The Uber Purpose Mess

How do you fix a corporate disaster? Learn how to re-connect with the purpose driven customer by engaging from within. For more about Dr. Izzo's work, go to drjohnizzo.com/
Hi I'm, Dr. John Izzo and welcome to Izzo on Purpose, a weekly series of videos dedicated to helping you succeed in discovering and implementing your purpose in work and in life. Today I want to talk about Uber and what I call the Uber Purpose Mess and how Uber has made a royal disaster of connecting with the purpose driven customer and employee that not only has drivers leaving them, but a whole movement to delete the Uber app from your phone and to switch to competitors all over the world. And the question is, how did you ever get into this mess and what would I advise them or any company that finds them on the wrong side of the purpose-driven customer and employee? Maybe even though there's some people who don't care about this series of ethical lapses at Uber, there's a significant number of people who do care and like all companies, a small group of people can make a big difference in terms of your profits and your success. So first, I don't want to spend a lot of time on the long list of things that Uber has done, mostly under their former CEO, but look, let's let's make a short list: sexual harassment claims at the highest level and discrimination claims, they have done all kinds of unethical things such as spying on their own drivers to find out if they were driving for other companies so that they could stop that, making requests for rides from their competitors when they would go into a new city and- then canceling them so those drivers were busy and unable to service requests from real clients, the use of a software called Greyball that would allow them to have drivers drive in cities and situations where they were not legally allowed to, but would be able to trick the regulators, to the recent hack that came public where several hundred thousand customers' accounts were and the data taken by the hackers and instead of going public like the vast majority of ethical companies do, Uber not only hid it but paid the hackers to delete the data and who knows if they actually did or what proof they have that they deleted it. And again, I could keep going on but the point is there's a lot of stuff going on at Uber and all most of it has really created what I call a purpose mess. So what would I advise to Uber or any company that finds themselves having lost the purpose driven customer and employee. First, number one, you've got to be honest about what's happened and you can't mince words. You've got to say look, we messed up, we had a culture of arrogance of deceit, a culture that we felt we were above the law, where we really weren't thinking about the best interests of our stakeholders and it's going to stop. And it's going to stop now. Now, the CEO has been doing a kind of a repair tour of this fall, but I believe it hasn't had the strong language and authentic apology that is required in these situations .The second thing is, you've got to win your employees' trust back. You know the interesting thing is that the customers only believe about 16% of what companies tell them about themselves so Uber can run ads and the CEO can run around and talk about how things are different now, but until you win those drivers, until you win those employees, you're in trouble because it turns out though there's only a 16% believability from what the company says about itself, about a 63% believability when an employee says hey, you know, I like this company. they're back on the right side. And I can tell you just in the last few weeks I've heard of Uber drivers criticizing the company, saying they can't stand the company, that they're not treated well. So look, they've got to have an internal campaign to really win the hearts and minds of their drivers again and I don't know all the things they need to repair on work on, but I know you've got to win them. One more interesting statistic is that I am ten times more, up to ten times more likely to share a social media feed from an employee than I am from the company. So again we've got to win the hearts of the employees. So apologize, then really go inside win the internal stakeholders first. The third thing is, be really clear on the set of commitments that you're going to make going forward. I would encourage you or any company that finds themselves in this situation to identify five to seven commitments they're going to make to their customers and to their drivers going forward that look, you can count on this. These are the commitments that we're making to you and I'm not smart enough to know what those commitments are but I know if you make them and you keep them, you can begin to win people's trust again.

[@jomontanee]

It is very insightful. Thank you.