Head Tale

I usually post a picture for Throwback Thursday but for something different today, I thought I’d post a different type of “throwback”.

I was recently talking with someone about the best leadership/management/business books we’d read. I said I have a few favourites but one called “Employees First, Customers Second” by Vineet Nayar was the first one that jumped to mind.

This is a fairly lengthy excerpt from an interview with him but worth a read:

The trust between the management and the employees are amongst the lowest today in the world. The first thing that you need to do is create an environment of trust where the employees believe what you are saying and are willing to follow you wherever you are going. Therefore, by pushing the envelope of trust you can create an environment of trust. So that’s the first thing that you need to do. The second is you need to make all the enabling functions, H.R., finance, and all these functions, the office of the CEO which all have enormous power with them, accountable to the employees as much as the employees are accountable to them. So we created an electronic trouble ticketing system where an employee can open a trouble ticket on any of these functions and they have to resolve these issues within a certain period of time and the ticket is only closed by the employees. The third is to make the management and managers as equally accountable to the employees as the employees are and one of initiatives we took was my 360 Degree is done by 80,000 employees across the world and the results are published on the web. That is true of 5,000 other of my colleagues and this is purely in development, this 360 Degree, which we use for development purposes but the very fact that you as an employee can rate a CEO and the results are published on the web for all to see creates the accountability for the managers and management, and creates a culture which unlocks a huge amount of energy in the corporation. Those are 3 small steps of how you can make an organization which is top heavy into something which is accountable to the employees with huge amounts of energy which gets unleashed as a result.

Here’s a TEDx talk where he summarizes this approach (but as with most things, the book is better than the movie since the book gets into a lot more detail about the impact this approach had on his company)