This interview with Debra Ward serves as a profound inquiry into the principles of service excellence, illuminating the intersection of hospitality and corporate culture. Debra, a seasoned expert in workplace strategy, articulates a vision of service that transcends traditional boundaries, advocating for an approach rooted in emotional connection and genuine human interaction. She underscores the significance of empathy in fostering a service culture that not only meets but anticipates the needs of clients and employees alike. This notion of emotional engagement is further emphasized through her assertion that listening serves as the most underrated service behavior, a sentiment that resonates deeply within the context of workplace dynamics.

As the conversation unfolds, Debra recounts her journey from the hospitality sector to corporate consultancy, sharing invaluable lessons learned along the way. She highlights the necessity of crafting a compelling organizational vision that aligns with the values and aspirations of its workforce. The dialogue challenges the prevailing metrics-driven mindset that often pervades corporate environments, advocating instead for a model that prioritizes emotional intelligence and interpersonal relationships.

Debra's insights invite listeners to reflect on their own practices, encouraging them to foster a culture of trust, recognition, and collaboration that ultimately leads to enhanced service excellence and organisational success.

Takeaways:

1. The essence of service excellence lies in the ability to genuinely listen to customers.
2. Creating a compelling vision within an organisation is crucial for achieving service excellence.
3. Emotional engagement and authentic interactions are foundational to establishing a thriving workplace culture.
4. One of the most significant misconceptions in workplace experience is the belief that one size fits all.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Live Love Learn
2. Ritz Carlton
3. Olympics
4. LinkedIn
5. McDonald's
6. Tesco

Welcome to High Five, where insight meets empathy.

I'm Mike Galea, and together with Tristan Kelly, we explore the evolving world of workplace experience.

From leadership and strategy to culture and customer experience, we're here to share practical thinking and purposeful ideas that help people and organizations to thrive. In today's bonus episode, we continue our exploration of service excellence.

And we're delighted to be interviewing Debra Ward, who is the director of Live Love Learn, a global workplace consultant. So let's get into it.

So we're joined today by the enigma, the wonderful, the amazing Debra Ward, workplace strategist, culture and transformation specialist, and someone who's literally brought hospitality thinking into the world of workplace in such a big way. Deborah, really great to have you join us today.

So good to be here. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Tristan. Great to be here. Great to see you. Festive time of beer, lots of energy, lots of opportunity to get it right.

And sadly, some people still don't do that.

Well, what we're going to do to retain that energy is we've just got a quick fire question set, really short answers. Some of them are one word just to get us into the mood and then we'll delve into things in a bit more detail.

So one word that describes great service culture.

Emotion.

Emotion. What would you say is the most underrated service behavior?

Listening.

What about a biggest myth around workplace experience?

One size fits all.

And this one I always enjoy. What would you say a brand is that gets it right and why?

Oh my God. Gets it right and why? I mean, one of the most historic ones, of course, is ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen, Ritz Carlton.

To me, the ethos that they created for their team that then spills into everything they do and the clients they serve and the people they meet and each other, I think for me is, is pretty special.

I would say also, I have to say the Olympics, the games makers, like, I, I was emotionally viscerally moved because I, when, when they said the Olympics is coming to England, I'm not, I'm not kidding as a Canadian who knows about hospitality, who talks about hospitality, who lives it, who has seen it, who have felt it, who have.

I was like, we're gonna entertain the world in one of the most stiff upper lips places in the world where, you know, emotion is not shown and it's all very, you know, reserved, darling. And I'm like, oh my God, what are, you know, this is not gonna go well. This is, I just cannot believe that we're gonna welcome the world.

And I was Reduced to tears by the games makers at times. I, I was very fortunate to be able to see four different events on four different single time. It was the games makers that made it for me.

And, you know, the training that went into that and the energy and enthusiasm and genuineness. It wasn't that whole, have a nice day, y'. All, you know, like, that wasn't.

It was genuinely people who are giving up their time, volunteering their time and welcoming the entire world.

Debra, just very quickly tell us your story. How did you become a service excellence extraordinaire?

You know, you are a leading expert in the country, and it's a privilege and honor to know you because you, you literally brought me into this world. Not, not from birth, but career wise, I should say. Just tell, tell. You lived in Canada. You, you're incredibly well known.

Just tell us about your story.

My dad, my mom and dad owned and operated restaurants and bars. And I realized at a really young age, if I wanted to get to know my dad, I had to get to know his business.

And so, you know, I was in the dish pit at like 13 years old, right? And I was a busboy at 14. I was a, a waitress at 16.

I was a bartender at 18, I'll say 18 for the purpose of this podcast, you know, and then I became a supervisor, manager, so on and so on. I was, I was in the kitchen a few times. But, you know, you get to know people like, you see human beings up front and personal. His, his restaurant.

So it was a pub originally, you know, quintessential pub, Five items on the menu, cute little booths, you know, small little stopover place. And, you know, my dad was an entrepreneur. He gets bored, he builds.

So, you know, it went from one little pub with five items on a menu, and then he had five bars inside and, you know, a different menu every night and a theater out back. And, you know, he'd wake me up at 2 in the morning, be like, okay, this is what we're going to do. We're going to knock down that wall.

You know, I got a front row seat to human beings and I got curious. And, you know, you learn to read a room, you learn to see as a waitress.

And again, I'm going to go back to this point, Mike, because it's so important to me. I really believe this.

You walk by a table, you know, if there's a couple that are celebrating an anniversary and, or if they're in a heated argument or if they've been married for 25 years and, and struggle to know what to say to each other anymore or if they want find out about the local environment.

You can read people and that skill, especially in the, in the age of AI and IT and remote working to be able to read and intuit everything that's going on in that one glance at people. Do I spend time and chat up the about the wine or do I just pour it and move on? I remember when I got an opportunity to, to go to Kuwait.

Like you're a single blonde young female in a Muslim country with no alcohol. And I remember my mom packing my bag and just saying go live life. The world is great and big and see it.

And that first chance to see another culture such so starkly different, so starkly different from anything I had ever, ever, ever, ever encountered just gave me such an appetite to see more, to see more of the world, to see more people, to understand more cultures, more religions, more traditions, you know, more behaviors. It was so exciting and I still have that today. I think curiosity is, is probably one of my greatest superpowers. I'm so curious all the time from.

Working in hotels and restaurants. How did you find yourself in the corporate world? Building a empire?

Yeah, I have babies. Right. Hotels and babies don't go well. You know, I remember and, and I was also a consultant.

So you know, you don't, you don't get paid if you don't work. So I remember literally expressing my milk in the bathrooms.

I mean this is before we had all these family rooms and all this beautiful stuff we have today.

I'm going to give a plug to a, to one of, one of my old team members, Sarah Campbell, now Sarah Pantry and she started a company called Matresence and she, she lives in Singapore. She heads up LinkedIn's experience workpl. She had a baby and had the same thing. And just like what's going on here?

Like we're getting this really wrong. And she started this whole movement. Anyway, back to your question. Why I started in front of houses.

It just having babies in a 247 operation doesn't work. I was consulting for Live Love Learn because I could work around.

I could still do cooking with kids on Fridays and PTAs and all the stuff I thought you Know as a woman, God knows why the hell we thought we had to have it all because like, it's just exhausting, you know, you can't have it all, you just can't have it all at the same time. Right.

And so I was consulting around the world around people, service and culture and what I found was again, I'm, I'm no rocket sciences like at all. I just noticed what we do in hotels we weren't doing in corporates. Right.

That love of people, that listening, that the wow moments, the ability to put a smile on somebody's face to anticipate their needs, we just weren't doing it. And I got an amazing opportunity with Mighty at the time to do a startup in front of house and again, nine to five and weekends off.

You knew that like when you're used to working blds, breakfast, lunch, dinners, we used to call them afds and I'll let you figure out the acronym. To have the opportunity to give that service, get paid better and have your weekends off and have a family life. That's what got me into it.

And it was really interesting to me that we just weren't doing those things. And to this day I'm still doing those things.

I, I honestly believe I just find areas where we're underserving and find somewhere that's over serving. You know, I always say if you want to know how to be a really have a really efficient workplace, spend a day in the back of an ambulance.

Is there a more efficient place that has a more urgent need? Right.

I think that's really interesting, you talking around the people element of hospitality I customers that is still so hard for many people within the corporate world to understand. I think I got a sense of this my sort of young days as a, as a graphic designer.

You'd always be talking to the account managers and they'd be saying, well, you know, we've got to make sure this resonates with the CEO. I've always been slightly anti authority, slightly challenging as a person, which is good for me, not necessarily for other people.

And so there would always be these discussions, why are we Pitching this differently. Surely in a sense it's not really up to the CEO, it's up to their customers that are going to see this piece of marketing, this piece of design.

So I always used to challenge against that and I would often say, well, the CEOs go shopping and so they're making the same decisions you and I are making. They're buying the same butters.

And, and that's got nothing to do with hierarchy, that's got nothing to do with education, that's to do with marketing and branding. Why are they buying Clover over Kerrygold over whatever.

And so that's always been my mindset that we are all customers more or less relatively operate on similar lines and yet there's so much compartmentalization within the corporate world. And you've touched on it there.

Oh, we're in fm, so we have to look at the building as, as a, as a physical thing, but actually the building, yeah, there's elements of that, the facilities part of it, but the thing that makes that building work, that brings that building to life, other people and they're so often overlooked. You've got so many service partners within the building.

So you've got the landlord, you've got the tenants, you've got the property manager, then you've potentially got three, four, five, six service partners providing cleaning, security, front of house maintenance, landscaping, etc, etc. How do you get them all together to align and to really then provide an amazing service for our customers?

Okay, no, that's, it's a great question and it's, honestly, it's the simplest answer in the world and we still get it wrong. I have, I, I say this all the time. Mike knows this. I kind of have three great skills. That's it, that's all I got. I can create a compelling vision.

I can hire or surround myself with amazing people and then I can gather those people around that vision to make it happen. That's all I got. Everything else is the team. Everything else is people and what we, we do.

And I hate, you know, Simon Sinek again, another normal Joe wrote one great book, had one great idea. I mean he's had zillions since then that just resonated with people is start with why. And we don't start with why.

We start with the what and the how and the, the, all the roadblocks and the, you know, if people. My favorite book again, this guy needs to pay me royalty soon. Gung ho. I've probably bought about 500, 600 copies of it in the world.

But you know, People need to have a sense of purpose. Every single one of us want to know why we are leaving our children. Why are we getting up at the crack of dawn?

Why are we trudging through snow and sleet and rain to come in for somebody else? Right. They want to understand not just the why, but what is their piece in the bigger pie.

How do they actually contribute to the greatness and the success? And then they want to be seen, they want to be rewarded and recognized for that.

Interesting. It's interesting. You're saying, you know, start with why I'm a big lover as well.

And Debra being, you know, I've been in a team with you and I've seen that, that unified mindset and, you know, that that's that, you know, single goal that we're all striving towards in terms of the objectives and the strategy. But why is complicated. Because it's a heart. Because it's such an emotional type question. And it's the art. It's the hardest one to answer.

And how would you go about rallying a workforce with, you know, starting with why? What does the why mean for you?

Well, that's, that's the thing, is that it's got to resonate with people and it's got to be authentic and it's got to be real. And it has to be, listen, I want to make money as much as the next person. I have no problems with profit.

I think we should all be looking to make profit, but not at the expense of people, not at the expense of productivity. Keep it simple, too, right? Like get something that resonates with people.

I recently worked for the company and their mission statement was like Alphabet soup and it was three, four sentences long.

If you think about the great missions, the great visions in the world, ladies and gentlemen, serving ladies and gentlemen, absolutely, positively must get there overnight. Just do it. It's something that's aspirational. You never get there. You have to know you never get there.

It's just something that constantly you're striving because you get where you think you're supposed to go. And the boy moves, you swim all that way and the boy goes further and you, you're going faster and further. You know, I'm loving it. McDonald's, right?

They're very affirmative statements though, and a lot of them are action orientated. Do you think that's the difference?

They have to be action oriented. They. You have to see yourself in that. Client services. And again, one of my, the greatest rides of my life, the front of house company.

We started creating exceptional, memorable experiences, one guest at a time. Creating the action word exceptional and memorable is the goal. And one guest at a time reminds everybody that it's not a cookie cutter organization.

And listen, when we sold back that company to the PLC, all 950 people knew that statement. They knew it was the acid test to every decision we made. Is it exceptional? Is it memorable? The answer is no, we don't do it.

If the answer is no, we don't buy it. If the answer is no, we don't hire them. If the answer is no, we don't work with them.

And the last day when, when. When I left the organization and it hit the press, my biggest competitor called me arch nemesis for seven years. And he said, you must be so happy.

And I said, it's kind of bittersweet, you know, like, it's my baby. And he said, but you're never gonna have to say, creating exceptional, memorable experiences one guest at a time, ever again.

And I said, when my biggest competitor can quote my strap line, I win, you never.

So we talked about some. Some great positives there. So in your view, what. What. What would you say are the three absolute non in a workplace service culture.

Have a compelling vision, hire well, galvanize people around the vision and make sure they have the time, tools, training, and trust to get it done. What happens is we throw these things on the wall or we give people this litany of, I mean, an sop. Have you ever read an sop?

It is the most boring thing in the world to read. Right? But we do it to cover our backsides. If you have a compelling vision, there is no need for an SOP. There's no need for values.

There's no need for KPIs, there's none of that stuff because everybody's really clear. Is it exceptional? Is it memorable? Nope. Okay, let's redo it. Nope. All right. Is it exceptional? Is it memorable? Yep. Let's move forward. End of. Right?

You don't need to have a mystery shopper, you know, but how do we track.

How do we track excellence, then? So if we don't need those KPIs and we don't need those measurables, how do we know?

Why are you talking excellence?

That's the question. How do we know we are. We achieve excellence?

Why. Why are you telling me you do not know? Mike Galea, you're better than that.

You know exactly when you've achieved excellence, you don't need some mystery shopper to tell you to do it. You don't need some external. Come in. You know, everybody knows if everybody is quiet, it's the same as right and wrong.

If you are quiet with yourself, you know what's right and wrong. When you're delivering excellence, you know you're delivering excellence. When you're not, you know that too.

You don't need an external, you don't need a checklist, you don't need a KPI, you don't need somebody else. All of that crap we do for clients because they need proof, because they have to cover their ass somewhere up the line, right? That's.

And how much time?

How much of that precious time, precious time that we could be with our customers, with our colleagues, with our communities, are we wasting filling out a bloody form to make somebody else feel better about themselves? The reality is we know when excellence is delivered. Everybody knows it.

I love your point around we should be spending more time with customers, which is something I'm often quoting. Especially when people are trying to launch projects and launch schemes. They're built in house and they've never seen a customer.

And then often they fall flat the first interaction they have with the customer because, as you've mentioned, they're not spending time with those customers. What do you think the best micro behaviours from service excellence practitioners?

Stop treating criticism like a bad thing. I think that is. Man, what a gift.

Do you know that for every person who complains, 10 people that say, I'm not going to bother, but they then tell 10 people, who then tell seven people, who then tell three more people.

Each works up to 106 negative conversations about one bad incident and you didn't get a chance to correct it because you haven't created the space for people to come and complain. And actually, it's an opportunity to improve. And I say that for our teams too, right? We have created a fierce society that is just brutal.

Fear and blame in corporates right now. Right? That psychological safety, that word wasn't around five years ago. Why?

Because we've identified why it is that people are terrified to say anything. So they don't say anything. They turn to blind eye. They don't, you know, oh, God, I'm gonna put my head above the parapet.

Not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna rock the boat. I'm not gonna get, you know, I could get fired.

Somebody has the balls to come to me and say this sock step, man, they're one of my favorite people because they care enough to complain and they trust me enough to bring it to me. Now lots of people try and do that, that's where it falls down.

If the leader, the manager, the customer service rep gets defensive, gets angry, doesn't listen, doesn't action, do you think they're ever going to do it again? We just shot down the best opportunity we have for improvement.

Do you see that from a generational point of view? Because this is something we keep talking about around the newer generation coming in with a different set of expect. Do you see that being.

Being the same?

Nope, I don't. I think. I think this generation is happy to complain.

What's wrong is our generation who's not happy to listen, who doesn't action, who doesn't create that psychological safety and say, hey, you know what? That sucks. And that really hurt to hear. How do we fix it? Right?

When I left client services, all 950 people had my private phone number, my personal phone number. Right? Now, there's a hierarchy, right? Of course, there's always a hierarchy. But I trust the people I hire to know when to call me and when not.

There's a loss of life, loss of property, loss of reputation. I don't want them to go through this person to get to this person to get to me, like, pick up the phone, go, Deb, we're in the.

Like, then we might have enough time to fix it before the client knows, before the press hears about it, before, you know, there's, you know, some sort of catastrophic event. Right? We'll deal with how and what happened and who did what and blah, blah, blah, later. Let's fix the problem.

And like, if you really think about it, like, really truly think about it, some of the best, most memorable occasions in your career has been when you've been in this with a lot of people and you're in it together and, you know, time's ticking down and you don't have a lot of time, and we're all in it, and everybody's like, okay, what about this? What about there's no hierarchy, there's just the problem to be solved and everybody mucks in.

I'm curious, Debra, and this question is for you. So you are a pragmatic problem solver and fixer, and you are very humanistic.

Is your mindset and approach you're describing, is that learned or is that inherent?

Both. So my folks gave me the freedom to be, and so I'm always going to thank them for that, for that. I've had a lot of bad managers.

I think bad managers teach you as good as. As much as good ones do. And I Don't I? That's not what I want for my team. You know, I, I just want us in it together. I really, really, really do. It's.

Solving problems together is one of the greatest highs that there is. When everything, you go to a restaurant, everything runs smoothly. The dinner's beautiful. It's, the food is flawless.

You know, the, the hostess is, is lovely and chatty. They're knowledgeable. You walk out, you might talk about the meal, right, but chances are you won't. It was just nice night. Nothing went wrong.

It's when something goes wrong and the hero waiter comes in and saves the day, that's the one you talk about. That's the one that gets your attention. That's the one that you tell 200 people about, right?

When somebody's gone about, you know, they're leaping buildings in a single bound. I mean, this, this book, Unreasonable Hospitality. That's what happened. Okay, so the short version is Will, Will Guardio.

He, he was, he was kind of the captain of the restaurant, and he overheard one of his tables, and it's a Michelin restaurant.

He overhears one of his tables talk about all these Michelin places they've been and how much they've eaten, the culinary delights, you know, three stars and two stars and blah, blah, blah, and, you know, sauce reductions and, you know, just everything. And one of them says, yeah, the only thing we didn't, we didn't do is get to have a New York style hot dog, you know, a classic New York style.

And he hears this and flashbulb in his head, runs down the street to the cart that's kind of famous for their hot dogs, gets a hot dog, comes whipping back to the kitchen. And he says, very famously, the hard part starts, now I gotta get the chef to put it on a plate in my Michelin star restaurant.

You know, Chef, you know, they have a little head a ted about it. And he's like, just trust me. Will says, just trust me.

Cuts it into four, puts it nicely on the plate, does a little, you know, dollop of relish and squirrels of ketchup, and he puts it behind his back, comes back up to the table and he says, I got a confession to make. Like I was eavesdropping.

He said, I, I, I just, I really would not forgive myself if I let you leave New York without having every one of your culinary desires fulfilled. And he takes this hot dog from behind his back and puts it on the table.

I mean, I get emotional thinking about it because the insightfulness of it all that's genuine hospitality. That's truly listening to what your customers have said and what they haven't said. He said he had the best.

He served food from all over the world and huge levels of expense and where they have to use the tweezers to put the little thingy. I mean he throws down a hot dog and has the best, best reaction he's ever had in his career.

And he just made it his mission to give that to his customers as much as he could.

And that sounds like a high five, doesn't it? That that's a perfect high five.

Definitely a high five.

He actually created a dream weaver role just for that. Right. So what you guys are doing with a high five is showcasing. It doesn't have to cost a lot, right?

I, I still travel with and Mike, you know this very well. There's always a thank you card or a blank card in my bag. Always the handwritten card.

There's nothing like it when you catch somebody doing something right. And when I get emotional and like I just did talk, talking about Will's service, it's when you watch people in their greatness.

It doesn't matter if they're the Rolling Stones on stage. A housekeeper who vacuums herself out of the room so you don't see your footprints or a waiter who runs down the street to get a hot dog.

Those are the high five moments you just can't miss.

I love your comment around catching people doing things right, which is brilliant and really is what every manager should be doing. That should be the primary focus of their day to day people management. But most organisations are wired the other way, aren't they?

They're looking to catch.

Looking to catch you do something wrong and, and you can't get that high five moment, that sort of tell everybody moment that you described from the restaurant without trusting people. Why do you think corporates can't let go of that control? Why they can't fully trust their team members.

It is easy to catch people doing something wrong. I can bring a three year old in here and they'll tell me 12 things that are wrong with this building. Right? But what does that do?

Look at the end game of that, right? Does that, does that instill loyalty? Does that give you a teaching moment?

Does that showcase to other people what it takes to be a hero with their company? Or does that just create fear and guardedness and people hiding things from you Accolade the good, right?

Because then what happens is people go, oh, oh, Joe got a card from Deb. What did he get the card for? And I clearly write, this is what you got the card for.

So I'm telling people, if you want reward and recognition and you want to move forward in this company, if you want to move forward with me, this is what it's going to take. Right. Because the only ones I want are people who are willing to give it their all and fail. Right. Failure is such a good thing.

And again, that's another thing we're getting wrong. If you're not failing, you're not trying. But what happens is people fail, and then they get in trouble because they've tried something new.

And to me, failure isn't failure. It's actually success in a different cloak. It means we're that step closer to success because we know, oh, now we know that that doesn't work.

All right, we can rule that out. We're that much closer.

And you have many phrases, Debra, and one that really jumps out at me is exactly what you're talking about. What is it? Be bold, Be brave.

Be bold, be brave. Be curious.

I've taken so much from this conversation, Debra. You know, and to summarise what, you know, what you are talking around, you know, service excellence is.

Keep it simple, keep it human, take risks, stop worrying about data and KPIs, and just focus on trusting everyone around you to deliver excellence in a unified way. Does that kind of summarise your thoughts?

Yeah, I wouldn't listen. Data is really important. I'm not going to discredit data, but data for data's sake is just a waste of time.

And a lot of it is just to prove what you already know. Like I said, validation.

It's validation, isn't it?

Yeah.

And I mean, you know, when you're kicking it, you know, when you're killing, you walk around a building and everybody's smiling and happy and, you know, listen, I was at Tesco the other day, and they were charity. Three guys out raising money for charity, right? And they had the top most fun songs. They were singing, they were dancing.

They had people dance on the streets. I had no money on me. I actually went out of my way to go to an ATM machine to get them £10 to come back and put in their bucket because of the.

Because let's go back to the very beginning of Tristan. Your question to me, the emotion they created in me in that moment made me act differently, made me feel differently, maybe behave differently.

And it gave me the energy to go another block, go to the ATM machine, come back and put it in their Pocket.

And that's the power of high five moments right there, isn't it? That. That's the power of. Of being on the receipt of an amazing experience. Whether that's service, whether that's entertainment. If you.

If you get that energy, well, that kind of runs right through you. And then you share that with other people.

And they might not have the 100% energy, but they certainly get a sense of it because you're going to really bring that to life emotionally through storytelling, feeling. And that can carry on for weeks and months. That power of it. Just one story.

Yeah. Or years. Years and years. And, you know, it's creating that energy. Not everybody's coming on the ride with you, Right. Like I'm Marmite.

Tristan, you either love me or you hate me. That's just that. That's the fact. Because I'm all in. I'm either all in or I'm all out. I don't have a gray area. Right.

So if you're somebody who's all in, what happens is people self select because they realize Deb's not taken second best. She's not going to take the mediocre me, and I don't feel like working that hard. So I better just bail, right?

And that's okay because that means the people who are in the boat with me, man, what a team. And that's the power and the responsibility and the honor and the privilege of being a leader. And you can lead from wherever you are.

Debra, thank you so, so much for giving us some of your precious time, sharing your views with us all. Wonderful. Of course. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we. Before we close this interview off?

Only one thing. We're all human beings. Treat each other as such. Right. Care for each other. And that sounds really wishy washy and very Kumbaya ish.

But I always say if you look after the employee, you might win, you might lose. But if you look after the human being, you're gonna win every time.

That's a great sentiment. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

That's another high five wrapped.

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