Navigating through the fog and listening to the unspoken...

John started as CFO at a massive global corporation and he was charismatic, astute and a great leader. He had all the IQ and EQ smarts and epitomized the essence of modern leadership. When he accepted the role, he knew that it was a great opportunity to make a difference, as his intuition raised concerns that something was amiss with the organizational culture.

He patiently orientated himself on the who’s who and “how things work”, got to know the respective operational teams and started understanding the culture of the organization and soon realized that although it was a wonderful organization and a great commercial brand, the attrition rate was still exceptionally high. Further, there was an unusually high amount of litigation cases with exorbitant associated costs.

John realized one big truth, both he and his colleagues were being misled by misinformation by the management. He decided to follow the money trail and do some investigating, and started scrutinizing the payroll records for irregular payouts, retrenchment costs, performance costs and checked the recruitment costs within the organization. He started cross referring the labour litigation costs with the cause of actions, looked at facility costs, health and safety compliance, software and hardware costs, coffee and tea, security costs per employee and the results were startling.

Of particular interest was the fact that employees who had left the organization either voluntarily or involuntarily cost the organization a substantial amount which invariably eroded the bottom line. He had to do something to mitigate the trend.

After also realizing that the company did not have adequate policies in place to deal with disputes adequately and that training was lacking for Senior Leadership, he quickly tabled this with the EXCO and soon thereafter the organization procured the services of experts for a full on intervention to conduct a risk assessment on the organizational culture, purposed to identify and eradicate any systemic impediments that were contributory factors of the skills drain.

Within six months, the organization had a significant positive trend in terms of professionalism, interpersonal relations and dispute resolution which significantly improved the employees’ attitudes, morale and productivity which was indicative of a significant improvement on profits.

NOTEWORTHY:

Too often the root cause of employee relations challenges are resultant from organizational leaders electing to buy into perceptions as opposed to making an effort to establish facts. Too many times as Leaders we are told watered down versions of what is happening in the organization and fabricated truths for some obscure reason such as either fear from the subordinate or even just boosting ego`s.  This is never good for the organization, as integrity, transparency and honesty begets loyalty and goes a long way to ensuring the correct decisions are taken to keep the organization safe from reputational risk and being financially sound.

Leaders should never forget that they are employees first and foremost and Executives and Board members have a fiduciary duty to conduct themselves with the utmost skill, care and diligence. Good governance is not about compliance. It is about doing the right things for the right reasons. If nothing else, compliance is and should be inculcated as part and parcel of the overall business case. There is no business case without the employees to realize the strategic imperatives.

In private companies employees have a duty to shareholders and all interested and affected parties in society. Shareholders invest their financial resources for a premium ROI. As a Transformational Leader in the modern world of work accountability is a KPI. They have a duty to the organization to lead by example and to influence others positively to achieve common organizational goals and bring out the best in people, this starts by taking note of the things that matter, listening more attentively whilst using sound judgement to discern between what is real and what is perceived.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” 

Aristotle

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