lot of things in life really are pretty simple but you should always be a little skeptical. And so I think the thing about Net Promoter that’s tricky is that as a measurement it’s … Single items are a problem because they’re not terribly reliable when you compare to multiple items. Although, some single items could be pretty good. I think problem with Net Promoter is it’s not a terribly good measurement in the sense that the same Net Promoter score can mean totally different things depending on the compliments of that score for people who are familiar with it in terms of your promoters and your detractors. You’re only counting two of the three groups. And so there’s different ways to get the same number and so it can be a hard measurement to use in terms of what it means.

Jim Asplund:
I think the other part that’s tricky is how do you help people understand how that happens? And so the classic sort of survey research way to do this would be to ask other questions and see what those sort of drivers, if you will, of that sort of attitude are to get people to say that they’re going to recommend you. Then oftentimes by then you’ve kind of flying in the face of simplicity of only asking one question.

Jim Asplund:
And this is familiar with what everybody’s done with this but at the end of the day, if any measurement system you should end with, people discussing what does this mean and what do we do to make it better.

Steve Wershing:
Well, and also just to ask another question on top of that, Jim, I think Julie one of the things that you found in your research is that some astronomically high number of clients say, “I would be willing to refer my advisor to somebody else.” but when we ask them, “Have you actually done it?” The number is a very small fraction of that. And so are there questions, Jim, that other than the would you be willing to kind of question that might be more useful in terms of finding out what people actually do as opposed to what they might be willing to do?

Jim Asplund:
Yeah, so in the book, we listed sort of 11 questions that we used to ask and we’ve decided that was a little long. It was kind of hard to expect people to do that. And so we’ve kind of boiled it down to three. I’ll give you the three and so these are more generally kind of across industries that my financial advisor, if you want to put it in that perspective, always delivers on what they promised. And that gets it real sort of basic confidence like I got what I expected. People don’t like surprises in the negative sense and so that’s a sort of measures that.

Jim Asplund:
A very simple thing is I’m proud to be a customer of X. We like to be associated with things that help us reinforce our belief in ourselves as smart, rational, sensible people who do the right thing. And the extreme case example that I always use a lot, I’ve done some work with Harley-Davidson over the years. And you meet a lot of people tattoo the name on their body and say lots of outlandish things about how great their motorcycles are, which is what everybody aspires to. So that’s an easy one to understand that.

Jim Asplund:
And then and then another one that a lot of companies think is a little far-fetched but is actually a pretty good item and actually the strongest one statistically in here, it’s a perfect company for people like me. A lot of times when humans kind of think about their lives, the best way to extrapolate how much something means to you is what would you do if you didn’t have it anymore. And it gets that kind of irreplaceability, which most things aren’t truly irreplaceable but they can feel irreplaceable. And how much is it sort of fit who you are and especially in our day now where things are personalized and specialized and individualized that that becomes more and more useful sort of an item to ask people.

Jim Asplund:
Now those are just the outcomes, so those measure very well. If you give answers to that, that are high, you have formed a sort of a strong attachment or engagement with that brand. Then I think you would then want to understand a few other things about how you got there and what’s working and what’s not working. And those things, I think it all boils down to really, does a company make you feel valued as an individual and as a customer or a person? I mean in financial parlance that could be as simple as making sure that people feel that you care about their financial well-being and help them understand how to improve that.

Jim Asplund:
I mean you don’t want to get into this kind of survey research and just kind of think about how you would talk to people. I think in what little work I’ve done the last few years with financial planning in investment community and wealth management, that’s where a lot of them were going, towards how do we help people improve their financial well-being. And that could mean a lot of things and a lot of different things and a lot of different people, right? So some people are planning for retirement and they’re near retirement, that’s very different than someone who doesn’t have a lot of resources but needs to kind of figure out how to not get trapped in the sort of cycle of not being able to pay their bills every month.

Jim Asplund:
But if you can show people that you care about that well-being and make that make your contributions to that well-being irreplaceable and make them feel valued as a part of that, that’ll take you a long way. And then you can start asking questions about little things like they like Mike versus Mary or do they want to do their transactions digitally or person and stuff like that. What I think is we’re all learning that all channels are available to all people because we’re all different. We have different preferences for these things, that that’s something that’s going to vary from person to person. But this individualization if you can think about that as you sort of core precept, it’ll take you a long way.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, it’s interesting as we run into this conundrum almost where I think financial advisors more so than in a lot of industries would understand and appreciate the emotional connection that people have with them because we’re talking about their lives and their futures. Interesting then when we start to think about the client experience, we almost go directly for some of those more rational indicators. Do we meet often enough? Do we call you back quickly? And yet from what you’re saying, I think we need to maybe hone in on those emotional indicators.

Julie Littlechild:
And I know you talk about sort of emotional connection and I think you say there’s like four different components to that. Can you sort of tease that a little for us so that we understand a bit more about what that means?

Jim Asplund:
Sure. In the book we go into this, there’s sort of four levels of emotional attachment we identified. The first sort of most basic of those, if you don’t have this don’t bother with the other ones, is confidence. Do you remember that movie Meet The Parents? There’s that sort of circle of trust moment where Deniro… can’t trust you. You’re either in the circle or outside the circle. So confidence really gets it whether you’re in the circle, right? And some people have had elevated this by the way into their whole brand promise.

Jim Asplund:
FedEx makes a great statement about kind of always being there on time and blah, blah, blah. You can make a big play out of just confidence if you’re the best at it. And so that’s a sort of foundational emotional attachment. Are you inside the circle of trust? Are you going to do what you said you were going to do every day, every time I need you? And always is a big standard but that’s kind of what people are looking for. And we talked about this as an emotional thing. I mean it sounds kind of procedural but the way people form emotional attachments get at some of those things you were talking about, the signals because we don’t know. We mostly just ask you, do you love me? How can you tell?

Jim Asplund:
My grandma used to send me a loaf of bread every week when I was in college, that was kind of a clue because she was old and her hands didn’t work very well but she still went to put the effort to doing that. So as a financial adviser, that’s not going to happen maybe but am I calling you often enough? I need to know you a little bit to know how often I should call you maybe, right? Or how often are we meeting or do I send you the right information? I should ask you what you want and how do you want the information. And I can give it to you like this or like this or how often do you want me to call you? Involve me in that sort of interaction so that as the customer clears signal to do what I want, then you can send the clear signal to me that you care by doing that.

Jim Asplund:
Now in a big organization that gets hard when you have hundreds of customers but there are ways to kind of do some of that. But so anyway so confidence is kind of the most basic of these emotions and then the next one up is it’s interesting how you name these things. We call it kind of fairness or justice, so we ended up calling it fairness or integrity. The easiest way to think about this is how do you react when things don’t go right. And so do you treat me fairly? And fairly is in the eye of the beholder, right? That can be in a different thing when you’re flying on an airline and everyone paid a different fare versus how do I procedurally wait for my next turn to be served.

Jim Asplund:
Any sort of fairness, there’s a big section in the book on that. There’s distributive fairness, there’s procedural fairness. We’re great at fairness as people basically. We’ve devised a lot of different kinds of fairness. That’s one big part of that and the other way to maybe think about it more easily is when things are wrong, how do you fix it? Is problem resolution a good thing? And I think we like to avoid making mistakes and having problems in our relationships but when things go wrong, how do we react and how do we make it right?

Jim Asplund:
So that’s really what integrity is about and that’s sort of a base or for lack of a better word, levels of that sort of emotional attachment pyramid. The higher levels ones are what we call pride and passion. And it’s interesting as researchers to kind of try to discuss things like this in sort of cold analytical ways but pride is really about positive association identification. Steve, you said you worked on a university campus. If you’re at one of those schools that cares about sports and they win a game, you can see that just people are wearing the uniform. And when they lose a game maybe they don’t talk about it so much and not wearing the uniform.

Jim Asplund:
It’s a fairly common thing called basking in reflected glory. We like to belong to things that are successful and be associated with things that reinforce our self-image as smart, sensible customers or people that buy the right brands or look the right way and what-have-you, whatever our sort of self conception is. Pride really kind of functions on these multiple levels. It’s associating with me and helping me tell people this is who I am. It’s also a little bit of this telling me who I am.

Jim Asplund:
It’d be nice to think that we had this plan for our lives and that we understood every single thing we did but sometimes we actually have to observe our own behavior as weird as that sounds to understand kind of who we are and what we like to do. And so pride is really an understanding that as customers or clients, who we choose to work with, who we choose to have as a financial adviser who we choose to bank with. It says something about us to ourselves and others. And when you do that right, those scores will be high. It will say, “I’m proud to be a customer of Harley-Davidson or Apple Computing or whoever and that people always treat me with respect.”

Jim Asplund:
Respect in a more diverse world, this is becoming more important and harder to do in the sense of how do you acknowledge that people on the good side that have unique and wonderful contribution to make with you as a customer? And on the negative side, how do you make people feel like they don’t belong here and maybe like you’re going to follow them around wishing they didn’t steal something? You think about the negative aspect of that sort of pride.

Jim Asplund:
A passion is kind of the ultimate expression of emotional attachment. It’s kind of our highest-level. That’s where people say little weird things and it can be about almost anything. One of my favorite stories from our basic research was we interviewed people about anything they felt that way about. And one of them we interviewed, it was Miracle Whip, the salad dressing. And actually, it was irreplaceable for her-

Julie Littlechild:
Where is this going?

Jim Asplund:
Well, so other people, of course, were kind of trying … You get a roomful of people they start to try to help, thank each other sometimes but she had a very compelling story. Basically, she had a big family and she was a caterer. But going back to her family as aunt, I can’t remember, aunt Pam I think her name was. Aunt Pam, she was known in the family as the best cook and who made the best stuff and organized the best family reunions and parties and stuff like that, and she said Miracle Whip helped her be that person. That’s the way that made… stand out.

Jim Asplund:
We’ve met with a lot of executives who don’t feel like their company has anything like that’s a given. And I challenged them actually most of you, in fact to our extent, anyone we’ve met has customers who feel that way about you believe it or not, whoever you are. And so it’s perfect for me. I can’t imagine what I would do without it or a world without it. It’s irreplaceable. I mean I had a father who smoked for 50 years. He pretends he’s quit now, so I hope my mom wouldn’t listen to this.

Jim Asplund:
So you don’t want it to be a chemical addiction. Those vices were irreplaceable to him. That’s not what we’re going here. There’s a good version of that where if you had to fly a different airline, it’s uncomfortable because you don’t really know how the procedures work. You don’t know what to do. It feels different or if you had to buy your coffee in a different place or wear a different pair of shoes, sometimes those things become very important. And it’s interesting in my line of work and probably yours, anyone you meet I kind of like to interrogate them about these things just to kind of see. Like my doctor or my nurses, I ask them what shoes they’re wearing, whether it’s really comfortable because I kind of get like…

Jim Asplund:
They usually have pretty strong opinions. I mean it’s fun to kind of elicit that stuff from them but those are kind of the layers of this. That sort of basic thing is can I believe in what you’re going to do and will you treat me fairly to that higher level stuff of what working or being a customer of yours says something about me that I like. And in fact, it’s so strong that I can’t imagine switching to somebody else.

Julie Littlechild:
And you made this point earlier but I just wanted to underscore it as well that I mean what you’re talking about is a different, not necessarily a different way to measure but it’s forcing us to think about measuring different things. And we talked a lot about differentiation in this industry as they do in others and I think this is sort of at the core of that.

Julie Littlechild:
And at the same time, we need to go deeper to say, “Well, if we looked at these four types of connection, how do we demonstrate that through the eyes of the client? And how do we impact? What are the levers that we can pull in order to impact that not enough to just say, ‘Did we get a 10 out of 10 or a five out of five on that?'” And that’s where I think we’re missing an opportunity to get really practical with some people.

Jim Asplund:
And at many levels, right? There’s a sort of a corporate levers. How do we brand things? How do we explain things? How the sort of advertising … What kind of promises does it make? And then there’s the on-the-ground examples. I love you how Southwest Airlines has sort of enabled or empowered its flight attendants to be who they are and have fun and be fun. And so flying with them is a very different experience in a lot of ways but one of the big ones and most positive is just that you’re interacting with people that actually seem like they like what they’re doing. And they make it a little more pleasant for you to be there.

Jim Asplund:
And so part of the book we talk about how do you understand that what you want to do is reduced the variants in those emotional outcomes by making every customer feel that way about you. But that might actually require you to cut the strings of some of your employees as for anybody … You’ve seen Pinocchio, which is probably all of us. And let the people who are doing the job on the ground be who they are. Let them know what you want them to do but don’t necessarily tie their hands by describing exactly how they’re supposed to do it.

Jim Asplund:
I mean we all have some rules. You need to wear the uniform. You need to do this. You need to do that but beyond that, we’re much better at understanding the outcome in the pattern and being ourselves to achieve that than we are at trying to remember a really long script of things to do. And oftentimes those go the wrong way too.

Steve Wershing:
So there’s a tendency also to collect that measurement at the corporate level and then try to do things on an organization level to sort of systematize that experience. So what you’re saying is really interesting. Besides just letting the team members be themselves and enjoy what they do and reflect that on the clients, what kinds of things can we teach the individual people interacting with clients to help them understand? Because in our business, individual team members may be the primary point of contact with the organization.

Steve Wershing:
So you might have an organization of advisers and have five or seven advisers, what kinds of things would you encourage those folks to do to sort of better understand what turns the client on? And how they feel valued and how to develop that emotional connection as an alternative or as a supplement to actually collecting information on client feelings about the firm?

Jim Asplund:
Sure. So I think you need to do the basic research and understand what’s common and when things go right and when it doesn’t go right. And it varies obviously from circumstance to circumstance but ideally, you communicate that to the people who are actually interacting with the customers. And you encourage them to think about when their stuff goes right, what’s it feel like, what’s it look like, how does it line up with what we identified as the general pattern. And when things don’t go wrong, now we’re not always the greatest judges of our own behavior on that. And the financial advisor is in a little trickier spot because oftentimes you might be the only one in the room with the customers.

Jim Asplund:
So it’s a little trickier but in general, one should have a little help from your colleagues who observe you doing this to help steer you in that way as well. We like to talk about this sort of transformation of managers today as more less boss and more of a coach, where they help you identify, observe what you’re doing, help you understand what things went right, reinforce when things went right, check in with you and make quick connections with you to kind of message those things with you and help you develop with a little coaching and some reviews.

Jim Asplund:
Frequent and informal reviews, I want to emphasize to help you learn on the job and experience when things are going right for you because people will be able to identify that feeling and that stuff in the moment if it’s reinforced quickly. It’s easier to learn that way than it is a lot of other ways. And even if you’re doing the other communication with the data and the research, you want to reinforce it with this kind of stuff.

Jim Asplund:
So I think the trick is to understand how well you’re doing and make people who are actually interacting with the customers accountable for those things going well but let them try to figure it out on their own to the extent possible because they’re the ones who are there. They have brains. They are capable of learning and getting better if they’re encouraged to do so and managed and developed in a way that encourages them to do that.

Jim Asplund:
And by the way, especially millennial employees now, they really expect that. They’ve grown up in a little different way. Their university experience a little bit different. They’re expecting a little more development. They’re expecting their job to have a little more purpose. If you assign the higher purpose beyond selling them the next cell phone plan to actually making them a customer for life and make them understand that this is the way you want them to relate to you. That’ll mean more to them and they’ll be more inclined to want to do that in general I think than even previous generations of people have been. I’m not sure that answered your question but hey.

Steve Wershing:
Well, there’s a lot of really good stuff in there, yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
And you’re putting me in mind of the fact that often when we think about the client interaction necessarily to some extent, we go down the path of workflow and process and defining the steps that need to happen. And I think we’d probably agree that there’s some benefit. It’s not just the Wild West, just do whatever you want and hope it works out but it’s almost like you’re trying to find that line in what you’re saying between that and not over scripting. I know you’ve got some examples in the book.

Julie Littlechild:
I always think if I have an issue, which say it is, I don’t know, a cell phone company, I know someone like a first-name basis with right now, but if I call them and the first thing I hear is something like, “I’m sorry to hear that Miss Littlechild. I’m sure you feel that way.” And you’re, “Oh no, stop reading that script. Go off script.” And it’s terrible because you feel like you’re not talking to a person anymore. I mean how do we think about the need for workflow and the need for authenticity? And how do we figure out how to draw the line or where to draw the line?

Jim Asplund:
It is an interesting balancing act here, right? Because I feel like the same thing where everyone’s apologizing to me all the time now-

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, but not doing anything about it, which I find interesting.

Jim Asplund:
So I think we lose the significance of the emotional content by scripting it, right? So some people are good at reading the script. They’ll make you feel like they actually believe it and maybe they do but most people, you can kind of tell. And if you think about any kind of our interactions with our children, with our family, with our customers, with our employees, that emotional content, a lot of those sort of edges around what you’re saying. Means a lot to people. And so scripting kind of gets in the way of that because it turns you into some other thing than a person sometimes if you adhere to it a little too strongly.

Jim Asplund:
Financial world, I understand people are a lot harder placed there because the regulatory environment sometimes makes you do things that sound like you don’t know what you’re doing because you have to bring somebody else in to authorize things. Or make you have to sign a lot of things or go through a procedure that’s just you know. Sometimes it’s how you do it. I mean a lot of this stuff may be unavoidable but if you could explain to people why you’re doing it and kind of try to personalize it in a way that’s useful to you, people will understand that to the extent possible you can do some of that.

Jim Asplund:
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve done work with like a retail banking environment where if a customer’s standing in line and they’re watching a bunch of employees not doing anything, it makes them really angry. Now they don’t know that they’ve… bulkanized the job so much that those people literally don’t have anything to do until somebody needs them to do something else. And so we tell them, if you don’t have anything to do, look busy, so they don’t get mad at you.

Jim Asplund:
People understand it if they come to them, I realize how old I am and I’m talking about people going to the bank but you go to bank at noon, it’s a dated example somewhat. You go to bank at noon, you expect to wait, right? I’m like, “Okay, I’m like every other doofus here at the same time.” And people will blame themselves rather than the bank oversimplifying things but if you got a bunch people standing around out doing anything or when you get up there, can’t do anything without nine other people approving it, it makes them look like you hired people who don’t know what they’re doing.

Jim Asplund:
Now there are ways to do that, that can make them not look so helpless, that it’s a little long to get into that here. So think about this that you’re always kind of on camera. Think about the signal you’re sending to people with the way you do some of these procedures that sometimes may be unavoidable. Yes, I have to get a permit from the city but make me understand why and make it a little less onerous of an experience and I’ll run with it a lot more happily than otherwise.

Julie Littlechild:
And I mean to me because we started part of this conversation with the connection between the client and the employee interaction and these are the examples. These are the examples that make it so clear that we can’t look at the client experience just as a client issue. It’s both, right?

Jim Asplund:
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
To our peril, we can go down one path and get it very wrong.

Jim Asplund:
Easily, and you need eyes open, ears open all the time to understand what’s happening, always kind of question the way you’re doing things, not in a paranoid way but in a healthy sort of continuous improvement way. So whatever signals you’re getting, be those from survey data, be those from actual interactions or just talking to customers, keep those lines of communication open, let the employees feel like active participants in it so that if they have a good idea, listen to it.

Jim Asplund:
I mean if they have an idea, I should say listen to it. They won’t all be good. A lot of them won’t be good but you want them to feel like they can contribute those because sometimes the people who interact with their customer will have a much better sense of what to do or at least what’s going wrong in a negative environment than people who are kind of analyzing it from two layers away. And even if their idea isn’t that great, you want them to feel part of the solution because they’ll be that much more involved in whatever ends up happening.

Julie Littlechild:
You make this reference, I probably won’t get it exactly right, but when you’re thinking about client experience, I’ll paraphrase if I could. If you’re thinking about client experience and making changes, are you doing that to solve a business problem or a client problem? And you said something along those lines somewhere but I thought it’s such a great … and it’s not a bad thing to solve a business problem but understand that that is very different, that’s about efficiency and profitability. But when we start also saying how do we solve the client problem, first of all we have to understand what they are and not assume we understand what they are because it turns out the client problems aren’t solving your business problems often. So just clarifying that, right? I think is really interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
Look, we kept you way more than we said we would but what are you looking at now as you look forward, do you have this rule of being able to try to look forward and answer some big questions? What are you seeing coming? What has captured your imagination?

Jim Asplund:
Well, we’ve been doing some really interesting work lately on a sort of employee side in terms of identifying the kind of common things that people are asked to do in their job. If you actually look at how people are kind of measured and the things we want them to do, we found really only about seven big buckets of things that we saw the core expectations and they’re big. So the core expectations have you know, you build relationships with people, you develop people, you lead change, you inspire people, think critically, communicate clearly and create accountability. Those are really the kind of seven big things we want employees to do on the job.

Jim Asplund:
And so once we’ve identified that, now we’ve kind of come back to our strengths research that I’ve been doing and others have been doing to understand, how do you take who you are to best do those seven things? And so at some point, we’re going to kind of release this. I don’t know exactly how but we’re putting together content that says you with these sort of what we call themes of strength or talent, how do you as an analytical person build relationships? It’s going to be different than how someone who is sort of naturally empathetic does that. We’re different people. We perceive situations differently. Both of them have value but we need to understand that those things happen differently.

Jim Asplund:
And so if you think in the context, again, I think of a financial advisor meeting with a customer for the first time, and you want to tell them that, “Hey, you need to build a rapport with these people and build a relationship with them.” If you’ve given a list of things that people are supposed to do, that list may or may not line up with kind of what’s easy for you to do. And so if you’re sort of person who naturally succeeds at connecting with people, you don’t need the script. You’re going to do fine.

Jim Asplund:
And if you’re a highly analytical person, the scripts going to maybe include seven things that are really not very comfortable for you.

Julie Littlechild:
Smile.

Jim Asplund:
Yeah, smile. Say hello within seven seconds and shake hands and all those stuff. Some of that’s non-negotiable, right? As a person you might expect someone to actually smile at you or be nice to you. Don’t judge on how well they did it but if you’re a highly analytical person, lead with that and say, “Hey, I’m a kind of a numbers guy and here’s what I think we can do for you.” And lean into that because they’re going to notice that that’s what you’re passionate about and that’s value you have to sell. And they might be that kind of person too. And even if they aren’t, they might want you to be who you are when you’re talking to them because that’s going to feel like you’re actually interacting instead of kind of going through a routine.

Jim Asplund:
And so we’re trying to package that in a way so that once you take the Clifton Strengths Assessment, it says, hey if you want to learn how to kind of do a little better on your job with who you are, here’s some tips. Again, all of our work is around how do you start the conversation. We think ultimately when we collect data, it should spur a conversation not replace it. At any time the data collection is replacing a conversation, you kind of missed a point because if that’s the end of things, you’re not going to get out of it what you need.

Julie Littlechild:
So Jim you mentioned that your marketing department would be appalled by the extent to which you cannot quickly identify where to go to look. So we’ll make sure that we include all of the links in the show notes that people get correct ones and-

Steve Wershing:
Have your marketing people spending over to it.

Julie Littlechild:
Okay, where would you suggest people go to learn more about you or the work that you’re doing?

Jim Asplund:
The beautiful thing about working a place like Gallup is we’re easy to find.

Julie Littlechild:
Yes.

Jim Asplund:
If you go to Gallup.com, you can find a link to just about everything we do from our Strengths work to our work in terms of employee and customer engagement to our Strengths work. We build assessments for to help hire more productive people. Obviously we do a lot of polling still on the most important issues of the day, as well as well-being around the world. It’s a cool place to work because we were awash in really interesting information. That sort of Gallup.com is the gateway to a lot of that stuff. I could give you a handful of links but I think if you just do all that, you’re good.

Julie Littlechild:
Okay, that’s perfect. We will make sure that is in there and thank you so much for your time. It’s been just fascinating talking with you.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, thank you Jim.

Jim Asplund:
Oh, it’s nice to talk to you guys. It’s always fun to kind of get on the phone and go through these things.

Steve Wershing:
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at Becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. So until next time, so long.