"I hate my job!" How many people at one time or another in their lifetime have felt this way? How many people have come home and told someone this? Let me answer that for you...Everyone! Johnny Paycheck sang about it. He had a #1 country song in 1977 titled, “Take This Job and Shove it.” People often think the only good job out there is the one they left and the one they’re going to. It's never the one they’re currently doing. Why is This?

My GGOB Story The year was 2011, and I was living it up as a young single 20-something in Springfield, MO. I was a proud community college graduate holding an associates degree in ‘electronic media production’ with a slight obsession with attending large-scale music festivals. You know the ones, Coachella, Bonnaroo, The HangOut Music Fest. I lived for them and I was always planning out which one I would attend next, always keeping in mind what my small hourly call center wage would support.

The pandemic has forced all of us—coaches, teachers, pastors, business leaders, and even parents—to walk a very narrow line. On one hand, we all need to take every action we possibly can to keep our friends, neighbors, kids, and co-workers healthy and safe even as the virus continues to surge. On the other hand, we have to find creative ways to keep society functioning—without jeopardizing the health of each other.

I recently wrote a blog about how, when our company conducted our second High-Involvement Planning (HIP) meeting in October, only 74% of our associates told us they were confident in the sales plan for the company—which was down from an 80% confidence rating when we conducted the same survey in June. Historically, we’ve seen confidence ratings consistently in the high 80s—sometimes into the 90s. Maybe it’s easy to write off the 74% number due to the ongoing uncertainty of the pandemic as well as the election and other factors. But it did get me wondering about what truly inspires confidence in people. That led me to conduct an informal survey where I asked our associates to send me their responses to a simple question: “How do you build confidence?” I was blown away by the diverse range of answers we received. I found it interesting to see all the different approaches people recommended, so I grouped them into a couple of categories:

Every October, we conduct our second sales-and-marketing meeting of the year (the first is held in June)—a ritual we’ve continued every year since 1983. The sales teams from each of our divisions make presentations to everyone inside the company—including our board of directors—and we ask our people to vote on their confidence in those plans. For us, this process—what we call High-Involvement Planning—is the lynchpin of how we build a true culture of engagement inside our business.

Historically, businesses using traditional management styles have been reluctant to give all their employees the knowledge they need to make good business decisions day in and day out as they do their jobs. Open-book management takes a much different approach. It’s all about capturing and sharing both financial and organizational knowledge with every employee and empowering them to use that knowledge to contribute to the long-term success of the organization, as well as their personal success. The benefits of knowledge sharing are numerous, and here are just a few:

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: