“Greatness is ultimately only extreme success.” Those words from my blog last week have stayed with me, perhaps because they make greatness less abstract and unattainable. Today I would like to explore this a little further.
Success is intrinsically the achievement of a purpose. This makes it naturally subjective. We all define it, strive for it and assess it differently, according to our own aspirations, abilities and actions. Thus, while any success can be great, you could say, at a higher level, that ‘greatness’ is more likely associated with an achievement of a purpose aspired to, or recognised by, many people. The more people that recognise the achievement the ‘greater’ it appears.
This is certainly true of organisational success. It reinforces Todd Duncan’s statement that “One is too small a number to achieve greatness.” After all an organisation is a collection of people, and thus, by definition, should define a common purpose for all the people who make up the organisation. Yet can you honestly say that everyone in your organisation is working for a common purpose?
You might like to think so, simply because everyone is working for the same organisation. But, at the very best, this is superficial. Individual objectives, personal priorities and ill-conceived incentives all conspire against effective collaboration, and even co-operation. Lack of employee engagement alone is prima facie evidence of this. But events like the Challenger and Deep Horizon disasters provide more extreme examples, where warnings about shortcomings were simply ignored by senior management.
Let’s, however, stay with employee engagement. It is possible that we focus too much attention on identifying this and how to improve it, thereby diluting our efforts. What if we consider employee engagement as being synonymous with common purpose or strategic alignment? After all that, surely, is ultimate objective of all employee engagement initiatives.
When you invert the way you look at employee engagement in this way you think differently about how you approach it. Now you look at anything and everything that detracts from the single-focus endeavour that shapes organisational success. For instance, sales commission. Have you ever considered, how divisive paying commission on sales can be?
A relative was telling me recently of the pressure that was being created by over-selling in her ski-holiday company. Their complaints about the excessive numbers of holiday makers being foisted upon them fell on deaf ears. Management’s attitude was simply, “You will find a way to cope because you always do.” This time, however, the numbers were too great. After several weeks of working 20 hour days, exhausted employees could no longer maintain their high standard of customer service, and increased customers complaints and senior management criticism led them to all resign.
You might argue that it should never have come to that. Of course it shouldn’t, but the point is that there was no strategic alignment. The commission-based salespeople were simply following their own objectives to the point it was actually detrimental to the business and the service and the reputation for service which is the company’s major competitive advantage. Unfortunately it could happen in any organisation. Even yours. So why risk it?
Rather develop an approach that has everyone in the organisation collaborating and communicating towards a common goal. Therein lies the seed of your organisational greatness – and personal success for everyone. And my employee ownership model gives you a very powerful means of building this.
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”