Leaders get the people they deserve. When leaders see their people as human resources, as a means to the end of getting the results, they treat them accordingly. They use a combination of sanctions and incentives to get as much out of those ‘resources’ as they can. But people don’t like to be treated as resources – as ‘commodities’, in Simon Sinek’s words. Their response is to resist and retaliate. Their response is to do the bare minimum – which is not good for the customer, or the business or ultimately themselves.

OUR SUMMARY OF THIS VIDEO: I think that there’s a huge opportunity in industry to double down on what quite frankly is good leadership. And I think one of the reasons that these industries are considered to be commodity industries is because we treat those workers as commodities, we treat them as replaceable hourly workers – so they act like commodities, and they treat customers like commodities.

We’ve created commodity industries – it’s not necessarily the products themselves.

Are we going to actually give training beyond the technical skills – are we going to give people training in human skills? We give hard skills training but we very rarely give human skills training.

For instance, are we teaching our frontline people how to resolve conflict? That happens – you know, somebody says ‘I don’t like this work you’ve done’. How does that go? Do you have any idea how that conversation is going to go when you’re not there?

Are we teaching people listening skills, are we teaching them how to give and receive feedback? Maybe there’s two or three of them on a job and one of them is slightly more senior – are we teaching them skills that make them better at their job with each other and with the customers?

And by the way. those are skills they would take home so you would be making them better human beings – and if you make them better human beings, it makes them super-loyal to the company.

So they might get offered a better job somewhere else, and of course there are minimum standards of pay that have to be met, but once you meet those thresholds they will say, ‘I’d rather work here because of the way that my boss makes me feel, because of the way this company makes me feel.’