Start With Why

perfect sense. “What gets measured gets done,” as well-known sales coach Jack Daly says. And in the world of debt collecting, the callers were given bonuses based on how much money they collected. This has resulted in an entire industry that threatens, badgers, hounds and provokes. It didn’t take long until Harbridge found herself adopting the same attitude whenever she talked with debtors. “I began treating people on the phone the way everybody else in the office treated them,” she said.
    Feeling like WHAT she was doing was completely out of balance with her WHY, Harbridge decided there had to be another way. “I got it in my head that I was going to start an agency that collected by being nice,” she said. People in the collections business thought Harbridge naïve, if not crazy. And maybe she was.
    In 1993, Harbridge moved to San Francisco and started her own collections firm, Bridgeport Financial, steeped in the belief that agents would have more success treating people with respect than badgering them. Harbridge built her company on her WHY—that everyone has a story and everyone deserves to be listened to. Her approach was to have her agents try to establish rapport with the debtor on the other end of the phone in the course of a three-minute conversation. The goal was to learn everything they could about the person’s circumstances: Did they have the means to pay the debt? Would they honor a payment plan? Was the reason for the failure to pay reflective of a short-term situation? “We would get people to tell us the truth,” she said. “Sure, we had a legal department, but we tried to avoid using it.” Harbridge knew, however, that no matter her intentions, if she measured the results the same way as others, the same awful behavior would result. So she came up with an entirely new way to incentivize her people. She found a way to measure WHY.
    At Bridgeport Financial, bonuses were not given for the amount of money that was collected; they were given based on how many “thank you” cards her agents sent out. This is harder than it sounds. Sending out a card thanking someone for the time they spent talking on the phone requires a few things. First, Harbridge had to hire people who believed what she believed. She had to hire good fits. If her employees didn’t believe that everyone deserves to be listened to, it wouldn’t work. Only good-fit hires would be capable of creating an environment on the telephone that would actually warrant sending a thank-you card, even though the purpose of the call was to ask for money. Harbridge measured WHY her company existed, not WHAT they did, and the result was a culture in which compassion was valued above all.
    But what about the other results? What about her financial results, the ones most businesses pursue first? Bridgeport Financial collected 300 percent more than the industry average. What’s more, most of the people and companies who were initially being pursued ended up doing more business with the original company that sent the collections agency after them in the first place. This is almost unprecedented in the collections industry.
    Harbridge’s business succeeded not just because she knew WHY she was doing what she was doing, but because she found a way to measure the WHY. The company’s growth was loud and her cause was clear. She started with WHY and the rest followed.
    Most organizations today use very clear metrics to track the progress and growth of WHAT they do—usually it’s money. Unfortunately, we have very poor measurements to ensure that a WHY stays clear. Dwayne Honoré has for the past ten years run his own commercial construction company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a trade he learned from his father. A leader with a deep sense of purpose, he devised some years ago a brilliant system to ensure that his values are reinforced in his company’s culture. He figured out how to measure something most people can only pay lip service to: work-life balance. Honoré believes that people should not spend all their time at work, but rather they should work to spend more of their time with their families.
    Every employee at Honoré Construction is required to clock in in the morning and clock out in the evening. But there’s a catch. They must clock in between 8:00–8:30 a.m. and out by 5:00–5:30 P.M. Stay any later and they are taken out of a bonus pool. Because employees know they have to leave by 5:30 p.m., wasted time has dropped