The Wall Street Journal’s very informative Independent Street blog carried an item yesterday about getting employees to think like entrepreneurs. The keys are to: Organize them into small groups, share profits, embrace failure, reward ideas and promote risk takers.
Those are all worthy ideas. But they speak to the fact that employers tend to think “programs” when it comes to fostering an ownership mentality. The thinking goes: If we give incentives, share profits, write stories in the company newsletter about successful or unsuccessful ventures and make everyone a hero, we’ll get ownership thinking.
A fundamental piece is missing: The top-down piece.
If owners want employees to think like them, they have to emotionally meet the employees where the employees are. Workers will be more likely to think like owners if they have executive leaders who demonstrate compassion; who take workers’ feelings into consideration when making decisions; who express their feelings about people; who manage their own emotions well at work and project a strong but humanistic image. It is company leaders’ people skills that matter most to fostering ownership thinking.
The company I grew up in, where I worked from age 24 to 41, was such an organization for most of that time. CMP Media sponsored frequent programs to foster entrepreneurial thinking. They sent many employees to every conceivable training course to improve our business and sales skills. They even paid for me to go to Columbia for an MBA.
But what made the company remarkable was the husband and wife team who founded it. (That’s Gerry and Lilo Leeds in the photo above.) They had superb emotional intelligence skills. They could read the mood of the work force and respond quickly. They had values they brought to work every day (the very well-off CEO drove an old station wagon to work for years and years). They were always approachable. That doesn’t mean they weren’t tough when they had to be. They made lots of difficult business calls along the way.
As employees and managers, the idea of “What would Gerry and Lilo do?” was never far from our thoughts as we made decisions that affected the organization. We didn’t own the company, but because of them, we acted as if we did.
October 31, 2008 at 10:43 am
How very true. I have experienced an abundance of training programs in my career. Many excellent. But is most sorely lacking in industry is emotional intelligence. That ability, as you say, to “read” the employees. You have to be able to look people in the face. One of the big problems with fostering entrepreneurial thinking in a “virtual” team separated by geography. I have been thinking about this issue a lot lately, working for a large globally dispersed organization.
One other component of that emotional intelligence is the “principle of charity.” If you can’t interpret the statements of your employees in a way that maximizes agreement between you, if you jump on verbal missteps or inaccuracies, you are undermining trust. I have found this principle to be critical to management and team interactions.
October 31, 2008 at 11:31 am
Matt, thanks for the comment. One of the reasons I work for myself now is that I found corporate America largely lacking on the “charity” aspect you describe!