Submitted by Brodie Schulze
Next week, Imagine!’s LDG members have the opportunity to attend a training through the Employer’s Council called “How Great Leaders Build Trust.” This training is one that all of us are excited to attend for one primary reason: it focuses on how important trusting and believing in employees is for an organization. Not just any employee however, but especially those who are on the front lines of services. This training instills the idea that those at the front are the most important individuals in an organization and have much to offer.
One example of an organization that embodies this idea is Toyota, the world’s leading car manufacturing company (as measured by profit and reliability). According to the author of The Future of Management, Gary Hamel, American car manufacturers studied Toyota for twenty years and they determined that American companies could not match Toyota’s success for only one reason: American organizations did not believe in their employees the way their Japanese counterparts did. Toyota truly valued everyone in the organization, while American companies discounted those at the bottom as “cogs in a machine.” Many companies are now recognizing that this approach can dramatically impact their ability to provide quality services and products and have begun adopting these ideas. Companies such as Whole Foods, Google, and Gore-Tex are included among that group.
We are excited to attend this training and learn how we can continue to push Imagine! and all of its departments in this direction because we on the LDG also believe that those on the front lines of service are the most valuable and deserve to be trusted. We have seen their hard work and ideas change not only the organization, but the lives of those we serve, and we want front line staff to have more opportunities to affect change. We agree with Imagine!’s commitment to embrace a bottom up philosophy and are looking forward to how we can take what we learn at this training and provide more opportunities for growth in this area.
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