Aha! Moment Monday
I remember years ago hearing of a company with a large sales force that made it their practice to fire the least-performing sales person at the end of each year. I think they believed it set an example to keep everyone working hard so as not to be last or left behind.
But it made me wonder about the culture of that organization (at a time when “culture” wasn’t a consideration in the work force; keeping your job was.) While I wasn’t privy to the inner workings of that organization, I imagined it not being as much a sharing of best practices or insights as it was of holding your cards close to your chest, a competitive environment, survival of the fittest, if you will.
So since I’m a fan of individual performance targets – where individuals work to achieve their personal best, not someone else’s – I wondered next, what if each sales person in the company grew their book by, say, 25%, would the last place person still be deemed less valuable and released into the wild?
And if the internal environment is competitive, can everyone wholeheartedly invest their resources on serving their clients or are they side-tracked having to watch their backs?
“When people aren’t afraid to have meetings with other individuals, and when people aren’t thinking about how to out-maneuver someone else politically, they can actually focus on the task at hand. They can spend more time actually executing.” Gary Vaynerchuk
Aha! ~ “Good culture creates speed”
Getting ahead is never about taking a piece from someone else’s pie or about protecting your own, it’s about creating a bigger pie together. A “culture of increase” (that just flowed out and I thought worthy of putting in quotations) is experienced when creativity – not competition (its opposite) – is the corporate value.
Now, creativity leads to innovation and you can’t innovate without failure. In good cultures where growth is accelerated, so is failing along the way. They simply fail faster, get the lessons, then keep going.
Let’s face it; we’re either pulling together or pulling apart.
As for pies, I vote blueberry. You?
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