Ask an owner who is responsible for the company's reputation and most will point to themselves, or to marketing. Ask a customer and you get a different answer. The customer describes the person who picked up the phone, the technician who came to the house, or the contractor who did the work. As far as the customer is concerned, that person is the company.
Many leaders resist what follows from this. If the people closest to the customer decide what the customer thinks of you, then how those people feel about working for you is a growth question. How you delegate, how you correct a mistake, and whether you know when someone's birthday is will shape your reputation a year from now more than any campaign.
This article draws on Frederick Dudek's conversation with Sandra Coker on Business Superfans® Advantage, Episode 223: How to Build a People-First Culture That Drives Referrals and Profit with Sandra Coker. [Link to the episode page — backfill once live]
The Problem: People Filed Under "Expense"
Payroll is one of the largest costs a service business carries, so it is natural to manage people the way you manage any other cost: watch it, trim it, and question every request that comes with it. The habit is understandable. It is also where the damage starts.
Sandra Coker is the founder and CEO of Human Power Solutions, a professional development firm that works inside companies as a fractional chief learning officer. She has run restaurant shifts, owned a fitness center that she says she bought in 2008 and ran for seven years, and started her firm in 2019 after, by her account, being fired from a training company five days before Christmas, having helped get that company to a million dollars. She wishes managers, leaders, and owners would stop looking at their employees "as being an expense or a bother."
Her reading of the employee who keeps raising issues is the opposite of the usual one: "It's because the person cares and it's because the person wants to do a good job." Frederick Dudek makes the same point in plainer terms. Nobody wakes up planning to go to work and do a horrible job.
When people are treated as a cost, they act like one. They do what is asked, keep their ideas to themselves, and take their best energy somewhere else.
Why It Matters: Reputation Is Carried at the Point of Contact
Coker tells a story from a morning she spent training tellers at a bank. She pointed upstairs to where the executives sit and told the room: "They're not the reputation of the company, you are."
She meant it literally. The tellers give the advice, make the referrals, and look after clients' money. An owner or senior manager usually enters the picture only when there is a problem to fix. Frederick Dudek borrows a phrase from a past guest for this: frontline staff are a company's directors of first impressions.
The effect runs past the customer. Coker cites a video in which the CEO of a 450-person company measured the success of his company on the divorce rate of its people. His reasoning, as she describes it, is that people who are treated with respect and asked for their ideas go home speaking well of where they work, and people who spend the day in disorganization and toxicity take that home instead. Maybe a child doesn't get a bedtime story. Maybe dinner happens in front of the TV.
It also reaches the hiring market. Owners often talk about a shortage of good people. Coker disagrees: "There's a lot of talent out there, and there's some good talent out there. You've got to be worthy of that talent." She says her own daughter has brought five or six people into the large financial institution she works for, because she loves the culture. A company that treats people well has its staff doing the recruiting.
Key Lessons
Delegation is how trust becomes visible
Leaders who keep the important work for themselves believe they are protecting quality. Coker says the team hears something else. Managers and supervisors who aren't delegating "are basically sending a message to others that, hey, I don't trust you. I don't trust you to do this work."
The cost is confidence. People who are never handed anything difficult stop believing they could do it. Her prescription is simple: delegate, expect mistakes, fix them, and add the skill that was missing. "People learn by trying and by making mistakes and they thrive when they're trusted."
Correct in private, and watch your tone
A mistake handled badly teaches the whole team a lesson, and it is the wrong one. Frederick Dudek describes the manager who reprimands someone in front of everyone: the negativity spreads like wildfire, and every person in the room quietly starts to wonder whether they are next and whether their résumé is up to date.
Coker connects this to psychological safety, which she says depends on a leader's tone, body language, and way of interacting with people. She also sees a generational gap. In the workplaces her own generation grew up in, decisions were made behind closed doors and nobody understood them. Younger employees, in her experience, want decisions made, clarity, and transparency. Neither expectation is wrong, she says, but the two sides need to talk about it.
The people doing the job know how to fix it
Process decisions are often made by executives in a room, based on what they heard from the next line down. Coker's warning is that this report is "not always accurate." Her advice to CEOs, owners, and executives is to "take a walk, have a huddle," and talk with the people who do the work.
Her firm applies the same idea to training. Workshops are custom-built and interactive, with what she calls "no death by PowerPoint," because, in her words, "There's so much wisdom in a room with employees." When she forms groups, she mixes strong performers with reluctant ones so that good practice travels between them.
One example she gives is a large utility company in the Northeast that wanted its field technicians trained in customer service. She proposed a pilot that pulled in people from across the organization, field techs included, and spent months building the program with them. Coker says the result was higher satisfaction scores from clients and a new sense of pride among the techs, who came to see the job differently: "I'm not just checking a meter or rewiring something or turning power back on. I'm actually serving my community."
There is a second benefit. When someone's suggestion is put into practice and they are credited for it, they tell their family and friends. That is the first public relations a company gets, and it costs nothing.
Recognition is cheap, and people notice it
Frederick Dudek's book Creating Business Superfans argues that people will crawl through broken glass for appreciation and recognition. His standard example is an hourly employee whose aunt is in the hospital. One company quotes the policy and docks her pay. Another tells her to go and pays her for the rest of the day. He calls the second choice cheap money, because that employee will tell everyone she knows what her company did.
The same applies to the small irritations. A broken monitor replaced the next day says something about how much a person's time is worth to the company.
Your team includes people who are not on the payroll
Many service businesses depend on contractors, and the contractor is often the one standing in front of the customer. A contractor who feels like a hired hand does the job to get it done. One who feels like part of the company tells the homeowner they made a good choice.
Coker runs her firm this way. She says she works with 50 contract facilitators, each of whom has their own business and takes work from other firms. They get a birthday brownie, quarterly cards, quarterly meetings, and an online community where they share resources, and at the end of the year she rents a private room at a bowling alley for a holiday dinner. Her stated aim is to be their first choice.
She takes the same approach to firms that offer services close to her own. "I'm not a big competition person. I believe in collaboration," she says. When a client needs something a complementary provider does well, she recommends that provider, which gives the client more people they can trust and makes her one of them.
Practical Framework: Trust, Hear, Recognize
Three questions cover most of what a people-first culture requires.
Trust. What work am I holding on to that someone on my team could own? What would it take to hand it over this month?
Hear. When did I last learn about a problem directly from the person who lives with it, instead of from their manager?
Recognize. Do the people who serve my customers, employees and contractors alike, hear from me when nothing is wrong?
A weak answer to any one of them points to where to start.
Implementation: The First 30 Days
Week 1: Hand over one thing. Choose a task you have been keeping and give it to someone, with the authority to do it their way. Agree in advance how you will handle a mistake.
Week 2: Take the walk. Spend time with one frontline role without a manager in the room. Ask what would make the job easier to do well, and write down what you hear.
Week 3: Act and give credit. Put one suggestion into practice and tell the team whose idea it was.
Week 4: Build the calendar. Record birthdays and work anniversaries for employees and for the contractors you rely on. Decide on one small, repeatable gesture for each.
None of this needs a budget line. It needs attention, which Coker points out is easily lost in the day-to-day unless a leader is intentional about it.
Common Mistakes
Taking the work back after the first error. This confirms the message that you never trusted the person.
Correcting in public. One person is corrected and the whole team learns to stay quiet.
Deciding from second-hand reports. The version that reaches the executive table has already been filtered.
Check-the-box training. People talked at for a morning change nothing in the afternoon.
Recognizing employees and forgetting contractors. The customer does not know or care who is on payroll.
Treating every concern as complaining. Coker draws a line between a chronic complainer and someone who is trying to make things better for the company. The second kind is giving you feedback.
Putting the policy ahead of the person. A rule enforced at a hard moment in someone's life is remembered long after the saving is forgotten.
Action Steps
Name the three roles in your business that customers deal with most often.
For each one, ask the three framework questions: do I trust them, do I hear them, do I recognize them?
Delegate one meaningful task this week.
Hold one huddle with frontline staff and act on one thing you hear.
Add your contractors and closest partners to whatever you do for employees' birthdays and milestones.
Identify two complementary providers you would be glad to recommend, and tell them so.
Conclusion
Reputation is built from the inside out. Customers repeat what they experienced, and what they experienced was a person: someone who either felt trusted and valued by the company behind them or did not. Coker says Human Power Solutions has grown into a seven-figure business with 98 percent of its work coming from referrals, and that it is only now starting organic marketing. Her advice to the CEOs she works with is short: "spend more time with the employees. I just can't say it enough."
