INC: The other day I visited a fabulous company named Gripple. With offices in the U.S., England, India, Brazil and France, the company is an innovative manufacturer of a wide range of fencing, suspension and loading devices. The company is full of ingenious problem solvers. But one of the things I admired most about them was that no one has any job descriptions…
The problem with HR is that it reeks of compliance, of following the rules. But innovation and creativity aren’t about following rules but challenging them. So which message is more important: obedience or innovation? If you try to send both at once, you can’t blame people if they’re confused. I’m often struck that, as companies agonize over how to make their workforce more creative, they ignore the easy first step, which is just to identify and remove the impediments to creativity. Every time you describe a job, you prescribe areas of thought and innovation. Every time you tell someone what their job is, you’re also telling them what it is not. You restrict the room for movement in their minds – even though we know that so much innovation is about bringing ideas together.
So I wasn’t surprised that Gripple doesn’t have fixed working hours either; they trust people to manage their time, and their commitments, appropriately. And Facey says he’s rarely been let down. Nor is Gripple a simple business. Manufacturing involves critical, complex processes and the company itself has high standards of production and turnaround times: Any product ordered before 2pm will be shipped by 4pm. The business is committed to growing at least 10 percent a year, with new products every year. It’s clearly no place for slouches. But it is a living demonstration of the principle that the best way to get people to behave like adults is to treat them that way… (more)
EDITOR: We were flattered when a colleagued forwarded this article and asked if we had written it. Would that we did!
