A few years ago I gave a major customer service training program to a large Midwest company.
When the going got tough, as they always do when you try to make a radical change to hundreds of workers, one of my contacts at the company, exasperated, asked:
“Why don’t you give us an award and go away?”
It appears that the same service unit that I was struggling to fix had the misfortune to have received the “Best in Service” award from an industry survey company the previous year.
From that point on, many of the workers simply had no education. They thought they knew everything, that they were already wonderful, and that they really couldn’t move on. Furthermore, they did not want to improve at what they did for a living.
On my own, I flew to New England to interview the president of the company that gave the award to that faulty team. Along with some of his key associates, we had lunch and in a very relaxed moment I asked him, “What if your company stopped giving awards for customer service?”
He looked at me to check my sanity and then said, barely suppressing a laugh, “Why would we go bankrupt?”
He had it and he knew it.
So, I asked him, “So, you’re really in the AWARDS business even more than you are in the survey research business, right?”
Knowing he was cornered, he forced a smile and admitted, “I guess we are.”
I offer this elaborate tale to ask you a question, especially if you own or belong to a martial arts dojo.
Are you in the field of martial arts training or in the “belt business”? And what would happen if you decided to eliminate the different belt ranges, which in most cases go from white to black?
Would you go bankrupt too?
I believe that the belt promotion system, while extremely popular in the United States and many countries, is fundamentally flawed and also leads people to target the award rather than the underlying capabilities that the awards, in this case the belts, mean.
This is not sour grapes. After eight hard and self-sacrificing years, I was awarded my black belt in kenpo karate.
But many aspects of the belt chase backfired, and if I had to do it again, I doubt I’d join a dojo that uses this recognition and advancement system. As I pointed out in a recent article:
“The belts make the trainee impatient and greedy for the next promotion, to acquire the next color in the rainbow of martial arts. The belts generate competition among peers to become the first to try for the next higher level, which provokes a certain amount of conflict, accusations of favoritism or toadyism, and occasionally injury as contestants compete for increasingly distinguished and relatively unpopulated rungs on the status ladder.
“You may find it interesting to note, in the last paragraph I alluded to, possibly six of The Seven Deadly Sins, articulated in the Bible and by various theologians over time, including Pope Saint Gregory and Buddha. These are vices that the sages I have said that mortals are wise to avoid indulging: Pride, Greed, Envy, Anger / Anger. Lust, Gluttony and Sloth. Makes you wonder if the Enlightened One would feel comfortable meditating under the bodhi tree with a girdle of arts martials tied around his body. waist! “
Perhaps getting rid of the belt system would leave only students who really want to learn and teachers who want to teach. Instead of focusing inordinately on symbols of achievement, perhaps we could focus on the real thing.