Actively express your disappointment and dissatisfaction every time someone in the organization places people in categories or classes based on personality, ambition, lifestyle, or any quality other than contribution, value creation, or performance in the job. Make copies of the Harvard Business Review article “Let’s Hear It for the ‘B’ Players,” and begin circulating them strategically throughout the organization.
Apply Sam Walton’s advice: “Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners [employees]. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them.” Tell your people everything you can with as much openness and detail as possible. Communicating openly will allow them to see the give and take, the uncertainty and the indecision that exist in every organization. It will make them more comfortable with the development of their own ideas. Ask for their ideas, and when they offer them, consider them carefully. Praise your people for sharing their ideas, and reward those whose ideas make a difference in the organization.
Start a new team focused on an idea or group of ideas that need special nurturing and incubation to flourish. Be sure to give the team sufficient resources, time, and separation to create something of value. Start another team next quarter or next month. Make such teams a common part of your department or organization.
No more tinkering. It’s time for bold new initiatives. Big, hairy, audacious goals. Do something revolutionary and out of character (positive, of course) for you and your team today. No more waiting. The important thing is to do something, even if it turns out to be a disaster. Prepare your team or organization for more experimenting with dreams and imaginings. Ask them to come up with their own revolutionary dreams and imaginings. Get used to implementing new dreams and imaginings on a regular basis.
Immediately reprimand anyone—direct report, peer, or supervisor—who bullies, berates, or belittles another employee. Moreover, back up your words with actions. Document the abuse and report it to a manager or human resources. If the abuse involves racial or sexual discrimination, consult an attorney. Never tolerate behavior in any form that disrespects another person. Once you make it clear that disrespectful behavior will not be tolerated, you create an environment for extremely open and honest discussions about respect, individuality, and human interaction. When people believe that their individuality will be respected no matter what, they perform better, develop faster, and respect others more fully.
Create opportunities for your people to express esteem and appreciation for one another. This could be done at the end of a staff meeting, during a retreat, or in an ad hoc discussion. Give your people the chance to thank each other, to praise each other, to appreciate the differences in each other—and do it often.
Discover at least one new contribution made by the people who report to you or work with you on a monthly basis, then recognize and reward it.
Admit that organizational hierarchies naturally generate opposition between those on top and those at lower levels, creating a natural hesitation to expose irrational, unexplainable political machinations and inconsistencies. Acknowledge that most people are unwilling to address or expose the shifting, hidden rationale and motives behind organizational decision-making. Then, have an open discussion regarding the organization’s most glaring contradictions and inconsistencies.
Obtain information on GE’s work-out sessions by reading one of the numerous books written about Jack Welch and GE, or by contacting GE’s public relations department for more information. Once you’ve reviewed the process, begin your own work-out sessions. Begin asking your employees to “talk back” to their bosses. Let them know that if their bosses won’t talk to them, you will.
Stop valuing conformance and coercion over flexibility and freedom. A love of diversity grows from a love of freedom and flexibility, and while we all want freedom and flexibility for ourselves, we often attempt to limit or control it in others. Begin by giving the most different, nonconforming person on your team or in your organization more flexibility and freedom to act and create value for the organization.
Let go of something you’ve been controlling tightly because you don’t trust anyone else but yourself to handle it effectively and appropriately. Give someone a new assignment. Grant a team new latitude. Allow one of your direct reports to pursue a course that you believe could fail, and do what you can to patiently mentor the successful resolution of your concerns. Let go!
Establish your commitment to upholding a consistent policy of extending greater trust to your people. Remember, any inconsistent pattern of extending trust will eventually result in an increase in cultural instability. Start viewing your people as trustworthy. Trustworthiness is learned from being trusted, while trusting only those who are trustworthy reduces learning and limits trust.
Ask your people how they feel about their actual learning experiences in the organization. Do they consider themselves passionate learners, active learners, occasional learners, infrequent learners, or rare learners? Don’t be afraid to keep asking until you get real, spontaneous answers. Nurture a passion for learning in each of your direct reports by discussing it with them regularly and following up on commitments made. Simple dialogue, held regularly, about learning and growing, professionally and personally, can make an enormous difference in the performance of your direct reports.
Help those in your department or organization identify where they are on the continuum between meaningful work and meaningless work. What percentage of their job leaves them feeling frustrated, burned out, underutilized?
Encourage your people to seek employment offers from competing firms as often as they wish and then be willing to match or improve upon those offers. The cold, hard reality is that we live in an age where every individual is a business unto himself or herself. Your top people are going to regularly seek outside offers anyway, so garner additional appreciation and trust by encouraging them to do so. Constantly checking the value of your current performance and future potential is invaluable in today’s world. Remember, it’s all about maximizing and capitalizing on potential—yours, theirs, and the organization’s.
In your next staff meeting, tell your direct reports about something you have done that was unethical, and how you handled it — regardless of whether you admitted it, hid it, or lied about it. Tell them what you learned from the experience and then encourage them to share their own stories of unethical behavior. Make it a group confessional with a purpose—to more quickly admit our unethical behavior when it occurs in an effort to correct it, mitigate against its effects, and prevent it in the future.
Teach your people two simple skills: empathetic listening and reflective listening. Empathetic listening requires listening to understand the other person’s feelings, and then taking the step to express your understanding of their feelings. Reflective listening requires listening to understand the other person’s viewpoint in detail, so that you can summarize the details and communicate them back to the other person. Once you have taught these listening skills, lead by example. Make sure that you are regularly and frequently exercising your reflective and empathetic listening skills in your interactions with staff and colleagues.
Ask your people to actively participate in the continual shaping of your organization’s vision. Your people will be much more inspired by your organization’s vision if they are part of developing as well as implementing it. Make them co-creators with you of your team’s, department’s, division’s, and organization’s vision. As with Google’s vision, all employees are enlisted in the ongoing dream to make information everywhere as accessible and usable as possible. Everyone is involved and inspired, and the result is a vibrant company that’s already redefining greatness.
