If one day a truck showed up at your business full of valuable materials given to you by an anonymous donor – and it was exactly the stuff you needed to take the company to the next level – you would be elated. A gift from heaven, you might think.
Ironically, a truck full of valuable materials actually has been parked out back waiting to be discovered for a long, long time. This truck contains the single greatest untapped asset available to you and your business.
That truck is filled with your employees’ ideas, their concerns, thoughts, passions and values. It’s locked up and no one has looked inside for a long, long time.
I used to hear it said all the time, “our people are our most valuable asset.” It’s funny how rarely that is heard these days. After all the botched efforts to engage our people we have pretty much determined it is either impossible to do or it is pure naive idealism. And so our human gifts go largely untapped, underutilized, and – I hate to say it – unappreciated.
With this said, I want to explain why this situation exists and why it matters.
Most organizations have a huge amount of waste. It ranges from as low of 15 percent of operating costs to as high as 50 percent. It’s all those things that happen every day that add no value, yet, for some reason, we do them anyway. And, someone somewhere in your organization knows just what to do to get rid of that waste. But they don’t do a thing about it. Why is that?
A truck full of passion
It starts with the fact that Gallup tells us 67 percent of our employees aren’t engaged. They show up and do what they are told, nothing more and often less. They know where the waste is, and they hate it because it squanders their time and robs them of the pride and satisfaction in a job well done. They don’t engage because they can’t; the way the business is managed does not allow them to make the change that eliminates the dreaded waste.
As leaders of organizations the vast majority of us truly believe in our people – in our hearts. But in our heads it doesn’t work as advertised. People seem to be so complex and a lot of the time their thinking seems half-baked and their actions nonsensical. We see living proof that the promise of employees seems to fall far short of our heartfelt expectations.
Employees disappoint us NOT because they lack the talent, passion and innovation we all think they have. The reality is the way we run our businesses actually prevents the fulfillment of the great promise of human innovation. What’s broken is not the people, it’s our management model and its inability to engage employees.
People thrive in a system designed to give them the data they need to make smart decisions. People thrive in a system where they understand the organization’s direction so they can take action that supports that direction. People thrive when the dominant motive is to do what is right, not to do what is safe. People thrive when they don’t walk in fear.
Open up that truck out back and take a look inside. The management model needed to release the passion and innovation of your people is waiting there for you.
The vast majority of businesses manage to put to use an incredibly small fraction of the ideas generated by people who work in the business. For most businesses, the number of ideas implemented per employee is terribly low, less than 10 a year, and for many the number is closer to zero. So much for tapping into the natural creativity of the workforce.
Why does this happen? Why would we pass this opportunity up? Why would we let those hundreds of good ideas die on the vine?
Why would we not want to grow our revenue, lower our costs and thrill our customers?
Why would we not selfishly grab every idea that would make our business more successful?
Why would we not want our people to feel respected and creative and successful?
The answer is simple. We do want all those things. But, we cannot see how it is possible to dramatically increase the implementation of ideas – certainly not the level where in excess of 100 ideas are implemented per employee per year.
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