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 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. Developing Your Workforce is an Investment...Here's Why! 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.

In more than 35 years practicing The Great Game of Business® at SRC, as well as three decades helping thousands of companies implement The Game in their own companies, we have determined the fastest, most efficient and most reliable path to Rapid Financial Results and Lasting Cultural Change™ follows a set process. We honed and developed the 10-Step Approach to GGOB Implementation to guide companies implementing The Great Game of Business in their organizations.

As a practitioner of open-book management at an employee engagement software company, I have a unique front-row seat to The Great Game of Business®. I’ve seen the impact it has on our own employees’ engagement, as well as many of our customers’. As our friends at Great Game™ often share, organizations who subscribe to the open-book methodology have employee engagement levels that are three times higher than the national average. By tying the work employees are doing daily to the outcomes and success of the company, these leaders are giving employees more reasons to invest their full hearts and minds in their work.

As business leaders, we care deeply about employee engagement, but we can’t operationalize a culture of engagement by ourselves. Without a strategy for scaling it across the business, it’s tough to move the needle. As my own business has grown, I’ve realized that the best thing we can do for our employees is to focus on the top two or three actions that will have the greatest impact—and hold our people-leaders or “trusted lieutenants” accountable as owners of those initiatives.

You’ve likely experienced people who occupy leadership positions and people who are leaders. There’s quite a difference. People who only occupy the position use power to get what they think is needed. Their use of questions often includes blame or demands control. Perhaps you’ve heard this one: “Don’t you agree, or is there something you didn’t understand?” People who are true leaders do the opposite. They ask questions to get people thinking about and owning the results of their work and the collective results of the company.

We love to see and hear the inside stories of companies putting the principles and practices of The Great Game of Business® to work in their organizations. As we revealed at the 2018 Great Game of Business Conference, we have a goal to impact 10 million lives in the next 10 years in the #sharonthedream campaign. Here are three of our favorite videos representing three very different stories of how the Great Game has made a difference...