Make Strategic Management a Game

By Jeri T Denniston, Chief Marketing Strategist, Denner Group International    11-8-2012

Takeaways: Think of fun, creative ways to engage your staff. Turn your strategic management system into a game everyone wants to play. It’s critical that the boss both communicate AND model the behavior he/she expects of everyone else.

In August, I related a story Michael Gerber told in his book, The E-Myth, which described the unique experience he had (and continues to have) at the Venetia Hotel in the Redwoods outside San Francisco.

You may recall, the hotel went out of their way to make his experience memorable by anticipating his needs, including a brandy waiting for him before he turned in for the night, the brand of coffee he likes, and the newspaper he prefers to read in the morning. They had installed a strategic management system that anyone could follow.

Make Your Strategic Management System A Game

The question was “How did the hotel get the staff to actually follow the system?”  This is key. Many companies have policies and “systems” they’ve instituted but no one follows them. First, the owner took the business seriously – he viewed the hotel as a reflection of his personal values and who he was. Thus, if a staff person didn’t take their job seriously, it reflected on the entire operation.

He told the manager when he was hired, “The work we do is a reflection of who we are. If we do sloppy work, it’s because we’re sloppy inside. If we’re late at it, it’s because we’re late inside. If we’re bored by it, it’s because we’re bored with ourselves, not the work. How we do our work becomes a mirror of who and how we are inside.”

He continued, “Work is only an idea before a person does it. But the moment a person does the work, the impact of the work on the world becomes a reflection of that idea – the idea behind the work – as well as the person doing it. In the process, the work you do becomes you, and you become the force that breaths life in to the idea.”

The point being made is that the boss, the owner, took the time to explain the purpose behind the work that each person does in the hotel, broken down into three thoughts:

1 – the customer is not always right but whether or not he is, it is our job to make him feel that way.

2 – everyone who works here is expected to work toward being the best they can possibly be at the tasks he or she is accountable for.

3 – the business is a place where everything we know how to do is tested by what we don’t know how to do, and that the conflict between the two is what creates growth and meaning.

Define Structure. Make it Fun.

The boss took the time to create a clearly defined strategic management structure based on how to behave in the world – a values system – through which the staff can test themselves and be tested. For all intents and purposes, he made this People Strategy a game.

The game symbolizes the idea the owner has about the world and his/or her contribution to that idea. The degree to which your staff “buy into” playing the game depends entirely on how well you communicate AND EXEMPLIFY your idea, your value system to them. You do this through new staff orientations, an Operations Manual, your organization chart, job descriptions, and written Performance Appraisals.

But most of all the owner or “boss” communicates this through his or her own performance and actions. It has to be seen and experienced before the staff will voluntarily perform in a similar manner.

In the next article I’ll share Gerber’s Rules of the Game. In the meantime, think about how you model your expectations of your own staff. Are you living and acting the values and behavior you expect of them?