Make a decision
Werner’s ability to take the creativity of his employees and harness it to select an idea that would work is one reason that Danze succeeded. If
you can’t do that, you’ll just keep having brainstorming sessions and never get anywhere.
“I can think of 100 ideas a minute,” Werner says. “The challenge for me is channeling them and limiting them.”
Werner uses a democratic system of voting for many situations at Globe Union, but it’s not a simple case of majority rules.
“We might have 20 ideas that get thrown up,” Werner says. “We’ll give everybody dots and everybody gets to vote. My dot counts no more than the newest hire’s dot. We’ll see which ones have the most energy around them and talk not about who got the most votes, but where is the most energy? We’ll try to narrow it down to pick three topics to develop.”
So how do you manage when it seems like you just can’t narrow down your list?
“If you think about ideas, if you have two people going back and forth, you have point/counterpoint and you can kill any idea,” Werner says. “If instead, you try to list all the positives and then, separately, you take what might be the negative and turn them into how-tos, they’re not really negatives. They are how-tos that get in the way.”
If you need to, make people change their language.
“I’ll say, ‘Can you re-ask that question?’” Werner says. “Rather than saying, ‘This won’t work,’ turn it around and say, ‘In order for this to work, these are the how-tos I must solve.’ We’ll literally try to lay out the strategies, the initiatives and the action steps that are required to drive them. We have those pretty rigorously detailed out in a living document that’s in an Excel or PowerPoint worksheet. Each month we review it and talk about it. What are the bottlenecks to success? What are the failures?”
Following a structure helps you take the broad boundaries of creativity and harness them into an idea to help your business.
“A lot of companies have great ideas,” Werner says. “But the next month, they have 10 more great ideas. So we try to pick the ones that really have the most energy and then we’re going to stick with them. We’re not going to a month later move on to the next thing. That’s where our planning process really helps us. We have not 20 inches of documents, but literally 10 pages that create a plan for an area. But the plans are really the initiatives, goals and action steps. They are very organized and all focused on what is executable.”
Still, there is a reason companies have presidents and CEOs. You need to make sure your employees stay on track with harnessing their creativity into workable action plans.
“The only goal is that they have a meeting every month,” Werner says. “If I don’t force them to have a meeting, they’ll get busy and you’ll have three or four months go before they have a meeting. And you find out four months later that half the people didn’t do what they said they were going to do because they got distracted. If they meet every month and it’s good project management discipline, it keeps things on track.”
The key is to start out small and let it build.
“Find some things where you can take one little thing and do it and try to model the success and move on to the next thing,” Werner says. “You can’t do it all at once.”
But you can do it when you let your employees explore a problem from all angles and put their talents to use in search of a solution, such as Werner’s team with the faucet industry.
“For us, the creativity begins with understanding the markets,” Werner says. “And then going through a whole series of exercises, which may be war games and new product development games and all sorts of role-playing and strategic tools to come up with things that are just different.”
How to reach: Globe Union Group Inc., (630) 679-1420 or www.globeunion.com or www.danze.com
