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Building a Team

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Goal of a Lifetime

ServiceMaster CEO and chairman emeritus C. William Pollard shares three guiding principles for building a revered global company—one satisfied customer at a time.
C. William Pollard | Outcomes, Feb/Mar 2008

Thirty years in business have taught me three timeless truths about excellence—and why for every leader and organization committed to delivering superior service, excellence is essential.

I joined The ServiceMaster Company as a senior vice president in 1977. For the first eight weeks, I actually did my administrative work at night, after having spent the day in the field delivering services and keeping in touch with our customers. One day, our company's chairman phoned and said he wanted to meet to review a report I had written.

I can still see my memorandum on his desk. It was marked up with all kinds of lines and crossed-out words. It was clear to me he had read it thoroughly! "Bill," he said, "I'm pleased with your efforts but not satisfied." He then told me the things I could do better and shared with me what it meant to pursue excellence. Even though I was irritated at the time, I knew I could do better.

That experience taught me that there's always room to improve. The principle of continuous improvement means: No matter where you set the bar for a standard of excellence, there is always a way to do it better.

Excellence is more often realized in the pursuit than in the achievement.

A second memorable encounter moved me closer to the heart of excellence. While I was serving as president and CEO of ServiceMaster, I learned that one of our customers, a hospital in Minneapolis, had become dissatisfied with our work and was ready to terminate our contract. I picked up the phone and arranged a meeting with the CEO to try and save the account. I then led our team through our company review process, called Quality Proficient Quotient (QPQ), to measure our effectiveness.

I remember sharing the results with the hospital's CEO, ready to convince her of our quality. "As you'll see," I told her, "our team scored in the high 90's in all the QPQ categories."

"I'm not interested in that," she said. "I judge your quality of work on Monday mornings at 6 a.m." By now, she really had my attention. "Monday mornings are the hardest times to clean a hospital. Over the weekend there is a lot of traffic, a lot of visitors, and a smaller cleaning crew." That conversation brought me face to face with a second principle of delivering quality:

Excellence is best measured not by the provider, but rather by the people you serve.

As you can imagine, I told this CEO that we would redirect our efforts to meet and exceed her standards—if she would just give us a second chance. She did.