The Leadership Coach's Blog
This leadership coach's blog, comes as a damaging PR story about a gym contract, a heavily pregnant woman and LA Fitness, causes the American owned fitness chain to bow to public and media pressure.
Business Leadership : LA Fitness - Humanity!
Gym chain LA Fitness has been caused to drop the £360 contract it was enforcing in the case of a heavily pregnant woman who had fallen on hard times, thanks to pressure from Guardian readers who were willing to pay her bill.
Hannah, a seven months pregnant reader from Billericay in Essex, had written to the newspaper in December 2011 after her husband lost his job, leaving the couple reliant on benefits.
The couple, who were also about to move twelve miles away from their nearest gym, had been loyal LA Fitness members for seven years and asked the gym chain to reconsider the two-year verbal contract it had tied them in to. However, the gym insisted the couple pay the full 15 months left of the contract, which would cost them £780.
Once the story reached the consumer pages of the Guardian, it attracted the attention of its readers, who both started cancelling LA Fitness memberships, and initiated a social media campaign. And they also offered to pay off the rest of Hannah's contract for her! This weight of negative publicity forced the fitness giants hand, and they agreed to cancel the contract.
But how could it come to this? What level of customer service and awareness is being afforded by LA Fitness, that allows member disputes to get so out of hand, that they enter the public domain?
This is strictly management by numbers. Under-paid managers following corporate instructions. 'Im just doing what is laid down by Head Office', would come the response from Hannah's LA Fitness gym manager. 'It's the same rules for everyone'. Or - 'You signed the agreement. You should know what you are entering into when you sign up'.
It's a management style that negates individual decision-making. Managers at local level become robots who have no power to think for themselves.
Sure the binding contract based agreement, brings in a significant amount of cash for all fitness chains. But what corporate values are at play, that means that a pregnant woman has to go to the newspapers to get her sense of injustice heard?
Hannah has gone to the Guardian, becomes she doesn't feel listened to by LA Fitness. They weren't listening, because the core values of the organisation don't encourage managers to empathise. It's low down on the list of priorities.
What matters is recruitment and attracting new members. But perhaps new members would be attracted to the gym chain, if they heard great stories about how the gym went the extra mile to help members.
But that would require the managers to be free to think on their feet, and sometimes go against Head Office policy. And for that to happen, Head Office would have to relinquish some control and leverage more trust.
Once LA Fitness was a single gym in California. Now it stands five hundred strong, with gyms all over the world. It's a faceless organisation, with no single identifiable individual at the helm who the public recognise as the face of the LA Fitness.
And it's this facelessness that leads to stories like Hannah and her contract. No one really cares that much because at the end of the day, LA Fitness will still rake in millions of dollars.
But it should act as a warning sign to the corporate management, that tells them that the systems they have in place, seem to have no room for a deeper humanity. And without humanity, what is the point of being in business, beyond the dollar, the deutschmark and the yen?
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