Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility

by Patty McCord

Why should the investors on earnings calls know more about what’s happening in your business than most

of the people working in it? I think it would be great if companies held the equivalent of an earnings call for all employees.

if I could pick one course to teach everybody in the company, whether they’re in management or not, it would be on the fundamentals of how the business works and serving customers.

How do you know when people are well enough informed? Here’s my measure. If you stop any employee, at any level of the

company, in the break room or the elevator and ask what are the five most important things the company is working on for the next six months, that person should be able to tell you, rapid fire, one, two, three, four, five, ideally using the same words you’ve used in your communications to the staff and, if they’re really good, in the same order. If not, the heartbeat isn’t strong enough yet.

One was to conduct an exercise we called “Start, Stop, Continue” in our team meetings. In this drill, each person tells a colleague one thing they should start doing, one thing they should stop doing, and one thing they’re doing really

well and should keep doing. We were such believers in the value of transparency that we did this exercise in our meetings, out loud in front of the group. Recognition of how important it is to be open rippled down through the company as we’d go back to our teams and report that the executive team had just done “Start, Stop, Continue” and fill them in on what had been said. That wasn’t a mandate; I didn’t make it an HR initiative. Most of the executives just did it, which exemplifies the power of modeling. A few told me it would never work with their teams, and I’d say to them, “Well, you know, they’re doing it in product and in marketing, and it seems to be working there because they’re getting lots of great work done.” That was usually quite compelling.