![]() ![]() He was an individual, who was known and who mattered. The young sales associate realized that he wasn’t just one of thousands of frontliners. ![]() The manager, who had met him when he was hired, recognized him and remembered his name. When thinking about how crucial human connections are to human magic, I always remember a young sales associate who recounted the district manager’s visit to the store where he worked. That link made each employee feel personally invested in the company’s purpose and gave everyone the energy that, combined with their skills, drove much of the store’s superior performance. I found out that the manager asked every single person on his team, “What is your dream?” He’d then work with each of them to help achieve it, largely by linking their personal dream to the company’s purpose. When I was still CEO, I visited one of our stores near Boston, hoping to find out why it performed better than others. Encouraging every employee to reflect on and share what drives them, as well as articulating and constantly feeding the connection between that personal purpose and the company’s, is therefore one of the most crucial roles of any leader, from top executives to store managers. It’s the link to individual drive that gives a company purpose soul and legs. By reflecting on how this connected with our work, we realized that our individual aspirations to do something good in the world connected and converged, which helped us define the company purpose. One of my most memorable moments at Best Buy was an executive team dinner where we shared what drove us personally. Use the following six ingredients to create your company’s unique recipe for human magic. So, what does? In my experience, it takes several mutually reinforcing elements to create an environment that unleashes the kind of human magic necessary for a company purpose to take root and flourish. Multiple studies have confirmed that, for any work involving cognitive or creative skills, financial rewards do not drive motivation and performance. The problem with this approach, as executive coaching pioneer and author Sir John Whitmore once pointed out, is that if you treat people like donkeys, they will perform like donkeys. The traditional corporate approach to motivating people has been a combination of carrots and sticks: a system of financial incentives designed to mobilize everyone around a plan designed by a few smart people at the top. It’s in that environment that Best Buy’s purpose of improving lives through technology has been able to materialize and blossom. What we had done was create an environment where employees were excited to express their untapped individual and collective potential. Had Best Buy changed its entire sales force? Or concocted a better system of incentives? No and no. He’d found sales associates genuinely engaged and interested in helping him, he said, whereas a few years earlier, shopping at Best Buy left him frustrated, as no one in the stores seemed to either care or be able to provide a great service and experience. In 2019, for example, I received a firsthand testimonial of human magic at work when a senior executive at an event I attended shared with me how shocked he’d been after a recent visit to a Best Buy store. ![]() It is the kind of environment that can unleash what I call “human magic” and result in inordinately great results, like what we experienced at Best Buy as part of the company’s resurgence. A fertile environment is one where employees have a spring in their steps in pursuit of a noble purpose, and where everyone can become the best, biggest, most beautiful version of themselves. ![]() Similarly, no company purpose, regardless of how well it is defined, can materialize unless the company environment is fertile. Nothing grows in bad soil, no matter how good the seeds and water are. #Thrive meaning in business how to#Yet while many companies are articulating their purpose, much remains to be learned about how to create environments that can help turn intentions into reality. There is no longer much debate that companies must be about more than maximizing profits. ![]()
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