Meeting the Standard, or Meeting the Extraordinary?
Woody Allen said that 80% of success is showing up. He didn’t say that the goal is 80% effort, he said that you were 80% of the way there if you showed up.
As letter grade, 80% gets you an A-. Anything in the A family is considered good performance (unless you’re trying to get into Stanford. Sorry.)
In a five star rating system like Yelp, 80% translates into four stars. Yaaawn.
If you’re trying to pick a doctor, a car dealer, a restaurant, an esthetician or a massage therapist, four stars is merely the price of entry. An A- player is not a solid A player or an A+ player. It’s not likely that an A- esthetician will get a client excited enough to make a personal endorsement. That privilege belongs to the solid A or A+ esthetician.
If you’re a spa that’s trying to achieve a solid A, you need solid A Players on your team. A Players do what it takes to be successful. They make sure that they make their contribution–not to make their spa director or owner, happy–but because it’s who they are.
If being an A Player means they need to show up for 80% of the staff meetings (an attendance standard used in most successful spas, as well as our own) they do it. Because that’s who they are as a professional.
A Players want to be surrounded by other A Players. To be an employee in Good Standing in our spa means respecting the contributions of others, too. If you are an A Player, you don’t just show up to a staff meeting to learn, or participate. You show up to respect the others who are showing up, including team mates, vendors, educators.
There are a thousand reasons why it’s inconvenient to attend a staff meeting. And everyone who attends a staff meeting has overcome at least one or two of those reasons to get there. An A Player, facing inconvenience, distraction, minor emergencies, car trouble, will find a way to be there. Because that’s who they are. They don’t want to be left out. They don’t want to miss something that they may need to know.
When a new employee begins their job at Preston Wynne, we have a discussion about the responsibilities of the job. One of those is attending our meetings. We take our meetings seriously, larding them heavily with education and avoiding the tedious scolding that characterize so many spa staff meetings.
A Players who come to our spa from other companies often mention how positive, useful, and (yes) even fun our staff meetings are. We make some attendance exceptions for students and very part time or on-call employees. But there’s a tradeoff: their opportunities may be limited too.
In an industry where fair play is a real, living value, I’m always surprised that an employee would believe it is fair to give someone who has not met the attendance standard that they agreed to the same rights and privileges of an employee who has made the effort and met the standard.
More often that not, when I hear an employee say, “No one ever told me that,” it is someone who missed the meeting in which we Told Them That. Likewise the person who grouses, “No one knows what’s going on around here.”
Success is not simply about your attitude. It’s about your actions. It’s not about shooting for 80%, which guarantees you’ll miss even that goal, but shooting for 100% and nearly succeeding.
That’s what makes Preston Wynne Spa special, different and better.
