The following is a guest post by John Durfee.  John is an Operation Freedom War veteran and a manager for Airsplat, the nation’s largest retailer of Airsoft Guns.  Learn from his insights when it comes to workplace team building and employee leadership development from an armed forces perspective.

I left the military years ago, but the principles drilled into me are still part of who I am and who I strive to be.  In the business realm, I find that they are still front of mind as I work to be successful and help my company prosper.  I need to train a strong force, strengthen our defenses, and know the lay of the consumer landscape in order to defeat our competitors.  In all my reading, I’ve found philosopher Sun Tzu to be a valuable source of knowledge for helping me in both my military and business world campaigns.  Here are some gems of wisdom that I’ve used in my office:

Defense

"Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live.  When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory."

Strength and growth occurs when you are challenged.  Most of the time, when you’re in a job for a long period of time, you can become comfortable.  And though you may end up performing the tasks you are assigned well, the danger that accompanies that is complacency.  You want to view your employees as always in training – always being challenged.  Regularly give them tasks that are a little beyond their current standard of abilities.  Have them start to take more responsibilities, while simultaneously giving fewer instructions. Provide them a goal without specifically showing the way.  You’ll be surprised when you find them completing these harder tasks.  You’ll be creating more independent and self-reliant workers who will stay productive and proactive.

Offense

"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy."

I work in a marketing department that uses a lot of online Web 3.0 sources to connect to customers.  We use Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, and more to bring our market presence forward.  However, our competitors have the same tools at their disposal.  The name of the game is flexibility and anticipation. Doing so allows us to make better offers to potential customers.  They show us what they can do, and in return we show them we can do it better.

A successful manager is one who is flexible and open to criticism of their own operation.  Ask your team if they have any input – foster an environment in which any idea is a possible plan.  This way you’ll have the collective knowledge of the group.  If someone comes up with a great idea, let them use it as pet project to see the results on a small scale.  As Sun Tzu says, "To Buy Cialis fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting."

Related: Read our interview with Winning Workplaces Board Member Michael Mulqueen, longtime chief executive of the Greater Chicago Food Depository and a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Marine Corps.

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Cheap Cialis />In this new article in The Economist, the chief executive of the Centre for Development and Enterprise argues that results in the People and Planet areas of a triple bottom line focus (Profits, People, Planet) are hard to measure.  Therefore, while Ann Bernstein frames her case in an African continental context, she suggests that business leaders everywhere would be best served by just pursuing the classic bottom line of Profits.

But just because a goal is difficult to measure, does that mean it should be abandoned?  On the one hand there is something to be said for the Measurable attribute of SMART goals.  On the other, though, many of Winning Workplaces’ award-winning small firms have succeeded financially because they built People and Planet bottom lines into their business model, and created human capital strategies that align with their triple bottom line focus.

The table below shows not only Profit-oriented results for five of our Top Small Workplace award winners, but People and Planet outcomes as well.  In fact, the latter two bottom lines have helped these five organizations collectively bring in more than half a billion dollars in annual sales!

*As of the year of their award

My counterargument to Bernstein is that if a company is truly committed to all three bottom lines, it will find a way to measure with some degree of depth and certainty the People and Planet results, which both influence and are influenced by Profits.

Related: The CEO of one of the companies listed above, King Arthur Flour, will speak on employee leadership development at our conference that starts tomorrow in Denver.  Last chance to register!

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This week he shared specifics with me on exactly why he thinks business leaders should sign up for this free email (emphasis mine):

The Weekly Bottom Line-Improving People Practice email should benefit all business leaders.  The world has become commoditized.  The true marketplace differentiator is human capital.  I enjoy learning the Best Practices other companies use with their most valuable asset – their people.

An engaged workforce is typically harmonious, productive and profitable.  These Best Practices eliminate the need to manage.  We have replaced management with effective leaders armed with Best Practices, and the difference has been remarkable.

While Winning Workplaces surely plays only a small part in Tasty Catering’s success, you can’t argue that they’re not doing a lot of things right in their staff engagement that comprises their highly productive workplace culture: As we shared in the company’s Cheap Accutane award profile, in a very tough year broadly and certainly in their industry (2009), their employee leadership development and other strategies helped them earn above-average revenues.

Register now to start getting our weekly, bottom line-improving people practices email FREE in your inbox.

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Last week we started sending out an update we’re calling "Your Weekly Bottom Line-Improving People Practice."  The concept is simple: Based on qualitative feedback we’ve collected from our Top Small Company Workplaces award applications, we choose and send you real world company practices and the subsequent results they’ve seen that best demonstrate the payoff of employee engagement and team building.

To show you what I mean, here’s this week’s practice that went out to our subscribers earlier today:

Company Profile:

• The Leadership and Learning Center
• Founded 1994
• Salem, Massachusetts
• Consulting

Practice/Result:

Provigil online No prescription style=”margin-left: 40px”>"Our employees design our people practices – everything from our benefit structure (employee committees create them) and benefit evaluation (twice annual surveys).  That is why turnover, which had been 30-40% in the late 1990s, has been in low single digits for the past several years."

If you’d like to start getting practice/result updates like this each week to help improve your business, click here.  It’s free and you can opt out at any time.

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If you were among the over 41 million people who watched the 82nd Academy Awards telecast last Sunday, you might have seen one of our 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces award finalists: outdoor clothing designer/distributor/retailer Patagonia.

During the program American Express ran an ad for their Members Project, a new partnership with social action network Takepart.com.  Here’s the commercial if you missed it:

The ad features Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who according to their application for our award – and the company’s own press materials – is still actively involved in the business he established almost 40 years ago.

This post on Patagonia’s employee and customer blog explains the set piece in the ad, the Matilija Dam, and why removing it would be good for the planet and people (which, along with profit, make up the three pillars of the growing triple bottom line business movement).

Patagonia’s work maintaining a strong triple bottom line is readily apparent.  On their website homepage, a vast Environmentalism section is given equal weight to revenue-friendlier sections such as Clothing & Gear and Product Information.

This perfect weave (pardon the pun) of company mission and like-minded employees and customers has kept business strong, even in a down economy.  I can’t get into specifics, because our Top Small Company Workplaces media partner Inc. Magazine will share those with you in its June issue should Patagonia be named a winner for 2010.  But trust me that they’re doing very well on the key business metrics you’re concerned about in your own organization.

Watch for the June issue of Inc. on newsstands to read about this year’s winning Cheap Accutane firms and their workplace culture improvement and team engagement activities, which you can adapt for your company.  You can also subscribe to Inc. and get the issue as soon as it comes out.

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