Culture is the magic ingredient in a companies success. Corporate culture is the result of leadership, thinking and ultimately defined by actions taken.
Let’s help you to grow into the inspirational leader your company needs right now. I’ll share a few simple tips that you can use right now, today to start making positive changes.
Customers are changing, employees are changing, markets are changing. The skills that used to work are changing.
If you’re …
Continue reading Unlocking Inspirational Leadership: 4 Key Skills to Help You & Your Team ThriveHave you ever missed Christmas?
It’s a deadline. A deadline for millions of people.
Have you ever heard someone say.. “Sorry kids, missed it. Took longer than estimated to organise so we will have to reschedule’?
No, neither have I.
I know this is a sad insight into my brain but for the sake of furthering leadership I’ll take the hit… let’s look at Christmas as a program of work… a collection of complex projects… millions of projects, billions of dependencies, complex supply chains, global distribution, purchasing, budgeting, resourcing… and no ‘boss’.
So how can billions of people achieve the delivery of their Christmas projects, on time, on scope – (roughly within budget)? It’s the biggest program run every year – and there is no overarching governance, no overarching assurance, no status reports… all we have is trust – entrusted leadership, inspiration, and an emotional commitment to deliver.
Culture Master Class
The game of business is not about finishing. It is about finding and continuously delivering value to customers. You role is now to work with your teams to find ways to sniff out ideas from customers (and your teams), to be constantly focused on testing or validating what value is in these ideas (by talking with customers and getting something in their hands to try), and to relentlessly work with your teams to shorten cycle times (innovation (idea) to test (value validation) to release (customer).
Business is about Customer Experience. How do your customers feel while engaging with you? How do they feel when they think about you? How do they feel after they have engaged with you? How does your product or service make them feel? Do you frustrate your customers anywhere on their journey? Do you slow them down? Do you confuse them? Do you make it hard for them to buy from you or engage with you?
Continue reading Can you list the emotions your customers want? Are you right?Try this today. It will start to foster a culture of ‘one-team’, a culture of learning, and importantly a culture or delivering value to customers.
Here is one ‘simple’ change you can learn to make that will mature your thinking from manager to leader and start creating a culture of ‘Trust, Truth & Transparency’.
Managers ask the three questions: ‘What will I get?’, ‘ When will I get it?’ and ‘What will it cost?’. These questions come a need to satisfy a short-term ‘lust for certainty’ – a satisfaction that is usually short lived.
Sadly these questions are not usually answered clearly – leading to a breakdown in trust, truth and transparency.
These questions come from a belief that value is released at the end of a set of tasks. This is old school thinking. Inspirational leaders know that value is streamed to customers, driven by customers and should only end when customers are no longer seeing value.
Continue reading Culture Master Class Series:It’s not a time of change, it’s a time of challenge. ‘Fast Change’ and the rise of knowledge work means it’s time to empower employees to take more initiative and voice their ideas in a time of better-informed customers. As leaders we must all avoid becoming stuck in the wrong gear and at the wrong time. But, the biggest challenge of all will be keeping our organizations young, fresh and current, that’s why we need Robust Leadership in place.
Problem 1. During our recent investigation into performance management, it became obvious that in many organizations the performance and operational processes are often in a bad shape and in need of an overhaul, often inadequate and out-of-line with today’s market demands if the organization is to survive, let alone thrive, in the new economy. In a nutshell they managed the wrong behaviours (metrics) and drive the wrong behaviors we are now asking of our leaders (emerging and existing).
Problem 2. With that in mind. The necessity to increase the value of all employees and executives is now urgent. So, how do we improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the human-side of Organizations needed for the future of business?
So, where has the spirit of leadership gone? Where is the Robust Leadership Australia so urgently needs? We want it, we talk about it, but we are not doing it.
Continue reading Bring The Spirit Of Leadership BackThis is one of my core principles. Everyday I work hard to ensure that members of my team can wake up with a sense of purpose. It sounds easy, but like most things in leadership – it’s difficult.
It’s a big goal to set. I try and achieve it every day – and to be honest I don’t always succeed. That’s why this is a team task. During the retros and during my walks and conversations with people, I ask and collect information that will help me work out how to make everyone ‘wake up with a sense of purpose’.
This is how we put a bounce in our team mates step, how we make them want to jump out of bed in the morning and how we inspire them to bring their best to work.
Continue reading Leadership Series: Wake Up With A Sense Of PurposeI was working with a client the other day and was asked how we attract such great talent to our projects. “Steve, you always seem to have the motivated team, the stars… that makes delivery easy”
Whilst attracting bright talent is a focus of mine (who doesn’t want to work with bright people?), we work hard at it, we also work hard at keeping them and maintaining the motivation.
Our underlying philosophy is pretty simple and is broken down into three points that anyone can use. Continue reading Leadership Tip: Inspiring Your Team
