"Organizational effectiveness and strategic alignment are driven by your company’s ability to develop an inspiring business culture. If you are smart about harnessing people and culture, you will gain competitive advantage by being one of the elite corporations that actually achieve their business strategies."
People and culture are such fundamental and critical resources for an enterprise that, unless top leadership is strategic about harnessing them, the organization risks being irrevocably eclipsed. From a 30,000-foot perspective, top leadership must precisely know the kind of people they want to populate the company with; where to find them and how to hire them; how to bring out the best in them and make leaders out of them; and how to move them along a career path expeditiously.
Coming from 30,000 feet down to the ground, what has to occur to create a business culture that fosters strong organizational effectiveness?
First and foremost, a company must be crystal clear about its reason for being (Mission), its idealized future state (Vision), and its fundamental cultural principles (its Core Values). With these high-level strategic documents in hand (and leadership’s passionate commitment to them!), the enterprise next must go about crafting a compelling call to action and an executable battle plan (that is, a strategy map, a scorecard, and a strategy execution blueprint). This is the foundation upon which a strategically grounded business culture evaluates and then enables high organizational effectiveness.
The next step is to recognize, respond to, and then incorporate the second-tier cultural elements that fuel employee motivation: competent and caring leadership; industry-leading business processes that add a “we’re elite” message to the company’s reputation; a performance environment that is all meritocracy all the time—revering empowerment, accountability, and a recognition and rewards system based on contribution; challenging and varied work that is also transparent as it relates to contribution; and the opportunity to develop and advance.
Then, to close the circle with the final key element, employees make the following request: “Surround me with talented people—that is, the right people in the right roles.”
With all these moving parts operating, the culture takes on a level of energy and power that far exceed the sum of the parts and, as a result, corporate culture becomes instrumental in driving high performance.
“What’s the Big Mistake I Don’t Want to Make?”
It’s basically the same mistake that’s always made in organizations—leadership resists acknowledging that a company is a “human system” and that leading people is a soft-and-squishy process. Instead, we make the faulty assumption that the “people factor” can be handled mechanistically—that a Performance Evaluation form will deliver performance enhancement; that simply administering a 360 survey will close developmental gaps; that the CEO’s making a compelling and inspiring speech will change the direction of an organization. The mistake that is made is to deny a fundamental reality of organizational effectiveness—that it’s primarily a human and psychological affair. The platform from which strategy execution and organizational effectiveness are launched and from which they can ultimately soar is built on vision, meaning, inspiration, passion, partnership, collegiality, and so forth. In simple terms, the long and the short of it is that organizational organizational effectiveness is primarily driven by leaders who possess a great deal of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and by business cultures that are infused with it (EQ).
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