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employee’s responsibility to make sure he has the right tools?”
Creating a Strong Culture
The short parable above illustrates how LCT impacts performance. The consultant guided the CEO toward a cultural model described any number of ways: innovative, high-performing, one with shared management, or one that provides for employee empower- ment. With a slight variation in empha- sis, all of these models productively blend the company’s intangibles— LCT—to create a strong culture that:
• Is greater than any one individual; • Is aligned along a common purpose; • Values multidirectional commu-
nication;
• Holds individuals accountable for
their own behavior;
• Encourages new ideas and accepts
constructive criticism; and
• Builds leadership at all levels,
ensuring that it will never be without a next generation of leaders.
But other than by anecdotal evi- dence, how do you know when you truly have established the business cul- ture as intended? By introducing meas- urement into the sustainable-culture equation. Strategically, you must pro- vide proof; you must measure. Like the CFO who can share profit-growth fig- ures through measurement of revenue and expenses, and the COO who can discuss the drop-in widget output as the result of counts, LCT must be quan- tified for two reasons:
1) Companies only value what they can measure. “The unmeasured must be measured, for if it cannot be meas- ured, it isn’t considered of value,” notes Debra Amidon, CEO of Entovation Intl. Ltd., Wilmington, MA.
2) While a company’s financial, operations and marketing efforts are routinely included in its strategic plan, talent management and the strategies for developing the personnel required to implement the strategic plan often are absent. Without the proper people having the proper skill sets in place, a company’s strategies will not be implemented.
Measurement in and of itself will not sustain a culture. Measurement is an invaluable indicator of the direction in which a company is headed and the trends being experienced. In fact, if measurement is viewed transactionally and exclusively as a number, the most valuable component will be missed: the information that can be garnered and used to create sound actions.
The Measuring Cycle
...consists of these six steps:
1) Measure leadership, communi- cation and teamwork to create a bench- mark from which to track your progress.
2) Understand the meaning behind the resulting measures and, above all, their impact on organizational per- formance. For example, what are the consequences to the organization if:
• Your employees report a percep- tion that the leaders are playing favorites?
• Your workers lack the information
they need to do their jobs?
• The existence of silos prevents
cross-departmental teamwork?
3) Share the information and its meaning with the entire organization, because engagement increases when
the larger picture becomes clear.
4) Work collaboratively to tackle organizational challenges at the root,
not superficially at the symptoms.
5) Remeasure. Use the benchmark from step 1 to quantify your progress. 6) Repeat the cycle of strengthening leadership, communication and team-
work with each iteration.
Gaining control of leadership,
communication and teamwork will bring significant savings, as absen- teeism is reduced, time spent on per- sonal conflict drops and turnover decreases. These savings will be aug- mented by a quantifiable improve- ment in employee engagement, inno- vation and trust, all of which have been documented to provide signifi- cant increases in revenues. MF
f rming
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