The corporate jungle and the corporate zoo
The Corporate Zoo
Most of us are familiar with the term Corporate Jungle due to the politics involved in each company. Some policies can be quite vicious and detrimental to the company, as there will always be casualties, just like in the jungle.
However, not every organization or corporation is a corporate jungle. Due to a certain level of success over the years, some companies have slowly transformed into a corporate zoo. There are some organizations that were created to be Corporate Zoo from the beginning.
Companies that have been transformed into corporate zoos might have started out as a company trying to survive. Most of the initial group of people are highly motivated to make sure the company is successful. Once the company reaches a certain level of achievement by accumulating sufficient cash reserves or after going public, many of the top managers and early employees begin to slow down and become complacent. Slowly but surely, the transformation will begin.
Just like the animals that live in the zoo, they don’t need to hunt to eat. Most lost their ability and instinct to hunt. If someone tries to return a lion born and raised in the zoo to the wild, the lion will most likely die due to lack of hunting ability.
Corporate Zoo corporations are set up to maintain systems and not for any competition in the marketplace. The employees who work there must be mentally prepared so that even though they have good job security and a stable monthly salary, they must be mentally prepared so that there are not many opportunities for promotion. We still need such organizations around the world to maintain the systems.
The top management challenge
C-suite leaders running business corporations need to balance the organization somewhere between the corporate jungle and the corporate zoo. Companies need to provide employees with some level of security, some comfort, and some certainty that their hard work will be rewarded.
On the other hand, we also need our employees to remain hungry for a higher level of success, to remain enthusiastic to take the company to greater heights, and to remain competitive in the face of a rapidly changing business environment.
When employees are too aggressive, they sometimes tend to focus too much on outdoing each other and there can be a lot of infighting. We need to direct your energy and attention to external competition, not internal battles.
payment and bonus
Most top managers love to lavishly reward their hard-working employees. Once the company is doing well, let’s pay our staff above the market rate, so we can keep them for a long time. Beware, overpaying employees is a sure way to start turning your company into a corporate zoo.
To keep them competitive, don’t pay them well, reward them well. Let me explain, divide the payment package into 2 portions:
1. The base salary
2. The monthly performance bonus
Keep the base salary slightly below the market rate. This will cause a feeling of dissatisfaction and create the desire to want to outperform your competitors in other companies in order to earn more.
When the team and company reach the monthly performance target, reward everyone handsomely in the monthly performance bonus so that when they combine pay and bonus, what they receive is well above the market norm.
In this way, companies remain competitive as everyone must stay on the hunt continuously. The pursuit of continuous creativity and innovation; the hunt to produce better products and provide better services; the search for process improvement and waste reduction; the quest to increase sales and create greater customer satisfaction; the search for quality leaders, better managers and stronger team synergy. The hunt continues!