Within a year we were hiring again. Only then did this leader define profit sharing across the entire company. This level of self-sacrifice was exceptional and set the pace of continued commitment to turning around the company for years afterward.
In addition to this approach to motivating the entire company to focus on continued commitment and sacrifice for the goal, this leader also re-organized jobs by getting managers out of the way of workers. He did this by concentrating on creating a very high level of autonomy, mastery and purpose in each of the roles in sales operations, marketing, sales and customer service. He said he learned those concepts from the Dan Pink books on motivation and thought it made a lot of sense. The...
People were getting projects done in record time and meetings drastically dropped to only those discussions needed to actually get work done. He gave everyone a renewed sense of owning their jobs. People started liking their jobs again.
Finally, he practiced much of what he preached and posted his own performance as well. He showed how he was doing on his own goals to improve in the areas of customer visits, closing new business that needed his help as COO, and in short worked to completely change the company. He focused on making the company more focused on customers while defining the need for speed of communication and collaboration which also drastically changed the company culture for the better.
