The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship featuring Neal Woodson

Transcript

Rob Dwyer (00:37.929)
Thank you for joining another episode of Next in Queue today. I have speaker teacher and author Neal Woodson among many other things. Welcome to the show Neal. How are you?

Neal Woodson (00:52.684)
Hi, Rob. It's really, really good to be here. I enjoyed, had a, I know we had a conversation the other day, but I really appreciate you having me on.

Rob Dwyer (01:02.389)
Well, I'm excited to dig into the topic of your most recent book. You have a couple of books, but your most recent book is called Giving a S#!+. How a willingness to be inconvenienced can transform your business, work, and your life.

Neal Woodson (01:21.634)
I'll shamelessly self promote right here. There you go. That's it.

Rob Dwyer (01:23.241)
Yeah, it's it's it's a great book. I highly recommend it. And it is a as you said, it's a relatively easy read. It's not going to be too down in the muck, but it has a number of great stories. And I think I'd like to just kind of characterize and get your reaction to this. Part of the main premise of the book. Is that? We have through a series of.

misattributions, flawed interpretations and stories been

hood winked into believing something that isn't true about ourselves and that something is that we are inherently selfish and that we are greedy and and all of that is not to paraphrase a certain movie but but that is good. You reframe all of this in the book. Tell me a little bit about that.

narrative.

Neal Woodson (02:35.404)
Well...

This is something that's bothered me for a long, long, long time. When I was a kid, I hate to take you back to my childhood, but when I was a child, I was the youngest of three boys. And so I got beat at everything. I lost all the time. We played games, I lost. We did pretty much everything to the point where my parents would occasionally tell my brothers, let him win.

him win? Well, one thing that I've noticed in myself is that I suck at losing. I'm just not, I'm a very poor loser. I don't do well in competition. try to get, I try to move away from competition when it's possible because of that, because I don't, I don't like that version of me. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it brings out the worst version of

On top of that, something else that, and this is really happening more and more these days, is a lot of kind of self-absorbed, self-centered self-interest. These days you see everybody, you know, it's me, me, me, me, me, all about me, gotta do this, this is about me, hey, look at me. And I never liked that, you know, and probably because I see a bit of that in myself, you know. We often see the things in ourselves that we don't.

that there are things in ourselves that we don't like, so we just don't like it generally. And I don't like any of that. So, you know, when I started my, got into my career more properly, you know, outside of those summer jobs and things, I started to see that in the business world, it is framed around that idea of competition and self-centered kind of self-absorbed self-interest. And I never liked it. It never felt right to me.

Neal Woodson (04:30.402)
The only thing that felt right to me was when I helped other people. And the more I thought about that, was like, there's something to this. There's something about this that's inherently right and wrong at the same time. And so it kind of came to a head in 2020, my wife and I were going to take a vacation. And that of course got canceled because of the pandemic. And my wife is...

kind of our consummate travel planner in our house. And she started to cancel reservations and get money back and just, was hassle after hassle after hassle. And she was being just kind of kicked around by companies. And I remember one day she just kind of threw her phone down and said, why is nothing ever easy? How come companies don't care about customers? And of course, at this point, I'm pretty cynical about it all because I'm thinking, well,

What did you expect? I mean, all they care about is your money. They don't care about you. But that really resonated for me. And I was thinking, it shouldn't be this way. Why is it this way? And, you know, I discussed this with some other people and most of them would say things like, well, that's just human nature. It's the way we are. And I have to thinking, but if it's the way we are, how can it make makes us feel so lousy? And particularly me, you know, it makes me feel just terrible.

But the only thing that makes me feel really good is when I'm doing something for somebody else. I'm really being helpful. So I decided, okay, I'm going to research this. I'm going to find out what the deal is. And what I found was pretty astounding to me, at least. It was pretty astounding that for centuries we have been told in stories and all kinds of things. And I believe that initially it was to try to give us some way of articulating what people were

doing at the time. We were fighting each other in wars or whatever it was. so if we look back at, for example, let's look at the Bible, for example. You go in there and for like the first two pages, humans are good. And then we eat the apple and it's all downhill from there. And if you go through history a little bit more, you get into what the 16th, 17th century, you get people like Thomas Hobbes who says,

Neal Woodson (06:56.366)
our lives are nasty, brutish and short, you know, and the story of man is just man against man. You know, that's the way we are. You roll into the 1800s and you get people like Herbert Spencer, who was a contemporary of Darwin's, who kind of perverted Darwinism and turned it into survival of the fittest, which Darwin never said, by the way. Darwin, if you read what he, things he said, it was more about

people who will survive will be the ones who adapt and who are more helpful with each other. So if Darwin had said something, it probably would have been more like survival of the friendliest. but that was perverted and, it was given, you know, Spencer did it because he was a white Christian male who was in power in a power position and wanted to keep it that way. And so, you know, and what that spawned was a whole lot of bad things. mean,

Rob Dwyer (07:29.461)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (07:56.63)
Nazism came out of that, white supremacists, apartheid, eugenics, all were in that, came out of that seed. And then you have Ayn Rand comes along and writes a book about selfishness as if it's a virtue. That's a virtue. And everyone, No one should help each other. You're on your own. You definitely do not want Ayn Rand in a foxhole with you.

Rob Dwyer (08:22.197)
Ha ha ha

Neal Woodson (08:25.772)
So we've been told stories pretty much throughout history that humans are bad. We are selfish. We are competitive, but we have to be because that's the only way you succeed. And what I found was in a lot of the research I did was that actually for the first couple hundred thousand years of our existence, we weren't that way. We were actually much more helpful and thank heavens for that because

Rob Dwyer (08:38.422)
Mmm.

Neal Woodson (08:55.75)
humans are not the biggest, fastest or strongest. And, somewhere along the line, somebody realized, you know, whenever UGG goes out to get the saber tooth tiger, UGG doesn't come home. You know, cause you go out by yourself and you become dinner. You don't get dinner, you know, but when we worked together and helped each other, we were able to go out and land dinner, you know, and bring it home. And, that's how we've really survived.

Rob Dwyer (09:13.695)
Mmm.

Neal Woodson (09:26.164)
all these millennia. We have helped each other. I we have created cities. We have engineering feats. We've gone to the moon. We've conquered diseases. Why? Because we've helped each other. We didn't do it on our own. Nobody has done it individually. It's always been with help of other people. And so this story that we are at our core, evil, brutish beasts, just isn't true. If anything, what I found

in the research was that we are both, we are both selfish and competitive, but we are selfish and competitive to survive. We are helpful and cooperative to succeed. Those are two different things. And, given what I, what I've found about kind of mother nature's part in this, she would much prefer that we were helpful and cooperative, because we are healthier and happier in doing that, you know, and there's science behind.

Rob Dwyer (10:09.085)
Hmm. Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (10:26.367)
Yeah, absolutely. So let's let's start there and and talk about the science behind it because you dig into this a little bit in the book. When we help people, what does that do physiologically for us?

Neal Woodson (10:39.49)
Well, and please don't, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, I'm none of that. I'm just a traveling salesman who just tried to learn more. I always tell people I'm kind of John the Baptist out there trying to preach the word. But what I found was that probably the biggest thing is when we are helpful to others, we get this little chemical cocktail of

Rob Dwyer (10:49.654)
You

Neal Woodson (11:08.994)
various hormones and things that we just get a little of that. And it makes us feel really good. And what's even more interesting is it doesn't just happen for the giver. It happens for the receiver. They get a little hit. And to make it even better, when people see it or hear about it, they get a little hit. And in fact, if you go to a movie and you see somebody in a movie do something really kind,

You ever notice how you feel kind of warm and really good? There you go. It's mother nature's kind of push. It's a shove saying, this is the way it ought to be. Do this and you'll feel good. You'll be happier. And there's, there's some research being done that says that we are actually happier when we are serving others, when we do things for others, that's what makes us truly happy. On the other side of it is the health piece. And I found this really interesting was there's a lot of research that's been done.

that people that are helpful to others typically have lower blood pressure, less heart disease, lower rates of depression, and even live longer on average. And I found this really interesting is that when a doctor gives like 40 seconds of compassionate speech to a patient, like, you know, turns to a patient says, you know, I'm here with you. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to

do my best to make sure nothing bad happens here. That those patients actually heal faster.

Because what happens that little chemical hit that makes us feel good also suppresses the stress hormone cortisol. And we all know what stress does. Stress is bad for our health. Over the long term, it's good in the short term. I we need it in the short term. mean, know, saber-tooth tiger is running after you. Yeah, you want cortisol. You want some stress. You want to take off and run, right? But living on that is really bad for us. And what we have set up in our society

Rob Dwyer (12:55.873)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (13:02.647)
Right.

Neal Woodson (13:15.302)
is almost living on that constantly. We are bombarded with cortisol, worried about our jobs, worried about this, worried about that, scared, you know, we're in competition, I gotta win, I gotta beat the guy next to me. All that does is it stresses us out and we get sick. And the antidote to all of that is just let's stop it and be helpful, be cooperative. Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Dwyer (13:39.775)
Yeah, pay it forward, right? mean, that kindness can be very, very contagious. But it's not just about being nice, right? Take us into the concept of compassion the way that you broke it down in the book.

Neal Woodson (13:58.616)
Well, compassion has, gets kind of a bad name in one respect. And that is a lot of people think, you know, that's, that's for church. That's for charities. That's for that stuff. It's, or it's, that's too touchy feely. And what are you talking about? Compassion? Really? and I didn't set out with this, with, with compassion in mind at all. It kind of came upon me as the more I did.

research and more work I did around this. But what I found was the definition of compassion is that it is seeing the suffering or needs of another coupled to a desire to help.

So it's kind of an awareness and action at the same time, you know? And that makes it different from empathy, because empathy is actually, you know, me putting my shoes, putting myself in Rob's shoes and say, okay, I know what it feels like to be Rob. I know what it's like to, you know, have a bad day in Rob's world. And I can feel that. Compassion doesn't, I don't have to feel what you feel. All I have to do is be aware that Rob's having a bad day.

What can I do to help? That's compassion. And when you think about it that way and you look at, let's just take business for example, business for example, business is a, it really is a compassionate premise. What do we do in business? We consider the needs of our customers and we help them. And that's compassion. So what if we focused on that?

Rob Dwyer (15:18.327)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (15:45.358)
What if we got more focused on that as what we do? How would that change things? I think it would make it a ton better and we'd all feel better and we'd be healthier. So that's kind of where I went with that. I didn't get too terribly deep into it, but I wanted to be clear that empathy and compassion aren't the same thing. They're related. And in fact, it's good to have empathy if you can. It can make you even more compassionate.

Rob Dwyer (16:14.849)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (16:15.992)
but it's not absolutely necessary to be compassionate. Because for example, you know, I was present at the birth of both of my children. I don't know what that feels like. I can't, right? There's no way I can know exactly. I know what pain feels like, but I still don't know exactly what it feels like to give birth. But I can see you suffering and I want to help you, you know? So there's a depth to empathy that compassion doesn't necessarily have.

Rob Dwyer (16:25.943)
Ha.

Rob Dwyer (16:38.923)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (16:46.914)
but also empathy doesn't require you to act. You can have empathy and do nothing.

Rob Dwyer (16:52.651)
Yeah, for sure. So you brought up business and this really was a book about business. We haven't talked a lot about business yet, but a lot of business people will say, well, Neal, that's, that's good and all, but we're here to make a profit. That's, that's what business does. And you made an interesting analogy, I think in the book between

Neal Woodson (17:01.55)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (17:22.359)
Profit and breathing can can you expand on that for us because I love

Neal Woodson (17:28.384)
So let me backtrack briefly - Let's define service first.
Years ago, I was doing a workshop for a bunch of senior vice presidents and vice presidents and the CEO of a company they wanted to refocus on service and and He the CEO had talked to me and he said I think we need to talk to these guys first and I said that that's great. Yes, absolutely, you know, and so The first thing I did in this little workshop was What is service? Let's get level set. Let's make sure we all have the same definition And of course the stuff I got back was, you

Exceeding customer expectations, going above and beyond for a customer, solving customer problems, taking care of customers. And I stopped them. I had to stop there. You know, was like somebody ate a marketing book and barfed it up. You know, I was like, stop. First of all, you have not really defined what it is and you're couching everything in terms of customers. We serve in other ways.

So I kind of had to just say, okay, I'm going to just cut to the chase. Service is helping people. That's all it is. It's not a fancy bunch of mumbo jumbo. It's just helping people. And the thing is, it's so much bigger than customer service. It is something we do from the moment we get up in the morning to the time we go to bed. It is a fundamental human thing. There are a lot of scientists that believe it is our superpower.

Our ability to work with each other in large groups and help each other is the thing that has literally kept us alive and helped us become the stewards of the planet. But we do it all the time. If you get up in the morning and you make coffee or breakfast for the family and you get your kids ready for school and drop them at the bus stop and you help somebody with a report at work and you pick up milk on the way home and you make dinner and help with the dishes, guess what? All of that service, every bit.

You do it all day. We just don't think of it in those terms. And so the next question I asked that team, said, so what's the purpose of business? And guess what they all said exactly what you did a minute ago. Oh, to make money. And so at the time, that time, I don't know why I didn't use it in the book, but the, the example I gave was, so I guess the purpose of your car is to fill it with fuel.

Neal Woodson (20:26.414)
And I said, what do you mean? said, what's the purpose of your car? And they said to get from point A to point B, you know, to transport me. said, exactly. It's not to fill it with fuel. And that's exactly what money is. Money is just the fuel for the business. But the purpose of the business is not that at all. Now in the book, I talked about a little differently. said, I wanted, know, take a deep breath, you know, breathe it out. Take another breath. Now see how many breaths you take in five minutes or whatever.

Count those. Now, do it for a whole day. Come back and tell me how many breaths you took for the whole day. Ultimately, all that's absurd, right? Nobody's gonna do that. You I don't know how many breaths you take in a day. I don't care. Breathing is not the purpose of living, but you need to breathe to live. Money is not the purpose of business. It's something we need in order to make it live. That's all. It is an outcome of doing business.

Rob Dwyer (21:21.857)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (21:25.004)
what business, the purpose of business is to help people. And the way I came upon that, it's kind of odd. My son was a, my son played lacrosse his whole life from the time he was five all the way through college. He was an All-American Division III lacrosse player, very proud of him. But in that time, I must've gone to a thousand games and stood on the sidelines talking to other parents. And in invariably in those conversations,

So what do you do for a living? And people talk, I work for ABC Industries. I don't know that company. What do you guys do? And I'd get a couple of different answers. Well, ABC helps people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or we make widgets. what are widgets for? Well, widgets help people, da, da, da, da. So over and over and over, I'm hearing, we help people. we help people. our product helps people.

So it really dawned on me after hanging out a billion times that pretty much seems like the purpose of business is to help people. Its whole purpose is a service orientation. The whole reason it exists is to help people. And the more I've thought about it, it's three things. You either help people do things they don't want to do or help them do things they don't know how to do, or you help them get access to things they can't readily access.

And every business does one, two, or three of those things. And just to make sure I wasn't crazy, I went looking for other thought leaders to see if anybody else had thought the same way. And I found that people like Tom Peters, the writer who wrote In Search of Excellence, probably one of the biggest and most famous business books of all time. Philip Kotler, I believe he teaches at Northwestern, big marketing guru. Leo Burnett, big advertising executive.

Stephen Covey, who everybody knows from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Robert Lusch, who was the co-creator of service dominant logic. All of them, I can find quotes from them that essentially say the business of business is service.

Neal Woodson (23:41.132)
And for me, that was like, yay, I'm not crazy. I'm not a nut, you know? And so I really got excited by that thought. The purpose of business is to serve. In fact, business is just the institutionalized form of what we all do every day, all day. And as part of that institution, money changes hands, but it doesn't change the purpose. The purpose is to...

Rob Dwyer (23:44.311)
Hahaha

Rob Dwyer (24:01.943)
Hmm.

Neal Woodson (24:11.086)
help people. And when you think about it that way, and you consider the fact that most people think the purpose of business is to make money, there is a fundamental misalignment. And that fundamental misalignment is, in my estimation, maybe the key problem that causes us to have terrible experiences and get terrible service in places.

because you've got a rowboat with people in it and they're all pet they're rowing in different directions.

Rob Dwyer (24:42.473)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Neal Woodson (24:43.776)
If you want an organization to work well, everybody needs to be rowing in the same direction. And if everybody in your organization knows that what we do is serve.

Guess what? Everybody's working to do better, to be better at service. So that's a huge thing for me.

Rob Dwyer (25:02.071)
So why aren't people doing that? mean, why is the message not clear in organizations? And why are people like you having to reinforce this and shout from the mountaintops, hey, we're here to serve. Because I don't think that that's what we see in our day-to-day lives with

most of the companies.

Neal Woodson (25:34.508)
Well, most, if you look at most companies, I kind of think this is, there's humor here. If you look at most companies, they segment service into something called customer service.

And to me, that's like saying, okay, we have a football team, but the only people that need to practice football are the wide receivers. Everybody else, you do whatever else you do. It's absurd. Everybody in the business ought to be practicing service. They ought to be doing it. And I just literally think it's because business leaders have, again, there's that hoodwinked by we got to compete, we got to win, we got to win, we got to win. And winning is making more money.

And that's just fundamentally wrong. It's just incorrect. And on top of that, that's what we train. Think about it. What do you think? What do they train in business schools? How many classmates do you think they get in, in treating humans like humans?

Rob Dwyer (26:37.451)
Hmm. I haven't been to business school. I've gotten my contact center MBA, but that's very different because we we spend a lot of time doing that. But I think in in your average business school, the answer is probably.

Neal Woodson (26:38.125)
I'll give you the-

Neal Woodson (26:52.684)
Well, what I found, again, a little bit of research, I found that rough, this is rough because I had to do kind of a survey of curriculum in different, in business schools. And I also did some surveying of training in industry. Okay. I found roughly about 80 % of the training people get is all technical stuff. And a lot of that technical stuff is financial, you know,

And then it whittles down to whatever you do, know, whatever your role is. So if you have a certain kind of role, you probably get more of something, something else. But in general, in a business school, it's a lot of financial stuff, strategy, all of that kind of stuff. And only 20 % is related to the human stuff.

Rob Dwyer (27:43.167)
Is that because there's an expectation that you're human, you should bring that to the table to begin with?

Neal Woodson (27:49.964)
I think it goes back to something we kind of alluded to earlier. That's something you should get at home. And there was a day when that did happen. When we were getting, we were getting some of that stuff at home. You were getting mom saying, say please and thank you. You know, say you're welcome. Listen to your brother. You were getting that. You were getting some of that stuff. And,

Rob Dwyer (27:56.951)
Mmm.

Neal Woodson (28:17.718)
And I don't want to sound like I'm crazy religious type, but we did actually went to church more. And as part of church, you kind of learn some of the ethics and morals. There's a lot of, there can be a lot of bad things you get from that environment. But one thing you do get is typically a little bit of kind of, some compassion and, and, listening and, that kind of stuff, right. Manners, those kinds of things.

We don't do a whole lot that anymore. you know, and a lot of parents aren't modeling that for their children, you know, and particularly today you've got people that are everybody, you know, hating each other. And so there's, there's so much and, and, and look at, at media, look at television, for example, and how many shows there are that are literally built around people just yelling at each other, all that.

Rob Dwyer (28:59.03)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (29:13.902)
you know, housewives or wherever and all that stuff, all that made up drama. It's all just people who have almost no emotional intelligence yelling at each other about stuff. And so that's what's being modeled. And so where are we going to get this skill to work with humans? We, we were going to have to train it.

Rob Dwyer (29:39.231)
Yeah, there is certainly something to be said for the great fooling of the world that reality TV is reality, because it's the farthest thing from the truth. But if you see enough of it, those behaviors will become part of the culture part of the zeitgeist and and people will start to mirror

what they are seeing and and you talk a lot about that in the book. So let's talk about mirroring or demonstrating the kinds of behaviors that we want people to mirror. Where do we start?

Neal Woodson (30:10.432)
Exactly.

Neal Woodson (30:25.848)
Well, one of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of messages and models and behaviors, right? And that...

we get, we need messages. We need, and one of the best ways to teach, particularly like if you're a parent, you start out with messages and you start by telling your kids. And I use this example in the book. You when I was growing up as a kid, my mom and dad wanted to teach me how to say please and thank you. And somewhere early on, my dad sat down and told me, when you ask for something, you say please. And when you get it, you say thank you. And then my parents,

My dad was pretty smart guy. He made sure that when he asked for something, he always said, please. And when he got it, he said, thank you. So he modeled it. So I saw it. So not only did I hear it, I saw it. And then I was encouraged to do it myself. And when I asked for something, I'd say, can I have some salt? Both of my parents would look at me with that look we all got when we were kids, probably.

Immediately I went, please. And then they would hand you the salt and I would take it and I would put it down and my dad would go, now what? Thank you. There you go. And after doing that over and over and over, it became part of my behavior. And I think we have to do, if we want to teach people, we can't just go to a class. I can't just send.

Rob Dwyer (31:45.546)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (32:01.262)
a whole bunch of people from a call center and the classes say, okay, shake hands and smile. No, it has to be modeled throughout the organization. And this is my, maybe one of the biggest ideas or not, it's not really an idea, but thoughts in the book is that what we do inside our house, if we want to have a certain kind of behavior outside of the house, we need to have it inside the house. And that's what I think a lot of things are missing. We think that,

Well, you know, that's really just for the customer service folks. That's what they do. So everybody could go train them on shaking hands and smiling. And when they come back, that's what they're going to do all day. Everybody else go ahead and fight and do whatever you do. That's BS total BS. That doesn't work. You need everybody in the house working by the same rules, doing the same stuff because everybody serves somebody. And I,

example I use all the time in classes is imagine if you are a parent and if you came home every day and you screamed and yelled at your kids, what's the likelihood that out on the playground they're screaming and yelling at their friends? Pretty high, right? If you want the people on your front line

Rob Dwyer (33:14.433)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (33:20.852)
acting and behaving a specific way, they need to see it everywhere else in the organization, from leadership all the way down.

So.

Rob Dwyer (33:33.911)
One of the most effective things that I ever experienced in an organization when it related to this, and I don't think it happens enough, in the front lines in call centers, in particular contact centers, agents are constantly getting coached. Ideally, agents are constantly getting coached. The question is, who's coaching the coaches?

And so a really effective way of modeling this throughout the organization is where you see the different levels of leadership all coming together for a coaching session and being very specific about what's happening after, because it can be really scary if you're an agent and your manager and their manager and their manager all show up. But the purpose then is

Okay, we have a coaching session and then the agent leaves and then that that frontline team leader or supervisor who was just coached. Now they're getting coached on how they executed their coaching. And then they leave and now the manager who just coached that team leader, they're getting coached on how they coach them. So that cycle of, we all get coached.

Neal Woodson (34:47.8)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (35:03.253)
because that's how we get better at whatever our function is within the company. Seeing that as someone who is maybe new to the organization makes that whole idea of getting coached, not a, I'm doing something wrong and therefore this is, this is punishment or I have to be corrected because I can't figure this out.

whatever those feelings are that people get. And instead it's just, this is the way we all operate. We all want to get better. And the way that that happens is through coaching. And so we all participate.

Neal Woodson (35:47.66)
Right. But that's culture. That's what culture is. This is the way we do things around here. You know, and so when somebody starts out, you know, in, whatever business it is, if they have that, that's their culture that needs to be pretty clearly spelled out to people. They need to hear that and know, okay, this doesn't mean you've done something wrong. We're constantly striving to get better. Yeah. We're all trying to get better. And so everybody, everybody gets coached by somebody. That's the way we do things.

Rob Dwyer (35:50.133)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Dwyer (36:15.275)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (36:17.185)
This is our culture. So fear not, you know, and I really do think that that's the way that that helps that will really help people to take that experience for what it's supposed to be, you know. But you bring up an interesting point about coaching. And yes, I did. My first book was about coaching. And we often think that coaching is really teaching.

Rob Dwyer (36:30.241)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (36:45.422)
teaching and coaching are very different things. Teaching is about telling. Coaching is about listening and asking questions. Coaching is about helping people help themselves. And so a lot of people think that coaching is, okay, I just listened to you on this call and here's five things you didn't do well and five things, here's the ways to fix those when what really should happen should be, so tell me how you think that call went. What went well, what didn't go well?

Rob Dwyer (36:56.469)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (37:15.896)
How should it look? What would great look like to you? What do you think you could do better? How can I help you do that? Notice I never told them one thing in that. All I did was ask questions because I'm trying to get you to see it yourself because when you begin to see it yourself, you won't do it again. You will actually get better.

Rob Dwyer (37:29.718)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (37:39.467)
Great.

Neal Woodson (37:42.062)
But when all I do is give you a checklist of things that now you have to put on the side of your computer because you really didn't, you didn't come up with it yourself because you don't, you don't really own it now. You just, it's just a thing. It's another thing I got to do. Instead, I can give you ownership by asking you and saying, what do you think? What do you think the problem is? What would you do to make it better? Now you own those things. You've come up with them. So we really have to be clear on what coaching is and how it works.

for it to be effective.

Rob Dwyer (38:14.039)
Yeah, you and I could do a whole episode just on that for sure. know we...

Neal Woodson (38:18.702)
All right, well, I'm not busy next week.

Rob Dwyer (38:23.063)
Let's talk about the person who is actually that I'll say frontline person right we we know that culture is a Really good culture often flows from the top because we need to see it modeled But that doesn't mean that

I can't make an impact if I'm in an organization that maybe doesn't have this service minded attitude permeating through it. What can I do if I'm not in the C suite to make a change?

Neal Woodson (39:11.384)
Well, let's be real clear. First of all, walking up to the boardroom and hammering your 95 thesis on the wall of revolution to change the world from a service perspective, that won't work.

Rob Dwyer (39:26.901)
I mean, it worked for Martin Luther.

Neal Woodson (39:28.238)
Well, sort of. Sort of. It was a rough ride. It took a long time, but that typically doesn't work. So you have to understand that what you're going to do is all by influence. And your influence is first finding out if there are other people who feel the same way.

Rob Dwyer (39:30.763)
word.

Took a long time, but...

Neal Woodson (39:56.942)
I like to call this building your little army, not of insurgents, just a little army, but to find out. And there usually are people who feel this way and don't go to the customer service department looking for the cause they're all a ton of them are in there. You don't want no go to other places looking for, go to the marketing department, go into whoever sales departments, find people who feel this same way and feel like,

Rob Dwyer (40:02.679)
You

Neal Woodson (40:26.638)
Service is a pretty big deal and it really needs to permeate our company. And I think it would make our company much better if we had a different kind of frame of mind. Great. And then start a book club. I got a book you can read. But there's a whole bunch of different kind of books and things you could do. You could sit down and at lunchtime just, hey, we're going to talk about chapter two. Let's all sit here and talk about it. And I know that sounds goofy, but it's a good way to get the conversation started.

to find some people who have like minds and want to make change and then talk about, okay, we've read this book or what are we going to do? What can we all do in our daily jobs to just make incremental changes? You know, how can I better serve the person next to me? How can I better serve the people who I serve? You know, I work in accounts payable. Who the hell do I serve? You serve our suppliers.

you serve our suppliers, but you would serve the entire company. So what can you do to make that better? What can you do to make it better for the people in your role? And then to encourage it, you you're, you are now the, the, the voice you go out and encourage it. When you see people doing things, Hey, I saw what you did. That's fantastic. Great job. Well done. You know, and if you, and if

Definitely, if you're like a middle manager in your next meeting, invite people from some other departments to come in your meeting. Say, why are we here? Because we want to work with you. We want to work with all the different people in our company because I don't want to compete with you and I don't want to silo. I want us to work together. So I invited some people from sales, I invited somebody from operations, I invited, because I want them to hear what we're talking about and they can take that back to their department. So you can be the model if you're in that kind of role.

Yeah. So there are actually a lot of things you could potentially do. You know, if you were the call center manager, Hey, you know, in our weekly call center meeting, I brought somebody from sales in, I want to get their perspective on this. Or I brought somebody from the UX designer guys. I brought one of those guys in here to talk to us about the design of this new product or whatever, but get more perspectives and be the voice of collaboration and working together. So.

Rob Dwyer (42:48.919)
Yeah. I'd like to get your perspective on some recent company news, who's a company that I think that we've all heard of. And I think a company that was really pretty famous for their service culture for a long time, fueled a lot of growth. That company is Starbucks. And I bring this up because you mentioned coffee in your book and you talk about how

Neal Woodson (43:07.15)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (43:13.292)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (43:17.495)
You know, we can make our own coffee at home for really expensive, but if we don't want to do the work, which you mentioned earlier about what service really comes down to, if I just don't feel like making a complicated cup of coffee, I can go to Starbucks and I can spend six, $7 on a cup of coffee and I don't have to lift a finger really. But Starbucks.

Neal Woodson (43:39.256)
sure.

Rob Dwyer (43:46.089)
sought efficiencies. They sought a broader menu offering. And their business didn't see the same kind of growth that had seen in the past. And now they are making some changes, going back to some older ways of doing things. For instance, handwriting on the cups, and whether that's your name or an encouraging message or something like that.

Neal Woodson (44:07.704)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (44:15.923)
I wonder what's your take on

Neal Woodson (44:22.348)
Well, mean, you know, there is Tom Peters in the book, In Search of Excellence. He talks about sticking to the knitting. And, you know, if you do something and it works, why go away from it? Why go in another direction? And, you know, Starbucks has been through this, they went through this period, Howard Schultz left the company and he had to come back where they went off into the whole, okay, we're going to focus on business now.

And Howard Schultz had to come back and say, no, we got to retool. We got to come back. We got to get back to the people, you know? and I'm not, I'm not trying to say that Howard Schultz is some saint or any of that. but that story makes it clear, you know, first of all, if you'd something worked, why are you, why are you moving away from it? Second, what's your real, what was the real, basis for all that? Well, you know,

for Schultz, one of his drivers was, I want to create this third place where people can go and hang out and drink coffee, kind of like the Italian coffee shops on the corner and give people that feel, you know? And that worked. And part of one of the elements of that working was seeing my name with a smiley face on my cup.

Well, some somebody along the way said, Nope, that's not efficient. That doesn't work. It takes 14 split seconds out of the thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, and we, all about efficiencies and saving some money and cutting a few pennies. And, and we've seen hundreds of companies do this. And then they realized that was dumb. Let's go back to being human. And even if it costs us a couple of pennies. Yeah. That customer's coming back.

billion times that year. That matters a lot. Okay, so we lose 10 bucks over the course of a year. We made, you a couple thousand.

Rob Dwyer (46:18.017)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (46:30.254)
A lot of companies are, you know, what do they say? Penny, Pennywise, Pennywise and Pound Foolish. Yeah. Or Dollar Foolish. Yeah. So a lot of companies are like that. You know, it's like, what are you doing? And I think, you know, and I know that Starbucks is trying to do some other things. I know that they're, you know, don't come in here and use the bathroom and all that stuff. And I...

Rob Dwyer (46:36.895)
Any wise pound foolish?

Rob Dwyer (46:45.015)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (46:59.33)
have mixed feelings about that. Part of me says, yeah, you know, a lot of people have abused that. and we live in kind of a scary world. And I know that if I were a manager of a store and I had employees in there and some people came in there were just hanging out at 10 o'clock at night and weren't buying anything, I would get a little nervous. And I don't want to endanger my employees. I also don't want to have to make it a situation where employees have to say, out.

Rob Dwyer (47:21.419)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (47:28.844)
And now they get beat up or something rather. Look, this is our policy. If you come in here, you gotta buy something. You know, I kind of get that from a safety perspective. I don't think it was necessarily done just for some nefarious reason. or at least, you know, I'm, hopeful that it wasn't so, but as far as your first question, getting back to stick to the knitting, what do you do? Well, what worked stay with what worked. And I think nine times out of 10 from a service perspective, when we're

Rob Dwyer (47:52.715)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (47:58.318)
human it always works.

Rob Dwyer (48:00.757)
I wonder if, and maybe this is because we live in an overly litigious society, particularly in the US, if some of those, we lay this out as policy is just proactive guarding. And I'll give you an example.

When I travel, go on a road trip, the best bathrooms are McDonald's. There are some convenience stores that are even better, but I won't find them at every time I need to stop. And so I'll often go to McDonald's, just use the restroom, because my expectation is that it's going to be clean and that might lead

Neal Woodson (48:21.55)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (48:48.865)
to me buying something there, but it might not. There's certainly a better chance that if I'm stopping to use the restroom, that I might also get food there versus go somewhere else to get food. And that seems to be a piece that maybe Starbucks is missing, but I wonder if they're missing that just because they have had experiences in the past.

And they're trying to guard against those and maybe leaving it up to individual stores to be squishy with that. And I don't know. I don't have any insight into Starbucks and how they're doing that, but how much do you think our propensity to

Neal Woodson (49:27.189)
Right, right, I got you.

Rob Dwyer (49:40.001)
focus on the edge cases, particularly the bad edge cases, lead us to making these sweeping decisions that are not terribly inviting or service oriented.

Neal Woodson (49:45.198)
For sure, sure, I'll get you.

Neal Woodson (49:52.686)
This is that whole thing about, why are we punishing 99 % of our customers for the sins of the 1 %? And there are a million examples of that. And like I said, I don't know exactly what their reasoning was for doing it. I'm hoping it wasn't some nefarious, we can save 10 cents on, you because people aren't flushing the toilets or something, who knows?

I'm kind of hoping it's not that. I'm hoping it was, well, because we've had some incidents where people have felt endangered and we want to protect our employees, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know any of that. So please, nobody write in to Rob and say, Neal, someone's an idiot because he said that.

But yeah, I don't think we should do that. I don't think you should punish, you know, punish one 99 % of your customers for the 1%. And there's a great example. Um, Jeanne Bliss, um, who is, uh, if, if you know, do you know Jeanne? Okay. Jeanne wonderful woman. And she wrote a book years ago. Um, I can't remember the name of it. I'll thought my head anyway in it, she gave the example of there's a bicycle company that

actually lets people just take the bike and go ride it. Test like a test ride. And they don't ask you for anything. Just go take it. They just trust you. And over the years, she gives the number and it's been a long time since I read the book, but it was some ridiculous number of, know, out of the 10,000 of those that happened, one bike got stolen or something, you know? but the company didn't, because that one bike got stolen, they didn't change everything. They just kept doing it saying, you know, we trust our customers because they wanted to send that message, you know,

Rob Dwyer (51:36.737)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (51:39.304)
And I remembered the name of the book. I love you more than my dog. was a really, really good book. but, and I, that, that struck me as a great example of exactly that, you know, you have to, as a business, you got to balance that, you know, you'd have to like, like you just did, you said, you know, at McDonald's, maybe they balanced that and said, you know, it's worth it for the handful of people that come in here and use the bathroom and don't buy anything. There's 10 times that to come in here and go, I'm going to go to Coke.

Rob Dwyer (51:55.233)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (52:09.132)
or I'll go in there and grab some fries. I know that I don't do it. I go somewhere and if I use the restroom somewhere, I feel kind of guilty if I don't just get something. I don't know why I do that, but I just, feel a little guilty. I'll have a cup of coffee or something. But.

Rob Dwyer (52:09.651)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Neal Woodson (52:34.486)
Yeah, I mean, that's a difficult, it's a kind of a difficult thing. I mean, you have to balance these things. have to, and I think you would have to, like you said, be squishy. I love that. That's a great phrase. but I think if I was a manager or a store, I'd have to kind of give some guidance to my employees and say, okay, if these guys come in and they say, we got a friend coming and they're the one that they're the only one that's going to buy something. They are going to buy something in a little bit, we're waiting on them. Okay. Give them a break.

Rob Dwyer (52:39.178)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Dwyer (52:43.745)
Yeah.

Neal Woodson (53:01.346)
But if they stay there for three hours and that person never shows up, okay, we got it, get out. You're taking space. People should be using this. But I think you'd have to, you you have to give some parameters. You know, I don't think making it a hard and fast rule is going to be good for anybody. know, making it, anybody comes in here and they don't get anything. If they're in here longer than 14 seconds, then out. You know, I think that would just, that'd be terrible.

Rob Dwyer (53:06.091)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (53:16.672)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (53:29.643)
Yeah, I imagine a lot of people probably wouldn't come back in that situation. Neal, is there anything that we haven't touched on? know we're running short of time, but I want to give you an opportunity to just, if there's a burning thing that you're like, man, Rob, I really wish you would ask me about this. I think your listeners need to understand this. What would that be?

Neal Woodson (53:33.366)
Yeah, exactly.

Neal Woodson (53:52.044)
Not really anything big. mean, you hit the, we hit a lot of the really big items. I think, and I tell people this all the time, the last four words in the book are go do some good. I think that we are living in a world of very strange priorities of prioritizing, our own needs and wants and our own status.

and our own material gains without thinking about what we're doing to other people.

If there's anything we could all do, it would be, can we just all go do something good today? You know, and then do something good tomorrow. And then maybe a couple things on Saturday, you know, um, I don't always do it. try, but, you know, just go do some good, go do more good than, than bad and do stuff for others. And I guarantee there's one thing, you know, as a person in this kind of space who talks about stuff like this.

No, I can't guarantee you'll be more profitable as a company. And in fact, nobody can, nobody can guarantee you that. So don't let any consultant or anybody come to you and say, I guarantee you will make X dollars and I have all the data to prove it. You know what, guess what? There's about 10,000 things that have to go right for you to be profitable. And one of those is luck. Cause I've seen a lot of people do all the right things and they just didn't make it.

Rob Dwyer (55:27.264)
Mm-hmm.

Neal Woodson (55:27.766)
Lady luck was not with them, but I can guarantee you one thing that if you do some things for others and you truly want to help other people, you will be happier and you will have a more meaningful and fulfilled life. can guarantee that. I absolutely can guarantee that. And so, so just go do some good. We've got enough bad, go do some good.

Rob Dwyer (55:48.567)
I love that.

Neal Woodson (55:56.686)
and it'll make you feel better.

Rob Dwyer (56:00.407)
Listeners, go do some good by going to the show notes, connecting with Neal and LinkedIn. Check out his book, Giving a S#!+. And thank you, Neal, for doing some good by being here with me today. This is a great conversation.

Neal Woodson (56:19.51)
Thank you so much, Rob. This is gonna be the beginning of a great friendship, a line from my favorite movie of all time, Casablanca. So yeah, thanks Rob, appreciate it.

Rob Dwyer (56:31.016)
Love it. Love it.