In my youth I was highly engaged in amateur car racing. One of the many challenges of this endeavor was the management of the unpaid volunteers who were helping to prepare the cars. Later, as a manager of professionals I came to realize that a person’s best work is always voluntary. Being paid does not automatically compel one to deliver excellence. Creating and maintaining a company culture where individuals ‘volunteer’ their best work is one of the major activities of leadership. How are you inspiring your ‘volunteers’ to deliver excellence in your organization?
When hiring people it is extremely risky to promise business outcomes because the fate of any project or organization is too uncertain for guarantees. So what can be promised to a prospective employee? By providing an enthusiastic blame-free culture that emphasizes positive empowerment, I have learned that I can promise that an employee’s skills and positive attitudes will be enriched as a result of being part of our team.
The best example for this goes back to the early nineties. I was running an early computerized machine shop focused on quickly delivering prototype mechanical parts to Silicon Valley customers. One employee was a very skilled manual machinist who had never touched a computer. After half a decade in our organization, he had become an outstanding CAD-CAM machinist After a decade of well mentored service with another organization he now works at the mecca of prototype machine shops: Apple!. He now gets to make the prototypes of iPhones and other amazing Apple gadgets.