Critical keys required for sustainable corporate success
Many South African corporations are failing to optimise their potential because they fail to emphasise the people side of their business activities.
A number of culture surveys of employees have demonstrated quite clearly that employees’ perception of management leaves a lot to be desired, and often leads to under-performance becoming part-and-parcel of the organisation’s culture.
This and other challenges occur frequently in companies with a distinct technology bias, where technical people are often promoted into management roles to which they were not well suited. Those in management responsible for such appointments generally pay insufficient attention to the needs and personalities of the people in question.
My long personal experience of issues of this nature, underlined by a highly instructive recent case study in which I was intimately involved, pinpointed the ideal starting point as an in-depth engagement with the human relations director as well as the HR managers of the various divisions and subsidiaries with a view to designing a competency framework to which a leadership development model should be applied.
The first point of entry is, quite logically, the business strategy. Overlay that with the results of the culture survey to arrive at an answer the question of where the organisation wants to go – a question usually predicated on the way the corporation is led and managed.
The resultant leadership competency framework focuses on behavioural and functional competencies – in short, interpersonal skills; leading people.
The leadership competency framework draws on international benchmarking, along with the models applied in successful international and local organisations.
Upon completion of the programme, which should conclude what management wants the framework to look like, analyse that nature of those competencies to identify areas of strength and areas of weakness.
At that stage psychometric assessments should be undertaken among the organisation’s top leadership people, including CEOs, COOs and FDs of all the business units. The consultant responsible for the entire exercise would then write integrated reports based on the psychometric assessments and the framework. The reports provide feedback identifying areas for development and the coaching required to tackle such issues.
At this stage of the proceedings it is advisable to conduct two-day workshops for each business unit.
Gratifyingly, at the conclusions of the workshops, the oft-encountered initial scepticism is no longer in evidence. Indeed, the response of most of the individuals in question was a desire to have gone through the process several years earlier.
Key to the success of the workshops is to investigate the personal vision of each of participants – an approach that focuses on the individual and one deriving from the belief that if the individual is successful, the organisation will be successful; if the individual is happy, the emotion will play out in the work environment.
By simply providing the employee with a platform to focus on themselves and what they want, one goes a long way towards inculcating a feeling of personal mastery, which then becomes a cornerstone of team mastery, where the spotlight falls on the executive teams of each business unit.
A critical next step is to achieve some form of alignment between the teams’ personal mastery and the sought-for team mastery.
Ask the question: What do you think your role is in your business unit? Work-shop that perceived role with the rest of the team and ask the team members what they expect of that person in his assigned role.
Unfortunately, more often than not, such an exercise shows major misalignment and explains why there is sometimes conflict within the teams. Significantly, people are generally willing to open up and share.
“My peers expect something different from me, even though I believe I am doing what I should be doing. I cannot fix something if I don’t know that it is wrong.”
Precisely the same process should then be elevated to more senior management.
As the entire process evolves, it will become evident who the top performers and distinctive leaders are. These are the individuals who would benefit most from one-on-one coaching as part of a professional training process.
A crucial component of the overall approach is the need for sustainability. It serves no purpose to go through each and every step of the exercise if it is to be consigned to the filing cabinets once the end point has been reached. In this context, an important element is to train the trainer.
The focus here is on the organisation’s industrial psychologists, who should be familiarised with the benefits of psychometric assessments, compiling the integrated reports themselves and facilitating the team workshops. It is manifestly better and cheaper to do these tasks in-house.
Success can be gauged via several yardsticks, the most instructive of which is a culture survey conducted upon completion of the personnel revamp. Another involves the completion of a questionnaire among the employees to have been part of the HR analysis. Additionally, ROI improvements may be assessed in certain sales and marketing areas.
Be that as it may, the sobering bottom line is that if you don’t get buy-in from the team, you will not achieve the desired results. It can take years before people actually change attitudes and behaviours.
