Transportation leaders can improve performance by connecting employees to a meaningful purpose, building trust, granting responsible autonomy, supporting mastery, and creating room for growth.
In The Heart of Business, former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly argues that companies succeed when they put human values at the center and release the “human magic” within their employees. He identifies five ingredients.
One: Connecting Dreams
A clear and meaningful purpose motivates employees and aligns them with the organization. At Best Buy, leaders tried to understand what drove each employee and then connect those individual dreams with the company's purpose.
The purpose must extend beyond making money and must be communicated clearly. A 2021 IBM study of 3,000 CEOs found that high-performing companies identified purpose and mission as critical to engagement at a rate 53% higher than underperforming companies. The CEOs also observed that declining trust in institutions had increased expectations for the role of business in society.
Two: Developing Human Connections
Trust is the foundation of successful relationships and a requirement for collaboration and innovation. Businesses can build it through transparency, open communication, and treating employees with respect and dignity.
Leaders should ask whether every employee feels treated as a unique individual and whether employees extend the same respect to one another.
Three: Fostering Autonomy
Autonomy—the ability to influence what work is done, when it is done, and with whom—is a basic source of intrinsic motivation and better performance.
Joly also cautions that delegation works only when employees have enough ability, training, and motivation. Autonomy without those foundations does not create the intended result.
Four: Achieving Mastery
Growth and fulfillment are essential to performance. A leader's role is to create an environment in which employees can become excellent at their work.
Joly's practices for developing mastery include:
- Focusing on effort rather than only results
- Coaching instead of relying solely on training
- Treating learning as a lifelong process
- Making room for failure
Transportation leaders can apply the same question to drivers and non-drivers: Are they being coached to master their profession?
Five: Put the Wind at Your Back
Growth creates room for promotions, productivity improvements, risk-taking, and investment. It can give employees, the company, and the surrounding community a sense of expanding possibility.
When growth is aligned with a noble purpose, it can generate energy and the desire to improve. If the current market creates headwinds, leaders should look for ways to turn challenges to their advantage while keeping the company's purpose in view.
Unleashing the Human Magic
Joly's five ingredients belong in the strategic planning process. A strong vision provides the foundation, but the organization must connect that vision to the aspirations, relationships, autonomy, development, and opportunity experienced by its people.