Published on: Tuesday, October 05, 2010
Making Orange Work For Your Organization
Comments
Report from World Business Forum, New YorkAdrian Gostick remembers asking his father, who engineered small component parts for large aircraft engines, what motivated him to work for Rolls Royce for more than 20 years. "Every day," his father replied, "I felt praised and listened to."
For the younger Gostick, co-author of
The Carrot Principal, and also co-author, with his business partner, Chester Elton, of
The Orange Revolution: How One Great Team Can Transform an Entire Organization, those words were both personally illuminating and professionally reinvigorating.
The raw materials of superior organization performance, Gostick says, are those highly engaged and regularly recognized individuals and teams who thrive on intellectual energy and share it with others to help achieve major corporate objectives. The execution of any business plan hinges on the engagement of key business leaders. If they are merely satisfied with their role and the challenges facing them, individual contributors are more inclined to punch the clock, get the job done and move on to the next challenge.
The difference between those satisfied leaders and more valuable engaged leaders is that the latter are truly jazzed by the work, motivated to share lessons learned with colleagues and far more inclined to ask how they can go the extra mile for the company's customers.
That's the power of engagement, and that's the reason why employee recognition programs are so critical to organizational success, especially in this business climate.
But it need not be more complicated than this. And this is, as Gostick's dad surely would have agreed, building a culture in which great performance is recognized, and the words "Thank You" are meaningfully and regularly institutionalized in the words and actions of every business leader.
Joseph Daniel McCool
Lessons learned from and about six-figure leadership and executive career management
