: Sharon Rich
: Your Hidden Game Ten Invisible Agreements That Can Make or Break Your Business
: Indie Books International
: 9781947480131
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Management
: English
: 200
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
There is a hidden game being played in your business. It is made up of the unspoken rules, unquestioned assumptions, and the invisible agreements that define how your organization operates. When you don't know the hidden game exists, it runs you and your business. You aren't playing the game-the game is playing you. In Your Hidden Game, business consultant and CEO of Think Business Growth, Sharon Rich, shows you how to bring these invisible agreements out on the table, shine a light on them, and work out new agreements together. Sharon identifies the ten agreements that are most essential to success in any business and lays out a roadmap for bringing your team into alignment so they can execute at higher and higher levels of performance. Sharon shares real stories from the front lines of her client businesses that demonstrate where organizational behavior goes awry and what leaders can do to get their teams on track toward their desired outcomes. Simply put, by becoming aware of the hidden games being played in your business and intentionally reworking the rules, you'll find yourself playing a new and more successful game.

Creating a Culture of Agreement

The New Rule

Agreement is Alignment–Alignment Is Everything

In his classic 1966 book,The Will to Manage, former managing director of McKinsey& Company, Marvin Bower, writes, “People in the business are expected to hold and be guided by informal, unwritten guidelines on how people should perform and conduct themselves. Once such a philosophy crystallizes, it becomes a powerful force indeed. When one person tells another ‘That’s not the way we do things around here,’ the advice had better be heeded.”4

People are tribal. We are hardwired to come into alignment with those around us and to be threatened by those who refuse to align. Without exception, people in organizations come to implicitly share understandings about the behaviors and attitudes within the organization that are acceptable, unacceptable, rewarded, tolerated, and punished. People who don’t agree either push to create change or leave. Anyone who remains is tacitly agreeing to live by these unspoken rules, whether they like them or not.

It’s practically unheard of for an organization to intentionally create agreements about how people in the organization will think and behave, individually and together. Instead, organizations fall into silent assumed agreements. Or, when overt agreements seem necessary, people tend to force them on the organization, producing resentment, conflict, and disengagement—along with noncompliance.

My publisher, Henry DeVries, started Indie Books International as a family-run business in 2014. His wife and four children all play key roles in the business. Henry wanted to keep the business side professional, so he wrote up some house rules that he thought were mutually understood and a slam-dunk to be accepted by all.

A contentious two-hour conversation over dinner shocked them into the awareness that, in fact, everyone didnot understand the rules in the same way—and that each person had assumed that everyone else was in agreement with his or her own individual version of how things should operate.

When we don’t discuss the rules, people will make up their own versions. At worst, this leads to fatal breakdowns; at best, conflicts, loss of time, and a lack of alignment keep organizations from their peak potential performance.

The First Rule of the Hidden Game: We Don’t Discuss the Rules of the Game

I recently met with the chief operating officer of a manufacturing company. Each department in the company is siloed from the others. They don’t coordinate their decisions or actions. Expenses are increasing, and there is a real threat that revenues will decrease over the coming year. No one on the leadership team discusses these dysfunctional agreements. In effect, there is no leadership team.

Reality will hold them accountable in the coming year. They’ll become yet another of the many companies that avoid discussing the game they are in and are blindsided when they lose.

I don’t want this to happen in your business.

You can transform your business a