The Making of an Amazing Company

I’ve worked for some of the worst. I’ve worked for some of the best.

I got my first taste of corporate life at the age of 18, as a stockman, for a major retail company. Like most of my classmates in our rural blue collar community, graduation from high school meant going directly to work, if you weren’t already working an after-school job. College would have to wait, if it happened at all. I needed girlfriend money and gas for my ‘72 Chevelle.

That was my first exposure to supervisors who reported to managers who reported to district managers who reported to regional managers who reported to a V.P. who reported to a C-suite executive who reported to a board who reported to owners who reported to shareholders, often under the watchful eye of a scandal-hungry media.

The weight of all that is heavy when you’re sitting at the bottom of the heap. Not only are you buried under policies (some of them draconian and senseless), bureaucracy, and decades, maybe even a century, of corporate culture, you’re also buried under the personalities, temperaments, and management styles of all of the people above you.

I quickly began ascending the corporate ladder into supervisor, then management, then director level positions, graduating from stocking shelves with boxes of Tide laundry powder to creating and managing multi-million dollar budgets, leading sizable teams, serving tens of thousands of customers under my direct purview.

I don’t know how I’m 55 already, but across 37 of those years I’ve worked and led in companies across three industries: Retail, media, and travel. I’ve also owned businesses in the transportation, logistics, risk management, and business coaching/development industries. And in each industry where I served as an employee, I’ve worked for some of the largest companies in the country.

Some of those companies were horrendous to work for.

They were known for their toxic environments, chronic abuse of employees (whom they openly referred to as the “body count”), and abuse of customers through unethical business practices. I once accidentally caught, with proof, a senior executive in my up-line of responsibility at a newspaper company stealing money from subscriber accounts to meet the quarterly revenue goal. Being a whistleblower in a company like that isn’t easy. You better be ready to pivot.

Some of those companies were a pleasure to work for.

The bad has outweighed the good in my corporate experience, hence my admittedly jaded view of corporate life. But there are amazing companies out there, like the organization hit particularly hard by the pandemic where the owners of the company completely stopped taking compensation themselves to minimize layoffs below them, and then hired back many of those who were laid off, with back-pay, as soon as was possible.

What kind of company are you creating?

Quantum Business Briefs is written specifically for aspiring, new, and evolving business owners. I assume, if you’re reading this, that you fit into one of those categories.

As a business owner, you have personally escaped the world of employment, a world that can often be best described as a prison. But now you have the responsibility of creating a new world, with your own employees, associates, contractors. You’re either planning, or executing the formation of a business, a culture, and an internal and external reputation. I hope you’re spending a great deal of time thinking about the culture and reputation that will be the breath and blood of the organization you create.

I’ll share with you here some of my thoughts, after 3 1/2 decades of corporate experience, about what it means to create an amazing company.

The Ten Traits

Your company will serve a greater good.

Every business has a profit motive. Without profit, there is no business. Profit is good. But your greatest chances of profitability, and generational success, lie in your desire to serve a greater good, meeting needs, solving problems, fulfilling honorable desires, improving the world in some way beyond their own success.

Your company will value people over profits.

Amazing companies understand that their greatest assets are the men and women who get the work done every day. They are the ones who, when listened to, breathe sustaining life into the organization. Often, in unhealthy companies, human beings are the first to be discarded when profit margins miss the mark. And those who remain are demoralized and slip into a pattern of simply going through the motions and checking the boxes to save their employment.

Amazing companies know that, in most cases, the more investment they make into the success, satisfaction, and day to day fulfillment of their people, the more likely their people are to invest the very best of themselves into the success of the company when they show up for work.

Your company will focus on generational success, not a single quarter, or year.

One of my favorite authors is Simon Sinek, and in his book, “The Infinite Game,” he explains the difference between leaders who are playing a short, finite game, and those who are playing the long, infinite game.

The former are so focused on the numbers for the quarter, or the year, that they often make decisions that may fix the next quarter, but shorten the lifespan of the company. While leaders who play the long game are less interested in keeping score from day to day, and more interested in making sure the company outlives themselves. They have the wisdom to make decisions that will result in generational success, the infinite game.

Your company will prioritize inclusion and contribution.

When I speak of inclusion here, I’m not talking about race, gender, or any of the number of protected classes of people, though those things are important. I’m talking about creating an environment where everyone, from the custodian to the vice president, and anyone in-between, is welcome to contribute to the success of the company above and beyond the routine of their daily responsibilities.

I remember one time, as a subordinate, finding myself completing my daily responsibilities with time left in the day. I asked the boss if there was anything additional I could do to lighten their own load, and/or support the team. I was promptly told to stay in my lane and fill my time with leaving more voicemails for cold leads. I immediately, and permanently, felt less inclined to contribute more than was required by the bullet points of my job description.

I’ve worked for organizations where the only “good” ideas are the ones that come from the bosses, while ideas and suggestions for improvement, that come from the subordinates, are dismissed, indefinitely delayed, or never even heard. Sometimes, in the worst of organizations, great ideas from the subordinates are heard and implemented, but only after the boss places their name on the idea and claims it as their own, to impress the individuals above them on the organization chart.

An amazing company will seek out brilliance, creativity, innovation, and contribution from everyone in the organization, regardless of their title, execute initiatives that are vetted and proven worthy of implementation, and then celebrate the individual who had the foresight and courage to speak up and be heard.

Your company will have leaders, not bosses.

Nobody needs bosses. Everyone needs leaders. Even leaders need leaders.

Bosses are easy to spot. They operate from behind, with self-serving motives, exerting command and control not from a platform of relationships, shared vision, and mutual respect, but backed only by the power of their position on the organization chart. These are the men and women who use their subordinates as a means to an end to satisfy the demands of their own bosses for the sake of job security, bonus achievement, and advancement. And they are the ones who are on a daily mission to catch subordinates doing anything that they feel may jeopardize their own ascension up the corporate ladder. They spend an unusual amount of time eavesdropping on phone calls, monitoring emails, tracking and comparing meaningless metrics, listening around corners, seeking out gossip from others, creating division, and stalking social media to sniff out even the appearance of impropriety, whether it’s actually there or not.

Leaders are different, and they are rare. They lead from the front. They are men and women of vision who inspire and move the organization forward through relationships, shared vision, and a desire to see everyone win, in every way, including in the professional hopes and dreams of those they lead.

Your leaders will catch people winning.

Bosses catch people failing, or making mistakes. Leaders go about their day looking for wins. On a never-ending hunt for successes to celebrate, no matter how small. They have the innate ability to see first, and foremost, the best in everyone and they have the acumen to nurture and draw out the best, but also bring about kind, gracious, patient, and hopeful remediation through areas of weakness.

Your company will value ideas and evolution over policies and pet practices.

As your company ages, the more at risk it becomes of being weighed down by the albatross of outdated policies and ineffective practices made sacred by a lack of innovation, but more so, by a fear of change and the unknown that comes with that change.

Some of the more humorous symptoms of such a company are the insistence upon clients printing documents, signing them in pen, and scanning them back…with a scanner…that’s likely buried under a pile of crap in a closet. There’s also the belief that cold-calling strangers on their phones is an effective lead generation strategy. Have you ever uploaded a resume for a job, and then been asked to manually type into a form everything from the resume that you just uploaded? Madness! Don’t even bother. You don’t want to work there. It gets worse after you get your name badge, Blackberry, and your box of carbon paper.

An example of a fatal rejection of innovation can be found in the opportunity Blockbuster had to purchase Netflix, but passed, because they just couldn’t fathom how mailing DVDs to people’s homes could be a successful business model. Only one of those companies is alive today, the red one, while the blue one is a dusty memory.

Your amazing company will not only welcome ideas, from everyone, but will encourage them, and create opportunities for them to be shared, often, without fear, in an environment where the first response isn’t, “That will never work,” but is instead, “Let’s think of all the ways it could!”

Your company will celebrate wins loudly, and acknowledge misses with humility, grace, and shared responsibility.

Whether they’ll admit it or not, everyone needs to feel acknowledged and celebrated when they win. Celebration is vital to the morale and health of an organization. And not just celebration over the fact that the bosses get to report wins to their superiors, for their own pats on the back, bonuses, and promotions.

I’m talking about celebrating the contributions of every individual who made the win possible. And in my opinion, the bigger, louder, and more joyfully raucous the celebration, the better. Sure, you could send a congratulatory email. But you could also celebrate the win with a free catered lunch and a mariachi band, or a day long picnic at the state park, or by sending the winning team on a cruise together (certainly my preference!)

But we don’t always win. Sometimes we miss the mark for any variety of external or internal reasons. And at amazing companies, when the mark is missed, there is shared ownership of the results, from the top down, and everyone is invited to examine why, offer solutions, and make course corrections to tee up a win tomorrow.

Your company will be filled with people who enjoy freedom to be who they are and do what they do best.

At most companies, you as a human being are reduced to a single sheet of paper, or two, filled with bullet points and KPI’s (key performance indicators). On orientation day you’re given your job description, your name badge, Blackberry, your box of carbon paper, and are sent off to your workspace to begin checking the boxes until evaluation day.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a job description document. In fact, you’d be remiss by not having one for each of the positions at your company. Everyone wants and needs to know what their responsibilities are and the metrics by which their performance will be evaluated. But what if it could be something different?

What if, at your amazing company, every person who joins your team is presented with the organization’s vision, a basic outline for how the position being filled contributes to the realization of the vision, and an invitation to bring all of their passion and creativity to the team to flesh out the job description in a way that reflects the uniqueness of who they are in a way that nobody else can, or ever has before them?

This will be a company filled with people who have remembered who they are, why they are here, and have been set free to be and do those things for the greater good of the organization, which itself exists for the greater good of the community it serves.