I was in a meeting last week where we were deep into a discussion of a company’s core mission and values. Great dialogue with respect to the ways in which leaders choose to instill a sense of character within an organization’s culture. The discussion was mainly about some of the change management activities around introducing these notions of mission and values, and almost as an afterthought, it was said “and let’s make sure we are recruiting people and rewarding them based on these values.”: Makes perfect sense.
But on reflection, I began to wonder — how many organizations hold themselves truly accountable to aligning high level statements about mission and values to their core talent management strategies? Are competency definitions that are aligned with culture long forgotten once the discussion of revenue and profit goals come into the equation? Will organizations seriously consider the data that they collect around values and truly attempt to determine if it differentiates quantitative measures of performance? Most of all, who’s going to step up and demonstrate that values are ingrained in the way their company recruits, measures, develops and promotes employees? Is it even possible if the CEO isn’t driving?
So far, I see lots of interest in getting to this kind of maturity. And I am taking bets that organizations will get serious about it (not many are yet) and will ultimately need effective, integrated talent management technology platforms to do it (yes, that’s when I smile big). The question is this: how far will forward-thinking organizations take it, and how soon?
And let me clear — this isn’t about a good recruiting application, or a great implementation of the latest performance management software — it’s about alignment between mission and values deeply embedded into core HR practices and automated with consistency.
Is there someone out in the blogsphere that’s seen an organization actually pull it off? If so, speak up — I’d like to talk to you and explore it in a future blog post.
Agreed that is all about values. I agree only because most managements demonstrate very low standards of common values to their employees. They talk a good game but their actions are what employees follow. Then managers are surprised that employees use these values to perform their work. Amazing!
Let’s see how this works.
Leadership applies to people and denotes the sending of value standard messages to people which most of them then follow/use. Thus we say that they have been “led” in the direction of those standards. Leadership is one side of the coin called values, the other side being followership.
Leadership in the workplace consists of the value standards reflected in everything that an employee experiences. Most of what the employee experiences is the support or lack thereof provided by management – such as training, tools, parts, discipline, direction, material, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, etc.
Leadership is not a process any manager can change. It happens inexorably every minute of every day because of the way people are. The only choice available to the manager is the standard (good, bad or mediocre) toward which to lead.
Managing, on the other hand, applies to the effective use of a resource such as money, supply chain, production, people or what-have-you. People are just one of many different resources to manage, each having methods that will succeed, methods that will fail and many in between the extremes.
For instance, the top-down command and control technique is a specific method by which to manage people. Top-down concentrates on producing goals, targets, visions, orders and other directives in order to control the workforce and thereby achieve organizational success. Top-down treats employees like robots in the “shut up and listen, I know better than you” mode, and rarely if ever listens to them.
In this way and others, top-down demeans and disrespects employees sending them very negative value standard messages. The standards reflected in this treatment “lead” the employees to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with the same level of disrespect they received. This is the road to very poor corporate performance making top-down managers their own worst enemies.
If you want to lead employees to very high performance, get rid of all traces of a top-down approach. Start treating employees with great respect and not like robots by listening to whatever they want to say when they want to say it and responding in a very respectful manner, thus leading them to treat their work, their customers, each other and their bosses with great respect. (Everyone wants to do a good job, don’t want to be told what to do, and do want to be trained and coached so that they can do well.)
You will be stunned as I was by the huge amount of creativity, innovation and productivity you have unleashed. Besides, most of them will love to come to work.
Best regards, Ben
Author “Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed”
Good post. Thanks.
I focus on change management and the problem you address haunts many major projects. The organization does a fine job of creating goals/vision for a project and then fails during implementation. There are many reasons why things fail at that stage, but a major reason is that the organization fails to reward and recognize accomplishments related to the new direction. And, this oversight is compounded when leaders fail to hire and promote based on what’s needed in the new environment.
Rick Maurer
http://www.beyondresistance.com
http://www.changemanagementnews.com (blog)
And even if organizations do a good job initially, they often revert back to rewarding heroics, which never make it into the mission and values statements!