Follow the leaders and 'walk the floor'
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Steven Slater certainly made a name for himself last week. After 15 years as a flight attendant, Slater exploded while working the JetBlue flight from Pittsburgh to New York. Apparently enraged by one of his passengers, Slater broadcast a profanity over the plane’s PA system, grabbed two beers and exited via the emergency exit shute.
Slater is now enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, but it’s what JetBlue did next that has grabbed my attention. A few days after Slater’s moment of madness, a journalist from New York magazine, who was travelling on another JetBlue flight, noticed a particularly perky flight attendant paying very special attention to his passengers.
Closer inspection revealed that the attendant in question was none other than Ed Barnes, the airline’s chief financial officer. Halfway through the flight, Barnes introduced himself, thanked passengers for their continued loyalty and then gave away some free tickets. With the plane about to begin its approach, he then helped the attendants collect the passengers’ trash.
The New York journalist’s explanation for the presence of the CFO on his flight was that clearly JetBlue was making amends after the recent Slater episode. But a spokesman for JetBlue later confirmed that senior executives regularly help out on JetBlue planes: “It’s business as usual.
Our top executives are flying all the time,” said JetBlue spokesman Mateo Lleras. “They help out, they talk to customers. As a company policy, once we land, every single crew member helps clean up the flight and tidy up the plane.”
Ed Barnes’ presence on a JetBlue flight last week was therefore not about managing a crisis created by a beserk flight attendant, but an insight into how great businesses are led. JetBlue has the kind of customer satisfaction data that the likes of British Airways and easyJet would weep for. It consistently appears at the very top of the American measures of best service. And one way it has been able to achieve this level of satisfaction is by doing exactly what Ed Barnes was doing last week and spending a day with a team on a flight.
It’s colloquially referred to as “walking the floor”. It’s a term that was born in the more frantic and more competitive world of retail. Even the biggest executives in retail regularly walk the floor - meaning they get out of their office, they head to one of their stores and they spend the morning talking to staff, watching shoppers and usually helping out on the floor or in the warehouse.
Sir Simon Marks, the legendary boss of Marks & Spencer, used to do it at weekends and his staff referred to the procession of stores he would visit as the “royal route”. Senior executives from Walmart do the same thing in the US, spending two days a week in stores and then take the insights gleaned from the shop floor back to their Bentonville headquarters for discussion the next day. I’ve been stopped in the middle of a session on market research by the CEO of one of the great luxury watch brands, who chided me (quite correctly) that my list of methods did not include “being street smart” and visiting a store in person. Different companies have different names for it, but all the great organisations do it.
The CFO’s presence on a JetBlue flight was not about managing a crisis created by a beserk flight attendant
There is a tragic inversion at the heart of most organisations in which those with all the power have little or no direct exposure to their customers or the everyday operations of the businesses that they run. Great leaders walk the floor, therefore, because it’s the only way to get an immediate and unfiltered injection of consumer orientation into their decision making.
I am not talking about the occasional visit to meet workers, open plants or attend a gala dinner. These sessions are usually stage managed and involve little or no actual insight for the executives involved. I am talking about the kind of visit in which a senior executive regularly takes time out to drop into their organisation and understand what is going on from a consumer and employee perspective.
See Mark Ritson appear at The Annual, Marketing Week’s new conference on 29 September 2010 www.theannual.co.uk
Of course, for the majority of the CEOs who populate our FTSE 100, the idea of deviating from the super-important tasks of leadership to do something as prosaic as walking the floor would be instantly dismissed as unrealistic and unnecessary. They are too important and too busy to sell bananas in a supermarket or clean up rubbish on an aeroplane. But I have worked for some superb CEOs and I can tell you that one of the traits they all share is a fascination, one could even say an addiction, to observing how their organisations operate at ground level. In their mind, walking the floor is more important than analyst briefings or board meetings.
And it takes us neatly back to the prime directive of marketing. Despite what some might say, the challenge of marketing is the same now as it was a century ago: understand your customer, and organise your business accordingly. Put that way, how could you ever expect to run an organisation without walking the floor?
Mark Ritson is an associate professor of marketing, an award-winning columnist and a consultant to some of the world’s biggest brands
For more information or to book your place at the Annual go to www.theannual.co.uk
Readers' comments (10)
Neil Lakeland | Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:04 pm
A great article Mark, as usual. Agree wholeheartedly that good leaders need to 'walk the floor' not just so that they understand their customers and business, but also so that they understand the conditions which their front-line staff face and also whether what they, the managers, are asking staff to do is feasible.
To many managers/leaders sit in ivory towers and pontification about what should happen at the coalface without actually understanding what the coalface now looks like.
Not only is 'walking the floor' good for staff morale it is also good for the business overall since front-line staff are forever on their toes in case they are visited.
I hope your article goes some way to persuading those managers who don't 'walk the floor' to give it a try.
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Adam | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 2:17 pm
What you describe is a constant challenge for any successful business. We all know of "Satisfaction surveys", these are rarely real life and honest. The ony way to know how your brand or company is really viewed is to work out a way to get out there at the same level as the people you sell to, or who use the service/product.
Each one of those sessions done is worth 100 surveys that are commisioned from the centre.
The catch then is to have the organisational clout to make the necessary changes happen.
Regards
Adam
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Stef Brown | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 2:18 pm
Shouldn't only be limited to senior execs though. Organisations, especially those in FMCG, should actively encourage brand and marketing staff at all levels to see how their brands look and feel in store. I'm still astounded at the number of brand owners that confess they haven't reviewed their brands in-store when an agency suggests doing so with them.
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Martin Hobbs | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 2:32 pm
Fair enough. Most CEOs or cfos would not be able to this, but even if they did - how many have the listening skills to actually learn anything ?
Answer: not many
Good work jetblue.
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Alexei Domorev | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 3:00 pm
Reminds me of "Undercover Boss" TV series. Love watching faces of executives when they discover how their businesses operate in real life.
Would be interesting to know how often Mr. O’Leary flies Ryanair or Mr Walsh gets to experience BA's cattle class on long-haul flights...
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Anonymous | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 3:20 pm
I work for a very large services organisation and every year all the "non-operational" staff ie marketing, sales, HR, finance, spend a week working for our operation. It's sometimes painful but none of us ever forget why we're here and what challenges our staff (and our customers) face on a daily basis.
Not saying we're perfect by any means, but it enables us all to come back to our "ivory towers" with new ideas and insights we don't necessarily get from running the usual focus groups etc.
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Roseli Anael | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 3:35 pm
This is what we can call a true Marketer…….After all, marketing is a social process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want through creating and exchanging products and value with others.
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Henry Ransby | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 4:14 pm
I have to disagree with Adam's comment on floor walking being more valuable than covering more traditional methods of research. Whilst I am in total agreement that "floor walking" is invaluable, I strongly believe that engaging with an independant Market Research company (whoever that may be) provides just as valuable insight into customers and employees satisfaction levels and their views on the brand management itself.
If, for example, the fact that a senior manager (of whatever level) is "floor walking" then the behaviour of both staff and customers will undoubtably be different to that of when they are not present. Whereas, if there is an independant company/researcher collecting this data then the behaviour is not usually affected so much (maybe this is due to the fact that people will try and identify issues in front of an off-site manager than they would do if it were an unconnected (to the Company) individual.
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Russell | Thu, 19 Aug 2010 5:07 pm
The real value of a walkabout is in identifying what questions need to be asked of the business, and not as a shortcut to decision making. This distinction is an important one, and one that is often confused - how many times have you seen an important decision taken based on the most recent conversation or observation of a senior manager? Successful managers understand this and use it to complement and direct the traditional methods of research that Henry rightly defends.
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Mark Ritson | Fri, 20 Aug 2010 6:54 am
Some super comments this week - if I can adjudicate between the comments of Henry (you need independent research) and Adam (surveys usually suck) - I think you are both in the right here.
Adam is right - a lot of quant research provides data that is empirically correct but lacking in insight. Walking the floor has big advantages over such research because it is immediate and not dependent on good q're design which is often missing.
But where I side with Henry is what you do after you walk the floor. It provides some excellent insights but to ensure what you are seeing in one spot is true across the business you need good quant data.
I saw this very clearly being done at WalMart. Senior execs would spot a trend or issue on the floor, but then turn to their EPOS data to check if it was correct across the US.
I saw it also being done by a perfume brands whose CEO often walked the floor and then came back with challenges for the marketing team based on his visits. The marketing director would sometimes disagree with his CEO and use quant data to make his case. To the CEOs credit, he was happy to be argued down with good data.
So a bit of both can be handy.
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