Years ago when I led private equity for JPMorgan Partners in Asia, I was introduced to Allen J. Bernstein, an iconic restaurateur who was the CEO and owner of Morton’s Steakhouse.
Article by Scott McKinley
Allen was looking to expand into Asia and wanted to consider having a capital partner tag along for the ride in Singapore and Hong Kong. I distinctly remember being in the car with Allen when he was on the phone in deep conversation with one of his executive leaders about a bad experience that a customer had in a Morton’s restaurant that very evening in the US (early morning in Asia). Allen was professional, inquisitive, supportive of doing the right thing for the customer, and trying to identify how to permanently fix whatever had gone wrong to upset this customer. I was impressed with what some might call his customer obsession. To see a CEO dig into a bad experience of a single customer only hours after the dinner hour was impressive to me as a young professional learning the ropes of how great operators ran their businesses. For Allen, customers were clearly his obsession.
Chris Artinian, Morton’s subsequent CEO for 16 years, eulogized his mentor with this story. “It wouldn’t be unusual for Allen to find out about something that had happened in the restaurants at 1 a.m. and to call me right then to let me know what went wrong,” Artinian said. “It was never to admonish anybody, but to educate, and to convey that the urgency to fix something means [doing it] now. In our business, tomorrow’s too late. It gave me even greater pride in Morton’s to know that we should care that much.”
Sounds like Chris was on the other end of that phone call I overheard in Singapore!
What can we learn from Allen’s obsession today?
As we all grapple with the workforce fallout from Covid-19, remote work, family challenges related to health and work, and the entire 2020 – 2021 “situation,” I had a thought. What if companies treated their employees as well as Allen treated his customers?
Richard Branson gets it: “The way you treat your employees is the way they will treat your customers.”
I’m pretty sure we have all heard something similar to Branson’s quote, but what I have consistently found is that leadership struggles with this concept. In some cases, employees are treated as “assets” or “leverageable, interchangeable” cogs in the machine. There is a belief that if someone can’t “cut it,” they can easily be replaced. This is a flaw that often ties to annual “stack ranking” processes that force elimination of 10% of the trained workforce. Leadership can be crushingly unempathetic to their employees’ diverse motivations, challenges, aspirations, and ability to learn. In the world of workforce talent development that I work in, I have literally been asked “What if we train all these people and they leave?” To which I always reply, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”
Lessons for post-Covid Leaders
You cannot be sustainably customer obsessed if you are not consistently employee obsessed. You also cannot retain top talent, let alone attract a continuing supply of new talent if you don’t take this one lesson to heart. Learn from Allen Bernstein and Richard Branson. Recognize that employees are people. Diverse people with real lives and real motivations. Diverse people who have challenges in their lives but want to do a great job. They want to take pride in their work and know that it matters. No one shows up to work seeking to make this the worst day of their lives and hoping to fail. People want to succeed, but to do that they need your support as leaders and peers. Ultimately, in both the short and long term, how you treat your employees will determine how they treat your customers. Treat all of them as well as you treat your BEST customers! And in the spirit of Allen Bernstein, start right. Now.
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