Provide Meaningful Work

• Make a difference, improve lives. It’s not just about making money.
• Keep the big picture in mind to drive all decision making. Focus on what benefits all three: clients, team members and the company.
• Encourage people to bring their full selves, including their sense of humor, to work.
• Apply the company’s core values in every aspect of work.

Create the Conditions for Success

• Ensure alignment at the team and project level.
  • Clarify expectations. Set clear and measurable goals.
  • Manage projects not people.
  • Use communication systems that put everyone on the same page.
  • Be open and transparent in sharing information about any and all work, limiting access only to personal and other confidential information.
• Give everyone the training and tools they need to be outrageously successful.
  • Train them in setting priorities.
  • Use time blocking and eliminate multi-tasking or switch-tasking.
  • Provide access to workshops, conferences and or training that can expand their expertise.
  • Compensate people fairly for their role and their region.

Focus on Continuous Improvement

• Challenge the status quo
  • Review what’s working weekly, and make sure to do more of it. Then figure out how to do it even better tomorrow.
  • Review what’s not working to identify what to stop doing and what do start doing. What worked yesterday may not work today.
• Identify systems solutions
  • Celebrate mistakes. Set aside time each week to discuss mistakes and come up with ways to avoid them in the future.
  • Avoid using blame and focus on systems improvements.
  • When a problem is identified, find the root cause, get input from the team and make the system changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
  • Encourage team members to come up with ideas to improve the company weekly. Appropriate ideas are implemented immediately.
• The entire team uses data to drive decisions and accountability
  • Measure everything to uncover processes that are no longer working
  • Change what’s not working and measure the new strategy.
• Coach team members to follow their interests and develop new skills and expand their bandwidth within the context of company goals.

Minimize Hierarchy

• Enable team members to think and act like the CEOs for their areas of responsibility.
  • Push decisions down the chain as far as possible.
  • Get rid of hierarchical titles like manager, vice president, etc.
  • Minimize levels within the organization.
• Allow those who are capable of leading to lead, no matter what their position.
  • Rotate the responsibility of leading meetings so everyone develops leadership and facilitation skills.
• Focus on teamwork and internal and external collaboration.
• Use project management and communication tools to keep meetings to a minimum.

Provide Autonomy & Expect Responsibility

• Hire self-motivated people and do everything possible to avoid un-motivating them.
• Expect people to take 100% responsibility for getting their work done.
• Trust people to do the right thing for the company.
• Encourage people to live a balanced life, stay healthy and take advantage of flex time to fit work around exercise, family, friends and fun.