“One is too small a number to achieve greatness.” I just love this statement by Todd Duncan that I came across this week. How much more powerful it is than my more prosaic, “No individual achieves success solely through their own efforts.” Yet whether you prefer the poetic or the prosaic, the words highlight an important, fundamental truth.
For most of us “greatness” may just seem an elusive dream. But what if you substitute the word ‘success’ for ‘greatness’? After all, greatness is ultimately only extreme success.
Everyone wants to be successful. Success may have infinite definitions because it is different for each one of us. But it is nevertheless a universal hope. Especially if you accept Maya Angelou’s definition: “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.”
This is simple but profound. Not least because you could say that it ultimately equates success with fulfilment.
Fulfilment is ultimately intensely personal. Nobody can be fulfilled for anyone else. Yet, by equating it with success and returning to that opening quote it becomes equally apparent that it not something that anyone can do purely on their own. Fulfilment, success, greatness all come from the way we interact with others.
This, however, is particularly significant for business leaders. If you are responsible for any kind of organisation or organisational group your success is more obviously determined by others. Your own success thus demands that you see the organisation as a single, integrated unit in which everyone is working to a common purpose. This means it is imperative that each person understands the big picture, their role and how it fits into the whole.
My model of employee ownership gives you this. It offers a solid foundation for defining success as well as a framework for building common purpose and the collaboration for fulfilment that fuels it.
Ownership will help your people personalise success and fulfilment within the context or their work lives and thus more likely to optimise their contribution to the organisation. While it might not make them great, it will help them feel part of something worthwhile. You simply need to remember that, “The more fulfilled people you have the more successful they will feel. And the more successful people your organisation has, the more successful your organisation will be.” Perhaps even great!
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.”