2226: Wait a Minute Here: Promoting a Team Culture That Questions the Status Quo by Laura Stack on Business Leadership

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[00:00:30] At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC. This is Optimal Work Daily. Wait a Minute Here. Promoting a Team Culture That Questions the Status Quo. By Laura Stack of the ProductivityPro.com Quote,

[00:00:58] Any business today that embraces the status quo as an operating principle is going to be on a death march. End quote. Howard Schultz, chairman and CEO of Starbucks. Let's face it. Most of the time, we want our work lives to run smoothly. And that's much easier to accomplish when you complete the tasks your manager asks of you. But decent leaders don't want yes women and yes men.

[00:01:23] In this age of required flexibility and agility, most leaders have learned to listen when workers offer new ideas. Even people who challenge the established status quo. One company famous for deliberately inviting its people to attack the status quo is well known for not just questioning it, but shattering and redefining the status quo. In fact, I hate to bring it up at all because it's overused. The shoe vendor, Zappos. But I can't help myself as a loyal customer.

[00:01:51] CEO Tony Hsieh's approach to business in general and leadership in particular have proven so wonderfully weird and weirdly effective, I can't just ignore it. Aside from bribing brand new employees with cash bonuses to quit as a test of their commitment and calling executives monkeys, Shea has recently reorganized the company into a quote-unquote holacracy consisting of interacting business circles with no real leaders.

[00:02:17] This gives the rank and file more of a say in how the companies run, and it helps avoid bureaucratic rigidity. There's no telling how long this will continue since Amazon acquired the company in 2009, but so far it still gets to function independently, and more importantly, profitably. How Tony Hsieh's approach can work for you While you probably won't take it as far as Hsieh, his approach offers an effective way to keep your team slightly off balance at all times.

[00:02:43] In this new flexibility era, we all need to be willing to strike off in a new direction suddenly, or turn on a dime, or even rev in reverse. Changes needn't come so hot and heavy no one ever has time to catch their breath if we're always seeking it as a company and as a team. What would happen if we are constantly willing to question how things are done? Not necessarily make constant changes, but be open to them. We often forget that best practices can't be static.

[00:03:11] What has worked best for years suddenly isn't productive anymore. Building cars that ran best on leaded gas, for instance, became worst practice when oil companies stopped adding ethyl lead to gasoline due to regulatory pressure in the 1970s. More to the point for white-collar workers, technology advances so fast that best practices may change several times a year. I bet some of you listening to this can remember when punch cards were best practices for computer programming.

[00:03:38] Intuit, the company that makes QuickBooks, Quicken, and TurboTax, is less well-known than Zappos for its questioning of status quo. But like Zappos, it has challenged itself so long and so often that a status quo no longer really exists, because nothing stays the same long enough. It began as a company that made accounting software, then asked itself, Why not? Over and over, eventually expanding into tax software and home mortgage lending, and rising to the top of those industries as well.

[00:04:07] A member of my virtual team recently purchased a home through Quicken Loans. It wasn't a painless process. Anyone who's ever negotiated a mortgage knows that's improbable. But to his great surprise, it was a fairly simple process. In fact, it finished so much quicker than expected, he was able to close on his new home a full two months before the end of his previous lease. It made for a leisurely move, although the overlapping rent and mortgage payments hurt a bit.

[00:04:33] According to a 2014 Harvard Business Review article, Brad Smith, president and CEO of Intuit, searches for what he calls golden questions he uses to define a new grand challenge. These questions vary according to the project, whether it's how to create a finished tax return in 10 minutes, now answered with the smartphone-based SnapTax app, or how to become the top home mortgage lender in the country. It's worth the effort to do the same yourself.

[00:05:01] When you decide how you want to challenge your company's status quo, wherever you fall in the team's hierarchy, ask yourself how to accomplish a grand challenge in a perfect world. If you were a superhero, how would you do it? Let's assume you're not. So, how close can you come in the real world? Remember to keep applying new technology to the question. SnapTax started with Intuit founder Scott Cook's determination to create that 10-minute tax return, but it wasn't possible until years later, after Smith took over the company.

[00:05:31] What can you do to challenge your company or team? When you become question-centric, you can find ways to test the envelope on many of the aspects of your team's mission and vision. Even if you don't lead the team, you certainly have some leverage on its workflow process, the projects it handles, and the tasks it solves. Ask how you can use the team's knowledge, experience, and KSAs in new ways. Does it make sense to go all the way back to basic principles or work around the edges to make changes?

[00:06:00] Either way can produce a more productive, supercharged team, one that adds to the bottom line at a more rapid pace than before. No longer can we accept the same old way of doing things, even for a few years. Some futurists believe we're fast approaching something called the singularity, when scientific progress will be so fast and constant, no one can keep up. Prepare for it now, always willing to test and question the status quo so you have contingency plans on hand for anything that might occur.

[00:06:29] Or, urge your teammates to do the same so you can be ready when it comes. Don't just question, though. Offer answers that will move your team forward. If nothing else in business remains static, this does. The only thing that matters is results. Make sure you can keep producing them, come what may. You just listened to the post titled, Wait a minute here. Promoting a Team Culture That Questions the Status Quo

[00:06:57] by Laura Stack of the ProductivityPro.com You're listening to a quick ad. You know what else is quick? Selling your car on Carvana. Just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer. Done. No hassle. No negotiation. No guy from an online listing lowballing you. Which means, by the time I'm done explaining this, you could have basically done it. Still haven't started? Hey, better late than never.

[00:07:27] Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters so you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts.

[00:07:55] Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC. And a big thank you to Laura, one of our regular authors here. She is an award-winning keynote speaker and the best-selling author of eight books, obviously known as the Productivity Pro for good reason. Her engaging personality, combined with over 25 years of experience helping organizations achieve results, have made her one of the most sought-after experts and keynote speakers in her field.

[00:08:22] Laura's been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and Forbes Magazine, and has been a spokesperson for Microsoft, Danon, 3M, Office Depot, Xerox, and more. And if that wasn't enough, her client list includes top Fortune 500 companies, Starbucks, Walmart, Bank of America, GM, Wells Fargo, and Time Warner. Plus, government agencies like the United States Air Force Academy, the Census Bureau, the U.S. Senate, and the IRS.

[00:08:51] So there is so much to learn from her, and you can come by theproductivitypro.com for all of it. She's got her videos, books, store, newsletter, and blog all there on the site. Again, that's theproductivitypro.com. And that does it for this episode. I thank you, as always, for being a subscriber or follower of the show and sharing it with others, which goes a long way to keep this podcast going. So enjoy the rest of your day, and I will see you back here tomorrow, where your optimal life awaits.