Successful leaders encourage company-wide creativity – keeping the end in mind

Every successful business has an end in mind and, unless it is a not-for-profit or a social enterprise, the end goal is related to turnover, profit and return on investment. After all, if a business is not making enough money long-term to pay overheads, wages and satisfy investors there is little point in putting in all the time and effort.

But having a financial goal doesn’t mean that the journey has to be formal, rigid and – well, dull!  

More and more organisations are realising that sustainable success comes from allowing a creative and free company spirit to flourish by valuing input from across the whole organisation as well as from customers. In a recent article in Time magazine  CEO of Chinese appliance giant Haier, Zhang Rumin, acknowledged that “as a company gets bigger, there is usually stricter control on its employees and less room for them to take ownership of their work“.

His answer was to  introduce ‘self managed teams’ where any employee can generate an idea for a new product or an improved feature from customer comments or internet market research and, once approved by management, can create and manage their own team to implement the project.  Team members receive a share of resulting profits.

After 3 years of operating self-managed teams most of the middle management roles at Haier were eradicated in favour of allowing the new-found freedom and creativity to flourish.

I was reminded of this wonderful video of a murmuration of starlings.  Each year starlings migrate to a warmer climate and return to breed in the same region once the weather warms up.  They have a definite destination in mind, yet the course of their travels between the destinations are so free, beautiful and, I suspect far more satisfying.

Does your company ethos allow freedom to everyone to take initiative and ownership?