The office culture of the top leader in your organization will be the same for the rest of the organization as well. Conjure up in your mind, or on paper, what you want to see. Tell your managers what it looks like. Walk the walk. As we learned from our research, the attitudes, beliefs and values of an organization define its culture, and the head of the "beast" will drive the whole body.

2. The most productive companies train and promote effective managers. This statement assumes that you selected the right people for your organization in the first place. Then you trained them to do the job you hired them for with the understanding that their training would be ongoing.
AMPCs constantly develop effective managers. They watch for excellent communication skills, strong leadership, creative thinking, team play, efficient work habits, achievement, development of others, and self-development. AMPCs give their managers the information and resources they need to understand and develop their own teams. They encourage coaching. They encourage the success of subordinates.
 
3. The most productive companies use employees in the best ways possible. In the "old days," idle employees might have run personal errands for the boss. In today's high-performance landscape, there are no idle employees. If you see them in your organization, you are not working for an MPC.

Just as defining the culture starts at the top, effective employee utilization begins there too, with an eye to designing a company where every job is dedicated to executing strategy in the most efficient way possible. No matter what a worker's job is, he is guided by a job description and knows what he is expected to achieve. MPCs complete projects quickly because they are lean. They rely on contract workers or temporary employees to help them over seasonal or temporary, non-recurring bumps in production. They increase their number of full-time, permanent employees only if there is a proven need for it.

4. The most productive companies encourage high employee effectiveness. And the only way to do this is to know everything possible about your employees—know them better than they know themselves. Understand what they do well and what they do best. Know their interests so you know where they will be most effective.
How do you gain this knowledge? Through assessments, surveys, postings of internal openings, nudging when necessary, and managerial development. Don't forget that managers sometimes hold their people back. Find out who does this and why, and find a way to stop it.

5. The most productive companies recognize and reward innovation. Chances are that the CEO is very good at this and that her managers need to get better at it. CEOs are often most familiar with the fact that the small innovations are priceless. Did someone figure out a way to make a stubborn piece of machinery work better? Who cured the delay problems in the shipping department by making a simple change to the order form?

Some organizations listen too hard for the cheer when they issue a press release about a life-changing new product or service. Cheers are nice, but they are rare. Top leaders have control over their own cheering sections, and they use that control liberally when an employee doing his job well figures out a way to improve something. Encourage the exchange of ideas and an open dialogue. Urge people to take calculated risks by not punishing them if the results are less than you, or they, wanted. Always focus on action instead of control.

Do you see your organization as you read this? If your answer is an honest yes, then you already rank among America's Most Productive Companies. If your answer is a maybe or a no, what are you going to do about it?