Embracing Value-Based Leadership for Organizational Resilience

In today’s post-pandemic business world, organizations are steering through novel challenges. Amid this climate, the critical role of effective leadership is paramount. One effective approach is value-based leadership, which is a model of using a fundamental system of organizational core values to govern operations, rather than just meeting deadlines or hitting targets.

In this blog, we outline the six reasons why value-based leadership is crucial in today’s volatile business environment and provide actionable advice on implementing these principles in your organization.

1.  Building Trust through Authenticity

Trust, earned through consistent and transparent conduct, plays a pivotal role in fostering commitment and loyalty among teams, boosting organizational credibility, and resonating with the public.

Actionable Advice: Keep communications transparent and hold regular, open meetings. Reflect your words in your actions, and when you falter, acknowledge and learn from your mistakes.

2.  Offering Clear Direction

Leaders who resolutely uphold their organizational core values provide their teams with a clear path and maintain focus on shared organizational objectives, even amid external distractions or pressures.

Actionable Advice: Clearly define your organization’s goals and frequently communicate them to ensure team members understand their roles in achieving them.

3.  Fostering Resilience and Adaptability

Value-based leaders demonstrate a blend of adaptability and resilience, crucial traits in positioning an organization for survival and long-term success.

Actionable Advice: Encourage a growth mindset by promoting a culture that sees challenges as learning opportunities. One practical starting point could be a mentorship program that connects seasoned team members with newcomers.

4.  Inspiring Employee Engagement

Leaders who prioritize their team’s well-being and align with the broader organizational mission motivate and engage employees, enhancing productivity, even in challenging situations.

Actionable Advice: Regularly acknowledge your team’s efforts and recognize instances where they’ve displayed the company’s core values. This validation can have a powerful motivating effect.

5.  Championing Ethical Decision-Making

Turbulent times often bring ethical dilemmas into sharp focus. Leaders anchored in strong values can more effectively navigate these challenges, ensuring their decisions align with the best interests of their team and the organization.

Actionable Advice: Develop an organizational code of ethics reflecting your core values to serve as a decision-making guide. This code should clearly state your mission, values, and the expected conduct within the organization. Regularly hold discussions around hypothetical ethical scenarios, using the code as a guide for responses. By doing so, you embed the importance of ethical alignment in daily decision-making.

6.  Encouraging a Long-Term Perspective

Organizations often find themselves in a tug-of-war between short-term objectives and long-term, sustainable growth. While immediate gains might be appealing, it’s crucial to keep sight of the bigger picture.

Actionable Advice: Integrate value-aligned goals into your strategic planning, balancing immediate targets with long-term aspirations. Emphasize the concept of sustainability, which refers not just to environmental considerations, but also to the capacity for enduring success. The idea is to strive for decisions that contribute positively to your organization’s future trajectory, not just for short-term gains.

Transitioning toward value-based leadership demands commitment, patience, and courage, yet the benefits are substantial. By fostering resilience, prioritizing ethical decision-making, and maintaining a long-term perspective, leaders can prepare for any challenges ahead, transforming them into opportunities for growth.

As we navigate the complexities of the post-pandemic landscape, value-based leadership evolves from being a tool to a vital strategy. We invite you to share your experiences, insights, or queries about value-based leadership. How have you incorporated value-based leadership in your organization? How has it impacted your decision-making and strategic planning during these uncertain times? Leave a comment below, send us an email, or connect with us on Twitter. 

Purpose: The Key Driver of Organizational Performance

 

In the past, purpose has often been cast aside as non-essential to an organization’s success. Finances, IT, sales, and products have traditionally been discussed far more often than purpose. Yet purpose is actually the key driver to organizational success. Without employees feeling a sense of purpose, a salesperson would be listless, and product engineers would lose creativity. Now more than ever, purpose is important to organizational performance because it inspires employees to move beyond inertia to action. 

Many people ask how purpose differs from mission, vision, values, principles, and culture. An organization’s mission describes what business the organization is in (and what it is not), and its plans for the future. Its goal is to provide a focus for leadership and employees. 

A vision statement lays out where the organization is going in the future. It is usually drawn up by senior management to take the thinking beyond day-to-day activity in a clear, strategic way. 

Values explain how the mission, purpose and vision will be achieved through the expected culture of the organization. They serve as a compass of the expected norms, behaviors, and mindset. 

So what, then, is purpose? 

According to David Packard, Co-Founder of Hewlett-Packard, purpose is like a guiding star on the horizon- forever pursued but never reached. Although purpose itself does not change, it does inspire change. The very fact that purpose can never be fully realized means that an organization can never stop stimulating change and progress. 

Have you ever had to drag yourself out of bed to go to a job that you hated? It’s like you’re pushing a heavy rock uphill. But when purpose is motivating your actions, everything feels very different. You have a kind of lightness, even when things are intense or tough. The same thing is true for organizations; you can feel when a company is animated by purpose… and that’s a feeling that people want to have! It’s also a feeling that drives better performance. 

Organizational Purpose 

The purpose of an organization is not the answer to the question, “What do you do?” which typically focuses on products, services, and customers, but rather the answer to the question “Why is your work vital?” It conveys what the organization stands for in historical, ethical, emotional, and practical terms. 

Below are the key characteristics of an organization’s ideal purpose statement, which is: 

• Central and enduring to the culture of the organization 
• Inspiring and unifying 
• The answer to the question, “Why is this work vital?” 

A purpose statement should be brief so employees can remember it and use it to guide their daily actions. It should also be broad in scope to allow the organization to adapt over time to a changing world, while its central focus remains constant. 

Here are a few examples of organizational purpose statements: 

• ING – Empowering people to stay a step ahead in life and in business 

• Kellogg – Nourishing families so they can flourish and thrive 

• Insurance Australia Group (IAG) – To help    people manage risk and recover from the hardship of unexpected loss 

• REA Group – To make the property process simple, efficient, and stress-free for people buying and selling a property 

• Southwest Airlines – To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel 

• CVS – Helping people on their path to better health 

In the current world, employee engagement is crucial. Employees need to work with a sense of purpose that comes from knowing that what they do affects others in the organization. Engaged employees relish what they do and are more productive. 

Purpose provides clarity and stimulates innovation. Embracing clarity can open the door to allowing employees to see possibilities that they wouldn’t have otherwise seen. They understand the organization’s expectations of them and the reasons behind those expectations. It empowers them to deliberate new methods of doing their work to meet the organizational mission. 

We would love to hear from you! What’s your organizational purpose? How is purpose driving your motivation levels and enhancing the organizational performance? 

 

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter. 

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Future of Work for Product Managers

 

I feel lucky that my career has allowed me to meet so many interesting, curious, and knowledgeable people. You will find some of them in this roundup of podcasts and interviews that I joined.

1. Future of leadership for product managers

I was honored to be invited by Chad McAllister from Product Mastery as a guest for his webinar on trends influencing the future leadership.

This conversation discussed why product managers must know about the future of leadership, the big trends that are driving leadership change, what exactly current leadership looks like, and how leaders can encourage employees to get engaged and move into the future. Listen to the podcast here.

2. Workplace culture

Michael Ogunsanya, CEO and Co-Founder of MindStand Pod, invited me to discuss workplace diversity and inclusion as part of his series exploring workplace culture.

In this podcast, we talked about creating more connected and inclusive teams, including methods of creating practical strategies for creating an inclusive environment. Listen to this podcast to learn what your company can do to create a more inclusive workplace. Listen to the podcast here.

Would you like to join the conversation? Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

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What The Heck Is Executive Coaching

“What the heck is executive coaching?” I get asked that question many times a day.

I admit that coaching is a nebulous term. When I say that I’m a certified coach, people ask if I coach sports teams. When I say that I actually coach work teams, people look surprised. ‘Why would a work team need coaching?’ they ask. Because work teams are just like sports teams:

• They are made up of different people who try to reach a team goal together.
• Each person on the team has two types of goals in mind: individual goals and team goals.
• Every team member has his/her own communication style, which may or may not work well with the others on the team.
• Although there is one official leader (the coach or captain), there are usually other team members who carry as much weight, if not more weight, than the official leader.

Similar to a sports team, thriving work teams need an ‘outsider’ to coach them to success, whether the whole team or just some of the team leaders. That’s what CHCI does. We coach teams and leaders to get from Point A to Point B, in the most effective way possible.

During the years, many people have asked for a practical book on coaching, so they can bring coaching skills to their own teams. That’s how Anne Loehr’s book, “A Manager’s Guide to Coaching” was created. Here is an excellent write up about one of the book topics: How to create effective coaching questions. Enjoy!

Let’s share experiences. Leave a comment below, send me an email, or find me on Twitter.

How to Train Your Staff With A Decreasing Budget

In our last blog, How to Use the 70/20/10 Model to Develop Careers, we discussed the “what”, “when” and “how” of using the 70/20/10 Adult Learning Model for employee development. Now let’s discuss the “why”.

Managers face daily decisions to ensure their team gets what’s needed for success. But with budgets getting smaller, it’s hard to stretch resources. After reading this blog, you will learn several tips on how to stretch your training budget, spend wisely, plan strategically and still meet your employee development goals.

The “Why” to Employee Development

What is the return on investment (ROI) for a manager who wants to allocate time and financial resources for her employees? Simply put: a better prepared employee is a more productive employee. According to the Association of Talent Development (ATD), companies that invest in training employees see a 218% higher income per employee than companies that don’t. The 70/20/10 model for employee development is one effective tool to leverage the current talents of your staff and build stronger teams, which increases the organizational bottom line.

We know that the manager cannot motivate an employee to improve; that has come from within the employee. However, managers can create a learning environment for them to grow. How? The first step is to take an inventory of the current staff, using a consistent assessment tool such as a 360-degree assessment, with an objective lens to collect skills data. This full assessment will provide two sets of data in one assessment: strengths and areas to grow. By selecting the right 360 tool, you can complete two tasks at once for the same price, creating cost savings for your budget. This 360 view lets managers begin to leverage the strengths in their staff that can be shared with other employees; it also shows the delta between the strengths and weaknesses, so you can create the best strategy to decrease the weaknesses of the entire team.

People Analytics: Creating The Ultimate Workforce

People analytics, historically referred to as HR Analytics and utilized strictly as an HR function, has evolved into a systematic data-driven approach to improving your entire business.

If you are a leader or manager in a large organization, you are probably familiar with these terms. But you may be unaware how your organization can benefit from people analytics and what it will take.

That is what we will discuss today.

Table of Contents

·         What is people analytics?

·         Difference between HR, people, and workforce analytics

·         How organizations benefit from people analytics

·         Where do you begin?

·         How other organizations leverage people analytics

·         Understanding the ROI of people analytics

·         How should organizations implement people analytics?

·         What is the cost of implementation?

·         How does CHCI use people analytics to help organizations?

What is people analytics?

People analytics is the process of leveraging new or existing data within your organization to provide invaluable insights into your workforce and help you make better business decisions.

People analytics delivers facts about your organization such as why people are leaving your organization, the challenges they face, how much this is costing you, and more. Equally importantly, it paints a picture of how to anticipate and prevent these staffing challenges.

Difference between HR, people, and workforce analytics

People analytics, HR analytics, workforce analytics, and even human capital or business analytics are all different terms that share a common purpose: to improve all areas of business performance through the use of workforce data. Whatever you call it, the goal is to create a productive, innovative and powerful workforce, which positively affects the bottom line.

How organizations benefit from people analytics

The true value of a well-structured people analytics initiative will reflect directly on your bottom line. We’ll talk more about this in a minute, under the ROI section.

For now, here are a few ways your organization can benefit from people analytics.

Ten Ways Organizations Benefit from People Analytics

1.     Understand and improve retention

2.     Identify patterns of racial bias or inequity in compensation

3.     Create effective, non-biased processes for hiring and promoting

4.     Strengthen workforce decision making

5.     Increase accountability

6.     Shift team silos

7.     Improve employee productivity and commitment

8.     Determine the traits of your quality employees

9.     Seek better employee sourcing options

10.Develop a culture where decisions are made in accordance with the evidence

How does it help my organization make better decisions?

A crucial component of people analytics is the ability to make informed decisions based on user data. An example of this is McDonald’s. They learned that employees working in groups containing a healthy mixture of generations tended to be happier. Happier workforces can lead to improved service, product quality, and teamwork, all creating higher value for the restaurant brand.