By Andrew Saffron
What is the multiplier effect | How people who enable others are the staff you need to attract and retain for a positive company culture (and how to spot them)
How can we all have a ‘multiplier effect’? How can we manage our impact on others so that we enable and encourage those around us to continuously raise the performance bar?
Continuously raising the performance bar means ensuring that everyone understands that to work here, you have two jobs: 1) the job you were hired to do; and 2) to continuously look for faster, better, cheaper ways of doing things.
Sadly, in many organisations, the weight of day-to-day activities often stops employees from doing this. They don’t see that it’s a false economy to see an irritatingly slow process and wait for someone else to do something about it because “I just don’t have the time.” They don’t see the dividend that would be paid next week, if they stopped and fixed the problem today.
So what is the secret to creating a high-performance culture? The multiplier effect. Employees or leaders who are multipliers not only do they do their job brilliantly well, but they also enable everyone they come into contact with to do their job brilliantly well too. Not just their teammates. Not just their peers. Everyone. The other people in the meeting they’re in. The person from another department who needs some information.
The junior person who’s learning how to do their job. The project team whose project is going to heavily impact their department. Everyone.
This diagram shows what I call the Four Quadrants of behaviour, one of which is the Multiplier – you’ll see the alternatives to this are clear. None of them are performing. None of them are adequate. None of them are acceptable.
Figure 1: from Better Culture, Faster (p. 35) by Andrew Saffron (published by Practical Inspiration Publishing).
Bottom-left quadrant: Dead Loss
To be blunt, these people have a negative impact on performance. They don’t do their job properly and they get in the way of others doing their job properly.
Bottom-right quadrant: Cheerleaders
These people might seem great at first (particularly if they’ve just replaced someone who was horrible) but it won’t take long before their people realise that because their task skills aren’t up to scratch, they can’t set direction, can’t challenge them, can’t answer their questions. So, their impact might initially be positive, but it will drift through neutral and end up being negative.
Top-left quadrant: Brilliant Jerk
This is the tricky one. Because you could argue that, because of their great technical skills, they’re actually adding something to the organisation. Yes, they might add something… at first. But I believe – in fact, I know – that this is a short-term thing. It doesn’t take long for the impact of these people’s poor behaviour to start impacting other people’s ability to do their job.
Top-right quadrant: Multipliers
Once again, people operating in this quadrant are having a multiplier effect because they do their job brilliantly well AND they enable everyone they work with to do their job brilliantly well.
So, how do you ensure that you are a Multiplier and how do you spot Multipliers (so that you can make them feel valued and help others to copy and paste from them)? There are 3 key behaviours:
Empowerment of others
I know what you’re thinking – a much over-used and abused term. But I define empowerment as “devolving decision-making authority to the place of greatest information.” In other words, allowing the people who know most about something, get on with it. And yes, that’s means without checking their work and even not weighing in with your huge intellect and experience!
A lack of empowerment is a productivity issue (decisions getting escalated into a bottleneck), it’s a quality issue (decisions being made by those with less knowledge than the person who escalated), and it’s a customer service issue (as a result of sub-optimal productivity and quality).
And if you’re thinking “I can’t possibly let that person make the decision… they won’t do as good a job of it as me,” then that’s your fault. Either because you haven’t given them the skills to be able to do it well, or you’ve tried to give them the skills, they haven’t learned, and you’ve done nothing about it.
Willingness to help
I truly believe that helpfulness is a key distinguishing feature of high-performing organisations. Within this type of environment, everyone is enabled and encouraged to think about how they can be of greatest service to others in the organisation. Some think of “helpfulness” as a bit anaemic, a bit cutesy. They’re wrong. Imagine if everyone in your organisation was doing their best to help everyone else in the organisation to get the best result.
Clear focus
Unless you’re very clear about what needs to get done, when it needs to get done and the resources required to deliver it, empowerment and helpfulness are useless. People must be held to account for delivery. This might sound like Management 101, but how often in your organisation do people find themselves facing conflicting priorities or too many priorities or changing priorities? A relentless drive to ensure that you’re clear about focus areas and that everyone else is 100% clear on them too, takes a lot of pressure out of the system.
When recruiting, you have to look for evidence that someone can operate in this way. If you get a whiff of this person leading with their ego, then it’s a hard no. If they talk about setting goals (mission control) and then letting others get on with it (empowered execution) then it’s a bite their arm off yes.
Multipliers begin with a heavy dose of self-awareness and the humility to know needs to change. Start with yourself and then insist on this as a prerequisite to work in your team.
About the author
Andrew Saffron is a world-leading culture change expert, the author of Better Culture, Faster and the director of Innermost Consulting.
Figure 1 reference: Saffron, A. (2024) Better Culture, Faster. Practical Inspiration Publishing.
