Business Success should be measured by friendships made and community established

As a young man of 30, I was selected over several older candidates to start up a commercial banking office in Vancouver for ABN AMRO. Although I had enjoyed a good career up to that point, I was struck by this enormous opportunity to build something completely new. What would it look like? What should be the main goal for this new office?

I finally decided that my paramount goal was to build up a business where all employees had the potential to enjoy and fulfill themselves on the job – to build a real workplace community.

My office did become a great place to work and it was also highly successful by any financial measure. It became the largest and most influential foreign bank office of its kind in Western Canada. What I discovered was that happy employees gave their customers superior service, which enabled the office to grow and become profitable.

I was thrilled that many of the employees told me this office was their best workplace ever during their entire career. Many of these employees still meet together to remember the good years we enjoyed as a big happy family (with a few normal squabbles, of course).

I later worked with some of the people from that ABN AMRO office in my other executive assignments. There are several colleagues with whom I have worked with repeatedly over 2 or 3 decades, due to lasting we friendships formed. And after 3 years of retirement, I still correspond frequently with friends that I worked with.

I wish I could say that my business career was an unbroken success story from start to finish – but I would be lying. Few careers really go that way. We all face tumultuous waves of challenge. Economic downturns, organizational chaos within big companies, unhealthy politics, and wrong-headed bosses make survival in any career hazardous, even when your own performance is superior. It is like being a great sailor on a small boat on a stormy ocean. Sometimes just getting home alive is a big accomplishment.

Fortunes of companies depend on countless factors, many of which are beyond management control. However in my experience, the best guarantee for organizational success comes when management is totally dedicated to the interest of all their staff; when it becomes a real community in the work place, a big happy family.

Two of the best run businesses in Western Canada – an airline and a bank – use this formula. All employees are shareholders and receive significant rewards when their organization succeeds. The Canadian Western Bank has had the highest stock price growth for the past 5 years of any bank in North America. The airline – WestJet is a pleasure to fly with as well as decidedly successful financially in a time when making any profit whatsoever seems difficult for the airline industry.

So is working for growth and profit wrong? Absolutely not! Both goals are essential for any company to survive and succeed. But if they are the only objectives, I believe the business will have a lower chance of success and it won’t become a friendly workplace.

Both human values and financial values are immeasurably significant in business. But when these values conflict, I always value people more than money. Business choices which put finances ahead of people rarely succeed in the longer run. But seemingly few companies have embraced this vision yet.