Achieving Sustainable Cultural Development
Culture is a dynamic and evolving process, not another task to get done quickly, and getting it right can mean the difference between doing great business and being ordinary. The traditional command and control methodology is still very prevalent in corporate business, despite a growing demand for a more collaborative approach where leaders, managers and their teams have the empowerment to decide and execute their decisions.
The expanding digital impact and new business practices designed to encourage collaboration and to harness the intelligence and the commitment of everyone, have struggled, and recent studies suggest most organisations revert to their old ways quite quickly.
When you decide to engage in cultural development of any kind, planning is critical; you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression and addressing your culture means you are addressing everything about your business; especially your people. It needs to feel like a welcome inspiration, not a ‘have to do it’ burden on busy people. As I said before, culture is dynamic; it’s developing anyway. Your choice is to drive the change to improve your business or leave it and hope for the best, and in business, the latter is never a good plan.
Working effectively to achieve long-term, sustainable results utilising training and development processes, requires a specific focus, a well-targeted program, high quality content application and proactive support from the top of the business, to be successful. There are several key factors that are critical to achieving these great training outcomes and working to ensure these factors are present and enabled, will make the difference between training that has little or no real impact and a program that produces extraordinary results.
Key Factors
- A full commitment to the development process
- An informed and empowered leadership group
- Company-wide impact and full engagement
- Interactive coaching to enable effective dissemination of information, concepts and skills
- The development process is integrated as a meaningful part of all business activities
- Alignment of the company cultural initiatives with the business systems and methodologies
- A program that is powerful, relevant, well-targeted and empowers everyone in your business
Making changes to an organisation doesn’t work as well as making change within the people who are that organisation. Collaboration happens between people who have the capability and courage to step up and engage proactively with others; this happens when you give them the opportunity to grow as individuals; to make personal change toward their own empowerment; this is the key to cultural development. Strategic planning is critical to success but ultimately, you entrust your decisions and the implementation of them, to the people in your business; they are the ones who deliver. Their innate capability to deliver effectively, will depend on their emotional and intellectual fitness; their levels of individual empowerment.
As the traditional hierarchical business models are disappearing, they are being replaced in the leading-edge companies with flatter, more adaptive structures. The critical need to harness and fully utilise the people assets within your business, to ensure future retention rates and the productive use of your workforce, is fast becoming the most important focus in workplaces moving forward. The work on your company culture is now becoming the most important work to do.