Eagles Soar, Ducks Quack

As told by Joe Cirulli, Gainesville Health & Fitness owner and Eagle Program founder:

“In 1996, when the current center opened, there was nothing but problems: the AC kept breaking down, the parking was limited, every day it was just one complaint after the next. It was so bad I would go to bed at midnight, and then wake up at 2:30 a.m. to come back to work. I just couldn’t sleep — I was trying to figure out how to solve the problems. I would come in the club, it was hot as could be, and members just complaining left and right; I knew I was slowly starting to lose my patience.

One day, I had a lady say to me, ‘Do you know how hot it is in here?’ I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I do. You know you’re in here for about an hour and I’m here for 16 of them; I know exactly how hot it is.’
That’s when I knew I was starting to lose my patience.
The breaking point was when a member came in to the front door complaining about something and I actually pictured myself strangling the member, which is when I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do to teach the receptionist customer service. I decided to leave and go to the beach and actually slept all night long. I had to come up with a plan that would help members look at what we we’re doing right, not everything that was going wrong. Over time, we fixed the AC problems and expanded parking, but members had gotten into a mode where they were thinking so negatively when they would come into the center. I had to come up with a mechanism to change their thinking.
I remembered listening to a guy named Ken Blanchard speak, who wrote the book ‘One Minute Manager,’ and he was talking about the difference between eagles and ducks. He said eagles were the people in the company who looked for ways to solve problems. The ducks were the people that just quacked all the time: ‘That’s not my problem. That’s not my job.’
I knew we had a bunch of eagles within the company. So I came up with this plan to help our members help us find eagles inside our company, and tell us about eagle moments where an employee went above and beyond. So I wrote up this article about how most companies have an employee of the month, but the truth of the matter — there is many employees that do exceptional things that management never sees. I was asking the members to be the management’s eyes and ears, like when you see one of our employees going above and beyond the call of duty, please let us know about it.
And that was really the beginning of it. We started putting up posters around the club and forms around the club members could fill out, eventually putting them on the website, and developing mechanisms to let the members know about it. And, from that I figured we needed to find a mechanism to reward the employees for doing exceptional things which led to the eagle dinners and led to what the program is today.”

The “Eagle of the Moment” is a program whereby members can nominate an employee who goes above-and-beyond. An eagle can be written for any of the employees, regardless of department. At Gainesville Health & Fitness, we receive around 6,000 eagles per year. We have various stations around the gym that we call “Eagle Nests” where members can write eagles. We have at least two of these at each center, and members can also write in eagles on our website. Next week, I will describe the “Eagle of the Moment” program in detail and share reward ideas for the staff.