While the world focuses on blaring headlines and dramatic confrontations, humility continues on quietly—but meaningfully—behind the scenes, and away from the spotlight. In his new pamphlet, “Humility: A Humble, Anarchistic Inquiry,” Zingerman’s co-founder Ari Weinzweig shares his two-year-long inquiry into how the gentle art of humility can bring out our humanness, elevate organizational effectiveness, enhance leadership, and enrich quality of life. 

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:

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.

Do you feel like your leadership team is finally ready to take the leap and open the books? But, you're worried some of your team aren't as enthusiastic as you hoped they would be? If you’re ready to start sharing your financial and operational information with employees, but you get the sense they’re just not ready yet, there could be some very logical – and common – reasons why. Today we discuss the top four reasons employees aren't ready to jump on the open-book management bandwagon. Maybe there's one or two that apply to your team. 

As a proud self-implementor, we have been trying to take our commitment to become a Great Game™ practitioner seriously for the last couple of years. We’ve been to the workshops, (Get in the Game™, MiniGames™, High-Involvement Planning™) and getting a lot out of each one we've attended. We’ve been training our staff in the business of business, instructing them on how to read financial statements, and have opened our books. We’ve done a few Mini-Games and are even reading the new books (which are extremely helpful for giving us insights and motivations into how to better implement The Game.)

  In The Great Game of Business, Jack Stack shares his experiences and lessons learned throughout the years, including what he was taught about management early in his career. What was the most important lesson he learned about management? Ignore almost all of those "best practices."  What he was being taught and what he had learned about management were entirely different! He discovered that the practice of management is filled with myths guaranteed to screw up any company, and we've compiled our blogs on the 5 Myths of Management here:

At SRC Holdings, we see our succession management program as one of our most important strategic advantages. It is also one of our greatest challenges because our managers must not only be good at their jobs but also good at building and maintaining our culture. Every year, we dive deeply into our workforce and employment data to evaluate ownership succession planning results while actively supporting the progress and alignment of our strategic workforce goals. During this process, the big objective is to complete detailed strategic workforce planning. The goals of this process can be achieved by answering four basic questions: 

One thing that scares me about our economy is the whole trend of downsizing. What’s really going on is that companies are getting rid of people and replacing them with machines. They view people as a contingent liability. They’re missing the fact that productivity depends on people. I don’t disagree that machines can make you more competitive. They can absorb overhead. They don’t take breaks. They don’t go on vacation. They don’t sit around wasting time. What machines can’t do is figure out how to make money. Only people can do that. If you have people who know how to make money, you’ll win every time.

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.