Principle 7: Enthusiastic People (Item 3)

Potential of an organization is realized through its people's enthusiasm, resourcefulness and participation.

Why this is important

You must give your employees space to have their say, show you care and keep your promises.

Companies need enthusiastic, volunteering employees. What can you do to ensure that employees actually do volunteer their enthusiasm and resourcefulness?

Your employees can contribute to helping the company reach its Goals and objectives, if you:

• Create and maintain an environment in which your employees can do their best work.
• Enable them to contribute – provide skills, knowledge, resources, power and authority so they can contribute.
• Actively work to fix systems and processes that prevent people from doing their best work.
• Show you care.

People need considerable encouragement to continue to volunteer their hearts and minds. Remember this diagram from Principle 1 (`Role Models'). We saw that people volunteer when

• they are given space to have their say
• they feel appreciated for who they are
• they have a cause.

When people are not given space to have their say, feel they are not appreciated or do not have a cause, they withdraw to varying amounts.

Leadership

It is a major part of the job of leadership to keep people in the top right quadrant so they feel they want to keep volunteering.

The old thinking of dealing with employees got people onto the left-hand side and tended to keep them there.

Remember, many of the detached employees who you may see as just coming to work to pick up their pay have very active lives away from your work place. Their `active lives' are in an environment where they are allowed to volunteer and where they feel appreciated.

As a leader in the new thinking, your job is to keep people in the top right quadrant. Keeping them there is a lot easier than getting them back. Depending on how much damage was done during the old thinking, you may have to do a lot of work to encourage people out of their various states of withdrawal.

Even if you are the best boss in the world and walk your talk on this concept very well, you usually have a lot to overcome to keep people in the top right quadrant — experience with previous bosses, broken promises, failed trust, myths about bosses (eg, the shadows), etc.

Teams

The team approach is an excellent way of encouraging volunteering, creativity and resourcefulness. It delivers because by their nature, teams begin to break down the old thinking that Principle 7 is trying to address. We recommend it.

Almost all National Business Excellence Award winners (Baldrige, EFQM and ABEF) have followed the team path in their approach to Principle 7.

Although teams are a very useful way to generate the volunteering, enthusiasm, innovation, resourcefulness that the company wants, teams usually fail. Companies appear to think that the team structure by itself will do all these things. It will, if a complete transfer of authority to the team accompanies the team structure. If an old-fashioned hierarchy still exists (and it usually does), the team will fail. If you try to boss the team, forget it.

• Give teams a real job to do. We have been to many team celebration days and team competitions. All of these show the huge amount of energy that is generated in the people by the process of being on a team. What constantly amazes us is the smallness of the projects. "This team of six met eight times and after huge effort and cleverness has saved the company $18,000." Without trying to offend anyone, who cares? If that much energy was generated, why not work on the real issues for the company and save $18 million or generate $25 million in increased revenue, instead of saving just $18,000 and generating a good time.

Teams without real jobs to do, fail in the long term. Team members see that they have not done anything useful and stop volunteering their energy.

• You must give the team proper authority to do its work. We frequently see so called `self-managed work teams' where there is no authority to do anything. All authority still rests with the boss, or team leader.

Teams without the authority to do anything, fail in the long term. Team members see that they can not do anything useful, become disillusioned and stop volunteering their energy. These failures are difficult to recover from. People feel duped. Another failure of trust. Companies often relaunch the team with just a change of name, but without the necessary change in authority structure.

We have found out these things about teams.

• A useful definition of a team is "all the people needed to do the work". This helps break away from the artificial team structures so often seen when five people are formed into a team to solve problem x. It should help those five people understand that they are just one of the steering committees working with the team.
• "Someone in the team knows the answer." In our experience, this is true for the team as it exists at any time. The cynics might say that when combined with the point above, you just keep expanding the team until you find someone with the answer. In reality, a member of the existing team knows.

Alignment

When you have all these people volunteering, you want them working creatively, enthusiastically and with resourcefulness on things that are important to the company. Human beings are naturally creative and resourceful. Often when these energies are released, people begin working full (or part time) for themselves. You need alignment of people's activity.

In Principle 2 (`Focus on Achieving Results'), we described the importance of alignment of focus on achieving company Goals and objectives.

When you are successful at creating space for people to volunteer their enthusiasm, creativity and resourcefulness, it is like starting a stampede. You then have to manage it like a stampede.

• You can set its direction by keeping it within very well defined boundaries.
• You can nudge it into different directions, but cannot change direction suddenly.
• It has a power of its own.
• You do not know where it will end up.

To create alignment, the company's leaders have a responsibility:

• to set the direction and let everyone know what the direction is and how they contribute
• to be consistent in that direction (not to change direction every ten minutes)
• to create, maintain and support an environment in which people want to volunteer their creativity, enthusiasm and resourcefulness to the company's benefit

From Principle 3 (`Customers'), you also need alignment with what customers value. We frequently see companies whose employees are so focused on themselves that they give little attention to customer needs. Music played at 200 dB in retail stores. Chatting about themselves and their own interests while supposedly looking after customers. All of the discussion in Principle 3 (`Customers') is to focus alignment of everything the company does with providing value to the customers.

Discussion helps implementation

Extensive discussion during planning can be the crucial difference between good and bad implementation.

Successful companies find that when they give space for discussion and debate up-front, this can iron out impracticalities. The discussion phase brings together the knowledge of each of the implementation stakeholders, which makes implementation much easier. Total implementation time can be more than halved. This can be crucial in meeting the need for shorter and shorter cycle times.

Deliberately go out of your way to find what is wrong — what will not work. Then you can work out how to overcome those problems. It is always easier and less expensive to do that before you launch the product than after.