Category Archives: Culture

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6 Simple Steps To Align Your Staff With Business Objectives

“We need team members to see their job as not just confined to their precise scope but to help the group around them or team get the best possible results” Atul Gawande

A strong business depends on people who can see beyond their own cubicle walls. What I mean by this is that a business depends on employees who understand how their actions impact the overall performance of the business. These employees have enough knowledge of the business that they can adjust their day to day work routines, deliverables and interactions so that they maximize value to the business at every occasion.

And, this applies to every employee at every level of the business from the cleaning staff to the board room!

Earlier in my career when I was a new project manager, I ran into an issue where project team members were taking actions that were good for their particular scope of work but they were not considering the impact on the project as a whole. They would take actions that would allow them to get their work done quickly and efficiently but it was causing significant work and rework for other project team members.

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4 Ways To Shred A Culture of Entitlement

“The quickest ways to kill entitlement are to regularly acknowledge what others have contributed to your current levels of success and always seek to increase this for others around you.” Andy Mason

 

What is a Culture of Entitlement?

A culture of entitlement means that your employees arrogantly believe that they deserve a certain level of unreasonable privileges. This belief is often built on the incorrect assumption that the current level of success of the organization is because of the work of the current generation of employees. Typically, nothing could be further from the truth. We are always building our organizations on the shoulders of the giants that have gone before us.

Where Does It Come From?

In the boom and bust world of the oil and gas business, a culture of entitlement always seems to take hold at the peak of the boom periods. This arrogance is created by the boom mentality where the price of oil increases and oil companies are scrambling to get more oil out of the ground by drilling new wells, creating new facilities and desperately trying to hire staff to make everything work. This desperation to hire results in escalating wages, options, perks and coddling that are simply not warranted and not sustainable.

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Why An “Echo Chamber” Culture Will Destroy Your Business

If everyone in your business is always in agreement with you and no one challenges your decisions or ideas then you are running an “echo chamber” organization (this is also commonly referred to as a “Yes-Man” organization). This type of organization is called an echo chamber because everything the leader says, the organization echoes back to them. There are no original thoughts, dissenting ideas or challenging statements.

This is a very dangerous environment to operate in as a leader. If no one is there to challenge your ideas and direction, you will eventually lead your organization into one of your blind spots (news flash: each of us has blind spots) and over a cliff. You won’t have anyone to warn you until it is too late!

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What Are The 5 Most Dangerous Words In Business?

“That is not my problem.”

If anyone in your business responds to a coworker or to a customer with “that is not my problem…”, your business is in serious trouble! These five words signal a dangerous situation where that employee is totally disengaged from the business and does not care about it, their coworkers, the customer or their career with your company.

I have heard these words many times over the years and other variants like:

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The Secret To Building A Successful Organization

“As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole.” Ed Catmull

 

Here is the secret: Real leaders are teachers! If you are not teaching your staff, you are missing a huge leadership opportunity and limiting the overall potential for your business.

I started doing noon hour training sessions in the mid-90’s. I think the first few sessions I did were on goal setting (based on Les Hewitt’s The Power of Focus) and they were pretty rough (a special shout out to all those who attended and never walked out!) However, the more sessions I ran, the better I got. I then encouraged others to do the same thing and we ended up with all kinds of employee led training sessions.