I’ve met with lots of people recently and the conversation always seems to come around to the same three subjects:

• Giving permission
• What happens on the inside drives what happens on the outside
• Doing the right things

These topics are all about the way we do things as leaders to determine the culture in our organisations.

Giving permission.  If you lead a team of people or business, do you ever step back and think about how your attitudes, behaviours and actions are reflected in the way your people behave?  I’ve started to call this the ‘goldfish bowl’ effect; if you visualise the round goldfish bowl you will realise that you are on show 360 degrees!  As this is the case, you need to make sure that what you do and say, how you act and behave are congruent and aligned to your company’s ethos.  In the past I’ve worked in organisations where the boss may come in and be in a foul mood and this has reverberated throughout the department.  The snappiness and underhand treatment has been seen as a way to get ahead in the organisation and has therefore been copied.  I was recently with an HR director who said that he’d had great fun carrying out a recognition event for a number of staff.  This had never been seen as his natural style in the organisation but has now given permission to his teams of people to enjoy their jobs!  What kind of things do you do that gives either positive or negative reinforcement of the way you want things to be in your organisation?

What happens on the inside, happens on the outside.  I was intrigued when a colleague told me about the company she is currently working for, where their external customer strategy is king, however their internal customer strategy seems to be pauper.  It reminded me of a saying ‘what happens on the inside drives what happens on the outside’.  In her business the policies for external customers increase their levels of customer satisfaction but at the same time create in-fighting between departments.  This is now getting to such an extent that individuals aren’t making decisions anymore and they’re starting to become more lax about attention to detail.  If this isn’t tackled very quickly it’s going to become a vicious cycle for everyone as staff will continue to take less and less ownership of issues, customers will become more dissatisfied with the service they receive and end up taking their business elsewhere.
Do you need to take some time out to look at your customer journey and your supporting policies and procedures to see that they create the right attitudes and behaviours from your people?  Can you be sure that you’re not in a position of driving your customers away and creating a detrimental effect on your business?

This leads into my final strand about doing the right things.  We are seeing so many economic pressures impacting organisations at the moment that it is imperative as leaders that we focus on doing the right things.  Martin Luther King once said that ‘the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort but where he stands in times of challenge’.

We are going through very challenging times at the moment with many organisations having to make lots of their staff redundant.  And even though these aren’t the messages that we’d like to give to our people – there are right ways of doing it.  By this I mean there are ways in which you can help your people manage the change and start dealing with the transition.  It is also important to remember that there are two groups of people who are being affected; those who are losing their jobs and those who are remaining in situ.  The former need all the help they can get to make sure they are best placed to get the new jobs externally, rebuilding their confidence and energy levels while those who stay in the organisation see their colleagues leaving, have the uncertainty of ‘am I next?’ and need to remain focused on the tasks in hand.  Keeping these people motivated can be a more difficult role.

I remember being in a position where we were all facing redundancy and our chief executive stood up and told us that he could no longer offer us a job for life.  He continued by saying that he could offer us career-ability so that when we were made redundant, we’d be the best placed candidates for any job in our field.  You can imagine how motivating this was for us all – we felt that the company still wanted to invest in our futures even though we may not be there in the long run.
Having been in a position of making people redundant and facing the threat of redundancy myself, I recognise how stressful a time this can be.  I also realise that it is important to create structures for business to be as normal as possible.

If you are experiencing this at the moment and would like me to share some techniques with you to make the transition smoother please get in touch.  Where you may be having to make some of your people redundant and would like to provide them with the essential help to get their new job, I have been putting together some modules, which include:

• Building self confidence
• Writing CVs and covering letters that stand out from the crowd
• Improving questioning and presentation techniques
• Managing feedback

That’s it for now.  Please give me a call to discuss any of the content in more detail.  I look forward to catching up with you soon.