How often have you heard this: “All we ask you is to do the job, nothing more.” Well, I don’t want people just to do a job. I want them to have a purpose in what the hell they’re doing. I want them to be going somewhere. I want them to be excited about getting up in the morning, to look forward to what they’re going to do that day. Maybe it’s a matter of tricking people into wanting to come to work. I say “tricking” because I don’t think it’s a natural thing. Most people would rather be doing something other than work—I certainly would—but they feel they don’t have any choice. Companies reinforce that feeling. They not only tell people just to do the job, they set up the work so it is just a job. They say, “Drill as many of these holes as possible, as fast as possible, and don’t think about anything else.” That’s one way to run a company. What you wind up with are workers who think a job is just a job. I call them the living dead.

Manager or Monster? Across Emplify’s entire data set, the most common challenges we see are companies promoting top-performing employees into management and then leaving them to their own devices. Unfortunately, when they become managers, they lack support from the business to transform them into truly inspiring leaders. Instead, they fall back on antiquated management styles that sow disengagement among the people they manage. These old styles of management are directly opposed to what I believe it means to lead, and were the driving force behind me writing my new book, Lead Like a Human.

For owners of closely held, service-based businesses contemplating the total or fractional sales of their companies, attracting and retaining key employees is critical to creating and sustaining value for the long term. A service-based business faces the unique challenge of proving its continuing viability to a potential buyer since its assets are people. A business that can keep its best employees during and following a transaction will be much more likely to keep its customers, thus retaining its value.

Success happens frequently when playing the Great Game of Business®.  Whether it is winning a MiniGame™ or hitting your goals, there are plenty of opportunities to accelerate these results.  To be even more successful, what we say when things go right is important (Gable, Gonzaga & Strachman, 2006). After a success, there are four types of responses:

    Research shows that companies who share ownership widely with employees survive recessions better than ones that do not. They lay fewer people off, they recover faster, and they often end up able to buy other companies who have not done as well. So what is their secret, and what are they doing to survive the most extreme crisis any of us has ever faced? That was one of the topics covered in a recent book I wrote for the NCEO, Dealing with the Economic Crisis: Lessons from ESOP Companies. About half the book looks at issues specific to ESOPs (plan restructuring, executive pay, refinancing, interim valuations, communicating valuation, etc.). The other half looks at ideas on organizational culture that any company can use—albeit they are likely to work better if you do share ownership. Several key themes emerge from companies we looked at:

Improve Your Year-End Outlook—Through Data-driven, High-Involvement Planning & Strategy Development Every business out there has been impacted by economic conditions in some way. While some have been forced to shut their doors, others have seen demand spike for their products or services. The devastating speed with which disruption has hit forced companies to make dramatic adjustments to cope and survive—or even to keep up and thrive. But short-term thinking will only get you so far. It’s now time to adjust your sights and start to look further out. It’s time to move past the uncertainty of today and begin thinking about what the marketplace is telling you about what your organization faces tomorrow.

It’s one thing to teach a strategic planning process, but it’s another thing altogether to actually practice what you preach. Here at The Great Game of Business®, not only do we talk the talk, we walk the walk. 

Employee engagement is a hot topic for the start of 2020 as business owners are focusing on attracting and retaining top talent. How are you going to invest in your employees this year and keep them engaged? As an employer, are you up to par with what your staff is looking for? According to this survey from CareerBuilder, employees are saying they want to get ahead in their career and utilize more training, but aren't offered educational opportunities to learn the skills needed to do so: Only 32% of employees are satisfied with the opportunities for career advancement.  58% think their company does not offer enough opportunities to learn new skills and help them move up in their career. If offered, 73% of employees whose companies do not currently offer educational opportunities or workshops outside of work hours say they would be likely to participate if they were available. Employees want to learn, grow, and contribute to the success of the organization. Have you considered training your employees in these areas?

Yup. It’s that time of year. We gather the family for the holidays, light the fire and watch Christmas Vacation. And it’s hilarious…until you remember that you still haven’t finalized your company’s bonus plan for the New Year. Yikes! You don’t want to end up like Frank Shirley (Clark W. Griswold’s boss), do you? As you design your organization’s bonus plan for the New Year, I want you to keep in mind a few things about designing what we call a Stake in the Outcome®. For those who play the Great Game of Business®, providing a Stake in the Outcome is one of the most important parts (and least understood practices) of the entire business operating system. And it goes way beyond the bonus!

The big payoff to us for playing The Game is that we become a more educated, more flexible organization. We can respond instantaneously to changes in the market. We can turn on a dime for a customer if we have to. We can respond to problems in the length of time it takes to place a phone call. We can do all that because we have a company filled with people who not only are owners, but who also think and act like owners, not like employees. That’s an important distinction. Getting people to think and act like owners goes far beyond giving them equity. 

Companies with the best people will dominate their market by 2020. Jack Stack has been saying it throughout this year as SRC focused on their 2019 Critical Number™: "People." But how do you attract, and maybe more importantly, retain the best employees? By providing them with more than a day job, but a career where they're learning, growing, and contributing to the success of the organization.

A few years back, we hosted our Annual Gathering of Games conference with the theme, “The Wisdom of the Crowd.” The event has always been a great place to learn from other open-book practitioners, and specifically remember this Gathering's opening keynote speaker James Surowiecki speaking about his book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which discusses how the collective wisdom of a group can outweigh the wisest person within the crowd. I was conflicted. How can the average of a group of contributors yield a greater result than that of the highest member in the group? For me, this was a hard-to-understand concept that seemed to severely oppose my traditional, mathematical thinking.