The Power of a Flourishing Workplace

Arriving as Correct Craft’s new CEO in 2006 was a little crazy, to say the least. The company’s owners were fighting, corporate governance had broken down, and I was the fifth CEO in five years. Flourishing was not a word you would use to describe the company, and that was obvious my first two days in the office, which coincided with a board meeting.

Correct Craft, a wonderful eighty-year-old company, was dysfunctional, losing money, and seemingly in its final days.

As I wrote in my book Making Life Better: The Correct Craft Story, the company had an amazing first seventy-five years that resulted from a strong, purpose-driven culture. However, much of that culture was lost in the chaos that described the five years before I arrived.

Getting Correct Craft back on track was very difficult, and at times it seemed hopeless, until we did something counter-intuitive just a few months after I arrived: twenty-five of us went to Mexico and built a house for a homeless family. Fortunately, that service event was the turning point for our company and the catalyst that began two decades of explosive growth and global impact.

Until that event in Mexico, no one knew if they could believe what the new CEO (me) was saying about us using our platform for good, and many wondered how long I would be there anyway. However, when some of our team joined together for a few days in the hot Mexican desert to serve a homeless family, folks began to believe the changes happening in our company were real. And, since everyone wants to be part of something big and impactful, that trip energized our team, providing the motivation we needed to not only turn Correct Craft around but have a significant global impact over the following two decades.

Recently, I had the opportunity to share our company’s turnaround story at Harvard University. About 100 business leaders, in addition to faculty members of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, were listening to our story. We were meeting on the storied Harvard campus to discuss how we could catalyze a movement of flourishing workplaces and I was happy to share the Correct Craft story as an example of how it could be done.

An important theme of the Harvard meeting was that not only do employees love a flourishing workplace – no surprise there – but organizations with a flourishing workplace achieve better results, financial and otherwise.

So, if a flourishing workplace produces significant benefits, how do we develop one? Below are some things I have seen work:

• Have a Higher Purpose – Almost everyone wants to be part of something great. At our company, we use our platform to make life better for everyone we contact, sometimes even our competitors. This energizes our team.
• Clarity – As CEO, one of my most important jobs – maybe the most important – is to provide clarity. I must be crystal clear about our mission, why, values, vision, strategic plan, and annual plan. If a leader creates clarity around these things and has good people on their team, everything becomes easier, much easier.
• Focus on virtues, not just values – During the Harvard event Dr. Andrew Abela offered an interesting presentation on the importance of virtues. In short, any organization can state its values, but virtues are how the organization lives them out. Stated values without virtues can backfire and have a detrimental effect; leaders must model the organization’s values in their daily behavior.
• A Learning Workplace – Few things will energize a team as much as learning together. Being a learner is a fundamental value for our team, and we created Correct Craft University to help provide opportunities to our folks. And we love learning together.
• Service – It would be hard to overstate the way our team and organization have benefited from a focus on service. Since that first trip to Mexico, I have taken members of our team to Cambodia, India, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and across both the Caribbean and Central America, serving people who need our help. And even those folks on our team who are not interested in a global service trip tell me how much they appreciate working for a company that is helping others around the world.
• Focus on Results – Focusing on results may seem obvious, but it is not. Many people build their self-identity and worth not on results, but on how busy they are; being busy makes them feel important. Unfortunately, this is a devastating trap that may make people feel good for a while, but it is not an ingredient of a flourishing workplace. Flourishing workplaces are focused on what they achieve together, and that focus drives better results, which provides tremendous work satisfaction.

An effective leader must be proficient in the business fundamentals. Hopefully that is obvious. But once those fundamentals are secured, implementing the steps above will create not only a flourishing workplace but also better results. I have seen this firsthand. In 2009 – admittedly a tough year – our company had $39M in revenue, and in 2023, we bumped up over $1 billion in revenue. There are a lot of factors that drove that growth, but none was more important than our desire and effort to create a flourishing workplace that allowed our team to thrive.

A legitimate question is, if these steps are so obvious and provide the results I claim, why doesn’t everyone focus on them? It comes down to how leaders view the cost of implementing these ideas. If a leader considers the list above and focuses on the cost, either the dollars or time, of implementing them, they will hesitate. They will see these ideas as expenses on an operating statement that they are trying to optimize. However, viewing these steps as an investment will totally change a leader’s perspective and probably their organization. Investing in a flourishing workplace is an investment with a huge return: in fact, it may be the single best way you can invest your capital for an outsized return. Great leaders see it this way.

There is one important caveat a leader should understand before investing in a flourishing workplace; something that was made clear to me last summer while taking a course at the London School of Economics. Investments in a flourishing workplace have an outsized return, UNLESS you make the investments just for the financial return. If you are trying to manipulate others just to improve your organization’s financial results, people will see through the hypocrisy, and it won’t work. However, if you are doing it because it is the right thing to do, the results will be great.

A flourishing workplace makes the lives of your employees better while also improving your results. What leader wouldn’t want that?

Written by Bill Yeargin.
Have you read?
The World’s Best Medical Schools.
The World’s Best Universities.
The World’s Best International High Schools.
The World’s Best Business Schools.
The World’s Best Fashion Schools.
The World’s Best Hospitality And Hotel Management Schools.