How do we motivate our teams and make everyone more aware of how their actions affect the success or shortcoming of the company? Jack Stack’s classic book “The Great Game of Business” explores defining success, developing metrics, motivating and coaching, and guidelines to share financial success with employees.
What We Love About This Book
It’s a great walkthrough of setting up a culture of motivation, transparency, measurement and sharing financial success. Identifies a lot of the common pitfalls at each step and ways to get ahead of the problem or get things back on track when things don’t go well.
Makes a very compelling argument for open book management. If you’re not actively sharing financial information with your employees, it could convince you why you should.
Great employees make great organizations. Great employees love to win. Defining what winning means, making a scoreboard and then sharing the win financially with employees is a time-tested way to get everyone rowing the boat in the same direction together.
Any criticisms?
What if ownership and management wants to win financially, but doesn’t want to do their part in getting on track for winning? While explored a little in the book, setting these things up without top down buy-in and leadership can lead to disaster. Winning doesn’t equal financial success for all companies and owners. Before embarking on this roadmap, be sure you define success as financial success at least in part. If you’re more mission based, or value freedom and independence, financial incentives might not work and might actually insult key people.
