Choose One Thing

One of our all-time favorite lines comes from the movie City Slickers, where veteran actor Jack Palance tells his urban charges that the secret of life is to focus on “just one thing.” His point – lost on Billy Crystal and the gang at the time – was that the “thing” is different for everyone. The secret is just to have something on which to dedicate yourself.

We frequently get asked questions about how to start sharing customer grades with employees. We promise never to take ourselves so seriously as to think we’ll be the guiding philosophy in anyone’s life, but we do think that Jack Palance had it right: focus on just one thing.

It hardly matters what the “thing” is. Just start with a low grade on the store report, let everyone know that it’s the thing we’re going to fix, share ideas on how we fix it. Then circle it with a big red pen and promise to come back in a week and share the grades.

I’ve attached a terrific chart which one of our clients shared with us. The store team started by identifying one question – and temporarily ignoring all the rest – as a big area where they needed to improve. After only a week the grade started to improve.

Just as important is what happened to the rest of the grades – many of those things took care of themselves once customer-facing employees found themselves in the habit of thinking about it.