We tell the story in our class about the time our CIO Craig Hergenroether’s daughter was working in another organization, and she said, “We’re taking our IT team to happy hour tonight because we got this big e-mail virus, but they did a great job cleaning it up.”
Our CIO thought, “We never got the virus. We put all the disciplines and practices in place to ensure that we never got it. Shouldn’t we celebrate that?”
What we choose to hold up and celebrate gets emulated. Therefore it is important to consider how those decisions impact the culture. Instead of firefighting behaviors, we recognize and celebrate sustained excellence: people who consistently distinguish themselves through their actions. We celebrate people who do their jobs very well every day with little drama. Craig, the CIO, took his team out to happy hour and said, “Congratulations, we did not get the e-mail virus that took out most of the companies in St. Louis and Tampa Bay.”
Overall, the Everybody Matters could is the kind of book that could have been an article. I wouldn’t recommend spending the time to read it if you are already superficially familiar with the fact that an organization can choose to treat people well (although maybe that would be revelatory for some people). It was on my to-read list due to it’s mention in the TED Talk Why good leaders make you feel safe.
I’ve previously written a little bit about recognition in relation to mainanence/prevention, and this passage from Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family stood out to me as a nice reminder:
Overall, the Everybody Matters could is the kind of book that could have been an article. I wouldn’t recommend spending the time to read it if you are already superficially familiar with the fact that an organization can choose to treat people well (although maybe that would be revelatory for some people). It was on my to-read list due to it’s mention in the TED Talk Why good leaders make you feel safe.