Wow, what a run of bad luck Tim’s is having these days.

First, firing an employee for giving a child a FREE TimBit, and now, not allowing a pregnant homeless women to eat her breakfast in the restaurant.

The important learning is that it doesn’t matter that Tim Hortons has a basis for either of these actions. What matters is that customers across Canada are not happy with the corporate behavior.

But in neither case, was this corporate behaviour — it was a specific individual acting in what they felt was a totally appropriate manner. Can these be any louder warnings for us about the critical importance of working with our employees on the customer service experience they are providing.

Tim Hortons has been a good corporate citizen. They are a big sponsor of local community activities in sports, culture and the arts — yet all of that money is being totally over shadowed by “unpaid media” that suggests the company is uncaring. Plus, I would guess, considerable time and money are now being spent to minimize and undo the damage created by there 2 recent situations.

How much better to have spent this time and money making sure employees understand and internalize the corporate culture.

So when the value of spending funds to create a customer-focus culture in the organization is questioned — remember these examples.

It doesn’t matter how well the head office gets it or how much you spend on training “what to do”, if your employees don’t embrace your customer service experience and understand how to interpret the policies in the context of the brand values you have developed, you will continually be fighting fires likes these.

It’s the difference between hiring and training for competence versus character.

Cheers!

One of the critical success factors for developing a great consistent brand experience is hiring the right people. I believe that involves looking at 2 key areas when hiring; competence and character.

Competence is the skills, knowledge and experience to do the job. Either they have these skills already, or you believe that with the correct training, they have the potential to learn to do the job well. This is often what most interviews and most training is geared towards.

However, even more important than competence is character. You should be looking for people who can get on board with your vision. People who get excited about your company vision and values — who love working with and looking after customers.

I recall a story about the great Ritz Carlton hotel chain. Whenever they interviewed someone for any aspect of their business, they shared a meal with the prospect and accidentally dropped a napkin while eating. They were looking to see if the person naturally reached to pick the napkin up.

The purpose of this little test was to see whether “helping” was a natural characteristic or one that was just on display for the interview.

Of course this was just one method of digging in to find their character. They had many other techniques. But the real lesson here is that they clearly understood the kind of character they were looking for in their organization, and had specific elements within their hiring process to unearth these characteristic.

My experience is that if you have to chose between competence and character — choose character every time. If you have the right person, you can always train for competence. it is almost impossible to change a persons character.

The best examples of this is the legion of stories of people who started at the bottom of the organization and who rose through the ranks to become a senior executive. These are always people who had the right character, just not yet the right competence.

So ask yourself, does your hiring process have elements built in that delve into the character of the potential employee to ensure that their character aligns with the results you want. If not, shouldn’t it?

Cheers!