The people throughout your organisation are changing, fast. But what isn’t changing fast enough is the leadership’s understanding of what that means. They need to switch from the outdated situation-oriented approach to a people-oriented view.
There are big challenges facing your organisation, no matter the sector some of them are universal and they’re brought about by the changing business climate. Hiring, aligning and retaining talent is more important than ever.
Are you keeping up with technology and exploiting it to develop new products, services and delivery formats?
What are you doing with all that data being generated? Are you distilling it into useful insights, drowning in it or maybe just ignoring it? The much-quoted statistic tells us that 90% of the world’s data was created in the past two years.
How’s your customer service?
There’s such pressure to provide instant gratification coupled with the threat of the scathing review and 1 star. And the least tangible but perhaps the most powerful is the uncertainty about the future caused by worsening volatility and increasing pace of change. If this is you in your organisation you are not alone!
Amid all this change, the root of the problem is that something isn’t changing fast enough. And that is leadership’s understanding of this new landscape and their upskilling to cope with the new pressures and demands on them. They need to see the new world view; one that is no longer based on the situation-oriented responses that are increasingly less fit for purpose; one that is people-oriented instead. This is because your people aren’t the problem; they’re the solution. And the new landscape, the volatile climate and the evolved workforce require leadership to master some new, very people-oriented issues. These are crucial to be able to future-proof the success of your organisation. Areas of focus in today’s landscape are:
Workplace wellness
Encompassing those key areas that are all about the individual: work-life balance, health and safety, employee growth and development, employee recognition and employee involvement; this is no longer just the preserve of the HR department. Managers need to be more involved in facilitating and promoting the wellness of every team member and crucially themselves.
Resilience
A person’s ability to respond to pressure, manage stress, overcome setbacks and support other team members clearly has a direct effect on their productivity (and that of their team). Creating resilient environments helps foster greater resilience in individuals.
Leading the multigenerational workplace
Understanding how those generations differ in their values, motivations and outlooks is just the start. Being able to harness their different strengths and facilitating the different ways people can best contribute is already an absolute must.
Aligning your organisation’s culture with its strategy
If the amalgamated personalities, beliefs, assumptions, behaviours, habits, anxieties and desires of your people aren’t a good fit for what the organisation is trying to achieve… then, well, enough said, yes?
Logic bombs for some of you I know, but typically these are not the traditional areas of focus for leadership. While many a visionary leader has certainly achieved a great many things in the past by valuing their importance, the more common approach to management has been to react to situations. However, the pace of change, the uncertainty and the growing pressure from all quarters means that organisations can only hope to survive and succeed if they are agile, adaptive, self-healing and future-proofed.
Is your organisation smashing it or are your people pulling in different directions? Low in energy for the next work challenge? Does it feel like it’s lost its flow?
Organisations under pressure can experience falling productivity, missed targets, dropping profitability, stress, burnout, churn and experience loss. It’s easy for the leaders to hold the workforce responsible for these symptoms. And it’s all too common for them to exacerbate the problems with well-meant interventions that are ineffective and ultimately counterproductive as they try to tackle individual situations reactively. Layer upon layer of remedial and often regressive initiatives all focussed on isolated issues slowly clog everything up and eat away at everyone’s positivity and motivation.
It’s high time for a new breed of leader. One that sees this new-world view. One with a people-oriented approach. One that can understand and harness the different strengths of the individuals in their organisation. One that can facilitate a resilient environment, nurture a self-managing workforce, future-proof their organisation and regain its flow.
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