The Power of Positive Programming

In the last few blogs, I’ve writ­ten about stay­ing on the same page and rein­forc­ing and strength­en­ing cul­ture and goals. Anoth­er key ingre­di­ent to suc­cess is to become a bro­ken record.

To excel at any sport, you don’t just need to know what to do, you have to prac­tice it again and again and again until mus­cle mem­o­ry does the work auto­mat­i­cal­ly. The pow­er of rep­e­ti­tion puts you on effort­less autopilot.

The same with math in school: say­ing the times tables again and again makes it auto­mat­ic. When some­one asks you, decades lat­er, ​“what is 9 x 9?” you instan­ta­neous­ly know the answer is 81. It’s burned into your mind.

Same goes for repeat­ed prayers. Or a pop­u­lar jin­gle: you can hear the first few bars and fin­ish the rest.

If it works in sports, math, reli­gion and adver­tis­ing, why not use the same prin­ci­ple in business?

As a CEO or leader, your goal is to fig­ure out what peo­ple need to have top of mind and then to repeat it again and again and again so that the whole orga­ni­za­tion is auto­mat­i­cal­ly in sync.

I call this Pos­i­tive Pro­gram­ming. And most orga­ni­za­tions are hor­ri­ble at it because they always focus on the next thing. You want to apply pos­i­tive pro­gram­ming to a few tan­gi­ble things:

• Val­ues, pur­pose and BHAG — by CEOs, exec­u­tives and team lead­ers. You can even make them the default in the first few slides of all your Pow­er­Point presentations
• Com­pa­ny goals
• Key sys­tems, beliefs and habits that cre­ate amaz­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ences because, at the end of the day, the cus­tomer is always the boss and there are things we can do to delight or dri­ve them crazy.

Some exam­ples:

• Retail com­pa­nies use the ART of sell­ing to take care of the cus­tomer and increase sales:
  • Approach
  • Recom­mend
  • Thank
• One orga­ni­za­tion has their sev­en steps to SERVICE
• A pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices com­pa­ny focus­es on excel­lence using GREAT
• A valet park­ing ser­vices busi­ness uses a cal­en­dar of the 31 behav­iours every asso­ciate is expect­ed to under­stand and deliv­er. Every day, every team at every loca­tion looks at the cal­en­dar and talks about the dai­ly prin­ci­ple, to keep it top of mind. Over the year, every employ­ee will hear every prin­ci­ple many times. With lots of turnover, it becomes train­ing about what mat­ters most – again and again and again.

Peo­ple often believe that the work lies in defin­ing a pol­i­cy or pro­ce­dure. But the real work is bring­ing the great­ness behind them to life – and you can only do that as a bro­ken record.

And when you’re made fun for doing that, and when peo­ple start say­ing ​“I know” or auto­mat­i­cal­ly fin­ish your sen­tences or key phras­es, you’re almost there.

The Chal­lenge

• What are the three or four things you and your orga­ni­za­tion need to repeat this year — again and again and again?

Need help fig­ur­ing out what to say again and again and again? We can help you with that!