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.Empowering employees so that they can make good decisions is one of an entrepreneur’s most important tasks.This means that you must build a corporate comfort zone in which your people can confidently express themselves and display the courage of their own convictions.From the business’s first days, you must ensure they aren’t constrained by an overly rigid structure, micromanagement or overregulation.While guidelines are useful for establishing a framework for the tasks ahead, a hard-shelled setup will hinder creativity and risk-taking.It will instead quickly lead to mindless repetition, lack of motivation and a falling off in standards.If you can encourage and trust your staff to use common sense, you will find that over time their solutions to problems will become more innovative, rather than less so.Make sure that experimentation is encouraged and employees aren’t afraid to make mistakes.In fact, your goal should be more than merely encouraging your employees to use common sense.Ultimately, you want their approach and solutions to become entrepreneurial or, more accurately, intrapreneurial.One of many intrapreneurial teams within our group is led by Les Payne on Virgin Australia’s engineering and maintenance staff.He keeps an eye on all aspects of ground safety, including the wooden chocks used to hold plane wheels in place when they are parked at the gate.About five years ago, he noticed that in heavy rain the chocks did not stay in place, and that this equipment also wore out quickly.Les and his colleague Ian Scott decided to redesign the chocks.They soon hit on a more durable and environmentally friendly material: plastic that had been recycled locally.The price would be the same as the traditional wooden ones, but the chocks would last at least six times longer.Over time, we have been replacing the one thousand timber chocks in use across the Virgin Australia network with the recycled plastic version.We were so pleased with this simple but effective measure that we reported it in internal newsletters, drafted memos to help raise awareness and also feted Les and team at the Virgin Group’s Stars of the Year dinner for successfully demonstrating how helping the environment can also help the bottom line.In 2006, both Les and Ian received an industry award for this achievement as well.The steps to constructing a creative and free-thinking workplace are quite simple, but it really has to start at the top.CEOs need to lead by example, by being visible and approachable in their role as the lead creative problem-solver.Give out your email address and phone number, listen carefully to employees (as I frequently point out, I always carry a notebook so I can jot things down), follow up on all problems, act on the best suggestions and celebrate others’ creative milestones and intrapreneurial achievements.When Virgin was small and housed in cramped offices, it was much easier for me to keep in touch with employees, but nowadays I have to rely on a team of dozens of chief executives who drive forward the various businesses within the Virgin Group as our ambassadors and advocates for the Virgin culture we have created.Whether you are running a small company or a large one, there are employees you may not get to speak to often, and whom you must rely on others to supervise.Things to look for in your managers: do they give out their contact info? Do they have little black books of their own? Can they tell you about employees’ good ideas and which of the best ones they acted on? Do they promote intrapreneurship within their teams? Are they intrapreneurs themselves?Such switches are very helpful in broadening senior team members’ experience and helping them to remember that getting things done the conventional way is not necessarily the best way.When your top managers are true intrapreneurs, you can be sure that you are on your way to building a committed, engaged, creative workforce guided by common sense and a spirit of adventure.Chocks away!LIKE A FINE WINEAgeing brings many benefitsI am, as I said in the Introduction, a huge fan of Australia and Australians.Australia always strikes me as a young and vital nation so it is interesting that the following question came to me from Down Under.Q: In Australia there is often an overt bias against employing older workers.In a recent business magazine article, a recruitment consultant stated he doesn’t look at anybody over thirty-five.These are some of the preconceptions often aired: older workers can’t change; they are not as creative; they can’t think laterally; they are not open to learning; they cost more to hire.What is your approach to hiring older workers? If you were looking for a position, how would you look to overcome the ageism barrier?-C [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]