Chapter Seven: Create a Secure Environment
Challenge: How to make employees feel secure in expressing their ideas? Managers, in turn, must feel secure in accepting new ideas, especially if the ideas expressed are different than theirs.
Solution: What does it take to express new ideas?
1. Belief that the organization wants new ideas from everyone.
2. Formal and informal ways to express them.
3. Belief that someone will take one’s ideas seriously.
4. Belief that one will get credit for new ideas and maybe a reward.
Steve Stapleton was the first Director of Sales Planning and Administration at Federal Express in the early eighties when FedEx was experiencing double digit growth. Package volumes were growing rapidly. At the same time customers were complaining that they didn't have time to complete and prepare the paperwork necessary to ship with FedEx.
Steve supported Corporate Sales' efforts to respond to the field Sales organization and field operations that FedEx must develop a customer automation device to assist customers with automating the process of air waybill and document preparation, especially for large volume and multi-piece shippers. Craig Bell, Vice President of Sales, approached senior management for permission to have Steve and Corporate Sales assume the lead in pursuing this and developing such devices.
Over the next weeks and months Steve lead other Sales staff, working tirelessly along with numerous departments, across many disciplines to begin the absolutely critical work of developing and deploying a device that would eliminate this barrier to continued volume growth. With the help of engineers, billing experts, purchasing, and many other departments work progressed with vendors to develop, test then deploy a variety of customer automation devices.
Want some great ideas for beating the competition tomorrow and the day after? Madan Birla describes the management architecture and specific innovations FedEx uses to beat its competitors year after year. FedEx delivers with its performance culture, and so does this book.
Richard Daft
Brownlee O. Currey, Jr. Professor of Management, Vanderbilt University
Author of "Fusion Leadership" and "The Leadership Experience."
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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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