One of the most common refrains in business, especially growing business, is “we only want the best.” That is, we only want the best employees.
It’s no wonder. According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace survey, 70% of the American workforce is either disengaged with their work—meaning that they come to work, clock in, then clock out—or they are actively working against the company’s goals by wasting time, ignoring quality standards, or simply stealing from the company.
Unfortunately, what many employees hear—and what too many employers come to mean—is that only the best will survive. Only the best employees belong.
Executives talk exhaustingly about motivating employees to do their best work. Invariably, some executives say things like “if our employees have free time, there’s more we can get from them,” or “why can’t we just put the fear of (God/their manager/the CEO) into our employees to make them do what we want?”
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t bring out the best in the employees or the company that employs them.
In their book, Conscious Capitalism, John Mackey and Raj Sisodia contrast John’s experience in hiring at Whole Foods with the approach taken by Jack Welch at GE. Under Welch, GE’s policy was to fire the bottom 10% of its workforce every year, on the theory that people would then work really hard not to be in the bottom 10%.
As John and Raj succinctly put it, such a policy is “a disaster.”
Whole Foods has implemented several different policies to encourage better productivity from its employees. From working to create cohesive teams, to transparent compensation policies, to personal wellness benefits available for those who want them, Whole Foods’ approach has been to bet that happier, more well-adjusted employees will more than compensate the company (and, by extension, it’s employees and customers) for the extra costs it incurs in employing them. John reports that the experiment has been an unequivocal success.
In Touchpoints, Douglas Conant and Mette Norgaard describe a similar effort at Campbell’s Soup Company that Doug started when he took over the reins as CEO. On his first day at work, Doug made a promise to all the company’s employees that became known as The Campbell Promise: Campbell Valuing People; People Valuing Campbell. He proceeded to demonstrate his commitment to the well-being of his people by asking “everyone he ran into, ‘What can we do better?’ ‘How can I help?'”
John attributes much of Campbell’s enormous financial turnaround to the effects of this policy.
What John, Raj, Doug, and Mette demonstrate is that there is a great deal more power in telling people that they belong. This is not some Pollyanna-ish desire for us all to be nicer. Teaching others that they belong brings with it the need to have clear, direct, and sometimes painful discussions about what they bring to the table.
The greatest power in business cannot begin to be unlocked until we have employees who are trusted and who understand and support the vision of their leaders. It takes a leader who is committed to being only one thing.
Only the best.
