Category: Opinion

What is the most important asset of any organization? Is it their physical property – buildings, computers, and desks? Is it their capital reserves in the bank? How about their portfolio of intellectual property? While all of the above items are important, they pale in comparison to the value of their people. An organization’s employees take care of and use the physical property, spend capital to fund activities to grow the business, and exploit intellectual property for economic gain. It’s the people who make it all happen – without them, everything else is just an inanimate object. Unfortunately, people like Jack Welch failed to see their value and changed the market to see people as nothing but another expendable resource. In the eyes of people like Jack Welch, people are no different than the wood used to make a door, the plastic used to make a consumer good, or a glob of solder used to make electronic goods. People became a commodity instead of human beings.

How has this impacted the workplace? We see more and more that people don’t work for an organization for very long. Changing jobs every few years is increasingly popular. Of course, this is only logical – why would you want to work for an employer who didn’t value you as a human being? Businesses do whatever it takes to keep employee pay as low as possible while increasing the CEO’s pay. When annual raises come due, the lower the number the better. Employees quickly see that if they want to get ahead, they will need to find another job making more. What if employers gave raises as if each employee was a potential new hire and they wanted to ensure they took the offer?

What would happen if the business world changed to value people over profits? What if companies placed their people first – ahead of profits, ahead of the customer, and ahead of the shareholder? Sounds radical, but companies who have implemented such policies have seen higher employee retention and greater employee happiness. But most importantly, that greater happiness directly translated to happier customers who then engaged in more business with the organization and improved shareholder value. Countless books on the topic of servant leadership and employee-focused business models exist, and they all show the exact same thing – employees who feel valued are more productive and happier to be at work.

A book I recently read said that – as a small business owner – I need to “fall in love with my customer”. The notion is that I should treat my customer like they are the most important thing on earth. Treat them like I treat my wife. Treat them as if I want nothing more than to spend time with them. When I treat my customers that way, my customers won’t want to leave. That same idea applies to employees – what if businesses treated their employees like they loved them?

In 1974, a Hungarian invented one of the most popular and influential toys of all time, the Rubik’s cube. Considering that I was born well after that time, I can safely say that I cannot remember a time without this toy. Growing up, however, I watched the Rubik’s company try to make toy after toy in some way related to the original, but they always tried new and “innovative” renditions.

Since my family members always knew how big of a Rubik’s cube fan I am, I would get all kinds of these newer toys as birthday and Christmas gifts. While many of them were flashy and initially interesting, I ultimately grew tired of them and would go back to playing with the original. After all, the original was fascinating… captivating even, and I was determined to learn how to solve it.

After spending a considerable amount of time experimenting and playing with my cube, one of the teachers at my elementary school gave me a list of algorithms showing how to manipulate individual squares in very specific ways. The summer after, I accomplished my goal to learn to solve the cube, but I was still hungry for more.

While my first few solves averaged around 10 minutes, I wanted to continue to get better and faster. I studied and fine tuned my process of solving the cube, realizing that at a certain point the design of the cube itself was holding me back. I then looked into what other cubes were out there and how they were designed to be more efficient and effective. These days I solve the cube in under a minute, and the best people in the world can solve it in a matter of seconds.

Constantly evaluating and enhancing processes and expanding resources also holds value when thinking about technology and business. Businesses that are growing very rapidly today focus their time, energy, and resources on making gradual improvements, becoming more resourceful. By learning from this, organizations can ensure that they are effectively working toward their goals, accomplishing more by using the most effective resources to the best of their ability.

All businesses share the same basic objective – to make money. That’s pretty simple, but what enables that to happen? Business leaders focus on increasing revenue, decreasing costs, increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance with regulatory guidelines, and finding and exploiting any competitive advantages they have. Of all the above objectives, one of the easiest is to increase efficiency and remove inefficiencies. Most people hate bureaucracies – we see them when we look to the federal government, the DMV and, all too often, the very companies we work for. Bureaucracies make us feel powerless and unimportant. They beat us down with rules and restrictions that keep us from accomplishing our job. Bureaucracies are the very antithesis of efficiency. In your business, are policies and procedures intended to chain your employees down, or liberate them to do the work you pay them to do? Are your processes streamlined for the mission at hand, or dictated by bureaucrats above in such a way as to slow down your business? As businesses grow, they tend to become more rigid and bureaucratic – more layers of management, more company ‘yes men’ who won’t challenge the status quo, and more workers who show up and punch the clock instead of having any excitement for the mission of the organization. Ever work at a small businesses? The focus is always on overtaking the Goliath in the market. Policies and procedures that prevent that from happening are removed, workers are empowered to do their best. People have a shared sense of purpose, and often develop a feeling of family. What can we learn from these observations? First, if you’re a leader within a large organization, how can you remove red tape and empower your people? What do you need to do to ensure that your people are working at their best? Are you creating roadblocks to your employees’ work? Employees want to feel empowered – they want to feel that their leaders are on their side. They want the bureaucracy removed so they can do their best. Second, if you work in a small business, recognize that your lack of rigidity may be the single biggest competitive advantage you have. With no bureaucracy to hold you back, you can find the best way to accomplish the mission and execute without roadblocks. Empower your team to win and then step back and watch them achieve. As a small business, your best way to attack Goliath is through superior processes, quicker turn around, less paperwork, and having employees that feel empowered to accomplish the mission. No business owner ever said “I think the federal government would be a great model for how to run my business!” but that is exactly what happens to businesses all across our nation. It’s time to change that trend!