Organizational Awakening

On those rare occasions that you actually have a few minutes to sit in your office and think about your organization, is your experience usually one of despair and frustration?  Do your thoughts center around problems with quality concerning the outputs of your organization?  Are you often frustrated with the lack of confidence you have in your employees or with their reliability?  If any of these are your reality, there is some comfort in the fact that you are in the majority.  Of course this is of little solace, since your main objective is to try and figure out the fix instead of joining a support group, sit in a circle, and bare your troubles to the world.


There is not a business or management text book sitting on your shelf that is not packed with solutions ranging from theory to application. The problem is not usually solved from the reading of this material; it obviously needs the energy of your being and soul in deciding which of them is really the long-term solution(s) and your commitment, for a good portion of the remainder of your life, implementing and perfecting them into an already developed organization, that is usually resistant to change.  Excursions to the book store allow you to witness rows and shelves of every imaginable topic on leadership and business management, from operational management, heavily ladened with mathematical applications, all the way down to the three minute pep talk on how to be a better people person.  I take nothing away from most of these materials; they each have powerful messages, truth and information.  Most of them are highly specific and exhaustive in their address of  important components; lessons we can all learn about successful operations.  But before you decided to move into the specifics, concentrating on the foundation is where the real awakening in your organization occurs, or a more playful analogy might be, The Ah Ha Light Comes On!

Managing people in changing organizations is part of what is currently being done by supervisors, managers, and executives.  People, as human assets, are the glue that holds all of the other assets, such as financial and physical ones, together and guides their use to better achieve results.  How effectively people at all levels contribute to organizational results is part of the challenge, and designing recruitment, hiring, and retention systems to ensure that human talent is used effectively and efficiently to accomplish organizational goals is critical to sustain and to provide for reliable organizational success.  Successful organizations must work continually to create a culture that emphasizes effectiveness and productivity.

 

The full engagement of employees is a crucial contributor and indisputable link to effective organizational contributions, but more importantly, that engagement must be complementary to the organization’s value system in order to realize, and fully benefit from, sustained success.  Obtaining full engagement from employees is directly and proportionately related to how employees are selected in the hiring process; in other words, the organization obtaining the correct match between a prospective employee’s overall attributes and capabilities (knowledge, skills, and abilities) with the job’s technical and performance requirements (job description and requirements) and obtaining harmony with the employee’s personality and belief system to the organization’s value system.  If you want to hit on all eight cylinders, the key is within this concept.

The real starting point for this process is your organization's value system.  It is the heart and soul of your business and drives the behaviors of your employees.  If you were to make a list of the characteristics or behaviors that would describe the organizational culture you would like to see, what would those be?  And more importantly, how important is each as a contributor to organizational success?  This is not an easy task, and it is one that without due diligence, the foundation to all the work to come, from our future discussions, will not produce the maximum reward that you so earnestly desire.  Do not think in terms of what your employees are currently doing or not doing.  Think about what is important to your customer base, both internally and externally, about what quality and consistency really mean to your profit margin and how they apply to your operational components, about employee ownership and responsibility for what they do, about results and achievement, about decision making, and so forth.  The list is not endless.  Typically, you should be able to identify 35 to 40 of these behaviors or characteristics that are really the meat and potatoes of what you do and what you need to maximize your long-term efforts.

My next message will address the first of many phases of what you will need to do with this very, precious and valuable list.