Written by Julie Johnson, Advocate for People & Culture, Mountain Leverage
Flourishing is the unique intersection of peak performance and highest satisfaction. When businesses unapologetically make flourishing their ultimate goal, they unlock a meaningful return on relationships with employees, customers, partners, and communities.
At Mountain Leverage, flourishing isn’t a side effect – it’s the intent. We’ve designed our team and our solutions around it, and we see that many of our customers share in this goal as they build internal programs and external strategies to enable the flourishment of all who depend on them.
Whether you’re in a busy warehouse, a small nonprofit, a corporate office, or, like us, a remote team, we at Mountain Leverage believe and can testify that focusing on flourishing will improve both performance and enjoyment across the board.
Here are four ways to embed this people-first approach into your business.
1. Enabling Flourishing for Employees
Before leaders can begin to think of profitability from customers and partners outside their own walls, they must consider their internal environment. Employees are the first stakeholders to buy into what the business is ultimately selling, and that doesn’t mean the SKUs.
At the end of the day, what is your business’s mission? Do leaders believe in the end goal and consistently cultivate a culture of championship for that goal?
For example, a grocery distributor’s focus on making margins while compromising quality will lose passionate workers who perform highest when they can get behind the mission at large. A competing grocer, though, will win over the market by first winning over employees. Show employees how your fresh, responsibly sourced, on-time products are elevating the everyday lives of consumers just like them, and those workers will show up the next day ready to pick faster, pay more attention, and see a longer, more fulfilling career path within the company.
Another way to ensure employees are flourishing is to foster an environment of two-way trust and championship. Hire high-performers and recognize that these team members don’t need micromanaging and outdated processes. All-star employees who will invest years of their lives into your company want and deserve freedom to grow in their performance, not by being hyperanalyzed for every performance number, but through helpful, real-time feedback. They also perform their best when working with smart technology and streamlined processes, both of which come naturally and enjoyably to today’s modern workforce. A great way to ensure they’re not getting burned out on the job is to build a benefits package that rewards and protects high-performers with even more freedom: flexible schedules, additional time off, wellness incentives, and interest-led career planning.
Intentionally propagating your company’s mission among employees first and designing an environment that fosters their flourishing will pay off in dividends as you watch dedicated team members thrive individually and as contributors to your bottom line.
Show your team that you trust them, and watch them rise to perform their best as they experience that they can trust you, too.
2. Prioritizing Peak Performance for Customers
As a business leader, you’re likely, and understandably, most concerned about your operation’s profitability. However, prioritizing customer needs goes beyond merely providing a product or service on time – it’s about creating a seamless, responsive, and reliable experience where customers know they can look forward to receiving your products and they can trust you as an entity. In fact, investing in the customer experience will result in key drivers of long-term profitability, including increased repeat business and customer referrals.
Prioritizing your operation’s peak performance means striving for zero errors, zero safety incidents, and minimal overhead costs. This kind of number crunching should involve a trustworthy supply chain technology partner and a combination of solutions that achieve peak accuracy, safety, and labor efficiency.
Outside of the warehouse floor, businesses that actively seek and listen to customer feedback and quickly adapt to their needs can gain a competitive edge. It’s only through live, personal, and regular conversations that your team will learn about your customers’ optimal delivery schedules, regulatory challenges, or operational needs that you can champion and support proactively.
By focusing on creating value for their customers, companies can establish more robust and profitable customer relationships, laying the groundwork for mutual success and flourishing.
3. Building on Trust with Partners
This one is straightforward – to ensure mutual flourishing among partner companies, you must be unapologetic in holding your partners to the high standard of dedication, trust, and transparency that you would want them to experience with you.
Companies that partner with you in technology, consulting, or network referrals will benefit from open lines of communication every time. That may look like holding roadmap discussions before details are concrete, sharing industry trends and data as soon as possible to allow for planning, or disclosing mutual customer insights so that both partners can champion the customer on both sides.
Trust in partnerships is really supported by transparency. Do your partners keep you in the loop amid product changes or shifts in demand? Do you maintain open communication with your partners, making sure they understand how your partnership plays a key part in your company’s strategy and offering strategic value in return? Establishing and nurturing trust with partners ensures smooth, efficient operations, which directly contribute to profitability.
By investing in these partnerships, business leaders cultivate a network that supports their strategic objectives and contributes to a multi-prong business ecosystem that flourishes amid market volatility.
4. Sharing Resources with the Community
Finally, one of the most rewarding aspects of running a business is being in a unique position to positively impact the communities around us. Many socially-minded companies give financially to local causes, and this is a highly effective way to multiply wealth locally. Whether a local fund is available or not, your organization may have non-monetary resources to share that can offer just as much positive impact.
Consider running a local internship for high school students or a fellowship for young professionals, where you can offer a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will benefit that aspiring individual’s career path and life choices. Maybe your team can build an intentional partnership with nearby schools to offer events, workshops, coaching, and networking opportunities. Imagine being a high school student in your area, with your own local challenges and opportunities – what content and engagement would resonate the most?
Final Words on Flourishing
By prioritizing people, community, and values over financial gains, a business with flourishing as its ultimate goal will retain top talent, attract even more customers, thrive with trusted partners, experience increased profitability, and be in the best position to share its flourishing with the communities around it.
What are some ways your business supports the flourishing of your employees, customers, partners, and communities? What new programs or strategies could your organization prioritize today, so that, next year, you can look back and watch how flourishing improved across the board?
Mountain Leverage has been doing this for 20+ years. We would love to hear your ideas and would be happy to help you bring them to fruition. Let’s talk!
