Does Your Organization Have A Maverick Culture?

Poorly communicated set of corporate cultural values tends to emotionally charge employees with feelings of uneasiness or non-responsiveness.  In addition it tends to enhance the nit-picking - fault finding – hypercritical symptoms, thus causing toxic levels of distrust, lack of loyalty and out and out disruptive behavior within the organization.  Employees, ALL employees, thrive on and deserve recognition not continual carping criticism.

The danger of this type of culture not only includes discord within the organization but has a high level of seeping into the overall business world and local communities.  Once this happens, the word spreads like an out of control wild fire about the Maverick culture within the company. 

Your organization becomes known as a not so nice place to work.  The locals talk about their neighbors quitting or getting terminated.  And usually they all believe terminated for the wrong reasons.  Recruiters have difficulty convincing prospective new employees to hire on, because the word is on the street that their tenure might be short lived.

Maverick over achievers don’t stay long.  They reach their perceived personal piqué of value and start looking for a new hunting ground to feed their quest for notoriety, or the next short hop to the top and usually for more compensation.  Maverick over achievers want to be the continual star of the show and in most cases they do not care where the bodies lie behind them. 

All companies must have revenue streams that support the company.  But if you don’t have a definition, a set of values, a set of goals, the proper hiring mindset, “FAIR” motivational factors that include all levels of employees, then your company is NOT running on all cylinders.  Your revenue stream is being attacked every day and many times the “C” level folks don’t realize it until it reaches an epidemic intensity.

BOTTOM LINE…..Your System Is Broken!  Employee Retention Will Be Off The Charts…..Cost Of Replacement Of Employees Will Silently Affect The Profit Of Your Organizations Bottom Line….Employees Will Quit Their Bosses Because They Know Their Bosses Are Trying To Enforce A Broken System….And Worst Of All, Employees Will Go Into The Business World Believing That Top Management And Owners Just Do Not Care.  And they will tell their side of the story.

We can help.

George F. Mancuso, CPC

President

Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

Grinnell, IA

ClientGrowthConsultants.com

Does Ethical Behavior in Business Bring A Financial Return?

Understanding that business ethics IS an intricate part and perhaps even an extremely critical tool for companies to realize the full impact of its’ value, within their business model.  It is my personal opinion that having a defined ethical behavior strategy will to help to enable more revenue, higher profits and in general a more successful company.

 

Realizing that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “ethics” as:  “the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group” [i.e. business ethics, professional ethics, work ethics] here are some additional pointers or thoughts for you to ponder:

A.     Be open for new ideas because if you are involved with improvement and change you are standing still.

B.     Continually ask for opinions and feedback; this should include your customers, vendors as well as your employees.

C.    Truthfulness in Business; According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of trust is:  “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.

D.    Become involved with customers, vendors, employees and community because familiarity in a key component to being trusted.

E.     Be respectful of other, regardless of differences, status in the company or community, age or other comparable distinctions.

F.     Achieving your promised obligations is paramount to gaining trust with current customers; and amazingly it will help you regain past customers once they realize your commitment to meeting your promises and/or obligations is valid and in practice.

So the two big questions for you: “do you measure up?”  “Does your company measure up”

Have a tremendous week and if I can be of any assistance, please call or write and I will respond immediately!  Remember, your comments or suggestions are always welcome.

Regards,

George F. Mancuso, CPC

President

Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

ClientGrowthConsultants.com

Leaders Can Show The Way - George F. Mancuso

Leaders Can Show The Way - George F. Mancuso

Leaders Can Show The Way

Change begins with leadership. Leadership sets the tone and shows the way. How your leaders think will cast the mold for the rest of the organization.

    It must be clear to others that your organization’s leaders believe that management capability is an asset worth time and resources. Where leaders demonstrate this through their own behaviors, the organizations will have corresponding success. Having leaders publicly recognize individuals for outstanding team management (as opposed to personally exceeding business goals) will set the tone for the importance the organization places on the role of the manager in delivering results.

    When leaders spend time with their direct reports, setting clear goals and expectations, providing feedback and actively working to build bench strength in the organization, they are setting expectations for how others will act. Take Jack Welch during his GE days. He spent a great deal of his personal time both developing his own successor ( Gman says: I’ve preached for years that you should always be training your replacement) and developing leadership capability throughout the organization by participating the GE’s management development programs. As a consequence, GE is constantly cited as having one of the best leadership development programs in the world. This happened because the senior leadership believed in the value of its leaders and made investments to insure they could deliver their maximum capability.
  
Also, leaders are the ones who primarily create an organization’s fundamental beliefs, values and culture. Where leaders go astray, organizations often follow. Creating a powerful culture takes time. But leaders can play a powerful role in establishing the outward signs of culture and behaviors that they both embody and endorse.

Communication: Keeping everyone on the same page
    Organizations tend to undervalue communication. But communication plays a powerful role as the vehicle through which leaders demonstrate and publicly recognize the desired behaviors in the organization. How leaders talk about managers sets a clear message for what is expected in the organization. Strong communication systems can help organizations build strong cultures and enhance performance.

Competencies: The essential building blocks
    Identifying the critical competencies that make managers successful in your organization is the first step in creating the new manager role. New managers who are hired and current employees who are promoted into management roles must be selected because they have the capability to deliver on key functions of this role. These competencies include such skills as setting goals that fit the business strategy, providing coaching and feedback to others and helping employees understand how they fit into the big picture.

    Often promotions are given because someone is a good individual contributor. Good technical skills are a far cry from good management skills. We need alternative career structures if the only way to move up in the organization is to become a manager. Not all great individual contributors make great managers. By having management competencies defined within an organization we can also coach and develop individuals on how to improve in these specific areas.

Measuring, rewarding and reinforcing
    It’s a cliché, but it’s true: That which gets measured and rewarded gets done. If you don’t include management competencies and results for such areas as reduction in turnover or developing staff to improve organizational bench strength in performance appraisal systems, managers will not focus on these issues. Organizations that reward their managers for being good managers will stand the greatest chance of building strong management capability over time. Rewards do not need to take the form of money. In fact, simple public recognition of strong management skills sends a message to the rest of the organization: Managers are important to us.

Organization structure: The key symbol
    When organizations design jobs so that managers must spend 90 percent of their time doing non-management work, we send a very clear message about how we view the management aspects of a manager’s role: They are not important. We need to redesign organizational structures to support managers so they can truly manage the talent within the organization.
  
By involving your leaders, crafting key messages, developing managers and examining the current messages managers receive about their role in managing others, HR leaders can change how managers are viewed, and how they view themselves.
 
 The process of building better managers is not fast or cheap. But the rewards can be substantial and well worth the effort.

Regards,
George F. Mancuso, CPC
President
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.

Don’t Underestimate the Role of Managers During Times of Change

    Doing the bare minimum of training and development—just enough to keep your organization within the law, and to keep from being sued—can easily lead to behaviors that damage companies’ reputations. Once damaged, a reputation takes significant time and money to restore. Some companies never really recover. Before you find yourself in a position of losing top talent or dealing with a weakened organizational reputation, you can invest in processes to improve the management capability in your organization.

    Human resource leaders are in an ideal position to influence all the elements needed to change the role of managers and to help their organizations build management capability. Many elements are needed, of course, but the first is the sponsorship of the most senior leaders to ensure buy-in and demonstrable support for the process. The rest of the elements involve your organization’s beliefs, values and culture. All of these are initiatives for change and are necessary to reinforce norms and expectations.

    Building management capability goes beyond training. It includes transforming the organization’s culture so that it values the role that management plays in attracting and retaining top talent and setting forth clear expectations for the manager’s role. As this model indicates, all organizations have an underlying set of beliefs about the importance of the manager. Organizations that have strong management capabilities believe that managers are critical for their ability to attract, retain and motivate employees. Strong beliefs influence the values of an organization, and consequently, culture.

    Each of the initiations of change in the model represents an area that organizations must consider if they want to build strong management capability. Just focusing on one trigger point of change will not bring about lasting change in management capability; the current culture will overwhelm small changes. By focusing on numerous change initiatives, organizations can modify the culture and create long-term change. Briefly, review the following considerations:

·        Leadership: An organization’s leadership must both believe in the value of the role that managers play and must lead by example.

·        Communication: The leadership team must consistently communicate the importance of the role of the manager to the organization and its ability to achieve high performance, attract talent and retain it.

·        Competencies: Management competencies must be assessed and developed. Entry into a management role must be predicated on an appropriate, although not necessarily perfect, set of skills.

·        Measurement and rewards: Any effective strategy must be integrated into the scorecard. It must be measured and rewarded.

·        Structure and symbols: The role of a manager must be structured so that the manager can spend sufficient time with direct reports. The term "manager" must mean something in terms of role expectations.

    By focusing on these valid points of change, the organization will develop new norms and expectations for behavior. The organizational beliefs regarding the management role will actually conform to what the intrinsic intention of change is encouraging: a belief that managers’ roles do make a difference.

Regards,
George F. Mancuso, CPC
President
Client Growth Consultants, Inc.