When Schwarz asked Koeze's managers to write up accounts of conflicts they had had with one another, an exercise in dissecting unproductive speech habits, some resisted. They viewed Schwarz's methods as BS and weren't wild about opening old wounds. One refused to participate. Koeze didn't see what the big deal was. "The only risk was someone would start to cry," he says.
And though Schwarz regards Jeff Koeze as one of his clients most devoted to the methods -- "Jeff is easily a nine or a 10" on a 10-point scale -- Koeze to this day feels his crew tiptoes around difficult topics. "Notwithstanding all of our training," Koeze wrote as part of a case study for one of Schwarz's handbooks, "I recently described the avoidance of delivering negative information concerning the performance of others as a core feature of Koeze's culture." Without a freewheeling discussion, how could he get the staff to embrace different ways of doing business?
Koeze brought in a local philosophy professor, Michael De-Wilde, who uses literature to get varied groups, including prisoners, to discuss their situations. At Koeze, DeWilde assigned Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. The workers were soon comparing one another to its characters. "You're like Lennie" (the mentally dim worker who doesn't know his own strength), one Koeze employee bluntly told another. DeWilde says the exercise helped two workers realize they wanted to leave Koeze, and that eased problems in the production shop.
In 2004, DeWilde helped Koeze face up to a service problem at his retail stores. Workers were too passive in service -- they camped behind the counter rather than prowling the store to engage indecisive customers. And they were too aggressive when it came to handling complaints; they were reluctant to simply give an unhappy customer a new jar of nuts. Neither problem was huge, but Koeze knew any failure to resolve a complaint in the customer's favor would risk losing that person for good. And sales weren't going to rise on their own -- his retail workers needed to sell.
Koeze asked DeWilde to fix the service problem, and in a way that would keep him from being surprised by problems a second time. For 10 months, the retail workers met every other week -- in two-hour sessions, fully paid -- and shared their ideas and frustrations. Marcia Huber, who has worked nearly a decade at Koeze stores, says her initial training was "next to nothing." She knew whom to call with a problem but hadn't been told how to solve problems. The occasional upset customer, then, was a source of great worry for her and others.
With DeWilde's help, the salespeople decided that it's OK, when a customer knocks on the door after closing time, to let him or her in; customers could sample anything in the store; and if a customer was unhappy with something, staff should replace it free of charge and without question. "That did take a lot of anxiety out of seeing someone walk through the door with a Koeze bag," Huber says.
Upon meeting DeWilde, she says, "At first we were intimidated by his education." But over time, she adds, "I felt very pleased that the company would put forth that much effort. It built our confidence."
Still, change was often coming too slowly to suit Jeff Koeze.
SOMETIMES, THE BOSS NEEDS TO CHANGE
By his sixth or seventh year at Koeze Co., Jeff says, he felt "a great deal of personal frustration." Being a boss, he realized, often meant delegating to people with skills inferior to your own. It also meant much of your own company is hidden to you, because workers don't share a lot of what they know. Those problems, of course, no boss can fix. He wondered if he should sell.
"I was not well suited to this or any business," Koeze remembers thinking. "There were things that had to be fixed about me. I was probably rational to a fault." As an undergrad at North Carolina, he had flourished at Chi Psi, the school's nerdiest fraternity. For his blunt debating style, his brothers voted him "most obnoxious Yankee" seven semesters in a row.
"He relished earning that distinction," says Donald Beeson, a Chi Psi brother. "He was very direct."
As a professor, among colleagues, Koeze operated under the assumption that the best argument wins any given point. "Formal authority is rarely used," he says. Inherent in that approach is the belief that people shouldn't be told what to do. Rather, they should be taught to decide what to do.
But the approach was foreign to the workers at Koeze Co. It took the help of Schwarz, DeWilde, and others, but Koeze eventually came to see "how unlikely it was that I was going to be able to argue people into doing things my way. The other piece of it is my own reluctance to use authority."
Indeed, he sometimes had to simply give orders. He had to stop researching and just make a decision. "He'll get so anal on numbers, he'll overanalyze it," says Paul Bernhard, an accountant who advised Scott and Jeff Koeze on succession issues.
So, Koeze did change. He took some of the Roger Schwarz medicine he had been prescribing for others: He began to share his thoughts, and that put people at ease. At DeWilde's urging, he also became more patient. And Koeze listened to and changed his own speech. He realized he confused people by verbally debating with himself the very issue on which he was about to give an order. "It's made worse by a habit I have of thinking out loud," he says. "Somewhere in here, there's an order. That's all they're listening for. 'When are you going to tell me what to do?' "
And Koeze stopped yearning for workers he couldn't afford and instead invested in the ones he had. "We can't afford to hire fancy folks," he says. "But we need them." He learned to spot traits in his existing workers -- compulsiveness, curiosity -- that translate into business skills. His dissatisfaction, he decided, "was mainly just me getting snippy with people."
