Leading Through Uncertainty - Top 8 Tips for Leadership When the Future Is Hanging in the Balance

You cannot open a newspaper or listen to the radio or TV nowadays without hearing about some organisation that is downsizing, closing down or completely restructuring itself. Global companies are moving their operations to 'cheaper' locations, public service organisations are having their budgets slashed while many are just failing to keep their heads above water in the current economic crisis.

We only hear the news when the final decisions are made public. But for many of these organisations, they have already had to endure weeks and months of waiting and wondering where and when the axe was going to fall. Thousands of people are getting up every day and going to work worrying about if, and for how long more, they are going to have a job. Many leaders are lying awake at night struggling with how long more they can sustain looking their people in the eye and telling them that they still don't know what the future holds. The stresses all round are massive.

Developing a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Introduction

This article provides an overview of organisational culture, how it is formed and the practical actions that can be taken to understand and shape it. The prevailing culture of an organisation has a major impact on its ability to react to changes in market forces, develop innovative new services and products or adopt more efficient practices and processes. We have written this paper for managers within a wide range of organisations who are looking for practical advice and information to help them create an environment that will enable them to successfully adopt improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma and Continuous Improvement.

A Definition of Organisational Culture

An organisation's culture comprises all of the values, beliefs, assumptions, principles, myths, legends and norms that define how individuals and groups of people think, make decisions and perform. 

If You Want to Change Your Business, Start With These 3 Steps

Much of the work that I do is focused on helping businesses go from where they are to where they want to be. I always work hard to make sure that the changes I help businesses make are sustainable, meaning that the leaders in the business are the ones to drive the change. Though every organization is different, most of the challenges that businesses and leaders face involve creating a fully engaged, capable team of people that can execute the mission of the business better than the competition while adapting to the changing market conditions. While that's a daunting task, I help these businesses make that change happen and often these are three of the critical steps.

Clarify Where "There" Is

Many of the leaders I work with recognize that they are not where they need to be, but they have not yet clarified what the new destination looks like. 

Organisation Culture Change

Culture is essentially the way an organisation does things. Culture is something that is shared either in the organisation as a whole, or among specific groups or functions within the organisation. Culture drives the way in which people behave within the organisational setting. It's important to organisations because the way it does things has a direct impact on the effectiveness of the organisation.

Culture is difficult to measure possibly because it is not a hard process that can be adapted and changed through the directives and policy. Instead culture is intangible, and is built from a mixture of norms, beliefs, values and symbols that are played out in the day-to-day machinations of organisational life.

Furthermore cultures are dynamic and change over a period of time, resulting from group interactions, leadership behaviour, organisational structure and rules of interaction. As people leave or join the organisation the culture of the organisation will shift over a period of time, the size of the shift will depend on the intensity of shared experience within the organisational setting.

Is Culture Change Needed In My Organisation?

Culture is seen as "the way we do things around here". There may be more technical descriptions, but this certainly sums up why culture has such a big impact on organisational performance. It is an issue MD's can struggle to get to grips with, as many of the issues that surround culture are deep rooted in history.

If an organisations is suffering from a negative culture, they may experience many of the following symptoms:

    Employees doing the bear minimum
    Staff failing to contribute ideas
    High percentage of staff using up their sick pay
    High staff turnover
    A tense and unproductive working environment
    Poor cooperation between departments