A client recently asked me to support them in enhancing their culture and raising the performance of their team.
Following our discussion they told me that they wanted to focus on “more technical and practical things” first— like, improved writing skills, better time management, and stronger sales and customer service skills. After focusing on these items, they said, they would ask us to help them strengthen their corporate culture and leadership capabilities.
Isn’t this exactly how we repeatedly get things upside down? If I don’t get along with my boss, or if I don’t enjoy my work, or if I’m not inspired, or if I don’t feel appreciated—you can teach me better writing skills until you are blue in the face, but it won’t have much impact, because I am not inspired enough to learn and grow. We continue to get our priorities mixed up this way.
Take this 1 minute quiz to see if your priorities are upside down.
As Stephen R. Covey famously stated, we need to put, “first things first”. Culture and leadership capacity are the soil in which we plant our seeds. Preparing the soil, cultivating it, and nurturing it, must all take place before we can grow any crops.
My new book, “The Bellwether Effect”, explains how this misunderstanding has become part of modern management folklore, and is now embedded as the daily (impatient and fear-based) practice of more than 80% of organizations (and why our research shows that 80% of those surveyed would leave their jobs if given a free choice). Partly this is due to our short attention span—we are obsessed with immediate results—but you can’t just shove seeds into the ground in order to speed up the harvest!
In another recent conversation with a client I was told that the corporate culture was not yet ready to discuss subjects like “inspiring leadership” because the main priorities were the metrics and meeting the quarterly financial numbers (and making sure people didn’t get fired for missing them!). The current corporate culture, he continued, was one of, “kick ass, take no prisoners and destroy the competition”. In The Bellwether Effect I write about my client Microsoft, which used to have a culture like this, but following the arrival of a new CEO, Satya Nadella, and the intense attention he and his team have paid to culture and leadership, Microsoft has become one of the most successful technology companies of our time. Read all about it here.
What do you put first? Doing or being? How people feel, or what they know?
Thank you, Lance. I so look forward to receive your new book in the post here in London, UK.
Today’s biggest ailment is that most people have lost connection with themselves, with their deeper true Self – that IS the true source of inspiration and…………..creative source all those values you previously described so beautifully in the CASTLE(R) Principles. Today we have to remind people of who they truly ARE, so that they grow beyond any fear based state of consciousness that increaslingly destroys our inner peace and our society. It is all about PERSONAL leadership now – I have to be open and willing to do the inner work on myself first, before real change and transformation of culture in community comes about.
So – I opt for inspiring opportunities for people that allow them to look beyond who they THINK they are, so that they can get a glimpse and experience of LIFE in its possibilities being vast and infinite.
Best wishes to you.
In the Coach Certification program we run, we say, “People hire coaches to, inspire them to grow from where they are to where they aspire to be.” Same idea as you are putting forward, don’t you think?
Right on Lance!
Relationship (including with oneself) and Task Functions are interdependent and synergistic with everything else. Organization culture and leadership are as important as the air we breathe in our functioning.
And so the question remains, why are we victims of “The Bellwether Effect”? As intelligent beings, why do we follow destructive pathways while knowing that an alternative pathway would work better? It reminds me of Robert Frost’s famous poem:
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
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I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I call it putting the cart before the horse.
When we don’t know who we are and why we are driven to do anything, then the culture is focused on action packed drama regardless of what is going on underneath.
It results in over compensating behaviours that cause unnecessary stress.
…and that describes 80% of workplaces!
My daughter recently bought a book from the UK on how to manage a small business, just as she and I do with our Celtic silver jewellery. It had a first question about how we want to be seen – something like that – our mission statement and so on. I thought of you, Lance ,and said, “I want people to come into our stand and have a wonderful time listening to the stories we tell about the Celtics and the designs in the jewellery. When they make a purchase, I want them to be so happy to own such a piece, to have a special satisfaction in the whole experience, to know that it was as much and more to please them as it was to sell something to them.
Thanks for reminding me that is how I feel about it, Lance.
As the old saying goes, “We sell the sizzle, not the steak”, don’t we?