The Million Dollar Greeting. Dan Sachs

employee is different. And every customer is different every day, and every employee is different every day, so it’s like a kaleidoscope. Most times the same customer doesn’t even want the same thing at two different times of the day.”

      Beliefs about Giving Excellent Service

      Not only do Ari’s books delve into the power of beliefs in business, his conversations do too. And he is passionate about them. He’s established what he calls a “self-fulfilling belief cycle,” which affects everything from the ground up. During our meeting, he draws a picture of it: a circle with arrows going around. That’s why he is so certain that delivering outstanding customer service increases the financial bottom line, even though he doesn’t have hard data to prove it (apart from the company’s growth and success over the years).

      Asked whether he feels there’s a law of diminishing returns when it comes to giving outstanding service, he shakes his head. “I don’t think so. If you believe there is a law of diminishing returns, you will find evidence to show that it’s not worth it. I don’t believe it; I think that it increases one’s energy to learn, I believe that it’s more fun, and I believe if we’re not getting better, we’re getting worse, and there’s one thousand other people that would be happy to have our customers.”

      Making guiding principle number 2 a concrete reality takes hard work—a lot of it. Zingerman’s has a ninety-day orientation that blends classroom and shift training, with continuing training for the entire time an employee works there, as well as clearly defined expectations for each position, with recognition and rewards when employees succeed. Additionally, like many companies, there are also formal performance reviews plus on-shift feedback and periodic conversations with managers.

      In an as-yet unpublished essay he shared with me, Ari writes about the best way to give feedback. After talking with him, it’s not at all surprising that he sees it as a two-way street, as something in which employees and managers equally participate: the former by creating a personal vision of where he or she wants to be in a year, and the latter by helping the employee realize that vision.

      He summarized his perspective like this:

      “If our work as leaders is a lot about helping everyone here figure out what their dreams are and then successfully go after getting them to be a reality, then inside-outing the approach to performance reviews—which everyone believes in but hardly anyone actually loves doing—could be a big piece of making that happen. [The essay] is based on my belief in each individual’s ability to get to greatness, in the power of visioning, and the assumption that one of our main responsibilities as leaders is to help every one of us live their dreams with ever greater efficacy.”