Tag Archives: Andy Stanley

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How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization – Part II

Back in May 2014, I wrote a blog post entitled How to Get the Pulse of Your Organization. In this post I described two techniques that can be used to effectively communicate and lead your organization; “Did You Know” emails and a web based employee feedback system. In this week’s article, I will introduce two other techniques that I used to communicate and keep my finger on the organization’s pulse.

  1. Monthly lunch with the leader – Pick a random set of employees each month to have lunch with you. Do not repeat employees until everyone in the organization gets a turn. A group size of 10 to 20 works best. Use these lunches as open mic sessions for employees to ask you whatever questions they may have. Be open and honest with your answers and wherever possible tie the answers back to the organization’s vision, mission, values and goals. Above all else, listen intently to the feedback, take notes and never get defensive. These sessions are your opportunity to hear what your organization is thinking and talking about. If the conversation starts out slowly, you can prompt discussion by asking questions like;
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A Change Management Model That All Leaders Must Understand

A few weeks ago I wrote about dealing with organizational change in my post “The Secret Of Organizational Change Management.” This post was based on a great article in Strategy + Business magazine which outlined 10 guiding principles for change.

That post was focused on how leaders should roll out change inside their organizations but it made me think about the flip side of this. How do the employees see change from their point of view? A few years ago I attended a leadership development class that provided a model of how people react when confronted with change. This model is from Spencer, Shenk and Capers . According to the model, everyone reacts to change by moving through the following six stages;

Stage 1: Loss – Employees are shocked by the change and experience fear and trepidation. They are cautious and can be paralyzed and unproductive for a period of time. It is analogous to a period of grieving.

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Did Your Organization’s Vision Leak?

Last week I posted an article on organizational vision entitled “What Is Your Company’s Vision and Why Should You Care?” Besides defining what a vision statement is and providing some examples, I stated that an organization’s vision must be “clearly articulated, consistently modeled and communicated”.

Why does the organizational vision have to be clearly articulated, consistently modeled and communicated? Because vision leaks!

I first heard the “vision leaks” phrase during a leadership training class led by Andy Stanley and then I noticed it was included as axiom number 13 in Bill Hybels’ book Axiom. I am not sure where it originated from but it is an extremely important concept for business leaders.