Want to be the Supreme Bean?

A couple posts from the always insightful Phil Gerbyshak and the beautiful and passionate Kammie Kobyleski (sorry Phil, you just don’t quite make it to beautiful!) have me thinking about how critical it is to bring our passion and positive attitude to work every day. How you celebrate doing that says a great deal about your organization’s culture…and your brand.

At McLellan Marketing Group, we embrace our sense of teamwork with a bit of proverbial tongue in cheek. Everyone is assigned a different kind of bean. Because of my habitual kidney stones, yes…you guessed it, I got kidney beans. There are lima, coffee, pinto and a variety of others.

We also printed up index sized cards that say "You’ve been beaned" and have some room to write a note. The premise is simple. When one of your teammates goes out of their way to be helpful or supportive — you bean them. You write a little note, thanking them for what they did and leave the note and one of your beans on their desk.

At the end of every month, we tally the beans. Whoever received the most beans is declared the "Supreme Bean" and heralded by everyone. They also receive a $10 gift card.

Over the years, many of the employees have created quite a collection of beans that they proudly display on their desks in a variety of creative containers.

Easy. Cheap. Fun. And a great way to declare our absolute intent to be passionate about the work we do, our clients and perhaps most of all, each other. Do you suppose when we add a team member and explain the whole bean thing, they get a sense that team focused is one of our core values?