The Alignment Effect

There once was a traveling salesman who spent his life on the road…
A different city every week, a different hotel every night.
Over time, they all started to blur together.

Some were fancy, others were dumps.
Most were forgettable.

But one trip, he checked into a hotel that caught him off guard.
The bellhop smiled like he actually enjoyed his job.

The woman at the front desk welcomed him like he was an old friend, even though it was his first time there.
The bartender remembered his drink order the second night.
The people cleaning the rooms would stop in the hallway just to ask how his day was going.

None of it felt scripted or fake. Just...nice, friendly, helpful people.

By the end of the week, the salesman couldn’t take it anymore. He had to speak to the manager…

“Alright, I have to ask. I’ve stayed in hotels all over the country and I’ve never seen anything like this. Every person here is so nice, so friendly, so helpful. How do you train your people to be this way!?!”

The manager just smiled.

“Oh, that’s easy. We don’t train them to be that way. We just hire people who already are.”

That’s the Alignment Effect.

Most companies try to train alignment into people AFTER they hire them.
The best companies hire people who ALREADY believe what they believe.

You can always teach the skills. It’s a lot harder to teach someone to genuinely care about other people.

Shared belief create aligned teams and aligned teams create momentum.