Here Is A Method That Is Helping Businesses Get Alignment On Organizational Values

A few weeks ago in the blog post “What Does Your Organization Value?” I wrote about what organizational values are and why they are important. I explained that the leaders of an organization must not just communicate organizational values but they must also model the values that they are communicating.

If they model something other than what they are communicating, their staff will pick up on it immediately. Employees emulate the values that their leaders are modeling, not necessarily what they are stating. Hence the Ralph Waldo Emerson statement “Your actions speak so loudly I cannot hear what you say.

In the article, I suggested that leaders conduct a poll of their employees to find out what the employees perceive as the organizational values. I believe that this is an extremely important exercise that an organizations’ leaders should do every few years.

So, how should you go about this in your organization?

What Everybody Ought to Know About Certainty And How It Can Hurt You

Certainty is one of the weakest positions in life. Curiosity is one of the most powerful. Certainty prohibits learning and curiosity fuels change.Dr. Henry Cloud 

This quote is extremely powerful and should trigger some deep reflection in each of us.

How many times have we walked into a situation like a meeting, negotiation, conversation or argument with absolute certainty in our position? I know I am guilty of this way too often. How many of these situations resulted in unnecessary conflict or a solution that was not optimal?

What if you had entered these situations with an open mind, willing to understand other viewpoints and learn about the positions that others have on the topic? What if you were truly curious and open to solving the situation in the most productive way possible instead of simply bulldozing through to your solution?

The Secret of Original Thinking

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.Albert Von Szent-Gyorgyi Nagyrapolt

This is a profound statement with profound implications. Seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought! Think of the impact you could have in the world if you were to able to see the same problems that confront all of us but you were able to think about them differently and propose unique and innovative solutions.

Does this seem too far fetched for you….too much of a stretch? I don’t think so! I think each of us has an opportunity to think creatively and uniquely about problems we face each day.

We all approach life’s challenges based on our unique perception of the world. To think creatively, just step away from the status quo, leverage your unique perspective and start asking questions about the challenges at hand. Follow these steps and see where it leads you:

The Secret of Organizational Change Management

In the 2014 summer version of Strategy + Business magazine, there was an article entitled “10 Principles of Leading Change Management.”  This article ties nicely into one of my previous blog posts “The Protean Corporation” that was focused on what corporations need to do to deal with the continuous and explosive change that they are faced with everyday. That blog post was focused on the organizational structure and culture required for our changing environment while this post is focused on rolling out change within the organization itself.

The 10 guiding principles for change as described in the article are summarized below (with some of my commentary added);

1) Lead with the culture – when building your strategy for rolling out the change, take into account your organizations vision, mission, values and overall culture. Does the change align with the vision, mission, values and culture? How can you structure or position the change to leverage these things and make it easier for the organization to accept and embrace the change?