What Mother’s Day Teaches Us about Organizational Transformation
First off, yes, I know Mother’s Day was a week ago. I didn’t miss it.
What is Mother’s Day? It’s the celebration of something:
1. … completely vital, critical, essential, and,
2. … mostly taken for granted.
We do that a lot in our organizations. It’s not a problem to celebrate the obvious items. The big wins. the new accounts. The new product launches.
But do we ever celebrate or recognize the critical inner workings of the organization? The things that are core to making the organization work and succeed must be taken care of, even celebrated, or they can diminish over time.
For each great organization, these elements might be different things. It might be Google’s sense of exploration and experimentation, or Apple’s belief in simplicity in design. It might be how you hire people; it might be your organization’s ability to process data, or a particular meeting that is core to your decision making.
Every successful organization has some part of it’s daily DNA that is critical to its success, and easy to take for granted. To maintain that success, you must spend some of the time to pay attention to that which matters most.
Zappos does this well with it’s now legendary customer service. They celebrate customer service wins every day in many ways. This is the most important thing to the organization; more important than their acquisition by Amazon.com. What was most important to them was to maintain the fundamental practices and behaviors that made them successful in the first place.
Remember what has lead to your success and take a little time-out to celebrate it once in a while…just like Mother’s Day.
What are the boring fundamentals that make your organization successful?