You’ve put an unfathomable amount of time and energy into growing or turning around your business. That’s your job as CEO, to go from one problem to the next focusing on things like SOPs, delivery, R&D — the tangible things everyone is watching and measuring, especially your board. The problem, however, is that you get so caught up in this aspect of the business that your organization might actually be quite fragile and vulnerable in other ways, and you don’t even know it. Creating a truly resilient business requires much more than simply developing a smart organization.
The Head & The Heart of Your Company
Every organization has a head and a heart. The head of the business is the measurable things: manufacturing, sales, and marketing, while the heart of your business is the culture, leadership, values, behaviours, habits.
If you think of your organization like a house, the head of your organization is the electrical system, plumbing, and HVAC, the things that make your home a liveable habitat. The heart of the organization is the foundation, windows, siding and roof. The heart provides the structure that holds the head functions, and keeps the rain and other natural elements out.
Because the truth is, even in the best of circumstances, it’s going to rain. The breakdowns come in your company. Expectations in the business aren’t met. Deliverables to the market are missed. A mass exodus of employees from one of your departments. A global pandemic. It rains, and sometimes it pours!
In the lifecycle of your organization, it’s not a matter of if it will rain, just a matter of when. The question is, what will the damage be?
Fix The Roof Before It Rains
The problem is many organizations have focused on the head but not the heart and when the rain comes – those breakdowns – it impacts everything. Not having a clearly articulated culture, principles of leadership, values and locked in agreement on the associated behaviors is tantamount to have a hole in the roof of your house. It’s human nature to not focus on fixing the roof until it’s raining. We often live life in denial, but the impact of this on our organization cannot be understated.
Maybe this is already happening in your business. You’ve put so much time into what you and the board thought of the essential elements of the business – the head – and now the rain has started to fall. You thought your organization was resilient, but now you’re seeing signs it’s not. You have to intentionally create an environment where people can be resilient because you cannot command it from them.
What Happens If You Keep Putting It Off?
If you haven’t worked on the heart of your organization, when there’s stress, your people won’t work well together. Typically, in times like these, people protect and cover themselves and relationships break down, which further exacerbates your ability to deliver and this will impact how you are perceived by the board or by ownership. You may have the financial wherewithal to handle the breakdown, but not for long. At some point, jobs are on the line. Maybe even yours.
The ability to produce through the hard times and ultimately survive depends on the resiliency of your organization, and a thriving, resilient organization is what you need to get to the huge payout that everybody is banking on and have the impact as a business you want to have.
Signs You Need to Work on the Heart
Here are some signs you need to work on the heart of your company:
- You are putting in a massive amount of personal energy and time to get things done in the organization. This level of energy and time is often seen as a badge of honor in the world of work and leadership but it’s a symptom of the larger problem.
- There is jockeying for resources (people, money) on your leadership team to meet individual objectives. There’s a bit of political game play around this where there’s little accountability among team members – meaning commitments made in meetings are not being followed up on, individuals not keeping one another in the loop on actions taken, and they are operating based on unspoken or unclear expectations of one another. They’re not sabotaging each other, but they’ve got their own thing going on — each person has their little kingdom and everybody is not pulling in the same direction.
- The morale in the organization is inconsistent at best. There are pockets of high morale and pockets of low morale but no consistency across the organization. The state of morale is largely based on individual managers.
- Turnover is approaching or exceeding 20% when you look at the combination of terminations and people leaving on their own.
- Teams are consistently missing deadlines for projects. It might even be a running joke that project dates are suggestions and they are almost never met.
Ready to Begin? Get Started Here.
The health of the head and heart of the organization starts with you. The heart of the organization is set at the top. First with the CEO, and then with your executive leadership team (ELT). There’s bottom up elements to make a healthy organization but if you and the ELT don’t set the tone and walk-the-walk, don’t even bother.
It starts with you and a clear acknowledgement of what’s occurring in the business and the specific issues that have been identified. Then accept personal responsibility for the current situation, maybe even explicitly apologising for what is going on, and for not fully living up to and championing the core values and principles. Create a statement of commitment and determination from this point forward to define, model and uphold the values and principles. It requires getting 100% clarity on what they look like and agreement to operate based upon them moving forward. Start by answering these 5 essential questions and get clarity amongst your team on exactly what the answers are:
- How do we behave? What are the behaviors that we will take a stand for in this room?
- Why do we exist? What’s our purpose? What are our fundamental functions?
- What do we do? People often have different ideas about exactly what the organization does.
- Who does what? There’s often duplication of responsibility or something important that’s been missed.
- How will we succeed? What will be the measure of our success and what are the key things we all agree will be done in order to get to that success?
The glue that holds this all together is a focus on agreements instead of expectations and “re-hire” everyone based upon agreement to the answers to the questions above – especially “how do we behave?”.
CEO’s and senior management often think the problem is them and they need to work harder to get to the outcomes they need, but if you haven’t created a resilient heart in your organization, this just leads to burnout. So build the heart of your organization. Mitigate the impact of the breakdowns before they happen. Build a resilient business, and get the payout you’re banking on.
This is a huge body of work and very hard to do alone, but it’s crucial if you want to create a truly resilient organization. If you’re interested in getting help implementing this in your business, click here to contact me.