5
ENVIRONMENT
Build an Open Team Culture

In a business sense, a “culture” is the social setting in which work takes place. Sometimes it forms spontaneously, evolving out of a set of core values and combining with corporate mission, vision, and basic goals. “Culture” can also be an unwritten set of mutually understood rules, such as “We typically start meetings five minutes late around here.” The efficient, effective executive takes a direct hand in guiding organizational culture, while making a deliberate effort to maintain a positive culture where it already exists.

Work culture in general has recently moved toward increased agility, flexibility, and speed, punctuated by periods of rapid evolution. To get ahead, you can’t fear change. Learn to quickly bounce back when something doesn’t work the way you intend.

Calculated risk is still an important basis of corporate culture, but leaders can no longer calculate all the variables for months before springing into action. Overcollaboration and overcautious decision-making takes more time than businesses can afford. Move from meditation to motion as quickly as possible, making instant changes based on the challenges you run into. You must move swiftly and be ready to change course on the spur of the moment, while realizing that flexibility rules the day.

It’s important to recognize that you may need to force the evolution of corporate culture at times. This occurs by aggressively adopting new technologies and strategies, as well as emphasizing force multipliers such as delegation, accountability, and communication. You also have to challenge your best people to become even better.

Most of how your team culture develops boils down to what you do as a leader. The easier you make it for your team to excel, the more likely they will. So get on your managerial bulldozer and remove the obstacles to your team’s success. Encourage teamwork, empower everyone, and emphasize accountability. Root out any internal limitations.

An effective, efficient executive must also be willing to fight in his or her corner, protecting the team in every way possible. You may have to rock the boat to get what you and your people need, which sometimes means making a sacrifice for the team.

CREATING A CULTURE OF TEAM EFFICIENCY

Business is becoming more complicated, competitive, and unpredictable by the day. Those in leadership positions must be constantly aware of this reality, because the decisions made affect the lives and careers of everyone on the team, and sometimes influence the fate of the entire organization.

Every once in a while, you have to stop, take a good look around, and breathe deeply—and then do whatever it takes to reduce the outrageous complexity everyone faces.

Bitter Truths

Organizations often grow top-heavy because leaders won’t let go of old responsibilities when they take on new ones—even when the old ones are money pits. Analysts Simon Collinson and Melvin Jay, writing in The European Business Review in 2011, estimated that the two hundred largest Fortune 500 companies alone suffer from “value-destructive complexity,” costing them $237 billion a year.¹²

Aside from an unwillingness to abandon unworkable initiatives, leaders create unnecessary complexity when they:

• Overthink business situations.

• Overengineer products and services.

• Lose focus on what truly matters.

• Avoid handling important issues.

• Repeatedly reinvent the process “wheel.”

• Aimlessly chase unclear goals.

• Fear that simplifying means eliminating jobs.

Instead of crashing and burning against the wall of over-complexity, hit the brakes, take your sledgehammer out of the trunk, and start breaking down the wall so you can move forward. Here’s the hammer—four tools you can use to simplify your life:

1 STREAMLINE WORKFLOW PROCESSES. Constantly tweak your workflow by:

• Trying new things.

• Clearing your team’s path.

• Slashing bureaucracy.

• Replacing broken and underperforming “parts.”

• Occasionally overhauling the whole work engine if necessary.

This requires a persistent situational awareness of your team’s productivity from moment to moment, combined with a willingness to step forward and make relevant changes if your people don’t do so on their own. As a leader, you’re responsible for making things easier and faster for your team.

2 APPLY SIMPLE RULES TO BUSINESS SITUATIONS. Don’t build elaborate decision-making and process flow frameworks. This goes double for your most complex issues. Cut items that don’t fit organizational objectives. If an initiative or endeavor fails to move the company forward, cut it loose and move on. Quickly identify process bottlenecks, create a few simple guidelines for handling them, and put those guidelines into action. You may discover that rather than having dozens of processes to deal with, you actually have one core process that applies to dozens of situations. Cleaning up your processes accelerates business wonderfully, resulting in greater simplicity and greater profits.

3 CUT UNNECESSARY POSITIONS. Simplifying may mean you no longer need as many people to do the job as you once did. While no one likes to let people go, restructuring may be necessary for the organization’s survival. After all, if the company fails, everyone loses. However, it’s always better to decrease head count through transfers, attrition, retirement, and lateral promotions first.

4 INCLUDE A SUNSET CLAUSE FOR ALL PROJECTS AND INITIATIVES. Make the end of an endeavor part of its natural life cycle. Plan for that ending, and when it comes time to shut down, do so—unless there’s an overriding reason to continue.

You can demonstrate your commitment to efficiency by actively working to simplify business processes with your team and working to get buy-in from other leaders as well.

Calculated Reduction

In my 2012 book What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do, I introduced the mantra of “reduce, reduce, reduce.” This works as well with excess complexity as it does with most aspects of business.

Keep this in the forefront of your mind, because it’s human nature to overcomplicate situations; we all want a hand in the solution, and no one wants to tell anyone else no. You have a choice: you can build tottering towers of business complexity doomed to eventual failure, or you can pare them down to stable, simple structures that will stand indefinitely.

INCREASING TEAM RECEPTIVENESS TOWARD SWIFT EXECUTION

Change already moves at a breakneck pace in the business world. Three- to five-year strategic plans no longer work, since they go stale within months. These words from my client Mike Howard, Chief Security Officer of Microsoft, leap to mind: “Remember: strategy is not like the Ten Commandments. It’s not written in stone. It depends on the circumstances—which could include anything from budget changes to a change in leadership or a change in world events.”

Front-line employees need the permission and the flexibility to work with any tactics available to them to execute in the moment—to do what’s required to achieve company goals. Therefore, you have no choice except to make your business move faster, without sacrificing quality. Implement these techniques in your quest for speed:

1 MONITOR TRENDS WITHIN YOUR INDUSTRY. Know what’s coming over the horizon and what’s nipping at your heels, so you can stay ahead of the pack. If Borders Books and Music—a personal favorite of mine that failed back in 2011—had responded more quickly and appropriately to far-reaching changes in the publishing industry, it might still exist.¹³

2 REWARD EFFICIENCY. If someone on your team comes up with an efficient way to save time or enhance workflow, reward that person with a bonus, a raise, more vacation time, or whatever seems appropriate.

3 TAKE ADVANTAGE OF OPPORTUNITIES AS THEY ARISE. If you have limited time to grab hold of something that can benefit you and your team, don’t dawdle. Either do it or don’t. Don’t take a year to implement a decision; have a sense of urgency.

Need for Speed

You don’t have to be superhuman to succeed in business; you just need to tank up with high-octane fuel. Tips like these will help you bypass competitors who haven’t yet realized the need for speed. Nowadays, consumers want instant gratification. If you don’t give it to them, they’ll find someone who will.

Innovate Constantly

If I had to pick only one piece of business advice that’s become pure cliché over the past few decades, I’d pick “think outside the box.” Because it’s so overused, I have to resist rolling my eyes when I hear it. But the lesson remains valid: don’t let your preconceptions, habits, or narrow-mindedness keep you from considering all parts of a problem. Outgrow your mental constraints and consider all the information at your disposal.

I hate to pick on Borders, but I still miss them years after they went out of business. They offered a nice alternative to the other “big-box” retailers, with a wide selection and wonderful customer service.

But the company’s failure to acknowledge that electronic publishing really did represent the wave of the future helped kill them. Their executives couldn’t see beyond their own boundaries. In addition, they overextended financially.¹⁴ Sadly, it became clear something was wrong more than a year before Borders declared bankruptcy. For example, I went into their stores and noticed every other light was turned off, and customer service wasn’t as responsive as usual. They’d even put out computers to let people look up and order books on their own. While that was a nice touch, when a company has to scrimp on its energy bills and customer service to survive, it’s already seen the writing on the wall.

The Barnes and Noble chain, on the other hand, survives partly because it developed its own electronic publishing branch, complete with an exclusive e-reader, the Nook. Nook started off with attractive color models in 2009.¹⁵ Compare that with Amazon’s Kindle, which didn’t release color models until 2011.¹⁶

Exiting the Proverbial Box

Taking full advantage of all your resources, both your own and those of your colleagues and teammates, blasts the lid off the “box.” Just make sure that while doing so, you don’t create another box—or step so far outside your comfort zone you have no idea where to go from there. Reinforce these five concepts with your team:

1 MONITOR NEW TECHNOLOGY. Even when you think it doesn’t affect you, study technological advances and how they impact other industries. You may find a way to turn them to your advantage. Consider Starbucks. Do you think of it as just a place to get a cup of joe? Of course not. They’ve successfully integrated product placement from other industries, especially music; they offer travel mugs, a wide variety of ground and whole bean coffees, and other similar ancillary products. They even offer food now. More to the point, they’ve made themselves the go-to place for people who want to casually read in a comfortable environment, work on their computers, or simply tap into free Wi-Fi.

2 NEVER STOP LOOKING FOR NEW IDEAS. The McDonald’s restaurant chain has enormous innovation skills. It began when the original McDonald brothers applied assembly-line methods to fast food production. This continued when Ray Kroc bought the company and started franchising the methodology.

3 ENCOURAGE DIVERSITY. You’ll have to fill certain work slots with whomever fits best, but typically, the greater the variety of people you have on your staff, the more likely you’ll survive tough times and boost innovation. Diversity in work experience, culture, personality, scholastic background, and even age can help your team survive when others do not.

4 PUSH YOUR BOUNDARIES. Even if you never completely leave your box (you have to specialize in something), constantly push against its walls and redefine its limits. If nothing else, this teaches you what works and what doesn’t. Nike, Inc. has done this over the years, producing hundreds of different styles of shoes for every kind of foot and activity. Nike also created the “Just Do It” advertising slogan, which simply and directly inspires people to push the envelope.

5 START SMALL. Smart leaders start with baby steps to make sure their core market approves changes. When the Gerber baby food company tried to sell adult entrees in the 1970s, they hit stiff resistance … and wisely gave up on the idea. Luckily, they hadn’t overinvested in the venture, and it didn’t take long before they went back to making baby food full time.¹⁷ Sometimes diversifying just doesn’t work when it steps too far beyond your usual product line.

Throwing Away the Box Altogether

Silly Putty¹⁸ and the Slinky¹⁹ are classic kids’ toys that emerged from attempts during World War II to create an artificial rubber and a kind of shock absorber for sensitive naval instruments, respectively. Neither product worked for the task it was originally intended for, but each did have remarkable properties. If the inventors had failed to think outside their narrow wartime boxes, nothing would have become of either invention. Instead, those inventors opened their minds to all the possibilities and made millions because of it.

CHALLENGE YOUR TEAM AND REWARD RISK-TAKING

As you build and refine team culture, you’ll consistently have trouble challenging your best and brightest enough to keep them engaged with their work. While we’re all created equal, that doesn’t mean we’re all the same. When bright people combine their intelligence with drive and hard work, they can achieve much more than average employees.

Good news. You undoubtedly have bright people working for you, which can result in higher team productivity. But the situation does come with its drawbacks, as bright people tend to get bored easily … and, as in school, bored smart kids often act out. The solution? Challenge them!

The Right Motivation

Forget offering bored employees the same old “brass rings” to grab for. Make them want to go for the gold. By “gold,” I don’t necessarily mean financial motivation, though that may help. What they really need is purpose: a chance to excel at something that matters. Workers who focus on completing specific tasks consistently, or on helping those in need, tend to have lower “boreout” levels.²⁰ This intervention works best when you learn how to recognize when bored workers are pretending to be busy so they won’t be found out and let go. Once you pierce that camouflage, give those workers the opportunity to prove they can excel. Here’s how:

1 KEEP THE COMMUNICATION LINES OPEN. Touch base regularly with your top employees, allowing them open access to you. Stay alert for signs of boredom. Ask them what they’re working on that excites them—or what would excite them if nothing currently does.

2 OFFER THEM TASKS WITH A REAL CHANCE OF FAILURE. This may sound like odd advice, but you likely have blue-sky projects that could be extremely profitable if done well. They’re challenging enough that most people can’t achieve success, so hand these to your bright but bored. The intellectual challenge will help them channel their boredom—and any risk-taking behavior associated with it—into potential success. If there’s no possibility of failure, then where’s the thrill when they succeed?

3 KEEP THEM BUSY. Pile your employees’ plates full of a variety of tasks, so when one gets boring, they can jump to another. Keep those plates full until they cry uncle, and then help them prioritize. All your team’s tasks should produce results worthy of their talents; busywork does nothing for the team’s bottom line. And don’t worry about overworking superstars. When Sirota Consulting conducted a study of 800,000 employees at sixty-one organizations in 2009, they found that workers with too little work posted an average job satisfaction rating of 49 percent—while those with too much work reported a job satisfaction rating of 57 percent.²¹ Don’t forget, the operative word here is challenge.

4 HELP THEM FALL IN LOVE WITH THE PROCESS. Anyone can work hard when motivated. But in real life, consistent productivity means bulling one’s way through the dull patches, producing even when doing less-than-inspiring work. If you can help your bored employees fall in love with the process of marketing, coding, writing, speaking, or whatever their job entails, they’ll never be bored. They’ll always have something to anticipate or polish. Also, find ways to help them embrace the boredom that naturally comes with any job. How? Teach them to anticipate the reward that comes after the humdrum—that is, a sense of accomplishment.

Stepping It Up

Employee boredom can corrode morale and productivity not only for those who are bored but also for those to whom they complain. There’s no reason to allow complaining when you can step up and actively fight it. You may not eliminate boredom altogether among your brighter employees, but, if you keep an eye on the situation and implement the simple tips to motivate them, you can definitely fight it to a draw.

Fight for Your Slice of the Pie

Given today’s global market and the exploding Chinese and Indian economies, business has become more competitive than ever. In years to come, many more Fortune 500 companies will be headquartered in developing countries.²² While that provides more opportunity, because the pie has grown bigger, companies still have to scramble for their slices.

Similarly, with limited internal resources in any company, if you don’t fight for your team, you may find yourself dealing with scarce resources just when you need them most.

Put Your Team First

No doubt you’ve seen too many self-serving maneuvers over the years to be surprised when a leader slinks off into everyone-for-himself-or-herself territory. So why not surprise your team by facing your in-house rivals like a team player? Keep these three tips in mind when the going gets tough:

1 PRESENT YOUR NEEDS CLEARLY. Who gets the resources he or she needs: the shrinking violet or the fighter who asks for them? Too often, I’ve seen people curse the darkness when they could just flip the light switch. If you don’t get what you want, ask for it. See your superior(s) and outline your needs, especially if you’ve just landed something new and urgent. Don’t make demands, but don’t shy away from your duty to provide for your team, either. They can’t proceed unless you provide for them.

At the same time, make sure those you compete with for resources know it isn’t personal—you’re still a team player, and you’re trying to build the company by building your team. Keep adding value in every way possible.

2 STAND UP FOR YOUR TEAM. Whether they’ve gotten in trouble for doing something controversial or the company is reducing head count, defend your people. Your team needs to know you’re on their side, come what may. This is especially true when someone tries to poach team members or lay them off. Each person who leaves changes the team dynamic and can reduce productivity—unless the departing team member was a poor performer or saboteur.

3 TAKE ONE FOR THE TEAM. Nobody wants to suffer when troubles come along—but to protect your team, you may have to. If you head a large division and your CEO orders you to cut your budget by $100,000 next quarter, find a way to do it that minimizes the damage to your team members, such as cutting back on discretionary expenditures, travel, and bonuses instead of cutting valued staff.

In a world where business competition has reached all the way into the boardroom, you have no choice but to stay alert for those who want to swoop down and steal your resources—whether that makes sense for the company or not. When presented with shortages, some people panic and do anything they can to stay on top.

So keep your eyes open, stay calm, and block any unwise attempts to take you or your team down. Be a team player for the organization, but verbalize your needs and stand up for your rights without shirking.