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Complacency is perhaps the very worst thing that can take hold in a workplace, but its origins are often subtle and hard to detect.

Mostly it’s that we assume that we’re doing the basics of team-building and really taking care to run the business, but along the way we stop (or in some cases never start) actually doing these things. The obvious things are the first to get neglected because they’re so, well, obvious that we console ourselves that someone must be taking care to get them done.

Brian Scudamore and 1-800-GOT-JUNK are success stories in so many ways, but when I listened to him present at an event in Vancouver last week I was struck by how many of his achievements seem to be down to an uncanny ability to balance the big picture with the small, everyday things that incrementally allow his company to achieve his vision.

The GOT-JUNK daily huddle is a perfect example of balancing the big with the small. It’s a seven-minute daily event held at the Vancouver offices in which one team member leads and others contribute by highlighting good news, reporting on metrics and in some cases personal achievements that happened outside of work. It’s deceptively simple but brilliant in that it focuses the team on the importance of what happens every day in the context of the business’s overall targets, and the direct role each team member has in hitting these targets.

The result? Team members feel simultaneously accountable for results and empowered to make things happen. Too often we expect this kind of symbiosis to manifest itself out of the blue, when in reality it’s the dividing line between companies that flourish and those that don’t.