Chapter Five: Engage Employees in the Enterprise
Challenge: How to engage employees, at all levels of the organization, in designing and delivering customer value propositions that are superior to competition?
Solution: Chapter five describes the four leadership practices used at FedEx to engage employees in the enterprise and create a clear expectation that everyone must be involved in the innovation process. While a car engine may be running, the car won’t move forward unless the engine is engaged. Similarly, for an organization to grow and move forward, employees have to be engaged in the enterprise.
Don Hardy, a colleague I’ve worked with closely for many years, had just returned from his assignment of heading FedEx Australia operations for two years. While there, he saw first-hand how FedEx’s employees worldwide were fully engaged in the company’s mission of doing absolutely, positively whatever it took to serve its customers. While Hardy was on assignment in Australia, one of his senior managers in Sydney, Kim Garner, met with a customer who sold duty free goods to tourists. As part of his business, for an additional charge he would pack and ship the merchandise so his customers would not have to carry the items they had purchased. His goal was to have the packages waiting for his customers when they returned home. FedEx was able to help him accomplish that Monday through Saturday, but he needed Sunday pickups – a service FedEx didn’t offer at the time – to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.
In response to this customer request, Kim met with his staff to see if they could come up with a solution to this problem. The team brainstormed for a while until they came up with a viable plan to pick up this valuable customer’s packages on Sundays. By going that extra mile, FedEx didn’t just keep this high-volume shipper; it actually saw an increase in business with the additional 50-200 packages the customer shipped every Sunday.
Don and Kim didn’t foist a plan on their employees. That would have meant using their employees’ brawns but not their brains. Instead they engaged their employees. This chapter discusses in detail the four leadership practices needed to successfully engage employees, the first dimension of a thriving innovation culture.
As someone who is committed to infusing non-profit organizations and the public sector with dynamism and creativity that animates great organizations, I'm always on the lookout for books to help us do that. From the moment I started reading 'FedEx Delivers' I knew I had found just such a book.
Gayle Rose
Co-Founder, Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis
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Chapter One: Innovating and Outperforming the Competition
Chapter Two: Overview of FedEx's Innovation Journey
Chapter Three: Why Organizations Don’t Innovate
Chapter Four: The Five Dimensions of an Innovation and Performance Culture
Chapter Five: Engage Employees in the Enterprise
Chapter Six: Expect and Help Employees to Continually Grow
Chapter Seven: Create a Secure Environment
Chapter Eight: Encourage Collaborative Development
Chapter Nine: Tap Employees' Commitment
Conclusion: Continuing to Lead the Way
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