I thought I had totally sworn off “reality” based television shows…

the kind that tries to gross you out by showing close up shots of sweaty participants eating live insects and wading through waist-high, leech-infested water or getting you all worked up over people who break down at the slightest discomfort and who should never have been chosen as contestants in the first place…

you know what I mean…

But last night, I stumbled upon a reality show that was different. So different in fact, that the concept blew me away. Plus, I spent an enjoyable hour learning some very valuable business lessons.

The new show is Undercover CEOs on CBS. Here’s the premise: each week, the program profiles a company CEO who “goes undercover” to become just a regular Joe (or June) and masquerades as an employee of the company. The first episode profiled the CEO of a large waste and trash management company who literally got “down and dirty” by using a giant hose to suck the…er…contents from a line of portable toilets and trying (not too successfully) to chase down trash with a stick that was blowing across an open field, all the while being supervised by unsuspecting employees of the very company he headed as CEO.

The CEO came away knowing things about his employees and his company that he could never, ever have learned sitting behind a desk in his fancy office or taking guided tours of his company’s operations. As an undercover CEO, he got first hand experience about what it was really like to work for his company: like discovering that one of his hardest workers went for kidney dialysis three times a week, yet never missed work and finding out that some of his women drivers had to carry a can with them in their trucks because there were no toilet facilities for females in those positions.

But perhaps the most important lesson of all was this: he learned that those employees were ambassadors for his company, the faces that his customers saw and depended on every day of the week. And his employees learned an invaluable lesson as well…

when he finally “came out” to them, they realized that here was a man who was willing to become one of them…

not to spy on them or to try to catch them doing something wrong…

but to learn from them. Because he was willing to do this, his CEO trust factor went sky high.

When are you doing to go “undercover” in your company? Even if you are a one or two person business, you can start trying to see things from your customers’ point of view. When is the last time you tried purchasing a product from your website, signed up for a newsletter to better understand the process your clients go through, or personally answered a support ticket?

Try it. The things you do may very well be fun. And chances are they won’t involve cleaning out porta-potties with a hose!

Personally, I can’t wait for next week’s episode…

the CEO of Hooter’s is going undercover!

And for more fun business wisdom, grab your free copy of Zen and the Art of Email Listbuilding by clicking here right now.

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photo: anonymous9000 Creative Commons License

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