Transparent Teamwork - Doug McDuff - Leadership in Action- Episode #016

As a business owner, do you want more engagement from your employees? Well, if you’re not sharing the financials of the business with your employees, you’re going to be banging your head against the wall. Doug McDuff, President of Landscape America, is here to share Open Book Management and how its four simple steps can reap great rewards. Learn how to get employees more engaged and focused on a goal, not getting hung up on the negatives and how to use transparency as a powerful tool in your business. 
 
Takeaways:
Although it may seem scary, there a many benefits that come from sharing the financials of the business with your employees. Chief among those is getting more engagement from employees and communicating that business is team sport.
Open Book Management is a great concept that promotes transparency and maximizes engagement. There are 4 steps to reaching Open Book: 1. Define Winning; 2. Create a Scoreboard; 3. Make a Bonus Plan; 4. Forecast and Drive Results.
To define winning for your company, think about a metric that you can track and set a goal for it, that if reached, constitutes a win. Make sure everyone can understand the metric and how to reachthe goal. An example metric could be Gross Profit.
Create a scoreboard for tracking that metric and make sure it is visible and shared with everyone. 
The bonus plan should be tied to reaching the metric on the scoreboard. Everyone should be able to see what bonus they can earn if the business achieves the metric goal.
Forecast weekly for each of the company’s sales buckets. Don’t get stuck on only looking at past performance, by looking forward and forecasting you can make adjustments to the plan and then try to hit the new goals. 
Avoid getting hung up on only the negatives of the business, it’s important to look at the positive and what’s going well. When things are going poorly, everyone will know from the scoreboard, so keep other communication channels positive!
 
Recommended Books & Podcasts
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
EO 360 (Podcast)
Growing in the Green Industry (Podcast)

Quote of the Show
“When the employees are engaged, they're making decisions on a daily basis that, that do affect the profitability.” - Doug McDuff

Links: 
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/doug-mcduff-5110a01b
Website: landscapeamerica.com
Email: [email protected]

Shout Outs:
Dan Foley - Business Coach specializing in Open Book Management
Jocko Willink
David Goggins
Entrpreneurs Organization (EO)
Blue Hills Business Group
Massachusetts Landscape Professionals

Ways to Tune In:
Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leadership-in-action/id1585042233
Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/2t4Ksk4TwmZ6MSfAHXGkJI
Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/leadership-in-action
Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubGVhZGVyc2hpcGluYWN0aW9uLmxpdmUvZmVlZC54bWw
Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/4263fd02-8c9b-495e-bd31-2e5aef21ff6b/leadership-in-action
YouTube - https://youtu.be/bvyONWQKsNw