The Golden Rule Has a Typo
Gary Chapman’s “The Five Love Languages” is a must-read for any couple that wants a healthy, sustainable relationship. It’s also a quiet demolition of the Golden Rule.
Most of us learned the rule as, “Treat others as YOU want to be treated.” Chapman’s version is, “Treat others as THEY want to be treated.” One word. Enormous difference.
According to Chapman, we humans have five emotional buckets that need filling:
- Words of Affirmation—for some people, praise lands as hard as action.
- Quality Time—who in a relationship has never heard, “We don’t spend enough quality time together”?
- Receiving Gifts—flowers, chocolates, Jimmy Choos, Ferraris.
- Acts of Service—doing the favors and the chores.
- Physical Touch—not necessarily what happens in the boudoir. A hand on the shoulder. Holding hands.
We all run on some mix of the five, but each of us has a primary. And there’s the trap: we assume everybody else’s primary is the same as ours.
If I value Words of Affirmation, I’ll keep telling my wife how smart and pretty she is. There I go, fat, dumb, and happy, certain I’m topping off her love tank, while she’s standing next to an unmade bed and a full trash can. She’s smart enough to know it costs me nothing to say she’s pretty. She’d rather I take out the garbage.
Companies Have Love Languages Too
Here’s my theory. Companies have a primary love language too, and Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema named them thirty years ago in “The Discipline of Market Leaders.” Their argument is that a company can be adequate at all three of these and truly great at exactly one:
- Product Leadership—innovation
- Operational Excellence—efficiency
- Customer Intimacy—the relationship
Stay in retail and it’s easy to see. Walmart wins on price and logistics. Nordstrom wins because somebody remembers your name and takes the return without the interrogation. Two successful companies, opposite primary languages, and neither one could survive by running the other’s playbook.
Where the Relationship Goes Off the Rails
FedEx is operationally excellent. Zappos is customer intimate. Now put them in a room together.
A Zappos employee calls FedEx expecting somebody to bend over backwards, and instead gets a process. She’s stunned. The guy on the other end isn’t cold and he isn’t a bad person—he isn’t empowered. FedEx’s pricing, cost structure, and procedures are all built on doing the same thing the same way ten million times a night. Zappos’ are built on doing whatever this one customer happens to need today.
When Company A, whose ingrained culture says the customer is always right, meets operationally efficient Company B, there’s a very high likelihood Company B is about to disappoint a set of expectations it never agreed to in the first place.
Play it out. Suppose FedEx delivered Nordstrom-grade intimate service. Would you switch? Now suppose that abandoning the well-defined procedures drove costs up until an overnight letter ran $300. Everyone goes right back to the $20 letter, delivered with a smirk instead of a smile.
The Mismatch Happens Inside the Building, Too
This isn’t only a customer problem. It’s a hiring problem.
Recruit a customer-intimacy person into an operational-excellence culture and you will eventually write her up for spending forty minutes on a call she was supposed to close in six. She wasn’t wrong. She was mistranslated. You hired somebody who speaks fluent Nordstrom and put her on a FedEx route.
It’s the same failure as the manager who hands a plaque to the employee who wanted a Friday afternoon off—generosity aimed in the wrong direction, then genuine confusion when nobody feels appreciated.
The Fix Is Boring: Say It Out Loud
Set expectations up front.
Tell your customers which value discipline drives your culture before you take the order, not after they’ve filed the complaint. Tell candidates in the interview which language your company speaks, and let the mismatches self-select out while it’s still cheap. Tell your own team, so the people on the front line know which behaviors get rewarded and which ones get them a coaching conversation.
Nobody gets Ritz-Carlton service at Holiday Inn prices. And Holiday Inn should be the one to say so.
Want to talk Love Languages, or any other issue that may be quietly wrecking your business performance? Sign up for a complimentary, no-obligation online coaching session by pressing that little red button down there.
