Business Leadership and Love, Part 2: 100/0, Love is Responsibility
Wednesday, March 2, 2016 - Joe Kiedinger
Welcome to Part 2 of 4 of our Business Leadership and Love series! Love is Responsibility.
In 1998, Fortune magazine named a relatively unknown bank, Synovus Bank in Columbus, Georgia, the best company to work for in the United States. John Izzo, a talented speaker, shared his experience in researching this bank. He met with the bank’s CEO and asked him the secret to their success. The simple answer was, “We love our employees. We are like family and everyone contributes to the common goal.”Izzo then toured the company and witnessed a numeric code spread out across the building. It simply read, ‘100/0’.
He asked a teller, “What does that numeric equation mean?”
A young teller responded, “Oh, that means 100 responsibility and 0 excuses. It’s the understanding that we must be 100% accountable for our actions. If we screw up, we own it, and get better.”
Later, meeting with the CEO, Izzo brought up the equation he discovered. He asked the CEO, “I thought you said that love was the ingredient to growing this place. Then I discovered the 100/0 equation and your teller told me what it meant. Is it really love that grew this company?”
“Yes,” responded the CEO, “Tough love!”
We sometimes forget when growing a people-centered culture that when we hear leaders talk about ‘love’, tough love comes along with it. Holding a person accountable by first setting expectations and then “inspecting what you expect”, is key to a great workplace culture.
I fell in ‘love’ with this story when I discovered it and shared it with my leaders. They all agreed that our culture supports this perfectly and it will be a great reminder for all of us. Now we have this scattered throughout our building at Prophit Marketing to remind us of this important expectation.
100 Responsibility / 0 Excuses.
Joe Kiedinger
ACTION PLAN: Does this fit your culture or perhaps you need to begin living it? Steal it!
In case you missed it, see last week’s Business Leadership and Love, Part 1: Is Love Really the Remedy?
Looking for more business leadership inspiration? Download our free e-book: Love & Respect in Leadership.
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