Culture Bites Podcast Episode 179
Notes from this episode
The Impact of Leaders: It’s not just how you behave as a leader – it’s what you’re creating around you!
In this episode Dom and Ash discuss how the role of a leader is vital in terms of the impact you have on people within the organisation. It often goes beyond what you’re directly responsible for as a leader. Way too many leaders drift into managing and directing a team, signifying a lack of trust within their group to get the job done.
Being clear at creating a strategy for stakeholders and customers offers the ability for everyone in the organisation to lean and buy into it. Ask yourself as a leader, how do you energise and entrust your people to deliver the organisational strategy?
Simplify the mission and objective. What are we here to do? This will help clarify their role within the bigger picture and create energy and support in order to do it.
Understanding what you do as an organisation provides comfort around people being able to do it. Keep people clarified, energised, and connected in being able to do their roles so they understand the difference they make.
Keeping focused on what the BIG WIN looks like requires focus. Avoid getting involved in the short-term stuff, develop people for the bigger picture. Make sure the culture is aligned with the strategy and organisational purpose. Try not to allow daily smaller business-as-usual items drag down the bigger picture.
Looking at your culture requires an honest lens, ask yourself are you looking out the window or in the mirror? Some of the broken things with an organisation is a mirror – a direct reflection of your impact on the culture.
As senior leaders we have the biggest impact on culture, this includes times when you are away from the business to focus on other things. If you not being there slows things down there’s a fundamental issue with developing the talent. You can’t hold the organisation to ransom just because you’re not there! A sign of a healthy and constructive culture contains teams that still flourish without you.
Everything within your organisation requires alignment to the strategy, including policies, procedures, and systems – they can’t be counter intuitive. Ensure all executive teams are also aligned otherwise various components will be working against each other.
Asking yourself, how am I travelling as a leader is par for the journey and requires coverage to ask every stakeholder, board members how are you aligned with the culture? Sometimes you have to have the tough conversations.
Naturally people want to be in control of their lives and make a difference, but a less than constructive leader can beat that out of people. Look at the departments that are less aligned to the strategy, if leaders worked on the less connected people within an organisation there would be a huge upswing – as leaders we need to connect with everyone.
Remember, people should leave your organisation better than when they came.