Organizational special sauce: an intangible force
“Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.”
You may know this line as the commercial jingle describing the Big Mac that McDonalds’ created to compete with the Hardee’s Husky, which came with essentially the same condiments, including Hardee’s own special sauce.
Over the years, the term “special sauce” has been re-deployed beyond the burger wars, from condiment to handy metaphor. Management and organizational commentators, like me, have co-opted the term to identify a level of organizational performance beyond extra effort. Here’s how I’ve observed organizational special sauce in the marketplace.
Organizational special sauce isn’t a strategy or campaign, nor can it be achieved with a slogan or mission statement. No special sauce was ever the child of an algorithm, big data, or other amalgamation of ones and zeros. To the chagrin of Wall Street quants, organizational special sauce is an incalculable, unprojectable, and intangible force. It’s 100% performance leverage produced by a single active ingredient: human beings loving to work together toward something they all believe in.
This leverage kicks in like a turbo after quantifiable, tangible leverage reaches its RPM red line. Every business would like to have organizational special sauce but few ever do, because the elements that foster it are not easy to achieve, including, but not limited to:
- Hiring the best people, who are then respected and valued.
- Excellence as a non-negotiable performance standard assumed by all stakeholders.
- Leaders demonstrate all the aspects that define the word: courage, integrity, morals, ethics, commitment, decisiveness, humanity.
- People are not interchangeable parts, as if they were modules.
- Corporate values flow to the organization’s last mile as a minimum expectation.
- Delegation includes responsibility AND authority.
- Corrective action first presumes shortfalls result from best efforts, and the first management step is redemption.
Here’s how organizational special sauce manifests:
- Peerless products and services.
- Industry-leading employee retention.
- Prospective employees line up to join the organization.
- Employees and partners are proud of and claim the organization’s excellent reputation.
- Ethical actions and integrity manifest as devotion to the unenforceable.
- Customers become the organization’s best salespeople.
- Teams work harder than they ever did, while having more fun than they ever had.
- And the classic marker: quantum leap performance.
You can’t demand, buy, or acquire the intangible leverage of special sauce, you can only foster an environment that gives rise to it. It’s an engagement sweet spot that produces results beyond expectations and projections – quantum leap performance.
Organizational special sauce is possible, but rare in public corporations, because it doesn’t conform to the analytical expectations of the Wall Street 90-day conference call. Our here on Main Street it’s more prevalent, where small business leaders know special sauce comes from the intangible resolve of their valued and respected employees.
Write this on a rock ... Contributing to organizational special sauce is one of the hardest and most beautiful things you’ll ever do at work.
Jim Blasingame is host of the nationally syndicate radio show The Small Business Advocate and author of the multi-award-winning book The Age of the Customer: Prepare for the Moment of Relevance.
