Your business needs
Having a consistent, strategically aligned culture that spans the entirety of your organisation is immensely valuable. When leaders all speak the same language and everybody derives the same meaning from their instructions, productivity hits an optimal sweet spot.
Despite awareness of this ideal and the desire to achieve it, a great many organisations can’t shake off the ‘say-do’ gap. A marked disconnection between leaders, employees and departments results in loss of focus on business goals. If this sounds familiar, there’s a high chance you’re trapped in any or all of the following scenarios:
Outdated people management
As organisational structures evolve with different technology, working practices and demands, the behavioural change which needs to happen alongside often doesn’t materialise. Despite updating tools and procedures, many companies’ productivity is still held back because people’s minds are stuck in a past era legacy.
Instead of being empowered and accountable, as today’s workforce expects and today’s organisational set-ups require, employees are being drip-fed demands from on high. Leaders are not providing sufficient clarity about roles, responsibilities and expectations. This hinders ability to channel energy and/or focus and results in the workforce becoming overwhelmed.
Silo mentality
Optimal productivity requires excellent synergy and efficiency between different functional areas and business units. Even though updated organisational models respect this, people are often still too focussed on their own deliverables and disconnected from the overarching business purpose. Either because it hasn’t been communicated or, sometimes, because it hasn’t even been defined. Employees at every level have no sense of being part of a collective consciousness. This often leads to resources being wasted and opportunities for improvement being missed. While nobody even realises.
Initiative overload
The determination to chase improvements leads many companies to purchase fancy new IT tools and launch endless streams of new projects. All too often, without any consideration for whether the relevant workforce is capable of taking on yet more initiatives. And even more concerning, without any oversight of what impact all these initiatives actually produce.
This typically creates a logjam which does more to hinder productivity than help it. A situation which could be avoided through leaders discussing objectives with employees and taking on board their perspectives of what they feel is helpful and practical vs obstructive and unnecessary.
