A truly collaborative organization will become a productive force to behold when contribution, in its many different forms, becomes the de facto behaviour of everyone.
Give Piece a Chance.
To be more specific, give a piece of content, a piece of feedback, a piece of knowledge, a piece of your experience a chance.
You have wisdom. You have intellect. You have opinion.
You should give that piece of whatever the chance to help others (and the organization) with various goals and objectives, be it individual, team or enterprise-wide.
Let others know that your piece might help build an ecosystem of improvement in the organization. In return, encourage others to do the same. You never know what may happen.
Marcel Proust once claimed,
“The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.”
It is with the new eyes of being a contributor, of giving piece a chance where I believe we will build organizations capable of addressing the chronic disengagement levels, lack of innovation and levels of productivity.
Over at HBR, Scott Keller and Carolyn Dewar wrote a wonderful case study involving ANZ Bank in a post entitled, “Three Steps to a High-Performance Culture” on January 26th, 2012.
One key paragraph stood out for me:
ANZ Bank offers an example: a decade ago, the bank embarked on an effort described as a “unique plan of eschewing traditional growth strategies and recasting the culture of the bank to lift efficiency and earnings.” In the initial two years, the share of employees having the sense that ANZ “lived its values” went from 20 to 80 percent, and the share seeing “productivity in meetings” from 61 to 91 percent, with similar rises in the shares seeing “openness and honesty” and a “can-do culture.” In parallel, revenue per employee increased 89 percent and the bank overtook its peers in total returns to shareholders and customer satisfaction. A full ten years after those initial efforts, ANZ has sustained its results: its profit after tax has grown at a cumulative average growth rate of 15 percent, putting it well ahead of its industry.
I
t’s a great example of how an organization, in this case an otherwise historically organized hierarchical bank, employed the ‘give piece a chance’ motto to great and sustained success.
ANZ might once have been a culture that was closed and disengaged. It might never have given piece a chance. But, through some organizational re-engineering and focusing on a concept like ‘give piece a chance‘, amongst other collaborative and engagement inducing actions, it demonstrated bottom line business results.
All we are saying, is give piece a chance.
