Over Your GGOB Honeymoon Phase? So Was My Company

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Newbies to the Great Game, seasoned company owners, and CEOs alike are often bothered by this question: How do I get my leaders and front-line employees more engaged in The Game?

A few years back, I was asking this question at my own company, Tasty Catering. While our company soared immediately following the implementation of GGOB, our Game engagement faded after about eight months. Although financial improvements were still evident on our scoreboard, I could tell by the faces and body language in our weekly Huddle that something was “off.” We needed a boost.

I reached out to the GGOB home office and underwent some additional training. I discovered that while we had done a good job of self-implementing with scoreboards and a well-designed Huddle, we weren’t evolving or involving the team. We were doing a poor job of connecting the dots between people’s daily actions, attitudes, and behaviors to the scoreboard, Critical Number™, and gain share plan.

Part of this stemmed from the design team that created our Game, who were not intentional about involving others and encouraging them to take the field—they still “owned” our Game. Other team members did not feel as involved in the Huddling process, partially because they didn’t understand the relevance of the weekly scoreboard numbers to their own jobs and lives. Essentially, we were not answering, “What’s in it for me?”

After realizing this, we started filling different Huddle positions (leaders, scribe, computer, analysis, wrap-up, etc.) with employees outside of the design team. Interest began to increase. The next step for us was to create team scoreboards that helped establish a line-of-sight for each employee and team as to how they impacted the all-company scoreboard. We wanted people to see what impact their actions had on those often-times intimidating numbers. Following that, we developed a succession plan for line-item ownership which doubled the number of employees involved in forecasting.

With our new direction, engagement soared to new heights and the faces and body language at Huddles improved drastically. The lag indicator—dramatic increase in financial gains—soon followed.

By involving our employees in The Game, the company soon didn’t need the owners; everyone took ownership of themselves and their numbers. This experience (and free time I now had) taught me that I wanted to become a GGOB coach.

As an owner of a growing business, The Great Game of Business is the easiest way to own and operate a company. Tasty Catering is now in its seventh year of The Game and the numbers continue to prove the collective wisdom of the employees could run the company better than the three owners.

In 2018, we hit record highs for sales and profit—and that was while the three owners worked less in the business than any previous year since the company was founded in 1989! It was quite the 30th anniversary present to see Tasty running so efficiently at the hands of engaged employees.