These 5 Management Practices Create Uncommonly Successful Workplaces

Monday morning, that means we got another episode of Green Apple Slices for you. On the other line, Accountants & Alliances for Sage Canada, Rachel Fisch.

Rachel: Hello, how are you?

John: I’m great.

Rachel: It’s Easter Monday today, isn’t it?

John: Yeah, absolutely.

Rachel: Happy Easter.

John: Yes, Happy Easter to you. And later this week, I fly to Chicago for the AICPA’s CFO Conference.

Rachel: Very cool. Later this week, I fly to Bangkok.

John: What?

Rachel: I know. Yeah.

John: That’s crazy.

Rachel: I’m speaking at one of our alliance partners called Allinial Global which is an amazing group of accounting firms around the world. They have a big international conference. I’m going to speak there. So I’m kind of like excited and nervous. We’ll see if I pick up the phone next week.

John: Right. I am so big now. I am International.

Rachel: Sorry, John who? What? No.

John: Yes, exactly. You’re not the first that’s ever done that. Including you in the past. No, I’m just kidding. But, yeah, but every Monday we always get together — ah, or maybe this is the last one. I don’t know. But every Monday we’ve gotten together and talk to an article on employee engagement, corporate culture, things like that. This one, 15five, is a great HR consulting company. On their blog, it was these 5 Management Practices Create Uncommonly Successful Workplaces. I know how big of a fan you are of numbered lists.

Rachel: Yeah.

John: You’re welcome. Happy Easter. Peep. It’s not like weird marshmallow animals.

Rachel: Oh, man, Peeps. Oh, good.

John: You can have mine, all of them.

Rachel: So first of all, this is a huge article. There are a lot of pieces to it. And in some cases, it gets pretty technical in some of the stuff, but there are some really great nuggets too. Now, I did have to kind of skip past the first couple of paragraphs.

John: Right. Well, that’s where it gets into the good stuff. So there we go. That’s where the numbers start.

Rachel: Well, I’m not a huge fan of big funding being a measure of success because me, it’s just you have that many more people who you now have to answer to, which kind of is the point of entrepreneurship. So I can definitely see the user on funding. But I’m like, that isn’t a measure of success to me.

John: right.

Rachel: Yeah. You got me on the ledge, got me to the good stuff, which is a couple of paragraphs down. But, yeah, there are some really great nuggets in here. So I mean, right from number one, being versus doing. So tell me about that, John.

John: Yeah, well, I thought it was really interesting. And if you want to just skip ahead and read the article yourself, you can go to greenapplepodcast.com. The link is right there. You can read all five. But being versus doing I thought was really interesting because it talks about how there’s individuals, but then there’s also organizations and companies, firms, what have you that have two different states. There’s the being, which is more of an internal invisible state, so that’s like, for a person, it’s like your thoughts and emotions and caring and compassion and things that you can’t really see. And then the doing side is more of your habits and practices and behaviors and your building and things that have an end result. I think that’s really interesting that I never thought about how people have this as well as organizations have it.

Rachel: Right, and what the differences are between those two things, like what being and doing looks like for an individual and then what it looks like for a company. So yeah, I really like the way it broke those out.

John: Yeah, because the invisible things of a company or an organization or a firm, shared values, and the culture and synergies and trust and things like this that are invisible versus the products and the services and the physical space that you work in and things like that. I think that it’s really interesting how they talked about how no matter what, you have to have the invisible being side taking care of, first and foremost, because no level of incentive or reward or punishments on the other side are going to get people to be excited about their jobs if the being side isn’t taken care of.

Rachel: I totally agree, and yet this is as individuals what we recognize, right, if you kind of break out the chart between the individual side. I mean, you know that, but then it’s like companies just want to live in the doing. They don’t want to spend time in the being, and yet it’s being that will drive the doing.

John: Right. I mean, charge codes are over here in doing.

Rachel: Yes.

John: And people, based on my research that I’ve done, say that they don’t want to socialize because there isn’t a charge code for it, or they don’t get paid to get to know each other or things like that, all these things on the being side that are so important. People have gotten, I don’t know, beaten out of them, I guess, to where they feel guilty doing any of that stuff. Whether it’s warranted or not, they just intrinsically believe that way. So it’s on the organization to create the culture where the being is the most important, but it also is explicitly said that way and you build the structure to allow the people to be able to do that easily without them having to feel like they’re sneaking around.

Rachel: Yeah, this sentence kind of wraps all that up. It’s like, not only are they real, so that’s the being side, but they dictate and determine what we do, and even more importantly, how we show up in what we do. So even though it’s like you’re trying to separate these two things, no, no, it’s how we accomplish the things that we do is on the being side. Anyway, we kind of beat that to death. But, yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting things that you can take from that for sure.

John: For sure. I didn’t even think about it this way. So I think that that’s really cool. Maybe I’m the only one. Everyone listening is like, “We did this in kindergarten. I knew this before I was coloring in the lines. That’s how young I was when I knew about being versus doing.” But you know what, I’m a late bloomer, so it’s all good. It’s all good.

But they have four other examples of ways to create an uncommonly successful workplace. And if you want to read more about those, you can go to greenapplepodcast.com and check out the link there. Yeah, don’t forget to hit Subscribe so can you to listen to all the episodes that we have every Monday with Rachel, and every Wednesday I interview a professional known for hobbies or passions outside of work. If that’s you or someone you know, let us know so we can have them showcased on the podcast because it’s always so fun hearing about everyone.

So that being said, Rachel have fun being in Bangkok, doing your talkie-talkie thing. I will be in Chicago having a heart attack after eating pizza for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Rachel: Sounds perfect.

John: Awesome. Well, we’ll talk to you next Monday.

Rachel: Okay. Talk to you later, John.