The power of We organizations

We organizations are becoming the most powerful and effective organizations in the world. Is your organization one of them?

During our childhood we are all encouraged to share our stuff, to be nice to people we don’t know, to have friends. How much of that is really applied to work later in our adult life? Do we think as individuals or as teams? which thinking is more effective in the long term? Listen to yourself, When you talk about your company… do you say me or we?

Saying “we” looks help you think as a team. If you ask people if they like to works in teams, or if they think it is the best way to work efficiently, they will say YES, of course. But for some reason, people don’t tend to work in teams. People usually wait for directions; they don’t contribute or share their thoughts without being asked, and usually avoid asking for help. They are afraid of asking. If you think about it, most of the mistakes that are made every day in organizations are due to questions not asked or not answered and issues not raised timely.  People don’t have the right incentives to do so. Even worse, we receive incentives to do exactly the opposite. There are incentives for individual sales, employee rankings, school grades, competition, leading without asking. No incentives for contributing, only numerical goals that usually are not attainable, no means to propose how we could do better, so we get frustrated.

I also have seen that in some conditions, people do make suggestions and contribute with their ideas. Last week I went to one of these rooms where you are with a group of 8 other people, you may not even know all of them, and you need to figure out how to escape the room. It surprised me how, even we didn’t know each other, we all contributed with ideas, we all participated and listened to each other, and finally, we all escape, we all won. “We”. Not “me”. Why did we work so well? I realized it was because there were no individual prizes, only just one big prize for everyone if we were able to go out. We had no reasons to compete with each other. We did not have a leader assigned, but no one tried to “steal” the leadership, that is, the leadership position was acquired by different participants in different situations. And lastly, the common purpose was clear: we all needed to get out of there in less than 60 minutes.

Take a retail business I worked with. They had several salesmen who worked on commissions. The manager was also on commission. So as he was usually busy with “managerial stuff”, he was not selling that much, so he was getting a lower salary than the best salesman. He was worried about it and showed frustration. He then tried to sell more, but would leave aside the managerial work that only he could perform. What’s the end of the game? The organization and the salesman were suffering from lack of leadership and low morale.

Young companies like Google, Zappos and Virgin and other smaller companies like The BAMA Companies or NY Label & Box  have been showing that following the same simple patterns we learned through our childhood, especially at work can make our lives much more meaningful, and our companies more valuable. They define rules that help to think as “we organizations”. Less physical boundaries to be able to communicate more easily, more collaboration from employees, more brainstorming meetings to invite new ideas, more participation from the customer and the suppliers, more respect to employees of any level, more flexibility to allow business to merge with personal life, no competition among employees, more space for casual talk.

A furniture company in Houston “put their salesmen on salary, in place of commissions for sales. Result: a steady increase in sales. Older salesmen now help beginners. Salesmen no longer try to steal business from other salesmen. They now help each other. They protect the customer” (Source: W Edwards Deming – The New Economics”).

This is part of the transformation of companies from the focus on “me” to the focus on “we”.

Related reading: Instill a culture of happiness and quality will follow

Examples of me: it is his fault. I am not meeting the objective. That is not my responsibility. Ask the manager.
Examples of we: what can we do? We made it. This is our company. It was our idea. Let’s do it!

Dr. Edwards Deming would say that there usually two main challenges to achieving change: Why changing if things are good? And why would I help or listen to you?
So, Why changing to “we” if we are doing good this way? Because there are various degrees of good. You could be doing better. All the lawyers are supposed to be certified to winning cases, but, are they all winning cases? The same way there are different types of lawyers, there are different grades of doctors, there are also different grades of companies. Yours is probably profitable, could it be even more profitable?

And why help or listen to others while I know how to do my job? Because jobs are never totally apart from each other. Everything you do, even if you are solopreneur, influences someone: another partner, a client, a supplier, a teammate. So if you listen to others, or if you ask them how your job impacts their job, you will get a different perspective, that you cannot get working alone.

“In place of competition for high rating, high grades, to be number one, there will be cooperation on problems of common interest… the result will in time be greater innovation, applied science, technology, expansion of market, greater service, greater material reward for everyone. There will be joy in work, joy in learning… Everyone will win; no losers”

W Edwards Deming

A “Me” organization finds it more difficult to change. A “we” organization changes all the time, as everybody can contribute to promoting changes, even clients or suppliers. Everybody is responsible, but nobody is guilty. We organizations lead processes through meaningful interactions among its members. There is room for continuous improvement.

If you work for you, you work harder, because you want to be better working the same way. But if you work for your team, you work for us, you will work smarter, you will be able to work in a different way.http://for.us/

Think for a moment how you work.
Are you having meaningful interactions at work with your coworkers or clients? What are you doing OK and could be doing better? Are you as a leader ready to listen to your coworkers? Are you promoting habits that help to build a “we organization”?

RECOMMENDED COURSES: Agile Leadership