Welcome to a Business Renaissance, Part 1

Written by Shala Hainer Friday, December 02 2011

Snapshot: Dianne Crampton, president TIGERS Success Series
For more than 20 years, Dianne Crampton has helped companies reach their next levels of success by changing work environments. The founder and president of TIGERS Success Series, Crampton shares her secret to creating motivated and enthusiastic employees through focusing on six values: trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk, and success.

Her system isn't just for the corporate world. She and her team have been called upon by nonprofits, church groups, and families who need help changing their dynamics. Internationally recognized, her work with Native Americans was featured at a United Nations conference, and her company received honorable mention in Inc. magazine’s entrepreneurial awards.

Crampton lives in Bend, Ore., where she enjoys organic gardening and hiking with her husband, Bill.

Womenetics: You've said before that there is a need for a business renaissance in this country. What do you mean by that?
Dianne Crampton: People in the gen X and boomer generations were raised to be competitive. If you think about it, in our education systems, we had the bell curve. There were going to be certain people who passed and certain people who failed. We were all being trained to be good people on a manufacturing line, connecting this cog into that widget. As a result, we were trained to be very individualistic, meaning we kind of look out for ourselves. We're very competitive, and based on our skills and talents and the tasks we accomplish, there would be a hope of being promoted.

Well, there has been an entire shift in how business is done and in the world as a whole ever since the information age has taken hold. We're moving into the relationship age, using our technology in terms of building relationships. You can see this in social networking, for example. So we are learning and having to learn very quickly how to be more collaborative and cooperative in building relationships with co-workers in the workplace and in other organizations, but also in building a base of cooperation in our social networks. As a result, there is a shift in how we do business, from “I'm in it for myself” and “It's a dog-eat-dog world” to one that is truly collaborative, to where we know we're working together and we're stronger working together. As a result, we look for ways and means of being more productive and more effective in working together. That includes how we talk to one another, how we listen, and how we understand.

This business renaissance that I'm referring to is one that is more collaborative and team based. This type of work environment that speaks to the heart and soul of the generation that follows gen X, which is gen Y. They are all about collaborating and working together. They prefer that over other methods. It's not so much being better than others as it is being great with others who have different skills and talents that are recognized as being important.

What we find in highly cooperative and collaborative organizations that have more of a team-based culture is that it takes fewer employees to get exceptional work done. In fact, in our book TIGERS Among Us: Winning Business Team Cultures and Why They Thrive, we feature a woman-owned business. She has 10 employees, and they generate $10 million in annual revenue. It's this type of business that I believe will create a renaissance in this country not only in innovation, but in actually how business is done, even to our supply chain that is based more on cooperation than internal competition. That's what I mean by a business renaissance.

Womenetics: Your TIGERS model has stood the test of time, nearly 25 years. Tell us about how the model works.
Crampton: I wanted to know what makes a good group of people truly great. And by “great,” I meant that they were ethical, quality-focused, productive, and very successful. I took it a step forward to qualify success to mean that not only were people achieving goals, but that they were excited about them and that when they achieved them, there was a sense of personal satisfaction. They actually bloomed and blossomed in achieving those goals, even if they were really tough to accomplish.

I studied all the group-dynamic research I could find in business education and psychology. What I learned from these studies is that there are principles that are found in any organization. And these principles are anchored by behaviors that can be seen daily in how people treat one another, the organization, and, if they have customers, the customers as well. These principles are trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk, and success.

So when these principles exist in organizations, the predictable outcomes are a very engaged, motivated, entrepreneurial, cooperative group of people. When any one of those principles is absent, there are also predictable outcomes. Generally, these outcomes are behavior related. We see a lot of this in conflict, fear of repercussions, not trusting the organizations, and all of the behavior that comes from that, including the low engagement that we see today.

So how the model works is we can go into any organization including a family – in fact, we had one TIGERS trainer whose business was improving family dynamics, who could actually go in and survey that group and from the results of the survey know exactly what that group needed to improve its behavior. So the TIGERS model works very fast. When an organization corrects at a behavior level the dynamic that is causing chaos, everyone feels safer. When it's maintained and monitored by management, change happens very quickly. The TIGERS model looks at the work environment and the behaviors that make that environment a very productive, safe place, and enjoyable place to be, or one that is less than that. And based on that, it helps leaders understand how to put in place what we call a work force development plan that changes the dynamic in a measurable way very quickly. We do that by measuring the level of trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk, and success on teams.

Womenetics: How does your model help women, specifically?
Crampton: Work morale and engagement is all about the emotional environment at work. Morale is a symptom of the work force community itself. I believe women understand community building much better than our male counterparts because, historically, we were the people who built our families and raised our children and built relationships with people in our neighborhoods and who grew our children into responsible adults. We know that employees, like our children, are each different. There is no one-size-fits-all dynamic with kids or with our employees.

We know that each individual is unique, just like our children, and that each brings unique skills and talents to the productivity effort within an organization. When we are connected to our feelings as women, we also understand that the emotional quality of our organization is extremely important. We are more likely to have those tough conversations – heart-tugging conversations – that deal with the emotional quality of our environment.

Let me give you an example of that. The woman entrepreneur with the 10 employees that I spoke about in the other question had 12 employees, and she's down to 10 – she had to let two of them go. She recognized that there would be a grief process in doing so. She recognized the fact that her employees had built relationships with these two people. Their leaving was nothing about them – it was the fact that she had lost a major contract, which decided not to do more advertising during the recession. This made it more difficult. She allowed for a grief process.

She allowed employees to really express how they felt about it. She let employees come up with ideas on how to bring those employees back from time to time and work potentially as independent contractors until the business shifted. If they were still available, she would bring them back in to the company. So the sheer fact that she acknowledged the emotional reality of a downsize was huge toward building trust and a real sense of family in her work environment that stimulated all her employees. It built trust and all the other TIGERS elements. Essentially, what she did is she moved forward with empathy, which is the “E” value in TIGERS.

It truly builds teams and the ability to assess the reality of the environment, and it's a power tool when clearing team chaos. I think that women understand this. Then there's trust, and how we build and sustain it, as well as community development and how we build collaboration and cooperation between people. We know that if we're building competition between our kids, there's going to be a lot of bickering and anger expressed. We can transfer what we know of our family dynamics and how we have raised our families to the workplace in an emotional level that is very effective.

The model helps women particularly in that it reinforces what we know to be extremely important in community development. It gives us the language and the tools to facilitate rapid change in our companies very quickly. In many woman-based businesses that have employed TIGERS in their organizations, other people just cannot offer the employees more money for them to leave – the employees are so loyal to their companies. So TIGERS is a great tool that I think is most readily grabbed at an understanding level by women. I think when it comes to how does the model help women specifically, we understand how important it is for people to feel a sense of satisfaction and celebration in accomplishing our goals as well, that oftentimes, we are willing to pause and recognize people for their achievements. This makes a huge difference in the success of our operations and especially as we begin to on-board more veterans coming back from overseas.

Read Part 2 of this two-part series.

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Based near Atlanta, Shala Hainer has been writing and copyediting since 1995. Beginning her career at newspapers such as the Marietta Daily Journal and the Atlanta Business Chronicle, she most recently wrote and edited articles for several nonprofit organizations before purchasing a flower shop in 2006. She earned a bachelor’s in communications from Jacksonville State University.