Seven habits of highly effective people - Stephen R. Covey [103]
I worked for several years with a very large real estate organization in the Middle West. My first experience with this organization was at a large sales rally where over 800 sales associates gathered for the annual reward program. It was a psych-up cheerleading session, complete with high school bands and a great deal of frenzied screaming.
Out of the 800 people there, around 40 received awards for top performance, such as "Most Sales,"
"Greatest Volume," "Highest Earned Commissions," and "Most Listings." There was a lot of hoopla -excitement, cheering, applause --around the presentation of these awards. There was no doubt that those 40 people had won; but there was also the underlying awareness that 760 people had lost. We immediately began educational and organizational development work to align the systems and structures of the organization toward the win-win paradigm. We involved people at a grass-roots level to develop the kinds of systems that would motivate them. We also encouraged them to cooperate and synergize with each other so that as many as possible could achieve the desired results of their individually tailored performance agreements.
At the next rally one year later, there were over 1,000 sales associates present, and about 800 of them received awards. There were a few individual winners based on comparisons, but the program primarily focused on people achieving self-selected performance objectives and on groups achieving team objectives. There was no need to bring in the high school bands to artificially contrive the fanfare, the cheerleading, and the psych up. There was tremendous natural interest and excitement because people could share in each others' happiness, and teams of sales associates could experience rewards together, including a vacation trip for the entire office.
The remarkable thing was that almost all of the 800 who received the awards that year had produced as much per person in terms of volume and profit as the previous year's 40. The spirit of win-win had significantly increased the number of golden eggs and had fed the goose as well, releasing enormous human energy and talent. The resulting synergy was astounding to almost everyone involved.
Competition has its place in the marketplace or against last year's performance --perhaps even against another office or individual where there is no particular interdependence, no need to cooperate. But cooperation in the workplace is as important to free enterprise as competition in the marketplace. The spirit of win-win cannot survive in an environment of competition and contests. For win-win to work, the systems have to support it. The training system, the planning system, the communication system, the budgeting system, the information system, the compensation system --all have to be based on the principle of win-win.
I did some consulting for another company that wanted training for their people in human relations. The underlying assumption was that the problem was the people.
The president said, "Go into any store you want and see how they treat you. They're just order takers. They don't understand how to get close to the customers. They don't know the product and they don't have the knowledge and the skill in the sales process necessary to create a marriage between the product and the need."
So I went to the various stores. And he was right. But that still didn't answer the question in my mind: What caused the attitude?
"Look, we're on top of the problem," the president said. "We have department heads out there setting a great example. We've told them their job is two-thirds selling and one-third management, and they're outselling everybody. We just want you to provide some training for the salespeople. Those words raised a red flag. "Let's get some more data," I said. He didn't like that. He "knew" what the problem was, and he wanted to get on with training. But I persisted, and within two days we uncovered the real problem. Because of the job definition and the compensation system, the managers were "creaming." They'd stand behind