CORPORATE CULTURE DRIVES SUCCESS - MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER!

CORPORATE CULTURE DRIVES SUCCESS - MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER!

This week, I am focussing on a question which is often overlooked: What makes a leadership group a real team? Furthermore, great insights from Deloitte, McKinsey and Henrik H?kansson, Director, People Analytics at Delivery Hero about the use of data in HR to predict future scenarios. Definitely worth a read. And for the second time, Ina Distel shares her views on why being an invigorating leader and implementing a corporate culture with soul implies finding your own sweet spot in the first place.?Find out more about Ina and the other members.

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Fighting for limited resources or aligned behind a shared purpose and goal:

When does a leadership group become a?real?team?

Chris Edmonds, consultant with The Purposeful Culture Group, recently summarized his experience like this: "What I have found is that 90% of leadership 'teams' are not teams at all. Most chief executive 'teams' are a group of individual senior leaders who meet on a regular basis to battle each other for limited resources. They battle for funds, people, time, validation, and more. Every day. These leaders carefully track which battles they won, lost, or which were a “draw”. The next day, the battle begins anew".

It′s no surprise as too many firms are still not clear about their shared purpose and have not created a shared understanding of their vision, mission, values and spirit. How can anyone be surprised if directors and leaders fight for their share of resources and often neglect the bigger picture. It′s a clear warning sign of an organization with immense silos and no unifying culture. That′s where the Soul System? comes in. Identifying the shared purpose and the shared understanding and then reflecting on the shared behaviors is the recipe for success. Because it allows the entire leadership team to actually get “on the bus” for the full journey and not just for a certain part of the ride that suits their individual needs.

It′s actually not too hard to identify a true leadership team:

  • they make themselves available to others and engage continuously with their people,
  • they have annual goals and openly share them with others,
  • they admit when they make mistakes and aren't fearful of asking for help,
  • disagreement to them is never personal, only a search for the truth or a better way of doing something, and
  • they like what they do and the people they work with.

As Andrew Carnegie once said: “Teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.”

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What makes leaders effective leaders?

I really like this table by techtello.com - it shows all the key traits at a glance. Check it out! It's a how to guide - just practise these 6 disciplines and the results will show up.

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Look In The Mirror First!

?Why being an invigorating leader and implementing a corporate culture with soul implies finding your own sweet spot

?We talk a lot about how leaders can empower others. How about empowering leaders first?

?In many businesses, leadership is still considered to be a natural talent. In contrast, companies invest heavily in making experts out of young professionals. Once they are ready for the next career steps, they find themselves being promoted to a leadership position – also because that’s the only way to climb the corporate career ladder.

?Of course, there are workshops and seminars on leadership, but the truth is, a two-days offsite twice a year doesn’t make you a great leader. It’s inspiration and thus a great start but by far not enough to prepare the next generation of leaders for the challenges of the future.

?The tricky part is that becoming an invigorating, inspiring, truly authentic leader goes far beyond the surface and there is no single recipe. It’s a process, an indvidual journey of personal growth that takes time and implies, if taken seriously, the willingness to reflect on yourself first. If you don’t understand yourself, how could you every understand and take care of others?

And then, it’s an everyday practice and it needs recurring reminders and regular support through coaching and training in the company. If you want to become an athelte or a musician, you need to practice as often as possible, and usually the more you practice the better you get. Why should it be any different with leadership?

?I love the quote of Eleanor Roosevelt on leadership: “Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.” That requires leaders to be conscious, confident personalities because you can only pass on to others what you do have within you. So how do organizations create an environment that supports that kind of leadership development?

In this context, the concept of IKIGAI, the Japanese word for 'a reason to live' or 'a reason to jump out of bed in the morning' might offer valuable insights. It's the place where your needs, desires, ambitions, and satisfaction meet and where an individual performs in his sweet spot of intrinsic motivation. That’s the place of inner balance. No surprise that finding your IKIGAI is closely linked to living longer. The concept can be used in many ways and provides a large playground for individual as well as team coaching.

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Let’s take this to the next level and think one step further, asking what leaders can do in order to build a strong corporate soul in their organization. We at Building Corporate Soul came up with a framework, our ‘3 Be’s’, that comprises six powerful questions along the three levels of the Soul SystemTM.?

Being:?Why am I here? Why are we here??

Believing:?What do we believe in? How do we shape believe in others?

Belonging:?What does it feel like to belong here? How do we create belonging for others?

If we combine the concept of IKIGAI with our ‘3 Be’s Framework’, we have a powerful methodology in place. Whereas IKIGAI sheds light on the dimension of ‘Being’, the “3 Be’s” help to guide companies on their journey towards a strong corporate culture with soul.

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In conclusion, firstly organizations need invigorating leaders. One of the secrets to developing them is to support future leaders with finding their personal sweet spot of intrinsic motivation. As they lead others, they have matured into personalities with strength of character and integrity, whose thoughts, feelings, and actions are aligned.?

Secondly, companies require a strong corporate culture with soul to face future challenges successfully. Leaders need to take it to the next level and have to create a sense of belonging within their organizations. All of this can be achieved through a combination of ongoing individal coaching and training in teams.?

I am closing with a quote from Ghandi that made me think and is probably more relevant than ever these days: ‘My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.’?

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Flexible work arrangements are ranking #3 on employees wish-list!

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McKinsey in the US studied the key topics that are critical when workers in the US think about swapping jobs. They surveyed over 25,000 US workers and have identified that 58% now have the opportunity to work from home at least one day per week. Moreover, the study finds that when given the option for flexible work arrangements, nearly 90 percent of workers embrace the opportunity. While the study looks at the US only, it′s probably fair that the results will be similar in many places around the world. The shift on work, workplace and workforce is happening in real-time now! Read all about what McKinsey & Co. have found out.

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What has happened why??

And what will happen next?

?Data analytics in HR is the next big thing. Henrik H?kansson, Director, People Analytics at Delivery Hero shared his learnings about the six key steps recently. Here they are:

?"As I've led global teams one of the key drivers for me has always been to be able to provide Global data that can be used for comparison and benchmarking throughout the business. However, for a local or regional team it might be more relevant to focus on more specialized metrics for each business unit. The?Global?driver also refers to having a consistent approach for architecture and capabilities across the business. With a clear framework it will be easier to set the right expectations with stakeholders and reduce confusion for anyone using your products.

The second driver refers to creating?Business Driven?metrics which will give value to the business that are gathered from being part of discussions and the roadmaps of your stakeholders. This could mean including other data from your organization to connect the dots and showcase how decisions affecting people will affect business performance. The main challenge here is that the business won't always know what they need, meaning innovation and creativity will be important in showcasing the value People Analytics can provide.

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The third driver is about making the data and dashboards?Accessible?to your users as this will drive conversations and help them make informed decisions. If a product you've developed is hard to find or not communicated properly, you'll struggle with utilization and adoption. The products should also be easy to understand to support storytelling for your stakeholders using data.

?The next driver is about ensuring the data is?Comparable?across regions, business units and functions to allow for benchmarking and a better understanding of what each metric actually means. Even the most basic metrics like Headcount can be difficult to agree on when you have many stakeholders, but having one truth will be extremely helpful in the long run. To support this you should consider having a consistent data model and definitions across all the data you expect to analyze and also set in place a way of adopting new data as it's highly likely your datasets will grow over time.

This leads us to the fifth driver, having?Continuous data?that is always up to date. Ideally your data should also be set up to support trending data over time that will help in providing context to if your metrics are getting better or worse. I've seen countless dashboards that show the current state with executives having no insight into if the numbers are good or bad, simply because there is no reference. Looking at the past will be a large part of predicting the future and helping the business anticipate future opportunities or challenges they'll need to address.

Lastly,?Quality?runs along all of the above drivers as without quality the analytics you provide aren't useful and only with good data quality can you build trust in your products. To improve the quality you will need to partner with the business and the data owners to ensure they keep their end of the bargain to maintain good data in the systems. While you can analyze and identify the issues, in my opinion it's not the responsibility of People Analytics to fix the data, at least not if you want to create scalable solutions. Fixing and engineering the data in the ETL process will be necessary to some extent. However, if you put the band-aids in that stage rather than fixing processes, training users to input data correctly and setting up controls to prevent bad data from entering the system you're going to end up with a huge workload and maintenance problem in the long run. Finally, this driver also refers to quality in the design and function of your products so that the users will find it easy and practical to utilize them. Since People Analytics is still a relatively new area for HR to delve into, creating easy to use products with a good user experience is critical for adoption and increased data literacy across your organization.” Read his complete view here.

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Mars – A family business with soul

Great article in the Economist about the family-owned company which is just going through a change of office at the top level. Since CEO Reid took office in 2014, revenues have increased by more than 50%, to $45bn, which makes them bigger than Coca-Cola. The company is operating by Five Principles:

  1. quality,
  2. responsibility,
  3. mutuality,
  4. efficiency and
  5. freedom.

The Economist comments: “They may sound like managerial guff. But they strike the right balance between making money and doing good. Many more showy corporations aim for that under the trendy slogan of “stakeholder capitalism”. Few carry it off as convincingly as Mars.” There are many family-run companies which are operating as if they were the role model for the stakeholder economy. One thing is obvious: they own the risk; they own the reward. Which ultimately makes key decisions being looked at with a view of the long run. It pays off. The full Economist article can be found here.

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The gap is wide

What employees feel and what they tell their bosses (and families, colleagues, friends)

The majority (80+%) of C-suite leaders think that their employees are doing fine in terms of physical, mental, social and financial well-being. But employees tell a different story – they confirm levels of well-being between 40% (financial) and 65% (well-being). So, for leaders there is only one way: don′t trust your perception and figure out what your people are concerned about. Watching the news these days can be depressing – not just for you as a leader but also for your people.

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?Whether it′s:

  • economic and climate volatility,
  • global unrest,
  • unreliable supply chains, and
  • the pandemic has not yet passed.

So, ensure that you understand what′s really going on, communicate clearly, honestly and compassionately and prioritize.?Reviewing workloads/demands and timelines, even consider pausing non-critical projects, if possible, to ensure your people can be at their very best.

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Reset - The Podcast – listen in to my discussion with Suki Thompson

Suki has been following closely what we have been doing at Spark44 - hence she knew a lot about our strong culture and the question went right to the point.?Listen to the podcast here.

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The next edition of the Building Corporate Soul newsletter will be in your mailbox on August 6. Please continue to join me on my mission to make soulless companies a thing of the past in 2022!

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