QuintEssentials: A Weekly Look at Leadership
Special to the Asheville Citizen-Times

Prescription for success: Quint Studer prescribes strategies to create great companies

ASHEVILLE – If you run a great company, employees will be thrilled to work there and customers will clamor to do business with you.

That’s the message Quint Studer, a former health care executive, prescribes through a series of best-selling books and his 154-employee consulting business, Studer Group, based in Pensacola, Fla.

In a visit to Asheville next month, Studer will address how leaders can build great organizations by focusing on their top workers rather than squandering time with low performers.
Studer published “Hardwiring Excellence,” which has sold more than 300,000 copies, in 2004, and followed it up the next year with “101 Answers to Questions Leaders Ask.” “Results That Last” became a Wall Street Journal best-seller after its publication last October.

Studer spent 20 years in the health care industry, but he says his approach works with any type of organization. Microsoft, the Naval Air Museum, school district, large corporations and small businesses have found success with the methods, he says.

On Thursday, Studer talked with the Citizen-Times about his work and his upcoming visit to Asheville.

Question: Many business management books talk about creating a culture of excellence. What sets your “Hardwiring Excellence” and “Results That Last” apart from all the others?

Answer: My approach is much more prescriptive. Most leaders know what they want to do and why they want to do it, but the question is always, “How?” The feedback we get is that our book is much more prescriptive on how to accomplish certain things — whether it be employee retention, employee development or customer service.

Q: You have a background in health care. How did you move from that into business management consulting?

A: I actually started out as a special education teacher. In that field, you have to be good at diagnosing the situation, then develop a plan to maximize that child’s potential. You want to organize everybody around the child. You use a lot of reward and recognition, but you have to use consequences. As the child develops, you continue to raise your goals.

I ended up going into health care in the behavioral medicine field. Again, I found out that the key to any organization is to diagnose the problem, figure out the goals and develop the organization to achieve those goals.

Q: So these principles can apply not just to hospitals but to any business or organization?

A: Absolutely. Good leadership is good leadership. In fact, we find that people spend too much time comparing instead of relating. People who don’t usually accomplish their goals compare themselves to a point where they figure out why they’re different. They say, “I’ll figure out why I’m unique, and then I don’t have to change.” We call it “terminal uniqueness.”

Q: Can you briefly describe the “Five Pillars” you emphasize— service, people, quality, finances and growth?

A: Every employee can look and find something he or she does that impacts each of the pillars. We want everybody to see that the work they have is worthwhile. Any direct research I’ve seen shows that there’s a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. If you can’t capture the hearts and loyalty of your employees, you’re certainly not going to capture the hearts and loyalty of your customers. If I want to make it a really great company, I have to make it a great place to work.

Q: You talk about “employee ownership” in your book. Can you give an example?

A: Have you ever pulled up to a restaurant at closing time? If the owner’s there, he’ll keep the place open. If employees are there and they feel like owners, they’ll take care of you. If they don’t, they’ll point to the sign and say, “We’re sorry. We’re closed.”

Then you say, “I’m never going back there again.”

Q: So how do you instill that sense of ownership?

A: The biggest questions we get on our Web site are, “How do you hold people accountable?” and “What do you do with problem employees?” First of all, there is such a lack of leadership training in companies. You get inconsistency, so some leaders permit things others don’t. We say, “What you permit, you promote.”

When we talk to employees, one of their biggest frustrations is they think the boss isn’t holding people accountable, which they think is unfair. If you don’t deal with the poor performers, they will wear down the rest of the organization.

Q: So getting rid of low performers can actually improve employee morale?

A: We call it addition by subtraction. We think you can have a high-performing organization and not have low performers.
It’s a very specific technique that I’ll be teaching in Asheville: How to re-recruit the high performer, how to re-recruit and develop the middle performer, and how to move the low performer up to expectations or out of the organization.

It’s how to spend 92 percent of your time with the 92 percent of your employees who are high and middle performers, instead of spending all your time dealing with the low performers.

The people who come to the conference will find it very practical. They will leave better prepared to lead their department or their organization than when they came in.

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