As families gather in the United States this week to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday there will likely be a common inconsistency in their stories. Many will likely be thankful for the job that they currently have even though they are considerably dissatisfied with that job. With the economic downturn organizations have been so focused on squeezing out costs from their operations that most have neglected investing in their people. The result is that most employees are at a historically low level of engagement with their employers.
So I thought I would take a break on this post from my usual topics of failure or innovation and instead focus on a lesson in leadership and philosophy. Last week Alan Wurtzel wrote an insightful post titled “What Circuit City Learned about Valuing Employees” for the HBR Blog. The article describes how important it is to respect your employees and give them the opportunity to grow. For the first 50 years this was a core value at Circuit City but by 2000 the company’s executives had all but eviscerated that belief and by the end of 2009 Circuit City was gone. As I read this article I kept thinking that these were some very important lessons to be learned for every retailer, especially Circuit City’s last remaining true competitor, Best Buy.
Just the other day I had realized that I had passed the fifteen year mark since I graduated from b-school. After my initial shock of how long ago that really was I began trying to summarize what I had learned from those 2 years of my life. While I recall very few of the details from the hundreds of case studies that were read, there were a few insights that I was able to recall but there were three that seemed to stand out compared to the rest.
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