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The Self-Actualization Pyramid
How do you create an environment where everybody wants to be self-actualized and live up to their potential? There are organizations out there who create an environment that allow people to move from job to career to calling, and it has very much a lot to do with the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need pyramid, where people move from their external motivation to their internal motivation.
If you know Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it’s five levels, and I took it and turned it into three levels. It’s like a paradigm for life. Survival at the base, succeed in the middle, and transform at the top. Survival, succeed, transform. So we took that pyramid – survival, succeed, transform – and we applied it to our employees. So money, recognition, meaning. Money being the survival need, recognition being the succeed need, and meaning having a sense of meaning and calling and inspiration in what you do, being the transformation need. Because when you’re in that self-actualized state, being all you can be, you do feel a bit transformed by it.
The number one piece of it if there’s a real key message here, it’s that when a recession comes along we all rush to the bottom of the pyramid. We all get focused on self preservation and our survival needs. And so what an organization and leaders have to do is create the environment where people move out of their fear and anxiety. So in our case, what we ended up doing was we ended up, in the last recession, saying we were not going to have any layoffs. So we did everything but lay people off. By doing that, what happened is we were able to secure the bottom of the pyramid. Nobody felt the fear of being laid off. And by doing that, we helped people move from the bottom of the pyramid to a place where they felt like, okay, now that I feel safe and secure, I can actually focus on the things that are going to make me feel more successful in my work and maybe more transformative.
Peak Experience
What we found is if we create peak experiences, which is an expression that Abe Maslow said people have when they’re in that self-actualized state, you create peak experiences for your people, your key stakeholders, you create peak performance for the organization. And during the worst of times, we tripled in size. Trying to create a peak experience for an employee, you have to sort of ask yourself, what is it that distinguishes the employment experience? Maybe they get a 3% raise every year, maybe they get a bonus, and it’s nice to get the bonus, but it wears off pretty quickly. What people tend to notice and remember over the course of their time in work is the experience they have with someone else. So how someone is recognized how we catch someone doing something right, that’s part of this first step of being at a peak experience. But even more so, the peak experience comes as a result of feeling like what you do is meaningful and purposeful.
In the hotel business, we would share guest comment cards. What most hotel companies do, and most leaders do, is they show the cards when people are upset. They show the angry guest and they say, “Why did you do it this way?” They actually don’t show the positives. It’s really crazy, but that’s how it’s done in the business. And what we’ve learned over time is, yes, you need to show the bad ones. You need to show the bad comments so that people understand, but you don’t actually hold back the good comments. And you make sure that people hear that. And so some of the things we would do as peak experiences is every quarter we would have guests come into our hotel to our employee meeting and tell their stories. Explain why they love this hotel, explain what it is about the quality of the service that they love. And then talk about maybe even an individual employee who’s not expecting it and why that particular employee is like a superstar for them, or what we call a hotel hero. And telling those hotel hero stories are not just poignant for the person who hears about themselves, but having everybody else in the room hear those stories as well, helps as well.
Plus, one of the things that we did that was really simple is we said, “If we want our hotel employees to be empathetic about the guest experience, let’s have them go stay in our other hotels.” So we created a new perk, which is every quarter each one of our employees gets to stay for two nights at any of our hotels for free. Now, not only does that mean that they get a nice perk, but it also gives them the opportunity to see what does it feel like to be a guest. And so, so much of it is just sort of getting inside the mind and the head of your employee to understand what’s important to them.