Building a best place to work is all about the doing
Upon reviewing “Washington’s Best Workplaces 2007″ I am reminded of something I heard from an interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer of Standford Business School. Professor Pfeffer was giving a lecture on his ideas of what builds a great company. Some of the areas toughed on in the lecture were:
- Managers need to ask why before how as the purpose of doing something is often just as important as knowing how to put things into action.
- Knowing comes from doing and doing comes from teaching. So engage by putting ideas into action and helping others to learn as you are learning. This constant organizational learning takes longer to put into practice but the lessons and skills learned along the way are invaluable.
- Action counts more than analysis and planning. Try things, keep learning, and keep improving as you go.
- There is no doing without mistakes! Learn from mistakes and celebrate that new awareness!
- Drive out fear as fear fosters inaction!
- Develop evaluation processes which embraces fighting the competition and not pitting employees against each other. Building a performance management program and set of processes which support people working together and not competing against each other will drive action.
- Measure what matters and can assist in turning knowledge into action.
- What leaders do is important and seen by employees to signal what is really important. If turning knowledge into action is important then as leaders make sure your actions support that priority.
After the lecture a frustrated participant came up to Jeffrey Pfeffer and said, “Everything you have just said is just common sense! You haven’t told us anything that we didn’t already know!” Professor Pfeffer replied, “You’re right but how much of that common sense is your organization putting into action?”