Build commitment to the principle of rethinking the world by rewarding rethinking. People have to believe that the company truly values their rethinking. The only way to convince them that the company truly values their rethinking is to reward their rethinking behavior. Year-end bonuses, spot bonuses, awards, personal notes, newsletter recognition, promotions, raises, stock options, restricted stock, or other perks and privileges must be tied to rethinking breakthroughs that create value for the company.
Visit Dell Computer Company or another organization in your industry or sector that is doing a better job of managing diversity than your company is at present. Find at least three practices that it is using and implement them in your company or department.
Hire outsiders, including people from other industries. They will help you see the future differently because they won’t be beholden to the status quo. Promoting from within is great, but so is drawing upon talent with diverse backgrounds and experience.
Develop a successor who is your opposite in terms of style, skills, and orientation. Encourage your direct reports to do the same. Never develop a successor who is just like you. If you do, you’ll simply promote your own assumptions and biases.
Implement ninety-day plans to shorten the planning and rethinking cycle in your organization, your department, or your team. Require new insights from each planning cycle as a means of promoting continuous rethinking. Keep in mind that rethinking is not a trait but a skill that can be learned and developed.
Hire a revolutionary trainer, or even several different ones, to help your people dream and imagine more. Find trainers who are unorthodox, unconventional, outside the box, irreverent, crazy, off the wall. They will breath new life into your team or organization.
Walk in your employees’ shoes by joining them as they go on sales calls, handle customer complaints, fill orders, deliver a service, or work on the assembly line. In this way, you can appreciate what each employee in the organization actually does. Walking in the shoes of your employees—as practiced by Southwest Airlines Chairman Herb Kelleher, to the point of serving drinks, cleaning planes, and completing safety checks—will also help you make better decisions about compensation and rewards.
Discuss mistakes openly and honestly, without criticism and reprimand. Every company wants to eliminate or reduce mistakes. Too many mistakes certainly can sink the ship. But it is in a company’s best interest to establish an environment where mistakes can be openly discussed, acknowledged, and used as learning tools for identifying meaningful solutions. It is said that an “expert” is someone who has made the most mistakes within a field of practice and therefore inherently knows how to avoid mistakes. Increasing accountability for actions means accelerating “expert” training ASAP.
Learn how to better value the contributions of all employees by making a list of the people, departments, or teams in your organization whose contributions you believe have been undervalued or overvalued. Attempt to answer why each undervaluation or overvaluation has occurred. For example, are those who work more creatively devalued because your company is part of a conservative industry? Are those who work better in disciplined structures devalued because your organization is more unstructured and free-flowing? Are there people in your organization who seem to be “misfit?” Why? Are they in the wrong jobs? Do their contributions need to be more highly valued in your organization? Identify patterns of overvaluing or undervaluing in your organization and draw the appropriate conclusions. When you’re satisfied with your assessment, develop a plan of action that allows you to better value the contributions of all employees, including putting them in different jobs or on different teams, when necessary.
Look at other organizations for work-life balance “best practices.” Look at the benefits page on other companies’ Web sites—see what they offer. Review the practices of organizations on “best places to work” lists (see Fortune magazine’s list, or the list from the Great Place to Work Institute). Determine which benefits or practices can be integrated into your own department or company. Remember, in the war for talent, it’s smart business to keep your eye on what your closest competitors offer.
Lavishly reward and publicly acclaim employees who establish balance between work and personal life. Make them organizational heroes and role models. This will take some faith and courage, but it will pay off—so just do it.
Change senior executive assignments every three years to stimulate new learning at the top of the organization. Such forced changes will not automatically engender a passion for learning, but they will remove obstacles and create new opportunities for learning. Create an environment where people thrive because of their passion for learning.
Flatten your organization. Remove unnecessary jobs. Redeploy people. Remove the friction. Flat, frictionless working environments are the future, so start flattening today. Vertical hierarchies create barriers; your job is to get rid of hierarchies wherever and whenever possible.
Hold an off-site retreat focused entirely on clarifying expectations for everyone on your team, in your department, or in the organization. Deal with expectations at every level, clarifying organizational expectations, customer expectations, shareholder expectations, senior management’s expectations, division or department expectations, project and team expectations, and expectations for every individual.
Make a list, from your perspective, of what’s expected of you; share it with your shareholders, board, boss, partners, or whoever evaluates your performance. The higher your position on the hierarchical ladder, the more humility this will take. The purpose of this exercise is to remove all assumptions about what’s expected and replace them with well-defined, fully clarified, and mutually agreed-upon expectations. Second, ask your direct reports to do the same exercise with you. Take ample time to discuss the results with each direct report. The mistake most managers and leaders make is that after setting high expectations and assuming that those expectations are clearly communicated, they leave out a crucial step—that is, discovering whether their direct reports are in agreement with and buy into their high expectations.
Create a “reward for talent” working environment that focuses on talent development and deployment by reassigning or redeploying every employee who is mismatched for his or her job. Begin today. Reassign or redeploy an employee who is mismatched every week until there are no more mismatched people and jobs in your organization. Forget about how difficult it will be or how much confusion or turmoil it will create. The benefits of moving on this issue immediately and decisively greatly outweigh the costs.
Add risk-taking goals to your annual planning process. Require risk-taking goals from every individual in the organization. Weave risk-taking into every part of your organization’s planning processes. No plan should be accepted unless it includes real risk-taking, and at least 20 percent of all goals should involve serious risk-taking. Within a single planning cycle, people will begin to think much more seriously about risk-taking. More important, they will begin implementing risk-taking action steps to achieve their goals. Continue this for a few years and you will succeed in transforming your organization’s culture.
Create an internal venture capital fund to invest in high-risk ventures. Run the venture capital fund just like an external VC with one difference—focus only on ideas and opportunities that enjoy strategic fit with the company.
Put down on paper your organization’s highest priorities, the things that matter most critically. Be as detailed and specific as possible to capture the true and full essence of what you think matters most in your organization. Once you are satisfied with what you’ve put down on paper, show it to your boss to get his or her input and agreement. If you don’t agree, attempt to work out the differences. If you can’t work out the differences with your boss, you may want to consider looking for a new job. Author Harvey Mackay writes, in his book We Got Fired!, that it may be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Enshrine results as the only measure that matters. Then clarify all the types of results that your organization wants and expects. Doing what matters most is a lot easier when organizations make it abundantly clear that there are certain results that matter most. Yes, it’s a complex world, but don’t shrink from this task. Writing a great two-minute speech is much more difficult than penning a lengthy discourse.
Build commitment to the principle of leading the way through change by discontinuing everything that doesn’t create value or produce results. Management guru Peter Drucker calls it organized abandonment: “The change leader puts every product, every service, every process, every market, every distribution channel, every customer, and every end use on trial for its life.” McKinsey consultant Richard Foster calls this process creative destruction. The point is to discard, abandon, or destroy what doesn’t work, what you don’t need, and what keeps you from changing.
