is that we do the little things every day to show the people on our team that we truly care about them. When we consistently do the little things to serve and care for team members—like listening well, empowering people, forgiving mistakes, giving credit where it’s due and offering sincere appreciation—we create a culture that is highly conducive to innovation. Also, by making a habit of doing the little things every day, and valuing relationships above short-term goals and numbers, we are more likely to put relationships first when it is very challenging to do so. In the fall of 2008, when the Great Recession was imminent, Jim Goodnight offered an incredible example of his commitment to putting people first. SAS faced the same issues that every other company in the industry faced. Sales plunged and almost every business was making budget cuts in preparation for what seemed like a long downturn. Many companies in almost every industry started laying off large numbers of employees to make their numbers work so SAS employees began to fear that the same thing would happen at their company. But Goodnight’s response to the recession was dramatically different, as Mark C. Crowley, author of Lead From the Heart: Transformational Leadership for the 21st Century, describes in an article he wrote for Fast Company: “In early January 2009, Goodnight held a global webcast and announced that none of its 13,000 worldwide employees would lose their job. He simply asked them all to be vigilant with spending and to help the firm endure the storm. ‘By making it very clear that no one was going to be laid off,’ Goodnight told me, ‘suddenly we cut out huge amounts of chatter, concern and worry—and people got back to work.’” At the time, SAS had a 33-year streak of record revenues. Jim Goodnight was perfectly willing to let that record go to make sure that people felt safe. He knew that by caring for team members and ensuring that they felt safe, he would be creating the space for continued innovation. As a result of his care, employees at SAS did continue to disrupt the market with innovations and the company had another record year while everyone else struggled just to stay alive.
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Matt Tenney is the author of Serve to Be Great: and a Boardroom (Wiley 2014), an international keynote speaker and a trainer. He helps organizations develop highly effective leaders who inspire greatness in others. He can be reached at matt@matttenney.com or by visiting www.matttenney.com.
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1 Jeffrey Cohn, Jon Katzenbach, and Gus Vlak, “Finding and Grooming Breakthrough Innovators,” Harvard Business Review (December 2008)
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