How Leadership Clarity Creates Organizational Health for Small to Medium Sized Businesses
A healthy organizational culture. It’s a goal that can energize and focus any business.
Discovering the paths to creating the ultimate workplace is on many business leaders’ minds these days. But for every organization that enjoys a great work culture, many more struggle with an unclear vision of what an organizational culture really is — not to mention figuring out the steps the business needs to take to develop a healthy and productive work environment.
People often mistake the word, culture for meaning a fun culture or a meaningful culture. The truth is, all companies have a culture whether it’s fun, meaningful, not so fun, not so meaningful or somewhere in between.
The question is do you like the culture you have, or do you want it to be different?
Having a great culture doesn’t necessarily have to mean fun, because fun might not be the right fit for all groups of people.
So how do you determine what’s the true, authentic and meaningful definition of a healthy culture for your group? And how do you bring your group’s organizational health closer to where you’d like to be?
Ultimately, it comes down to this: People want to know where they fit and that what they do makes a difference.
When you’re doing things right, the whole team will feel it because there’s a shared sense that creating a great culture is the right thing to do.
And it means more than just right in the profit sense, or the growth sense or the business sense — even though a great culture reaps benefits on all those fronts. It’s just right.
The Advantage. Your advantage.
As a consultant to small and medium businesses on technology solutions, and also in my own role as CEO of Mavidea, I highly recommend reading the book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business, by Patrick M. Lencioni.
It’s a great read and it’s absolutely right on about the process it advocates for identifying and strengthening an organization’s culture and health.
It’s a process any leadership team can study and work through both for and with their business. The lessons it brings to your enterprise can become a competitive advantage over your competitors.
The book’s guidance in building organizational health can also help you retain your team and define your own unique culture.
When you work through it as a group exercise, as we did, you begin to understand how your group behaves as a unified team. We also found it enriches our team’s daily interactions and supports our organization along the path to building a richer and more fulfilling future.
Bringing clarity to the way we work.
Most importantly, we discovered that if you’re able to specifically define your core values and what you aspire to be, you begin to weave that knowledge into everything you do:
- It’s becomes part of how you interview people.
- It’s becomes a basis for evaluating performance.
- It becomes a central, continuing process of creating a clear culture that everyone on your team can identify with and understand.
But this is more than a book review. It’s an action plan!
In my next post, Clearly Original
Our 6 Steps to Creating Organizational Clarity at Mavidea, I’ll show step by step, how we worked through the process defining organizational Clarity at Mavidea, using the method laid out by the book.
If we can do it with our dynamic and entrepreneurial organization, you can do it with yours. We’re building a Contagious Culture at Mavidea. Contact us to learn more.
