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Human Performance

Published April 2008

When Business Declines, Focus on Alterations

Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D.

 

The professional practice of human performance improvement is supported by scientific literature that has grown fourfold during the past 20 years. But occasionally a casual incident or conversation suddenly will jolt me back to daily workplace realities and the pragmatic lessons learned without the scientific rigor I admire.

Such was the case recently when Jacob, my neighbor and owner of Pico Cleaners, a 120-employee dry cleaning company, chatted with me about his business. He runs a tight ship with employees who have worked there for years. What emerged from the discussion, in his words, were some key principles for performance success:

• Pay more and demand more.
• Every employee is family; support one another.
• Show me a better way, and I'll do it and reward you for it.
• Spend time on employees so they can spend their time on the business.
• Never put a ceiling on rewards. The more you do, the more you should get.

I have learned many fundamental lessons over the years from my dry cleaners.

DeLuca Cleaners

The DeLuca brothers have been in the dry cleaning business for more than 30 years. During the early 1990s, when the economy was doing poorly and unemployment had sharply risen, I noticed fewer clothes on the racks.

"Mr. DeLuca," I said, "I guess the economy is affecting your cleaning business, too. Is it bad?"

His response: "True, my dry cleaning business is way down.  People wear their garments much longer before bringing them in, but my alterations business is booming."

His observation immediately resonated with my work as a performance professional. In good times, we are in our glory. We support recruitment, hiring and selection. We build performance models and tools to help rapidly integrate new workers. We implement methods to expand performance capabilities and meet growing job requirements.

When the economy falters and businesses contract to save on costs, we simply shift to help increase productivity, eliminate nonessential work demands and support workers' performance as their task loads increase due to layoffs. The DeLuca principle fits well: "When dry cleaning declines, focus on alterations."

Weisman Cleaners

Wouldn't you know it? A beautiful new jacket ruined by a cheap ballpoint pen. The beige Ultrasuede was covered with indelible ink. In despair, I displayed the disaster to my friend Jack who owns five small dry cleaning shops. "Looks really bad," he concluded somberly. Then came his offer.  "Donate this garment to science. I'll experiment on it. If I fail and it's ruined, I won't charge you. If I fix it, you'll pay me and write me a testimonial." Jack has a wall full of letters lauding his miraculous accomplishments.

In our work, we often face problems that appear insurmountable. These are opportunities for us to show our stuff as performance professionals. They demand we dig deep to identify root causes, seek out appropriate, feasible, economical solutions and help save the day. Like Jack, we need to establish clear partnership rules. And like Jack, we can ask our client partners to bear witness to our accomplishments.