It's Time To Rethink And Reshape Our Organizational Cultures

It's Time to Rethink and Reshape Our Organizational Cultures

Attracting and retaining the best and the brightest, and achieving extraordinary results is simple; create a great organizational culture -- A Culture For People. One of the most important jobs of a leader is to create and manage the organization's culture. To create a culture of greatness, a leader has to create an environment thatunleashes the minds, hearts and imagination of its people, to enable them to achieve the organization's mission, vision, values and goals. The lessons of the David Gergen ring true today:
"A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will strive to get there."
To navigate in our rapidly changing world, corporations andorganizations everywhere have had to adapt many of their business strategies, practices, and actions, at a dizzying pace. I believe the one area where change has been far too slow and too shallow is organizational structures and "human resources" practices and polices. This has resulted in many organizations devolving into low energy, mediocre cultures that stifle people and consequently, they cannot keepup with the ever changing, demanding pace of today. This is a tremendous cost to companies, organizations, people, families and communities around the world.
There is a rich reservoir of individual and collective genius lying dormant in every organization, ready and able to help. The mind-set shift to tap into this reservoir is the understanding and acknowledgement that people are extraordinary.While the leaders at the top struggle with how to change and what to change, we often fail to recognize that many of the answers we are seeking rest within the people in our organizations. After work, these are the same people on the internet looking to create the next great thing; the same people that are working in their communities to make them better and the same people raising families undertremendous challenges. These are great problem solvers and innovators. But then they come to work and we box them in; we expect them to compartmentalize their minds, cover their hearts and oppress their imagination. When we fail to recognize and utilize the tremendous gifts people can bring to organizations, we unintentionally dampen their spirit and drain their energy. This causes people to feelfrustrated and undervalued. Frustrated, undervalued people cannot give their best; this is a lose/lose scenario.
It is time to rethink and reshape our organizational structures, "human resources" practices and the way we lead people. Most importantly, it is time for leaders to consciously and deliberately shape organizational cultures. This is the job of the CEO and the leadership team; the "HR"leader cannot do this alone. The leadership team needs to give (at least) the same time, attention and resources to the development of their people and culture as they do to the development of their products, finance, strategies and facilities.
Many of our leadership and human resources practices were designed for a very different time in history -- a time when things were more predictable and"time" moved slower; a time when people were not as educated or informed. That was a time when people were given a task and simply needed to follow a set of predetermined steps to accomplish it -- they complied because they had no other choices. In the past, innovation belonged to the research and design departments, and managers functioned as overseers and problem solvers. Today we need innovatorsand problem solvers everywhere in an organization and we need shared accountability and ownership from everyone. The past was truly a simpler time (but not a very exciting time). And yet we hold on to these outdated organizational designs, human resource systems and outdated leadership practices rather than finding the courage to change them. We have made interim adjustments and fallen prey to...