For the deciding game of the National League Championship Series, I was in a neighborhood grid on the northwest side of Chicago, watching the Cubs battle for their first World Series spot since 1945. I was sucked in by a lot of mediocre Cubs baseball over the past 20 years. years, as well as the occasional decent team – always, for one reason or another, or a dozen, doomed late in the season, never able to create the breaks that other teams took. Still, the current group seemed different in one way or another, especially in the fact very good together.
Late in the game, a Los Angeles Dodgers batter made an easy out at first base. There, according to protocol dating back to at least Little League, first baseman Anthony Rizzo said he had it, waving his arms in the air as he followed the ball, to wave to other players. Then, a strange thing:Javy Baez, the skilled second baseman, drifted…and again…and stood right in front of Rizzo, until their gloves practically touched, disaster unfolding. Baez calmly poached the exit, then as he jogged into second, he and Rizzo shared a laugh. That ritual, it turns out, was an inside joke that lasted all season, now playing out in one of the most pressured games the Cubs organization has faced in about 70 years.
"That's why they're going to win this game and go to the World Series. Because even with such high stakes, they are just playing. »
"That's why they're going to win this game and go to the World Series," said a friend of mine, a local who had been watching the team all year. "Because even with the stakes that high, they're just playing around. This same friend of mine broke down in tears when the Cubs completed the win about an hour later, and later reported that when he woke up the next day he remembered the Cubs were going to the World Series and wept happily during his morning shower.
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It sounds weird to ask, but:Wouldn't you just like to run a company like the Cubs? Best performance for over a century. Great camaraderie. World champions, sacred cow. Losing so much baggage along the way that their fans – customers? – are emotionally overwhelmed, and all the more in love with that C on their hats.
Related: 5 Ways to Make Your Business Better Than the Competition
The parallels between sports and business can be dangerously simplistic. (How many clichés in your workplace, you have to wonder sometimes, started in ball parks?) But it's worth wondering how a culture changed so completely. The answer, I would say, is that the Cubs have figured out how to have more fun at work. I would also say it's something you might as well try yourself.
The organization has earned more since hiring Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations in 2011. Most Epstein's big moves have been, in a way, to whittle the roster down and rebuild around some fantastic young talent. Another masterstroke was, in 2014, hiring Joe Maddon as team manager. Maddon, the son of a plumber, had recently guided a moribund former team, the Tampa Bay Rays, to the World Series. He also had a temper well suited to a franchise whose long-term memories were all about losing. He came to work every day with his sleeves rolled up and a snack ready, making the Cubs club a cool and pleasant place. At the end of the Cubs' surprising 2015 season, for example, he invited a boatload of zoo animals to hang out with his players before a game:in attendance were a flamingo, a penguin, a sloth, a baby snow leopard . In 2016, the Cubs' most iconic gear was a T-shirt bearing Maddon's signature goggles with some advice he offered Baez when second baseman came in from the minors:"Try not to suck." It's become an unlikely team mantra.
The Cubs' success and laid-back clubhouse caught the eye of sportswriter Jonah Keri. It groups Maddon with other coaches who have fostered cultures of fun in their respective organizations. Keri thinks this can create a competitive advantage for these teams. The sports hiring trend, in fact, has swung from the authorities to the Maddon types of the world. In the NBA, the Golden State Warriors in 2014 fired a very good coach in Mark Jackson and hired the easy-going Steve Kerr, who immediately led the Warriors, in consecutive years, to the team's first NBA title since 1977. and NBA record. wins in a season. One of Kerr's memorable moves, to keep his team relaxed, was to project assistant coach Luke Walton's stark cameo on the soap opera The Young and the Restless for players before a practice.
"There's an institutional bias against people smiling," Keri told me. "But you can be positive and keep working hard and be motivated and goal-oriented while keeping your head down." ”
Even the NFL, the No Fun League, presented a championship trophy to the relative relative, Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He had been a college dynamo coach at the University of Southern California, and yet on his first tour as NFL head coach in the '90s, he got carried away with the New England Patriots, where his upbeat thrill didn't translate to an intermediate team. He took flak for appearing to get high while playing basketball with his players in the stadium parking lot. "Did the Patriots play worse as a result? said Keri. " No. He didn't immediately set Seattle on fire; his first two years there were losing seasons. “But Carroll was very, very positive from the start,” Keri says, “and eventually they came along. »
In Keri's reporting, one word that kept coming up around Carroll and Kerr was "discipline." Apparently people felt compelled to mention it amid praise for their playfulness, because even in sports, a culture literally based on games, the perception remains that only the most serious have a monopoly on structure, planning and resolve – the building blocks of leadership. It may contain an element of truth. But she also makes irascibility and inaccessibility the refuge of insecure managers.
“If you lead a staff member, sometimes they at least need to be guided,” Keri acknowledges. A manager cannot always be everyone's friend. All it's saying, however, is that hiring doesn't need to favor stormy personalities over sunny ones. “Flip the default,” he says, “from negative to positive. »
Related: It Takes a Positive Attitude to Achieve Positive Results
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The question of how to incorporate positivity into a growing business is a question dear to Michel Buffet, Ph.D., of the firm of London-based management consultancy YSC. He has worked in the field of leadership assessment and development for 18 years, consulting dozens of Fortune 500 business and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. A few years ago, he found himself with co-workers trying to build a small business on the values they wanted to see in their workplace. Key among them:making a profit while remaining, well, fun. They found that this approach only got them so far. “We hit a wall,” he says. “We had to grow up a bit. We had to deal with this idea that if we wanted to grow the business, we had to be more focused on managing and building infrastructure. “
This is a starting point for the sport, in that the structures are going to be largely in place when any coach takes over a team. If you're not leading a sports team, you'll probably have to find the dance halfway. So how do you maintain your profits with your game savvy?
If possible, start as you scale. When Buffet works with companies that are hiring, they start by profiling someone who is likely to be successful in a given role. This step is not about credentials or experience; it is the rest of the person. How social are they? How adjustable? Are they curious? Are they good at diplomacy? When they're stressed, what behaviors do they exhibit?
And, shoot, do they like to have fun? One trait that Buffet measures is, in fact, hedonism. And it doesn't conflict with ambition, business instincts, or adaptability.
“Being part of an organization is more than doing a task. It's more than selling a product. It's also a matter of experience and who you care about. What kind of community do you want to be part of? »
“Being part of an organization is more than doing a task,” says Buffet. “It’s more than selling a product. It's also about experience, who you care about and who you want to spend time with on a daily basis. What kind of community do you want to be part of? For Buffet, an openly gay man who had never worked in a company with other openly gay people, coming to YSC was a pleasant jolt. “There were three openly gay men in a small business,” he says. “It was inclusive on every level.”
Inclusiveness is key. People who feel included in discussions will be better able to communicate their knowledge. When leaders rise in a company, they should always work from the best information they have and then take some kind of action. But the larger the organization, the more leadership comes from the hands-on business, the greater the need for leaders to act on intuition. Making people at all levels of an organization feel comfortable offering their knowledge, without siloing it or dividing it into factions, can only inform the decisions you, the manager, need to make.
The goal is to find people who can fit into the general work culture as you build with a range of personality types, and then have it all work together as you grow. expand. “You want an organization that has some diversity,” says Buffet, “but it's a good balance. You want to have a center of gravity, enough people to define a culture. ”
I asked Buffet which companies are exemplary in terms of corporate culture these days. Certain pharmaceutical companies come to mind, and that's probably because they tend to be profitable and have a sense of mission:to cure people. The technology naturally also has some strengths:"It sounds like a big cliché," says Buffet, "but Google has been really good at it. Facebook too. “Banks are having a hard time,” he says. “Because their goal has been so tainted in recent years. What do they represent? ”
But profitability is at the heart of all these sectors. I've worked for companies where the idea of fun is supposed to be baked into the identity of the company, but the ownership never says exactly what they plan to give up to make the office a place where people have looking forward to spending some time.
At one such company, we were struggling to convince owners to provide the basic benefit of snacks in the kitchen. Around the same time, I happened to take a tour of a Google office, where the employee who drove me and a few other people around us walked us through a small canteen and offered this factoid:On average, a snack costs Google less than $2 and requires an employee to spend 40 more minutes at work. I don't know what the average Google employee makes, but I'm guessing it's over $3 an hour. It seemed like one of those win-wins where one side (the company) actually wins a lot more.
I mentioned this calculation to the owners. Sure enough, soon after, snacks regularly appeared in our kitchen.
Related: 8 Principles of a Good Company Culture – Does Yours Have Them?
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A bare profit motive does not conflict with workers enjoying their work, nor does a wise coach derail championships. A modest investment in Goldfish crackers and pretzels could actually save a business a huge amount of money. And if you want to foster the kind of environment where people shoot parking hoops with their managers, you can still win a Super Bowl.
There's hope for bosses who don't have the charisma of a Pete Carroll. I asked Keri who in sport builds a less obvious culture of fun at work. He named the Pittsburgh Steelers' Mike Tomlin the youngest Super Bowl-winning coach. And Gregg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs, a famous and five-time NBA title-winning prickly interview subject. "His public persona is that he doesn't suffer from idiots at all," Keri says. “But it’s the biggest softie of all time. He loves his players. I don't mean he likes his players. I think he likes its players. Here's how it goes in sports – again, not always the most obvious corollary of the workplace, given its general machismo, but often a laboratory for culture change. Keri was inducted into the Baseball Writers Association of America, which controls voting for the Hall of Fame. He's one of the youngest, and he took his first chance to vote for a forgotten former Montreal Expos outfielder named Tim Raines, whose support was so low he was about to fall off the ballot. . Raines was not, in Keri's words, an easy guy to assimilate into the family. But he was strong in certain categories such as on-base percentage which, in part due to the Moneyball revolution, have acquired a greater influence in the evaluation and appreciation of players. Raines was not voted out. A poll of young baseball writers, however, showed much higher support for his dignity – a sign for Keri that, as in many fields, young leaders may simply have to wait for the older generation to retire before they can reflect their values throughout the system.
“As society evolves and those in power change, we progress in different ways,” Keri said. “We are less sexist, less racist, less hidden. I feel more progressive now than I did in my twenties. Millennials are going to be a lot less conservative than 40-year-olds now, and a lot less conservative than 40-year-olds 40 years ago. ”
Children will inherit the culture they ultimately create. So it's worth getting ahead. On the one hand, you stand to build a stronger business, if you run it right, and should enjoy your life the way you do. For another:The Cubs actually made it to the World Series and then won the thing. Do not despair. It is, overall, a joyous time we live in, where seemingly anything is possible.
Related: You can do anything
This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of SUCCESS magazine.
