When you demonstrate your commitment to your team, they reward you with increased effort, trust, and support.
We tend to think of the challenges of managing a virtual or nontraditional work team as a rather recent phenomenon made possible by advances in internet and communication technology. But more than 50 years ago, British entrepreneur Dame Stephanie Shirley built a successful software company that employed and inspired thousands of people, most of whom worked from home.
From Shirley’s autobiography, Let It Go, we learn her success is even more remarkable in light of the fact that she escaped from Nazi Germany at the age of five as a Kindertransport child refugee sent to England. In school, she showed a real aptitude and interest for math, but ran into significant roadblocks because of gender bias in post-war Britain. In fact, she had to obtain special permission to receive instruction in mathematics from an adjacent boy’s school because it was not offered at her all-girls school.
Early in her career, she worked at the British Post Office Research Station building computers from scratch and then writing machine code to operate them. Finally, striking out on her own, Shirley founded a small software company. Freelance Programmers was created with only six pounds of startup capital. Undaunted, she successfully recruited and trained a workforce of talented stay-at-home mothers who had few other choices for employment at the time. These employees were excited to make a difference in technology, expand their role as women, and support their families at home.
Shirley pioneered how she connected her employees together and motivated them to achieve more than what society approved at that time by using flexible work methods, job sharing, profit sharing, and employee ownership. She adopted a “Trust the Staff” philosophy to allow each employee to feel valued. To manage projects, she used flow charts to define the tasks to be done and implement respective timelines. Communication was primarily conducted through the use of a simple telephone.
This was all accomplished at a time when Shirley aggressively fought the battles for equal work and equal pay for women. She couldn’t even open a bank account without her husband’s permission. She changed her name to “Steve” in her business correspondence in order to be viewed as a legitimate business person.
Now Dame Stephanie Shirley is a wealthy philanthropist and true inspiration for her team and other women in business. When asked why she gives away so much of her time and money she humbly replies, "I do it because of my personal history; I need to justify the fact that my life was saved so many years ago."
Dame Shirley knew the importance of providing for the unique needs of her team members to inspire commitment. It is because of her pioneering spirit and her ability to unite her people around a common goal that she successfully built one of the first women-led technology companies. She understood that when you make decisions without creative input from the appropriate people, they may respond with outward acceptance, but never fully commit to supporting the decision or policy. Conversely, when you include your people in decision-making, shaping policies, and adopting programs, you demonstrate that you value them. When you recognize achievements, you reinforce your commitment to your people’s success. When they see how you demonstrate your commitment to them, the team rewards you with increased effort, trust, and support. It is with this formula that Dame Stephanie Shirley truly learned how to write the right code to engage her people.
Here are a few points for reflection: