Posts Tagged ‘culture’
Some tenets of a Service Culture
If I collect these momentary brain dumps in to lists of Service Tenets, who knows, maybe someday I’ll have a good list. Here are two to start.
Service Culture Tenet: Everyone serves each other first.
I started my professional career as a training manager for Wal-Mart logistics. Back in those days, Sam’s philosophies were still very much alive and well. My job was to train new supervisors and managers in the distribution centers, and whatever else, of course. There are a few memories I have of that job that have helped shape my philosophy of service interactions. The interesting part and point of this post is that those experiences were provided me by the leadership of the Company at the time.
I don’t remember how or why I ended up there, but a group of fellow training managers and I were at Sam and Helen Walton’s modest home in Bentonville for some sort of event. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: culture, customer, service
Quick thoughts on Service & Leadership
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you.”
Max dePree wrote that in his “Leadership is an Art” book over fifteen years ago. I once wrote a training class based on the contents of that book, and it is still one of the definitive pieces of leadership literature in my mind and library.
While this site is about service, I have to relate service to leadership and management. Leadership and management have been an integral part of my career from the beginning. I remember the first management training class I led as a brand new Training Manager in a huge company. There I was, a kid in his early twenties, trying to tell battle hardened frontline managers how to get the most out of their receiving dock workers… it was really intimidating. It would have been much worse had my new boss not sat me down and told me that “as a Training Manager, you have to be the ideal. You of all of the managers here MUST walk the talk, or you will have no credibility.” Then he handed me a copy of Robert Greenleaf’s paper “Servant as Leader”… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: culture, leadership, service