I often find that managers with high levels of empathy find it difficult to enforce critical workplace standards. Yet these two seemingly contradictory areas need to be complementary of one another within a manager to produce excellent morale and workplace results.
Obviously, we all intuitively know that quality leaders are optimistic. Without optimism it is easy to dishearten your team and create a bleak workplace climate that detracts from employee engagement and innovative outcomes. Effective optimism enables people to dream big and take calculated risks. We would all agree that it is critical for healthy team functioning and creating a culture that minimises a fear of failure, so what could go wrong with optimistic leaders? The key is to get the balance right so that a leader is not operating with a blind optimism. Blind optimism occurs when high optimism in a leader is not complemented with the ability to analyse the potential pitfalls in a plan or strategy. It is not about diminishing optimism to fix the problem, but more about balancing it out with due diligence in planning and decision-making. If this balance is not achieved either through personal leadership growth or through other collaborative team members whose strengths are in this area, eventually the organisation will be led into serious trouble. The negative impact of this imbalance not only puts an organisation at fiscal risk, causes stress on the leader, but it also creates other human collateral damage. So, let’s examine these. Imbalanced optimism impedes quality leadership results, because it hinders leaders from being persistent in playing the long game toward success. Instead, they tend to overcommit to too many new things by jumping at many exciting shiny objects that come across their path. This can only produce
One of the critical success factors of any organisation is the retention oftop talent. There is now no question that employee engagement heavily influences this. Furthermore, if you have been investigating this subject, you will know how important the direct manager’s relationship with any employee is to foster employee engagement. However, many managers have had little training in employee retention strategies. I have worked with developing managers for over 15 years and I want to share with you the bare bones of what can make any diligent manager into a genius in the area of employee engagement. Myths Must be Overcome: First there are some myths about employee engagement that need to be unmasked. Let’s dispel some of the myths that are being bandied around. Myth one: It is essentially an organisational issue: No, it is not essentially an organisational issue, but an individual psychological phenomenon within the psyche of each employee. Hence, by its very nature, it is a unique experience within each employee. Myth two: The best strategy to improve employee engagement is through an organisational level approach: Partly true, because context is always important, but left on its own without the individual approach, it will only ever be hit and miss. You need to predominantly address engagement at the individual level, plus examine if there are organisational cultural impediments to increasing employee engagement. Myth three: The manager’s interactions with their direct-reports are the direct cause of low employee engagement: Half-truth, for there is a correlation between them,
I regularly rub shoulders with senior business leaders and find that many do not fully comprehend what leadership competencies matter most to be successful within an organisation. A leader generally doesn’t like to waste time, yet regarding developmental approaches I find many who do, by inadvertently chasing shiny objects that promise transformation, yet deliver little progress. Having been in senior leadership positions and now walking beside leaders, I want to share some key insights to assist leaders in focusing on those developmental areas that create an exponential difference in their organisations. An integrated approachI think that most understand that to make it at the top, senior leaders must have a convergence of behavioural competencies that have been gathered through their journey to the top. However, it is often difficult to put one’s finger on the critical components that make the difference. When interviewed many leaders will point to some of their strengths that they have become aware of over the years, truly believing they are strengths that support them in a senior role. However, what we know now through research is that strengths at one level of leadership in an organisation can actually become a weakness if not tempered by other complementary behaviours. This is the whole premise of a book like Goldsmith’s, “What Got You here, Won’t Get You There.” The very behaviours that brought a promotion up the leadership ladder will undo success if uncritically transferred to executive levels of leadership. Two steps to successHence, leadership development approaches
The three words of this article’s title seem simple enough to understand and many organizations invest heavily in trying to achieve just this. But I think in order for us to intelligently discuss this topic, we need to ask a couple of questions and bring further clarity to the topic. The first question is, “What is organizational culture?” The second question is, “Can organizational culture be managed?” So allow me in a few words to answer these questions by examining different definitions and then to investigate any potential steps that could be taken to produce positive change. Most people who deal with this topic will articulate organizational culture through summarising the individual elements that make up culture such as, collective – behaviours, values, myths, symbols, norms, rituals, beliefs and assumptions that “this is the way we do things around here.” It would be difficult to find leaders who would disagree with these fundamental components as being the essence of what makes up organizational culture. However, it is the expanded definition of culture that I am going to discuss shortly that starts to expose different opinions. Furthermore, the preferred perspective chosen profoundly affects the strategic approach taken to deal with it. Generally speaking there are two main paradigms of organizational culture that people choose between. Some see it as a singular dominating influence that each individual operates within. Others see it being made up of various sub-cultures within the one organization with continual superficial adjustments being made by those in each