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A FEW WARNINGS
We have noticed that the people who get fired or who quit have a few things in common, and if you are on the team, we think you’re great and would hate to see either of these happen so, we want to give you a “heads up!” on a few more things.
How to Get Yourself Fired
1) Working Against Our Specifications
When training a new person, there is a wide open space to learn and grow but also to mess up, stumble and fail. We get this. We are everyday folks just like you. It takes time to make your new skills and knowledge into second-nature habits. However, after you are trained and know-well what you are doing, there ARE standards in place that are there for a reason and willfully rebelling against them will only hurt us all.
The Power of Words- For instance, you will learn quickly that we believe that words matter. Words are stimuli that evoke all sorts of thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Just notice your internal reaction to the word MOUSE vs RAT. Words evoke emotions which is why certain words are off-limits in any culture and in some cultures there is no freedom of speech at all (like China) which just goes to show how powerful mere words can be.
Because words have so much power, you will learn in your certification 2 training for operant conditioning that there are words that we just don’t use. We don’t sell “bundles” or “packages” but instead sell “programs.” We don’t use “shock collars” on a dog, but a “remote collar.” When using a remote collar, the trainer doesn’t “zap” or “shock” the dog, but merely “taps” it.
If you find that a dog is sensitive to using a prong collar to learn to heel, then a good trainer will CHANGE THE STIMULI to one that the dog can handle better. Switching our words when talking to clients is the EXACT same thing. We are merely swapping stimuli so that we get the response we are looking for from the one being trained. Make sense?
The Reason for Checklists - We have checklists for almost every task. It just makes sense to have these. Once doctors added checklists to their surgeries a few decades ago (which they fought like crazy for some reason), they stopped leaving gloves, tissues and scalpels in people (something like 40% less!). This just goes to show that some of the smartest people in the world still need checklists too.
The big idea here is that each item on our checklists has a purpose. You might not like checklists. You might not like working from checklists. You might not like the tasks on the checklist, but just like they had to tell the doctors - “It’s part of the job!”
All this is to say: Please understand that posting a picture to social media of the dog you just trained or texting the families that you worked with a couple days ago to see how they are doing is just part of your job.
Note: If you think something on the checklist is needless or is redundant, then by all means bring it to us, because you may be right. Be prepared for a conversation about why we have it and we’ll see if it’s still needed. As you know, one of our values as a company is Ease & Simplicity, so if you have any ideas of how to make the process easier, we are all ears!
Leaving Lessons Early: As you may have figured by now, TRUST is a big factor in this position. For most jobs here you are either in the field or working from home. So a lot of times there isn’t much direct supervision. With that being said, if we find out you are leaving clients houses early (cutting lessons short) or not working during work hours (unless allowed by management), that can be grounds for immediate termination. For Eval/Networking Pros, not networking during networking hours or just not doing your stuff is grounds for termination.
2) Mistakes vs Rebellion vs Innovations
There is a lot of freedom to this work which most of us love, but it seems that some people start to get a sense that they can do whatever they want to do. Here are some good and bad examples of team mates using their freedom.
Mistakes - An Eval Pro told a client that Square auto-charges their card (this was back when we manually had to enter in credit card numbers each month). It was a lie. He was trying to force a sale and it backfired. The lady worked with Square herself and knew that that’s not how it worked. We lost her trust, lost the sale and she told on him to his supervisor.
He didn’t get fired, but he did have to humble himself and call the lady to apologize. He said that he didn’t know what came over him and that because he didn’t know how to answer her question, he blurted this out and immediately knew that he messed up. Because he was humble about it all, we counted this as a lesson towards Value #4 - Do the Right Thing, even when it’s hard and he might lose the deal.
Rebellion - As mentioned above, we had an excellent dog trainer who was calling the remote collars “shock collars” no matter how much we talked to him about that. He said that he only used that word when the client used that word, but we found out otherwise, so he was fired because he was willfully going against our rules.
Innovation - We had an excellent Eval Pro who was new to sales. He was trained in our tactics and our scripts, but he asked if he could start testing various things and found MUCH better and faster ways to do it. Ultimately, we combined our way and his new ideas and came up with the evaluation process that we have today. Once again showing that we do value freedom and honest feedback.
So please, handle your freedom well and if you have ideas that you want to test, just ask if you can test them, or what you’ve stumbled into. We are more open than you might think.
How to Mess Up Your Heart & Mind
1) WATCH OUT FOR DISILLUSIONMENT 30-60 DAYS FROM NOW.
We’ve all seen this a thousand times so let us just put some words to it. In every new project or new relationship, or in this case, a new job, people seem to move through stages.
Stage 1 - Grand Visions! This is the stage in dating where she is the Golden Haired Beauty and he is Prince Charming. Everything is wonderful and exciting and just right. At work, your boss is great and your new job is exciting. You just can’t believe that your life is going so well.
Stage 2 - Grand Illusions Crashing Down! - As the confirmation bias can’t just keep dismissing all of the evidence that maybe things aren’t perfect, you start to notice that you don’t like the way he chews his food, and she is kind of rude to waitresses, and your boss is moody more often than not, and this job is harder than you thought, etc. The bubble has popped and you’ve realized that things are NOT in fact perfect and wonderful.
Stage 3 - Decision, Decisions: Stay or Go - This is the point where we have to decide if you will stay, forgive, adjust and/or mature because working through the hard times will be worth it. The other option would be to leave to chase the next Grand Illusion because you aren’t in fact that into him/her/this job, etc.
Stage 4 - Maturity Yields Fruit - If you stay in the relationship, or in this case, the job, you will get the fruit of learning a new skill and becoming a bigger and better person from it because you did the hard thing and you stayed. This is a Value #6- Growth through hard things pays off big time!
So heads up! You will eventually realize that our team (and the rest of the world) gets moody, clients can be weird, dogs can be stubborn, and helping us change the world for one million families is hard…but if you stick with us, you’ll realize that this is fun, rewarding, and deeply meaningful work!
2) Be un-OFFENDable
The best-selling author, John Eldredge, calls this the Age of the Offended Self. That is, we have exalted ourselves, our pride and our feelings so much that we think “HOW DARE YOU” say something that might make me feel uncomfortable or uneasy or that I disagree with. Scrolling through your news feed is enough to see what he sees. All of the ranting and raging is being done by people who are OFFENDED.
Since we believe that honest feedback is good for everyone, be prepared to receive it. We can only hope you’ll hear it with the intentions that they are being told… to make you the best version of yourself within this company. As all relationships go however, not every conversation is expressed perfectly but we hope as we get to know you that you feel comfortable enough to let us know if you do get offended so we can adjust and learn how to talk with you because everyone is different and that’s okay!
Ideas are great and we love to hear creativity, but not all ideas are equal. Some are good, some are bad, some are good but at the wrong time, etc. Though some ideas may be bad, they will all most likely be discussed and some may be turned down. Be ready for either outcome when you bring an idea to the table!
The best defense against being easily offended?… Be un-offendable. Rise above all of it and let people think, say and do whatever they want because they won’t get in the way of THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY to work with us and push towards building the game-playing tribe of 1 million dog-lovers!
How do you stay un-offendable? Well…
3) REFUSE TO BUILD A CASE AGAINST PEOPLE
This is basic relationship advice, but people have good days and bad days, right? Also, people have strengths and weaknesses, right?
This means that all relationships are based on a bedrock of CONSTANT FORGIVENESS. Why? Because people are broken and moody and have weaknesses.
Somewhere around Day 1, you and your closest teammates will all answer these 2 questions as a means to orienting yourselves to each other:
I excel at ___________.
If you notice me ________ (being moody, messy with details, being overly-sensitive to criticism, needing lots of affirmation, procrastinating, telling it like it is, etc), please forgive me.
We do this so that we can get ahead of the curve. If I know that you are overly-sensitive to criticism, then I’ll be more likely to sugar-coat it a bit more. If you know that I am a bit rough-around-the-edges, then hopefully when I offend you, you’ll be more likely to let it go before it even messes up you.
The big idea here is to NOT build cases against others (because it’s going to eat you alive on the inside and might eventually blow up into a fight or worse or you quit because you don’t like someone), but to either FORGIVE THEM fast and/or give them some respectful, well-timed, well-placed FEEDBACK so that they know what they are doing and maybe can adjust some things, because, while truth hurts, its very helpful.
4) WATCH YOUR CONCLUSIONS
You’ll hear this one often. We find that when we take on a new project or tasks or relationships that we are TOO QUICK to judge and draw conclusions. For instance…
The first few dogs you encounter seem tricky, it would be easy to conclude: “Gosh, this is going to be hard.”
The first time you meet a teammate, they are rude and you might think, “Ok, so stay away from that guy!”
The first vet’s offices you go into to hang some Wonder Dog posters in your down time, and they don’t seem interested at all, so you conclude, “Vets clearly have no interest in this.”
The truth is that you had an odd series of harder dogs to train, or that Kyle was in a bad mood that morning, or that you were visiting the vets offices at their busy time, but instead of HOLDING YOUR CONCLUSIONS until you gathered more data, you made the conclusion too quickly.
Why is that a problem? Because we make decisions based upon the patterns that we THINK we see in the world, even if they are untrue. If your teenage love broke your heart, then you saw a movie that night of another heart-break, then you heard of a friend who got their heart-broken as well, you might think you see a pattern and conclude that love always ends in heart-ache so it’s just not worth it anymore…and the next thing you know, your heart is all closed up and potentially not letting in the one person who won’t break your heart.
Do you see how that works? Our faulty pattern finder will try to see patterns and then we tend to base all new decisions on the pattern we think we found, and if you remember that CONFIRMATION BIAS will help you deflect all evidence that your conclusion isn’t true…
Which all comes down to: Watch your conclusions about things because they are VERY VERY VERY hard to break once you’ve made them!
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