Assume Responsibility for Audacious Results
As this year is promptly drawing to a close, we are featuring the top ThinkSlashBe articles, interviews and videos from 2013. Let us know which one struck a chord with you. Here is Casey Leung’s blog:
As an entrepreneur, it’s difficult to place the success or failure of your company squarely in the hands of others; it’s easier and less of a headache to prescribe a replicable formula for your employees to follow. But as Manfred’s story demonstrates, creating a culture that invests in your employees’ capacity for responsibility is an exercise in generating true entrepreneurship.
Manfred Vollmer is well acquainted with creating audacious results. Now a partner of institute B, he started working at IKEA in Germany during the early 1980’s, a period of massive growth for the home furnishings company. Despite IKEA’s sales and expansions, the supply chain was in disarray and Manfred was brought in to create a logistics management system. It was there that he was first immersed in a company culture of total personal responsibility. It’s a culture he continues to espouse at institute B today.
“The culture was based on the principles and beliefs of the founder [Ingvar Kamprad] but it left you a lot of freedom. You had to assume responsibility within your area of expertise. There weren’t any boundaries or a hierarchy, you could talk to anybody in the organization and you could just do what’s right in your type of work.”
Shortly after creating IKEA’s supply chain management system, Manfred was sent to open a new IKEA country headquarters in Belgium – a country about which he knew nothing. “It was the middle of December when the boss told me, ‘We need an office over there. Thirty people are arriving on January 15th, so make sure everything is working.’ I’d never done that before. How was I to get the money? How could I find a location? This was a new country with new languages – Flemish and French, and I could speak neither of them. You’d think that a company as big as IKEA would bring you all the resources but they don’t. Your job is to make sure everything works.”
With two colleagues and little direction, Manfred had to improvise. In Germany, he loaded up a rented minivan with office furniture and equipment. “I figured the easiest way was to do a sort of cloak and dagger operation during the night. There wasn’t much control at the border then, so I smuggled everything into Belgium in the little minivan. On the 15th of January we had a new office and it was done.”
Manfred credits IKEA’s culture of freedom and creative spirit for enabling his success. “Basically, what it comes down to is that within the company, you see a need, you make a decision, and then you proceed and create a solution by yourself. You also take all the consequences for that – you have to know what you are taking on, and if you make a mistake, that’s okay. IKEA allowed you to take the responsibility, and they had to accept that you would make mistakes. Failure is part of the process and part of the progress. You had to accomplish something, there was no one telling you how to do it or giving you the method – only the result counted. I was quite happy that the company gave me this opportunity in the early stages of my career.”
Creating a culture that gives employees freedom to create is a challenge – one that will push your company to produce audacious results from every corner. Are you up to it?
Written by: Casey Leung
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