Build Wise

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” Business leaders today thinking about corporate values and culture can learn a lot from this ancient Kenyan proverb. A leader may wonder, what happens if the company values printed on mousepads or etched in glass in the lobby don’t reflect how people really feel and behave? Even though these proclaimed values may have been drawn up by well-intentioned people—founders, the board, HR, the exco—what happens if they’re inconsistent with the unspoken or organic values that really drive organizational culture? The grass dies.

Enstoa is truly a people first company. At the start of each year, we gather all of our team members from around the world for our annual Spark session, 3 days of off-site meetings, interactive sessions, team building activities and events. We reflect on successes and lessons learned of the prior year, and socialize the strategy for the year ahead.

Most of us have been taught to believe incentive-based compensation (“bonuses”) to be an essential management tool. The widespread use of this in almost all industries around the globe is a testament to how entrenched a concept it has become. Enstoa tested this theory in 2013 by scrapping bonuses and can now confirm the practice is useless, even harmful. We grew revenue-per-employee by 40% within four quarters of making the change. It wasn’t an anomaly—our 2015 growth is solid and 2016 looks good.