Transforming the Customer Experience @ The Lobby - A Tridel Meeting Place

I am often asked how we continue to move forward to sustain market leading experiences for our customers. As with most things, the secret is in the simplicity of BELIEVING in your purpose (your team and of course, yourself). The vision for one of our most recent and successful innovations - The Lobby - started with four massive failures, a lot of soul searching and an object lesson in perseverance.

In my career as an intrapreneur, where time and time again with my team, I've shown how big legacy companies can continue to lead and innovate; there are lessons learned that I think are worth sharing for those who may be beleaguered by the "it's not broken, why fix it" complacency that sometimes cause great brands to fail.

Lesson #1 Never let a good idea go to waste and expect to be misunderstood. Why wouldn't we want a new strategic differentiating initiative that would help with the cost of operations and prevent repetitive mistakes?

I spent my first 20 years at Tridel trying to figure that out.

When I started at Tridel in 1998, I'd just returned from contract work in the US - Florida and Arizona - where like in the GTA, the markets for the 5+ years prior had been a challenge. At the time I was focused on Low-rise detached housing's merchandising of model homes and the repositioning of the HUGE design centres with equally HUGE overhead, to offer post-move-in products and services. It was a life saver to the companies I worked for and frankly for me, who needed to find a way to adapt my skills in a down market.

After leaving a Director position and starting with Tridel as a Marketing Manager (Lesson #1.5 - don't let title get in your way of working for a good, values-based company ) my first BIG idea was to suggest a centralized design centre. At the time, we were having our customers select custom finishes and features in unfinished construction trailers, 600 sq.ft. unsold suites (which lets just say were not our top sellers) or anywhere else "free" space could be had. It was a real "no frills", rack and stack, get-er done approach but at the same time we allowed our customers to do virtually "anything", which may sound like a good idea, but not really. This "customize whatever you want" program (e.g. converting a family heirloom into a vanity sink) created a lot of risks; the least of which was the time and lost costs, the worst being the brand damage caused by an unrecoverable-unhappy customer despite positive efforts and intentions. We had some tough and expensive lessons over the years with this approach.

No matter how I tried, what was so obvious to me as a great idea, was a terrifying and terrible idea for most everyone else, except for an amazing visionary few who stayed with it to support the the concept (thank you Andrea, Len, Stella and Jim) , which was pitched in 1998, 2005, 2010 and again around the end of 2017, when the idea finally found it's time.

Lesson #2 It's not about them, it's about you! Why did it take so long? It is really tempting and easy to blame individuals or the resistors. Don't do it. It's not productive. Also, it's not so much about being right but about building the right consensus and choosing the right time. It's about being fierce with the ideas, not each other and finding a way to translate your vision to the best business case or sometimes to an incremental alternative or your BATNA.

To succeed as an innovating intrapreneur, our job is to dig deeper, be more self-aware and learn what is at the heart of the resistance to the idea. Don't take it personally. It's often not what they say (i.e. money-business), rather it's usually more about what they don't tell you directly (i.e. the psycho-social-power dynamic) that comes into play over innovation and any big change.

At Tridel, we have been investing in executive leadership training to advance higher performance within our teams by using an incredibly effective tool - Striving Styles by Dr. Anne Dranitsaris of Caliber Leadership Systems. This helps to make each of us aware of each others unique skills, abilities and ways of connecting to our work and change. Ultimately, this should help prevent us from making the same kinds of mistakes of the "Blockbusters" of the world and allow us to be more open to ideas and each other.

Lesson # 3 Believe in yourself and your purpose, more.? With transforming the customer and employee experience while improving the company's processes and performance; looking back, I needed to work harder to align more of the customer's needs with our operational interests and work on being more effective at getting others to see what I was seeing. To be patient. Out-work the situation. Be resilient and most of all, believe in my purpose.

New is threating, scary and not always seen to be good, even when your asked specifically to produce it. When you are pushing a new, transformational idea, you need to overcome the fear, angst and sometimes outright frustration or even anger that gets directed toward you; so you need to really?believe?and commit. Getting people to see what you see is often not just difficult but can be downright esteem-and-soul-crushing at times.?

Persevere, it's worth it.

I know it's tough to do when the world around you is in a state of perpetual change and where the speed of business is accelerating. How can you lead, when it's like everyone around you really would prefer to stay the same? [Lesson #3.5 Operational effectiveness or OE is sometimes floated as a way to get more profitable and gain quality but, OE alone only goes so far before you get parity with the competition and you all become alike. ]

A lot of organizations promote themselves as innovators but few have the supporting?decision making infrastructure to capture it.?Stephen Jonson (The Art of Business) and?David Brown (Farsighted) are great leaders on the concepts of how big decisions get made and how well positioned teams (e.g. Blockbuster v Netflix, Nokia v Apple)?missed the market completely when they failed to innovate.?Blockbuster and Nokia gave their markets away and it seems that in every instance the SME's (subject matter experts) within their own organizations had the ideas but there were always insurmountable barriers to change. The self-interests/limitations?of a few, over the true sentiments of the group, being the most common.?So, stay with it, work to gain consensus and elevate the voice of the group so the power of your purpose will prevail.

Lesson #4 Embrace the impossible. The diabolically destructive and dual perspectives of "why change, we've always done it this way, " combined with the inertia of complacency and fear of the unknown, manifests in that insurmountable barrier of the impossible. However, to borrow from Adidas, impossible is nothing, just ask Whitney Wolfe Herd who believes in her purpose which is to: engineer kindness, accountability and good behavior despite everyone saying that change of social media culture is impossible. Herd, the founder of Bumble, who just made her first Billion $, says; [my idea] "it didn't feel that big to me, it was just a problem I saw, I felt it was unfair, I saw an opportunity to improve" and she believed in her skills to do it as well as the power of her purpose.

One of the biggest barriers to transforming to The Lobby sooner was the "it's impossible to change" how we structured our Design Services because traditionally, every community was independently set up from scratch; not just the physical location, but all the supporting administration. Despite the investment in time resources and risks of error, the prevailing fear of a down-market had many convinced that we'd prevent potential losses by having small agile programs versus the costs associated with carrying a centralized, permanent space and program. Fear of the maybe kept us stuck for a while and trumped the known benefits as well as the potential of the possible.

Needless to say, during the crisis caused by COVID, when many of our competitors could not continue operations, our newly launched Design Services program that includes a supporting digital experience, allowed us to never miss a beat for our customers and Company. Never underestimate the power of pursuing the impossible.

Lesson #5 1000's of years of Chinese military genius can help navigate the corporate gauntlet - get to know Sun Tzu. My first female mentor in business, Carol Dutcher-Bream, was as entrepreneurial as she was academic. She introduced me to Sun Tzu. While I cannot remember if she actually gave me the book or referred to it, I have read, re-read and shared it with 100's of colleagues, managers, employees and friends. I have carefully applied the principles throughout my career and I can say there is a lot of wisdom in 1000's of years of strategy, even if it is military, and it's perhaps why Harvard Business 101 still has it on their reading list.

The book in three sentences:

Know when to fight and when not to fight: avoid what is strong and strike at what is weak. Know how to deceive the enemy: appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. Know your strengths and weaknesses: if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

There is a new podcast by David Brown - Business Wars that gets at the wins/losses between competitive brands, where he also shares the wisdom of Sun Tzu's principles summarized and applied to business. I highly recommend it to all innovators and visionary's and perhaps more importantly, to those who put them down or just don't get it.

Lesson #6 Success is in the WE not the YOU. It's a bit cynical and it usually happens so fast you will get whiplash, but your transformational idea is at the point of no return (to failure), when you and your handful of allies, hear those same people who diminished, disputed, derailed and disparaged you relentlessly, saying "they knew all along"! You will be amazed at how they take personal pride in the success and the "your (bad) idea" now becomes "our (great) idea".

This is where simple can become very hard. Where success can feel a bit like a failure.

In fact, I've been in situations (unfortunately too many) where some of these corporate "cannibals" don't bother with a "we" did it! Rather they take a 180 U-turn and do a full blown takeover to "I" am so glad "I" had this idea. (Though if you were to ask one of these "idea pirates" where they got it from, they'd be lost.)

This can be brutal and deeply disturbing to a sense of team and your self-esteem, especially if its from the top. And although for most of my career, I've found satisfaction enough in knowing and being a part of something that succeeded, today I feel very differently. I now work to mentor those who work with me; to teach them to be generous and share any victory, but to not let the "cannibals or pirates" continue to self-promote and advance unfairly off of their gifts.

We should always take the high-road, because no matter who formed the genesis of the idea, it is always about the interdependency of sharing thoughts, moments, challenges with others that feeds creativity and innovation. In my experience we rarely if ever do something 100% alone and it is always better to enjoy any achievement with others, the more the merrier.

At Tridel an aphorism we use or what we call "Jackisms", is to: Stay humble. Stay Hungry. Angelo DelZotto, who was our fearless innovator (soon to have an inaugural BILD Pinnacle Award named after him) never seemed to take sole credit for anything. He created and inspired innovation because he shared in it. However, not every company is lucky enough to have someone like Angelo or Master Sun, that shared their wisdom of the art, always leading by example with the sheer brilliance of their ideas, strength of their thoughts and the integrity of their actions. Thank you Angelo (and Andrea who is her fathers daughter) for teaching me the "how" of conscious, innovative leadership.

Suffice it to say, The Lobby - A Tridel Meeting Place was the work of literally every department in the company. It was a perfect example of organizational transformation for the benefit of everyone - employees, leaders, partners, consultants, trades...most of all our customers. If you want to learn more on exactly how we transformed Design Services at Tridel check out Introducing The Lobby included above or follow Jim & Stella's Interior Design Blog.

Which leads me to conclude by sharing my favorite principle of Sun Tzu. Develop your character as a leader/person to maximize the potential of your employees/people. After all innovation is a team sport.