The following interview with Tim Sanders is a condensed version of HR.com's live, one-hour online learning webcast.
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Tim Sanders is the author of the New York Times´ bestseller Love Is The Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends. His most recent book, The Likeability Factor, published in April 2005, is the basis for a PBS and a 20/20 Special, where Tim explores the measurable aspects of likeability, including levels of friendliness, relevance, empathy, and realness and how you can improve your life by increasing your likeability factor. From 2001 to 2003, Sanders served as the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo!, delivering next-generation marketing programs to world-class brands. From 2003 to 2005 Tim served as Yahoo!´s Leadership Coach advising business and public sector leaders on next generation strategies.
Sanders joined Yahoo! as part of the acquisition of broadcast.com in July 1999. For over two years at broadcast.com, he served as an integral part of the company´s business services division and developed audio and video broadcast ventures for a variety of clients.
KE: So, Tim, let´s begin by having you tell us what a ´Lovecat´ is and why it´s a good idea to become one.
TS: I use the phrase ´Lovecat´ to refer to a person who is successful because of their generosity, not despite it. I first head the term used to describe a particular businessperson in Dallas, Texas. To talk to him you would think he was a pretty tough nut, but he has a really soft heart when it comes to mentoring people and sharing his Rolodex. He really cares about people and he is also very smart and shrewd about his business. Somehow, some way he found a balancing act. They called him a ´crazy old love cat,´ meaning that he is a really nice guy, but don´t mess with him. It reminded me of a song by The Cure. The lyric that Robert Smith wrote was, "We move like cagey tigers, yet no two can get closer than this." It made me think about the fine balancing act between the social contact at work and the relationships we also forge there.
KE: I´ve got to believe that when you start talking like this, you get a lot of raised eyebrows. What´s your response to people who say this kind of talk doesn´t belong in business?
TS: I feel like Mark Twain in that I poke fun at how seriously businesspeople are taking work. I wanted to raise some eyebrows. The publisher and I had some discussions about using the word, ´Lovecat.´ I like ´Lovecat´ because it provokes a response and it certainly shakes things up.
I have been challenging the conventional wisdom of dog-eat-dog. I´ve been thinking about that phrase and I´ve never actually seen a dog eat another dog. I truly believe that if a dog ate another dog it would be headline news on CNN. As a result, I have spent a lot of time challenging the status quo. What we have learned in human resources recently is that the mood state at work is a bigger driver of productivity than the tools for which we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to put into our organizations.
KE: Take us back in time to when you first came upon the notion of ´biz love´ and tell us what happened that led to your ´aha´ moment, when you knew this was the direction you wanted to go in life.
TS: Several years ago, I was involved in a client situation where I just couldn´t quite get the job done no matter what I tried to do. In the past, I had always experienced that business was completely unforgiving. If you have a situation where you can´t deliver on what you´ve promised for whatever reason, you lose. What I learned in this one situation was that because I had shared my knowledge and my contacts throughout the relationship, despite the less than desirable outcome of our transaction, there was a sense of forgiveness and support. That led me to believe that the quality of your relationships will determine the consistency of your business plan. It was in this ´aha´ moment, where this staid business guy from Harvard picked me up with a big bear hug and said, "Good to see you" when he should have said, "You´re fired."
I realized that life is a bunch of close calls and you really want to build relationships and share everything you can along the way to create that headway in life to find success. As I went back and started to talk to successful business people like the late, great Stanley Marcus Jr., or Mike Rawlings, I began to find out this little secret that most people in business don´t know. If you have more faith in people than the average leader, you win because you are able to get over the heartbreaks quicker. You are able to trust, delegate and scale your business further when you create a sea of goodwill to manage those ever changing market conditions. Most of the people live under the idea that whomever possesses the most fear wins, because they are more motivated. It is really a battle going on out there. If you had created a fund and invested in the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, you would have outperformed the stock market by over 20% every year since 1996. You would have outperformed the S&P 500 every year since 1998. And you would have even outperformed the Russell Index by a factor of two since the market crash in 2001. Companies that are great places to work have lower retraining costs, improved customer service perceptions, and higher levels of goodwill from the public, media and shareholders. Compassionate companies make more money. It is good business.
KE: As I was reading your book, it occurred to me that putting your principles into practice could help create a more engaging workplace, something many companies are struggling with. What are your thoughts?
TS: One of the best ways to engage someone is to be relevant to their wants and needs. Whenever you are able to give people what they need, whether it is advice or human contact, you give them a greater sense of loyalty and you improve the overall experience of them being around you. When you create a retention environment, what you are doing is creating a theme park. You are creating a great experience. Two years ago Towers Perrin did a study that indicated that 45 percent of the entire workforce in America is at risk of leaving their jobs for somewhere else when the economy gets better. Eighty percent of employees have their resumes online in a place like Monster or Careerbuilder or HotJobs. In a recent survey by Investors Business Daily they asked people under 30 why they went to work every day, and cash compensation came in third. The number one answer was work environment and number two was mobility, not upward mobility, just mobility. These points boil down to the idea that when you create an environment where people feel cared about, nurtured and growing, then you will improve retention and create a high performing environment, and you will experience breathtaking low turnover.
KE: You talk in your book about the three intangibles that we need to cultivate and share. What are they? Then, let´s then look at each one in greater detail.
TS: The premise is that you have tangibles and intangibles to offer other people in your business life to be successful. Many of the tangibles are things like money, time, and headcount, hard resources that don´t scale. Intangibles are invisible values that when you give them away, tend to grow. The three intangibles that grow when given away are knowledge, network, and compassion.
When you take the time to be a life long student in a deep way and you learn why things are, and you share that information conscientiously and in a humble way with other people in your business, you are growing them at an intellectual level. You are also getting valuable feedback from them based on their life experience and knowledge and you tend to get smarter the more you do this. Almost every cynic in the world will accept great advice at the right time. Knowledge sharing becomes foundational to building relationships. When you have done that and you have created enough personal trust in the relationship, you can begin sharing your network. The people that you know can offer solutions to your business needs. Sharing your network is one of the most generous things you can do. The reason we don´t do it right off the bat is because our network is so important to us. In my book I say, "Your network is your net worth." And it is because we own it outright. You share knowledge to build trust, you share your network to build value, and then you can share your compassion and your desire for them not to suffer and for them to find happiness. That kind of engagement creates the best kind of corporate performance because it engages the mind, soul and body between people and the business.
On the back of strong knowledge and networking, you have created the kind of environment that makes work personal. Work should be personal. We have this idea that work is impersonal and the reason why is because we have so many weak and broken relationships. The thinking is, if we were to show compassion at work, others might perceive us as weak and try to take advantage of us. When you have a personal relationship with someone, you can also let your guard down and be a human being and participate in the end of their suffering. It is good for the business. It is good for the person. It doesn´t hurt your credibility and they are accepting of the gift. Compassion is something that you grow into in relationships. When a person says that they are compassionate to their people at work and it is reciprocated, it is because they have shared their knowledge and network. That person is enjoying a uniquely charmed career and is likely very successful.
KE: To build knowledge, you strongly recommend reading books. Do you have recommendations for people as to the types of books they might want to begin reading?
TS:I would recommend that C level executives entertain the idea that their organization create a divisional set of libraries that supply people with the knowledge and books we all need. There should be a library for HR of great books. Employees should be given five to ten hours a week to read or study in an environment of conscripted learning. It creates a different viewpoint about where the value is within the organization. What you begin to see are different water cooler conversations. You begin to see environments that are more collegiate and academic. Those environments are, on average, much more innovative. They are able to solve a lot more problems internally without the help of consultants. The companies that do this are organizations like Dell and Ikea.
I look at reading books as an important part of how I´m going to add value to other people, and solve problems. I begin by looking for things that are on people´s minds, burning issues. For instance, outsourcing and off shoring is a huge issue in HR so reading a lot about that is important. I think that HR executives should read and learn about benchstrength. Leadership benchstrength is a coming crisis. The number of people wanting to be leaders is declining. Young people today would rather be an entrepreneur or franchisee than an executive. Middle management training is another issue I would encourage people to read about. Leadership development is very in vogue but no one is talking about middle management training. There is a book called Middle Shift coming from Vince Thompson at AOL that talks about a huge shift where HR and LD are going to add the most value by grooming managers around issues like emotional intelligence and basic P&L. Organizations that begin to focus their efforts on middle management training will have much better benchstrength 10 years from now.
I have a book list that I am happy to give to my HR brothers and sisters. The list outlines the 10 best books for HR executives and you can get it by emailing me at email[at]timsanders.com
KE: How do you see compassion showing its face in the business world? Can you give us some examples?
TS: To me, compassion is your desire that another person not suffer. Suffering is everywhere. It is inside organizations and in the lives of our customers. When business leaders say that they are going to solve the suffering of dissatisfaction and they start thinking about improving the experience and proactively doing something about it, they are tapping into their employees´ greatest energy. Your greatest impulse is always to avoid pain and suffering. When organizations align themselves with that it is a huge breakthrough because they begin to align themselves with where the energy is. Too many organizations have wishy-washy mission statements. These organizations are not putting compassion front and center. I challenge people to write personal mission statements of their purpose. The more focused it is, the better the results.
KE: Tim, you worked at a place where the employees are called "Yahoos." Not every organization is as irreverent and playful as Yahoo. I´m sure there are a lot of skeptics listening, saying, "Is this guy for real?" What is your response to that?
TS: I have studied this worldwide and Yahoo! is really a replica of Southwest Airlines. The fact is that Jerry and David are playful guys but we are as structured and mature as IBM. We are just a better place to work. If you find a compassionate environment at work off-putting, it might be time to head out to pasture. Statistically, kids today do not care about the same things that we did. The world is now wired and unless you contribute to the end of suffering, the public will get you. They will find you, evangelize that you were a bad company by using everything from blogs to email and you can´t fight it because it spreads like wildfire. Companies that align themselves around compassion and caring and eliminating the suffering of customers, employees, and shareholders will be able to spend all of their energy creating value instead of fighting fires.
KE: Certainly the message that you are delivering is supported by a number of thought leaders. I am thinking of Daniel Pink and his book, A Whole New Mind, in particular.
TS: And Jack Mitchell of Hug Your Customer and Joy at Work by Dennis Bakke. I am not alone here. Conventional wisdom needs to be turned on its toes. Business has become remarkably transparent. Things happen to companies in eight quarters that used to take eight years. You have to wake up and realize that the next big thing in business is people. The only sustainable competitive advantage is culture.
KE: What is the resistance to being human at work?
TS: We still think we are a bunch of animals and we live by football and war analogies. We are afraid that if we show someone that we care, they will use that to take advantage of us. We have such a dim view of people. We think that the buyers are liars and the employees are thieves and we live a defensive posture. That is our generation. The kids of today will show you how to beat them on Playstation. They are not afraid. They are fearless. That is why they take over a lot of organizations; they are stupid enough not to know better. The longer your memory, the deeper your wounds and the deeper the wounds, the harder it is to go back to the well and be compassionate again after getting hurt. Some people just need to get over things.
KE: Will you leave us with some words of advice for HR professionals?
TS: I want you to challenge yourself and everyone in your organization to ask, "What is my purpose? Why am I here? What is it that I do?" If you will focus your energies on helping to attack the suffering inside your organization - whether it is in systems or working conditions - and identify the pain and make being a painkiller your role, you will tap into incredible energy. If you keep trying to make people happy and profitable you are going to go crazy. No matter how much you try to drive efficiency into an organization as your singular purpose, they still find a way to waste that money. The more you try to make executives happy about how the organization works, the more they will find another reason to lie in bed and worry. When you part those clouds of suffering within an organization, you see joy unleashed. I believe that profits are not produced; they are enabled. They are enabled by removing the pain and suffering from within organizations. HR executives are morphine. You see the pain and you remove it. If you accept your mission as participating in the end of suffering as the way your HR group operates, you are going to know what to do in every decision-making situation. It is the one compass that is always going to give you direction.