When employees won’t use what their organization sells, leaders usually blame logistics. Location. Scheduling. Convenience.
They’re almost always wrong.
Last year, I took over operations at Iowa State University’s veterinary teaching hospital—one of the premier veterinary facilities in the country. Within my first month, I noticed something that kept me up at night: many of our own employees were taking their pets to competitors.
We had a student discount. But faculty and staff? Nothing.
That’s when I realized: we weren’t just losing business. We were broadcasting a message we never intended to send.
The Signal Your Team Is Reading
Every organization sends signals about what it truly values. Most leaders obsess over the signals they intentionally broadcast—mission statements, town halls, strategic plans. But the signals that actually matter are the ones you don’t control: the behaviors your policies incentivize, the gaps between what you say and what you fund, the small barriers that reveal what you really think about your people.
When your own team chooses competitors over your product, that’s not logistics. That’s a referendum.
It might be a referendum on quality. Or culture. Or whether they believe leadership is paying attention to what actually matters. Cost might be part of the equation, but it’s rarely the whole story.
Still, I didn’t want cost to be anyone’s excuse.
Why the Obvious Solution Isn’t Obvious
It took eight months to implement a 15% discount for all 36,000+ Iowa State employees and students. Not just our College of Veterinary Medicine—everyone across campus.
Eight months for something every private veterinary practice in America already offers their staff.
Why so long? Legal review. Audit processes. Verification systems. Budget approvals. Policy documentation. The bureaucratic machinery of a large public institution grinding through what should have been a no-brainer.
Here’s what I learned: in most organizations, the barriers to doing the obvious thing are more cultural than financial.
The actual cost of the discount? Manageable. The cost of admitting we should have done this years ago? That’s what took negotiation.
The Real Reason This Matters (And It’s Not About Revenue)
My ultimate goal isn’t just getting our veterinary medicine faculty to use our hospital. It’s making the entire Iowa State community see us as their veterinary hospital of choice.
When a chemistry professor brings their dog to us for surgery, they don’t just become a client. They become an ambassador. They talk about the experience in faculty meetings. Their graduate students hear about it. Word spreads through departments, across campus, into the broader Ames community.
That kind of authentic advocacy can’t be manufactured through marketing campaigns. It only happens when the experience exceeds expectations—and when people feel like they’re part of something rather than just purchasing a service.
But here’s the catch: you can’t build ambassadors if your own people are quietly opting out.
The Questions Most Leaders Avoid
I guarantee some of our faculty and staff still won’t bring their animals to us, even with the discount. And that’s actually valuable information.
Because if cost isn’t the barrier, what is?
Maybe it’s our hours. Maybe it’s a bad experience they had years ago that never got addressed. Maybe it’s a perception problem about teaching hospitals—that students will practice on their pets, or that appointments take twice as long.
Those are real problems that require real solutions. Surveys. Listening sessions. Operational changes. Culture shifts.
But most leaders never get to those conversations because they let the easy excuse—cost—remain in place.
When cost is the barrier, employees nod politely and say “it’s just a bit out of budget right now.” Leaders accept this, feel sympathetic, and move on. Everyone avoids the harder conversation about whether there are deeper issues with trust, quality, or culture.
Remove the cost barrier, and suddenly you’re forced to confront the real reasons people are choosing alternatives.
The Broader Principle: Trust Is an Operational Metric
This isn’t just about veterinary hospitals or university settings. This pattern shows up everywhere:
Tech companies whose engineers use competitors’ products at home because their own tools are clunky or poorly designed.
Financial services firms whose advisors quietly recommend their clients avoid certain products the firm pushes hardest.
Healthcare systems whose doctors send their own families to different hospitals for anything serious.
Consulting firms whose partners ignore the frameworks they sell to clients.
Restaurants whose staff won’t eat the food unless it’s free.
In every case, leadership tends to rationalize: “Our employees have different needs.” “They’re not our target demographic.” “They get a behind-the-scenes view that customers don’t see.”
Sometimes that’s true. But more often, it’s a convenient story that lets leaders avoid looking at uncomfortable truths.
What Actually Changes When You Pay Attention
Three months after implementing the discount policy, something unexpected happened. Our primary care department—which had been struggling with caseload—started seeing an uptick in appointments from ISU employees.
But the more interesting shift was internal. Faculty and staff started talking differently about the hospital in public settings. There was a subtle change in how they described us to prospective students, to visitors, to people in the community.
They started saying “our hospital” instead of “the hospital.”
That shift didn’t come from the discount itself. It came from the signal the discount sent: leadership is paying attention to whether you actually want to engage with what we’re building here.
The Test You Should Run Tomorrow
Here’s the diagnostic question every leader should ask:
If your employees had complete freedom and unlimited options, what percentage would actively choose to use your product or service?
Not because it’s convenient. Not because it’s free. But because they genuinely believe it’s the best option available.
If that number is below 80%, you don’t have a competitive problem. You have an internal credibility problem.
And if you don’t know the answer—if you’ve never actually asked or observed this behavior systematically—that might be the biggest problem of all.
The Hard Part Isn’t the Policy
Implementing the discount policy was straightforward once we got through the bureaucracy. The hard part is what comes next: systematically removing every other barrier we can control, then confronting the ones we can’t.
It means surveying our own people about why they do or don’t use our services. It means listening to answers we might not like. It means making operational changes that are expensive and disruptive. It means admitting that some of our assumptions about quality and service have been wrong.
Most leaders never get here because they stop at the symbolic gesture. They implement the discount, send the announcement email, check the box, and move on.
But the discount was never the point. The discount was the entry fee to a much more important conversation about whether we’re building something people actually want to be part of.
What This Means for Your Career
If you’re reading this as an ambitious professional trying to build your leadership brand, here’s what matters:
Your reputation isn’t built on the strategies you execute. It’s built on your willingness to confront uncomfortable truths.
The leaders people remember aren’t the ones who had the best PowerPoint decks or the most sophisticated frameworks. They’re the ones who noticed what everyone else was ignoring and had the courage to address it directly.
Sometimes that means implementing a policy that should have existed all along. Sometimes it means asking questions that make your executive team uncomfortable. Sometimes it means acknowledging that the emperor has no clothes, even when everyone else is complimenting the outfit.
The discount policy at Iowa State won’t show up on any traditional success metric. It won’t dramatically move revenue numbers. It won’t be a highlight in our next accreditation review.
But it changed the conversation about who we are and what we value. And that’s the kind of change that compounds over time in ways spreadsheets can’t capture.
The Question That Matters
The next time you’re in a leadership meeting and someone presents a problem, ask yourself: Are we solving the stated problem, or are we solving the easier problem that lets us avoid the real issue?
Cost is almost always the easier problem. The real problems are usually about trust, culture, quality, or whether leadership is paying attention.
Your team knows the difference. They’re watching to see which one you choose to address.