Of the many takeaways attendees leave NCEO meetings with, I’m always curious to know what they have learned about team dynamics and what makes some teams more successful than others. After all, at the heart of many great company cultures are the norms and values that inform the behaviors of their teams and team members, whether they serve in management roles or not.
In fact, one of my favorite moments from the NCEO’s Fall Forum in St. Louis, Missouri, was a slide that posed this question: “Please recall an experience when you felt particularly proud, energized, satisfied, and/or effective. What was happening? What made the experience memorable for you?” The presenters, Jesse Tyler of associate-owned Hypertherm and Jon Sweigart from Praxis Consulting Group, shared a series of responses. Some of the comments from employee-owners referred to a sense of agency doing what they felt needed to be done at work, a sense of pride in one’s craftsmanship, or feeling like they were truly supported at the company because they never got torn down by others.
One of the comments in Sweigart and Tyler’s slide deck was highlighted, large, and bold on the screen. It seemed to be the most simple yet most thoughtful and touching of them all. It read, “When management picks my brain.” Could it really be so straightforward? The unassuming act of asking for this employee-owner’s thoughts and input on a given matter made them feel proud, energized, satisfied, and effective. It seemed so easy, yet in many workplaces throughout the United States, it is a less common occurrence than it ought to be.
Jesse and Jon used this exercise and the comments that came from it to demonstrate the importance of humble leadership and high involvement at the team level when trying to create successful continuous improvement programs. Organizational learning scholars call this “quality in conversational turn taking,” which is to say that everyone at the table has a chance to speak up. Teams with these characteristics tend to outperform teams without them, regardless of the number of high performers either has on their team. Team members not only feel more seen and heard in these workplace environments, but more, if not all, team members are given opportunities to identify potential problems and provide viable solutions to organizational challenges. Without high involvement, organizations open themselves up to more organizational errors and failures.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, employee-owned Crêpes à Latte had bigger problems than finding out what a lack of conversational turn taking might look like at the organizational level. As Haydee Caldero, Crêpes à Latte’s chief operating officer, told people in St. Louis, the company, which provides catering for live events, had to find a way to survive a devastating hit to its revenue for an unknowable period. I was fortunate enough to run into her at one of the NCEO’s networking events and learn about how they dealt with these extraordinary challenges. For Caldero, the key was how to be resilient, a process she describes as “an organization’s ability to respond and adapt quickly to disruptions or significant, unplanned changes that could threaten its operations, people, assets, brand, or reputation.”
Caldero highlighted in her presentation that even if the stay-at-home order was lifted, “many states, organizations, and clients were clear that large in-person events would not resume until a vaccine was widely available.” The company leveraged the experience, knowledge, and input of their teams: “We would need their contribution to identify and execute new business opportunities as well as eventually support reopening.” The company began seeking input immediately and implemented various cross-functional initiatives to identify solutions to problems and create new business opportunities quickly and efficiently. Surveys and small team meetings enabled groups to look for new lines of potential revenue. Cross-departmental teams were formed to work on long-term strategic planning and short-term experiments. By summer 2020, 84% of surveyed Crêpes à Latte employee-owners said they had learned new skills through this whole process. The company ended up being able to generate revenue through an innovative Crêpes à Latte treat box that could be personalized and sent to people in remote meetings (the NCEO did that for one of ours). With in-person events resuming, Crêpes à Latte is in good position to rebound.
I invited Deanna Colombo, executive assistant and member of the employee-owned Butler/Till’s employee communications committee, to St. Louis to share insights on her company’s work ensuring that employee-driven teams and leadership teams are in constant alignment with and support of one another. Her summary of Butler/Till’s vision for success rings true for all the companies mentioned here: Leadership support of team-based initiatives can ensure that the efforts of both are successful, as long as communication is not a one-way street. These success stories never seem to be tales of micromanaging or one group telling another group what to do without a shared vision and buy-in from both sides. When the involvement of all players in the game results in setting short- and long-term engagement goals for committees, teams, and the organization as a whole, employeeowners and the leaders of their businesses celebrate in these successes together as a real team where no one player matters more than the whole. It is shared experiences like these from employee-owned companies that make the ESOP community one of learning and truly something special.