How - Dov Seidman [133]
Everything about Sewell culture reinforces its three basic “spirits,” and they celebrate them every chance they get. “We tell lots of stories here,” Joe says, stating what has already become obvious to me in the course of our conversation. One of their favorites involves a technician who had recently been hired from one of their competitors. “The technician charged a customer for work that he hadn’t done. One of the other technicians went over to him and said, ‘Hey, what are you doing? You can’t do that here.’ And he said, ‘Oh, at the last place I worked, that’s the way we made a little extra money.’ So the technician told him that we don’t do that here, and he apologized and said, ‘I just didn’t know.’ So the group watched him a little bit, and the next day they caught him doing it again. This time a few guys went over to him and said, ‘Hey, we told you we don’t do this here.’ He replied, ‘Okay, I’m sorry. I got it. It’s a bad habit.’ So now the group watched him a lot. The third day they caught him doing it again. This time, they spreadeagled him on the back of a car, told him to get his tools, get his truck, and get out. No supervisor, no manager; they just said, ‘We’re not going to let a guy like that mess up our business,’ and they fired him.”
Now that may seem a little rough to you if you work in a cubicle, but if you work in a service garage, the culture can tolerate a different set of behaviors. Joe admits that the fired technician could have raised a fuss, but he just went away. He realized that he just didn’t belong.
To “Be Genuinely Caring” can be rough, but it also brings inspiration. When a team member suffering from an illness had to go on disability and discovered that his insurance didn’t kick in until he was off the job a month, his fellow group members all donated a paid hour of their own time to support him. When Hurricane Katrina wiped out Sewell’s one New Orleans dealership (located between the Super-dome and the Civic Center), over 40 of the 114 associates working there lost their homes and possessions. Associates in Dallas/Fort Worth, despite not knowing any of the affected families personally, canceled that year’s parties and awards, quickly raised $168,000, donated use of their summer homes and cabins, found apartments and housing, and helped those associates rebuild their lives. Although they didn’t know them, they considered them a part of the Sewell family.
Self-governing cultures both inspire alignment and eject elements that don’t fit in. That’s one of the many reasons that Sewell, in an industry that typically sees 184 percent turnover each year, enjoys just 22 percent turnover. “We reinforce behaviors by celebrating them in stories,” Joe said, “but we also reward for them. One of the big measurements in the automotive industry is the customer satisfaction index (CSI). We pay every person in the dealership—whether you mop the floors, answer the phones, or sell cars—on how well the store does in CSI, because we believe everyone has an impact on customer satisfaction. We break it down and post it in all the different work areas. Everyone knows, for instance, if the customer satisfaction index in the pre-owned car department is low, and we have people from accounting saying, ‘How can we help you get that up?’ ”
Values-based self-governance is not an end in itself; it is a way to influence the creation of winning cultures for the twenty-first century. Through culture, companies have the opportunity to grow more varied and diverse while simultaneously remaining tightly aligned in a common purpose. There are no hard walls in cultures; they are progressive and evolutionary, growing and changing at all times. Sewell’s culture, for example, is not purely self-governing; by Stallard’s own admission it has elements of coercion and instances where rules provide the best way to get things done. But