This is a guest post by Jon Gordon. Jon is the bestselling author of a number of books including The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy, and his latest, The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work.

One Simple Rule is Having a Big Impact.

I didn’t invent the rule. I discovered it—at a small, fast growing, highly successful company that implements simple practices with extraordinary results.

One day I was having lunch with Dwight Cooper, a tall, thin, mild-mannered former basketball player and coach who had spent the last 10 years building and growing a company he co-founded into one of the leading nurse staffing companies in the world. Dwight’s company, PPR, was named one of Inc. Magazines Fastest Growing Companies several times but on this day it was named one of the best companies to work for in Florida and Dwight was sharing a few reasons why.

Dwight told me of a book he read about dealing with jerks and energy vampires in the work place. But after reading and reflecting on the book he realized that when it comes to building a positive, high performing work environment there was a much more subtle and far more dangerous problem than jerks. It was complaining and more subtle forms of negativity and he knew he needed a solution.

Dwight compared jerks to a kind of topical skin cancer. They don’t hide. They stand right in front of you and say, “here I am.” As a result you can easily and quickly remove them. Far more dangerous is the kind of cancer that is subtle and inside your body. It grows hidden beneath the surface, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but either way if not caught, it eventually spreads to the point where it can and will destroy the body. Complaining and negativity is this kind of cancer to an organization and Dwight had seen it ruin far too many. He was determined not to become another statistic and The No Complaining Rule was born.

The fact is every leader and business will face negativity, energy vampires and obstacles to define themselves and their team’s success. That is why one of the most important things we can do in business and life is to stay positive with strategies that turn negative energy into positive solutions. Thus the goal is not to eliminate all complaining; just mindless, chronic complaining. And the bigger goal is to turn justified complaints into positive solutions. After all, every complaint represents an opportunity to turn something negative into a positive. We can utilize customer complaints to improve our service. Employee complaints can serve as a catalyst for innovation and new processes. Our own complaints can serve as a signal letting us know what we don’t want so we can focus on what we do want. And we can use The No Complaining Rule to develop a positive culture at work.

About Jon Gordon:

This post is a guest post by Jon Gordon. Jon is the bestselling author of a number of books including The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy, and his latest, The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work. Learn more at www.JonGordon.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @JonGordon11 or Facebook www.facebook.com/jongordonpage .

There are lots of reasons, but here’s a highly significant  — and counterintuitive — one from Marcus Buckingham’s First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently:

Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers.

The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.

This is an important post from Seth Godin last week:

One of my favorite restaurants is a little Mexican place in Utah called El Chubasco. I’ve often eaten there twice in a day, and once (it’s true) ate there three times.

It’s always crowded. Sometimes people wait outside, in the cold, even though there are plenty of alternatives within walking distance. So, what’s the secret? Why is it worth a drive and a wait?

No specific reason. The energy of owners Jill and Craig is certainly part of it, but most customers never encounter them. I think it’s the hand-fitted gestalt of thousands of little decisions made by caring management out to make a difference. Usually, when a business like this gets bigger or turns into a chain, marketers make what feel like smart compromises. The MBAs collide with the mystical, and the place gets boring. “Why do we need 14 free salsas when we can get away with six?” or “Perhaps we ought to stop handing out huge tumblers of water for free–our bottled water sales will go up.”

This turns out to be the secret of just about every really successful enterprise. Sure, you can copy one or two or even three of their competitive advantages and unique remarkable attributes, but no, it’s going to be really difficult to recreate the magic of countless little decisions. The scarcity happens because so many businesses don’t care enough or are too scared to invest the energy in so many seemingly meaningless little bits of being extraordinary.

Here’s the main thing to focus on: much of the time, the things that appear to create more work or be less “economical” are what actually create the magic.

That’s why a cost-cutting focus, while having an appearance of wisdom, is actually deadly.

Tom Peters makes the same point in his landmark book In Search of Excellence. There is this notion to think that good business sense (and bringing good business sense to the world of ministry) means optimizing and creating efficiencies.

But that’s wrong. Good business sense is about making a great product or service — something people will love, rather than just put up with. Efficiency only becomes important after that, and as a result of it.

There might be a reason to have only six versions of salsa instead of 14. But that reason needs to be based in the fact that fewer options will somehow serve people better (Apple exemplifies this in many ways), rather than in the fact that it will be less work for you or “save money.”

Excellent. Here they are:

1. If you don’t want this job, I’ll find someone who does
2. I don’t pay you to think
3. I won’t have you on Facebook while you’re on the clock
4. I’ll take it under advisement
5. Who gave you permission to do that?
6. Drop everything and do this now!
7. Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions
8. Sounds like a personal problem to me
9. I have some feedback for you…and everyone else here feels the same way
10. In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all

Here’s one of the best parts, in response to number 3 (“I won’t have you on Facebook while you’re on the clock”):

Decent managers have figured out that there is no clock, not for white-collar knowledge workers, anyway. Knowledge workers live, sleep, and eat their jobs. Their e-mail inboxes fill up just as fast after 5:00 p.m. as they do before. Their work is never done, and it’s never going to be done. That’s O.K. Employees get together in the office during the daytime hours to do a lot of the work together, and then they go home and try to live their lives in the small spaces of time remaining. If they need a mental break during the day, they can go on PeopleofWalmart.com or Failblog.org without fear of managerial reprisal. We are not robots. We need to stop and shake off the corporate cobwebs every now and then. If a person is sitting in the corner staring up at the ceiling, you could be watching him daydream—or watching him come up with your next million-dollar product idea. (Or doing both things at once.)

Read the whole thing.

Stephen Covey describes these circumstances well in First Things First:

A low-trust culture is filled with bureaucracy, excessive rules and regulations, restrictive, closed systems. In the fear of some “loose cannon,” people set up procedures that everyone has to accommodate.

The level of initiative is low — basically “do what you’re told.” Structures are pyramidal, hierarchical. Information systems are short-term. The quarterly bottom line tends to drive the mentality in the culture.

In a high-trust culture, structures and systems are aligned to create empowerment, to liberate people’s energy and creativity toward agreed-upon purposes within the guidelines of shared values. There’s less bureaucracy, fewer rules and regulations, more involvement.

A great article from the 99%. Here’s how it starts:

“The work had better be good, I’m paying them enough.”

Over the years I’ve heard this statement — or versions of it — from many different managers charged with getting creative work out of their teams.

From a conventional management perspective, it probably sounds like common sense. But to anyone who understands the nature of creativity and what motivates creative people, it’s a recipe for disaster.

In my article “Management in Light of the Supremacy of God,” I place significant emphasis on how the core of great management involves extending people’s autonomy rather than exercising detailed control over people.

One reader recently asked: “How does this relate to the reality of sin? How should the doctrine of sin and the fallen human heart affect our understanding of management?”

That’s a great question. I typed up a very quick response. Here’s what I said:

Glad you enjoyed the article, and thanks for your question.

Briefly, I’d say the reality of sin is addressed by the “accountability for results” component. We should maximize people’s freedom, but this is freedom within a framework. The framework is not only necessary because of sin — people are served by helpful structures and systems in themselves. But this also is one of the ways sin is kept in check as well.

A couple other thoughts. The emphasis on expanding freedom also takes into account the reality of sin, because as Paul teaches, the law actually makes sin increase. He is talking broadly there about God’s law and the human heart in general, but it does have an application to management: creating detailed rules is more likely to stir up sin in employee’s hearts than control sin. There is a place for rules, and sometimes even pretty strict ones (for example: in relation to financial reporting), but when there isn’t someone’s life at stake (airplane checklists, for example) or laws/ethical realities, the disposition should be to allow people freedom to identify their own way to accomplish the outcomes.

Another issue is: what are the specific sins of most people in the workplace? While all people are sinners, I don’t think that, for most people, their sin manifests itself as laziness and unwillingness to work. I think most people want to do good work and seek increased responsibility. Much sin in the workplace falls in the realm of motives and such things as that — a lot of which is outside the purview of management. So giving people freedom within a healthy overall framework will typically not be abused because of sin; and when it is abused by a few, it doesn’t serve the organization to punish everyone for a few bad apples.

One last thought: We also need to think of the sins of management. Sometimes people think “let’s tightly control people, because they are sinners,” not realizing that the managers themselves who are the ones to exercise this “tight control” are also sinners. So a tightly controlled approach as a response to sin runs into its own problems. Freedom within a healthy framework takes account of sin in the best way, in my view, because most people will excel when given the chance and since this also minimizes the opportunity for management to sin by overly controlling their people and viewing them mainly as means.

A while ago I was talking to a professor who does some teaching on leadership, and he said he wasn’t a fan of Jim Collin’s Good to Great because he had seen Collins’ “first who, then what” principle often used to justify laying off talented people from organizations.

I told him that I thought that would indeed be a pretty bad application of the principle, but that these people were misunderstanding Collins. Collins’ principle is sound; but this misapplication of it is not.

I was just recently dipping in to Good to Great again, and noticed that Collins actually deals with this very issue. It comes down to the distinction between being ruthless and being rigorous:

To be ruthless means hacking and cutting, especially in difficult times, or wantonly firing people without any thoughtful consideration.

To be rigorous means consistently applying exacting standards at all times and at all levels, especially in upper management. To be rigorous, not ruthless, means that the best people need not worry about their positions and can concentrate fully on their work.

. . .

To be rigorous in people decisions means first becoming rigorous about top management people decisions. Indeed, I fear that people might use “first who rigor” as an excuse for mindlessly chopping out people to improve performance. “It’s hard to do, but we’ve got to be rigorous,” I can hear them say. [Note: I’ve actually heard people say that! Pretty bad.] And I cringe. For not only will a lot of hardworking, good people get hurt in the process, but the evidence suggests that such tactics are contrary to producing sustained great results.

The good-to-great companies rarely used head-count lopping as a tactic and almost never used it as a primary strategy. Even in the Wells Fargo case, the company used lay-offs half as much as Bank of America during the transition era.

In contrast, we found layoffs used five times more frequently in the comparison companies than in the good-to-great companies. Some of the comparison companies had an almost chronic addiction to layoffs and restructurings.

It would be a mistake — a tragic mistake, indeed — to think that the way you ignite a transition from good to great is by wantonly swinging the ax on vast numbers of hardworking people. Endless restructuring and mindless hacking were never part of the good to great model.

I would just have one improvement here. Probably few people set out to purposely take a “mindlessly hacking” approach. Most who do so probably don’t even realize it, but instead think they are doing right.

So I think the most helpful point Collins makes here is that the disposition of every organization should be to value and keep its people. Lay-offs are an over-used tactic, especially in downturns, and do not generally correlate with sustained great results (as I’ve blogged on before).

The disposition of a company should be to retain its people (assuming alignment with the values and that they are performing) both because this most aligns with the value of people and because it actually benefits the organization more. For, as Collins points out later on this same page, the ultimate throttle on growth for any company is “the ability to get and keep the right people.”

So the lesson of the “first who, then what” principle is not that people are easily expendable. They are not, and should not be treated as such. The lesson is actually the opposite: people are valuable, and the disposition of an organization ought to be to keep them. Endless restructuring and removing of talented people, even due to changes in strategy, were “never part of the good to great model.”