Print This Post

Articles

Your Role in a Leadership Position in Today’s Organization

Organizations have only 3 courses with which to conduct business: people, time and money. How effective an organization is with time and money is totally dependent on how effective they are with people. Money is replaceable, people are replaceable but time is not, consequently organizations have become sensitive to the issues around leadership and people in order to maximize their time based resource. Organizations are finding that by creating effective working environments, and people friendly cultures, by creating meaningful work opportunities they are reaping the rewards by way of increased productivity, employee loyalty, employee retention and motivation and ultimately better bottom lines. Organizations are becoming better managers of their intellectual capital.

Creating employee loyalty is not the same process as before. To create employee loyalty, organizations must constantly respond to people issues, to treat their human resource as their most valuable resource. This does not mean organizations should coddle or fuss over their employees. It does mean organizations must create adult-adult relationships, delegate meaningful tasks and assignments, and nurture effective relationships between employee-employer.

From a leadership perspective, it means that leadership skills and interpersonal skills are fine-tuned. That the role of leader (so is also of coach, facilitator, mentor versus the old style boss and gun slinger! Leadership skills and management skills are learned skills. Leaders and managers are increasingly required to manage two opposing thoughts at one time and still function at high level, including:

• Providing more direction from leadership and more autonomy on the front line.
• Creating a business environment in which people have the freedom to work, yet one that holds everyone accountable for end results.
• Giving more clarity for expected outcomes and removing restrictions on how to achieve them.
• Making guidelines for predictability but being flexible to test the change daily.
• Consistently communicating competitive strategies in an unpredictable environment in which change is the norm.
• Being preoccupied with cost reduction while keeping an unwavering commitment to providing unique customer service.
• Recognizing that one disgruntled customer (internal or external) is too many, but going all out with the help of the frontline to find every dissatisfied customer.

The behaviours that leaders model directly influence the culture of the organization. To ensure the culture is created that is supportive of the strategic goals of an organization, the leadership must demonstrate behaviours that are deemed winning! Leaders must walk their talk! Employees will knowingly or unknowingly model their behaviours of their leaders thus perpetuating a culture that is either desired or undesired.

Organizations that aspire to be leaders in their field are proactive in engineering their working culture to reap large returns from their intellectual capital. This isn’t about being altruistic; this is about growing the bottom line. Organizations who are desperate to catch up spend enormous amounts of time and money on fixing “stuff”, falling into the trap of flavor of the month “fixits”. Aspiring companies, create new rules to live and work by that assist them to achieve their goals – they also share and celebrate their success with their employees.

By aligning the internal work culture with the strategic goals, organizations can expect to gain a significant competitive advantage. They will experience a decrease in turnover, improved external image for the purpose of attracting high quality employees, an increase in profitability, an increase in innovation and ultimately overall organizational success.