Q. How could a leader develop a team-oriented culture?
One of the things that we do
here is we have something
called a discretionary fund.
Each of the managers in our
company has an allotted amount of money that’s given
to them every year, and it
varies depending on the size of
the group or the number of
people that would be involved.
The purpose of that is we
didn’t want accounting micro-managing decisions being
made at the floor level or at
the management level within
the company every time someone said, ‘I’d like to give somebody a gift certificate, or I’d
like to buy them dinner,’ or something like that. We didn’t
want accounting saying, ‘Well,
give me a justification for it,’
or making any kind of attachment to it of, ‘This has to be
tied to a client,’ or some other
business reason.
There are just times where,
you as a manager, have to step
in and do something, and it
has to be timely and it has to
be immediate, and it doesn’t
need a whole lot of overview
or peer pressure on you about
why you did it.
So, this discretionary fund
system has been very helpful
in terms of giving us the
opportunity to reward people,
to send something to someone
or give them a night off. Just a
quick way to recognize the
effort that individuals put in.
There are many times that
people work here to late
evenings, multiple evenings to
get ready for a particular presentation or a project going out.
It’s important to recognize
those things when they happen, not to save up a list and
then, at the end of the year,
give them something to thank
them for all they did the previous year, so we tried to reward
people in a timely manner or
on an ongoing basis through
something like that.
It’s one of the many tools that
we use. Obviously, just walking
over and saying thanks or just
being aware at a management
level that someone’s been
working the last couple of days
really hard for you and just
walking over and saying, ‘I
want you to know I really
appreciate what you did.’
It’s those kinds of things
that are extremely important,
in terms of just maintaining
the culture, and also supporting the staff and showing
them that you are aware of
what is going on and that you
do care.
HOW TO REACH: KZF Design Inc., (513) 621-6211 or www.kzf.com
