Would You Like to Know How to Broadcast Your Workplace Culture?
Corporate Culture—For most, the untapped key to performance excellence!
Spreading the gospel of cultural excellence is simple. However, to do it requires openness and consistency. The quest for cultural excellence is a little like dieting–there are more plans available to use than any of us have time to try, but in reality none of them work very well; at least not without a strong commitment the health of your entire body. According to research by IBM and others, between 60 and 90 percent of organizational change initiatives fail. It’s no wonder. Making the changes that lead to excellence is not an overnight pursuit–it’s a long term process that often means rewiring a company’s fundamental DNA.
Our society is much different than it was in the last century. Younger generations have different individual desires and different ideas of what they expect and need from a workplace
and their leaders. That shift in social ideology requires that leaders are equipped with different knowledge and skills than our predecessors needed to succeed. To adapt and address the needs TLI has developed and offers the NEW leadership style (GSC).
Cultural excellence today is grounded in the organizational leaders’ willingness and desire to make personal changes within themselves. By doing so, the leader’s behaviors set the standard of performance and then radiate (broadcast) out into their workplace communities and business. A corporate culture is inextricably linked to the leaders acquired skills, behaviors, beliefs and standards of operations committed to. Meaningful cultural change begins with determining what environmental activities and factors reflect your organization’s beliefs, values, behaviors and results. In addition, what you want your company to do within the industry and communities it serves and what your company desires to become. The greatest skill that top cultural organizations have developed is its ability to harness the ideas and wisdom of its employees and apply them to that grand vision.
At Team-builder Leadership Institute we help organizations become the top performing companies through our premier training program (Compass System) ensuring their leaders are masterful in the three core competencies of leadership, interpersonal communication and work performance fundamental skills, as well as:
- Developing commercial acumen and business judgment
- Executing and achieve results through their peers and subordinates
- Persuading and influence stakeholders
- Creating Synergies through working in partnerships
- Providing vision and direction
- Driving change and innovation
- Inspiring people to follow them
- Building talent for competitive advantage
What the ‘Top 100 Companies to Work for’ create is a continuous feedback culture. At Team-builder Leadership Institute we develop this openness and flow by introducing and instilling in the organization a “Code of Participation” (COP). Our Goals, Structure, Culture (GSC) leadership development training, provides a unified sense of purpose along with a clear understanding of what to do when and how to create a culture of harmony and high performance. It instills longevity and suitability while creating an ironclad leadership succession development system. The culture is created and perpetuated by the ongoing agreement and commitment to that high performance culture. With the culture in place, a new leader doesn’t change the organization when they begin as most like to. They instead are assimilated into the high performance culture. The culture helps everyone scan for environmental and performance needs that must be adjusted to in order to maintain optimum performance ensuring everyone including the leader has the flexibility to adjust to circumstances and needs.
This culture features systems and techniques that inspire community input and feedback, which empowers the entire organization and creates behaviors that trains employees in the art of feedback and collaboration. This provides companies with valuable new ideas and innovation on a daily basis. Though no one can promise instant success by committing to this path of organizational wholeness. No one can provide you with the motivation to achieve this; you have to have the desire within you. But we can give you the tools to create your own culture of excellence.
Pursuing excellence is unique for each individual and organization that reaches for it, but they all have trouble measuring success and whether they’re achieving their goals. Sometimes, even knowing what constitutes cultural excellence can be a stumbling block, if you haven’t defined what this looks like in advance. The key to the genesis of cultural excellence is collaborating and deciding what excellence looks like for you and your organization. What does an excellent manufacturing process look like? What is good customer service? As your unique culture begins to take shape, use your predefined benchmarks to see if your changes are moving you in the right direction.
Here’s How You Can Effect Cultural Change Today-
• Create a master cultural plan. Define what excellence means in detail. Be as clear and articulate as possible, and set up reasonable timelines and benchmarks.
• Survey your work teams. Studies show long paper questionnaires are often ignored. Instead, meet with your workforce community together and in one-on-one meetings and personally ask them two or three specific questions that move the dial on your cultural vision.
• Solicit outside help and fresh eyes. Whether a consultant such as Gallup or a local management coach, they’ll help identify problems you can’t see yourself because you’re often too close, or too familiar with your environment.
• Talk with the industry peers. Find local authorities and businesses that you’d like to emulate and learn what they’re doing right and use their culture as a benchmark to measure your progress.
• Survey employees anonymously. Use the process of an in-depth biannual employee survey that asks detailed questions and solicits input. Creating a climate in which employees can express criticism without worry is essential. Conduct a bracket-style competition to inspire all employees to reflect and innovate on each another’s ideas. In addition to the improvements realized on the technical side of the audit business, the game results in lots of small cost-saving changes as well.
The reality is that society’s notion of recognition tends to be antiquated. In this new generation of workforce beliefs with Millennials and Gen X-Y-Z generation; autonomy, self-expression, flexibility and free time are more important rewards than ever.
Our Suggestions For Your Organization:
If you want to create a culture of excellence, it’s a wise investment to study the companies that do it best. The results are its annual lists of Best Companies to Work for in America.
The main thing all top performing cultural companies have in common is that their leaders and managers are visible and openly convey how valuable each employee is to the company. The result of this practice, and beliefs and culture is a high degree of trust, which makes people commit to their positions and performance. In the top 10 best performing companies, more than 90 percent of employees said they trusted their companies. That’s the most phenomenal result any organization could ask for.
So cultural broadcasting is at the heart and soul of the new American workforce. Your passion for inspired collaboration combined with the proven systems and techniques that create the long-term sustainability of these behaviors in your organization is what we’ll build together!
As organizational development and transformation specialists and expert I’ve seen positive changes in our business community over the past several years. Talk of “corporate culture” is everywhere. It’s fantastic that it’s becoming general knowledge that the level of success a company enjoys is a direct result of the how effectively their culture engages and mobilizes its workforce. One of the major challenges we still face however, is to make it common knowledge that an “organization’s culture” is a direct results of the leadership foundation or platform of the company.
Just as a healthy plant grows from a healthy seed so too is the organizational culture a result of its specific leadership culture. Most organizations have leadership cultures that are very laissez faire. Companies have policies and procedures but they let their managers and leaders interpret how, when, and why they apply those guidelines and rules based on their own emotions. The results are a recipe for chaos. Some leaders take a very ridged stance on rules enforcement, some are very lenient so to avoid confrontation, and some only use rules when it benefits them personally. This inconsistency is a culture killer! It strips the policies and procedures of credibility, it creates resistance to an unfair system, it creates resentment of individual leaders and at times, whole leadership teams, etc. The effects are profound, detrimental and far reaching.
When I am asked to consult with an organization that is experiencing a negative cultural or emotional work environment, apathy toward productivity or a combination of the two, more often than not I find the challenges being experienced originate in the way that leadership is being practiced within the organization. Leadership is like the practice of law or medicine, there are certain tenets that when followed ensure the most effective and positive results possible. As with any profession, the further you get away from the core values and activities that create sustainable success the more challenges you will experience and create.
Now that corporate culture has become the hot topic, there are new articles every day that espouse the five steps to this and seven steps to that, all claiming to be the key path to a positive productive corporate culture. Many are insightful but most often incomplete. They discuss issues like employee engagement, positive work environment, and hiring the right people, etc. What they usually exclude is the fact that every performance variable can be in place and aligned perfectly and if the leadership foundation is sub-standard so too will be the results and organizational culture as a whole. You cannot work around bad leadership behaviors, skills and practices because they are the foundation of any operation!
Another often espoused myth is that it is a long hard road to a positive and powerful corporate culture. I suppose it depends on your definition of “hard” but all it takes is to build-in a professional leadership standard comprised of the universal skills, techniques and behaviors that all people from any culture respond well to. It doesn’t take years of work and millions of dollars. It takes commitment by every leader in the organization to use and enforce the professional standards. It takes being willing to display and use what you expect from others while ensuring every activity is a positive step toward the goals being pursued. And to make the positive culture sustainable, it take requiring new leaders to adjust to the culture that is in place and working properly not try to change it or their part of it to their personal likes. Most of all it takes a willingness on the part of everyone to change their actions and behaviors by adding the skills and techniques that will make them a stable, positive and cohesive source of engagement and positivity for the entire workforce! Possibly the best news is, that professional leadership foundation and standard can be built into your corporate culture and it changed without even taking anyone offline as well as with far less expense than you would imagine. Contact us at The Team-builder Leadership Institute and we can help you build-in that professional leadership standard—quickly, inexpensively and permanently!
Train your leaders and build your culture!
