After speaking to a few CEO’s, Managers and HR directors over the last two weeks – it has been interesting to reflect on the common “pain points” they are currently experiencing. The top five themes were:

1. High Turnover/Retention
2. Mediocre client service (role described as boring/mundane)
3. Team morale (cohesion within and between teams).
4. People are resistant to change and the ever-increasing rate of change
5. Communication (as a theme which runs through points 1 – 4) – people not having the full picture of what is going on and why

 

All of these themes involve people and the way they interact with each other. So who in the organisation is responsible for observing people and the way they are interacting with each other? Who in the organisation can see the bigger picture of how all the parts are coming together? Who can accurately say what the cause of any of these 5 themes are? Who has that information or insight?

The image that comes to mind is a leaky bucket. As these “pain points” are noticed, a band aid is placed over the hole (effectively a solution to address the symptom). Ie. send people on client service training, team-building sessions, communicate more frequently around a change process, put a formal recruitment, induction and development “process” in place in an attempt to hire better and reduce turnover.

What if you stopped making any assumptions about where the pain is coming from and actually found out where it is coming from. It may take slightly longer to diagnose, but at least you will then be solving the real problem. For example, what if high turnover is only 20% due to the people you are hiring, your induction process and development process. What if 80% of high turnover, is really about someone’s day to day experience they have in the workplace, on the job, interacting with their manager and colleagues. Then your solution would rather be finding out what their day-to-day experience is (good or bad) and how they rate their manager and colleagues. What if low team morale or competition between teams has nothing to do with how many team-building exercises you do, but rather the structure of your organisation? What if the competition is due to your organisational teams working in silos (sales, marketing, finance,operations, servicing, administration, IT etc) – instead of cross-functionally. So instead of sales complaining about marketing leads and marketing complaining about sales conversions, both functions are co-operating to find the best win-win solution for both teams and ultimately the organisation. The focus is always on the organisation.

The only way an organisation can adapt to the rate of change required is if everyone is receiving timely information about what is going on in every area of the business that affects them – all the time. To achieve this practically, we need to re-think the “corporate way” of communicating through channels of hierarchy on an irregular basis. Communication, problem-solving, decision-making and innovation need to happen continuously and perhaps without the authority of a manager (depending on the issue at hand). This allows for a more self-managing environment of ownership at every level of the business. Quick learning cycles and faster implementation.

Are you ready to re-invent the ‘corporate way’ to one which better serves your organisation, its needs and all the people in it? Are you ready to re-think the way you do things and address the real problems in your organisation? As Einstein once said, “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.”