The relevance challenge for senior leaders
One of the biggest challenges that senior leaders have today, is not only ensuring that they themselves remain relevant in an ever-changing world, but that the businesses that they oversee do too. The importance of this cannot be overstated.
It’s how great organisations win the war for talent, build connections across the generations, ensure good public relations, and ultimately maintain a healthy balance sheet. As ever, it’s not luck, it’s design.
Every organisation, regardless of location, industry or sector, has a reason for existing, an aspiration that it seeks to achieve and a set of morals that it expects of its employees in pursuit of aspiration achievement.
In other words: purpose, vision and values. All of these attributes are extremely important inputs into the definition of workplace culture and they have to be relevant to the world that we live in today, not 10 years ago.
Purpose signals that the organisation is in tune with the world (and the social cultural context) in which it operates. It demonstrates that the business has something to contribute to the positive evolution of it.
Vision is a description of the aspiration that the organisation has. This is an expectation of stakeholders, shareholders and potential employees and has to be achievable for it to be believable and is set (and then reset) in line with strategic cycles.
Values, meanwhile, are the organisation's opportunity to make public the kind of culture that it seeks to build. Values summarise the emotional connections expected between employees and their work and - when done correctly - are translated into meaningful daily actions.
These three foundational attributes of workplace culture are responsible for attracting people to the organisation, retaining high potential employees and staying in step with global and regional expectations.
Unfortunately, when these cultural attributes are tested, they are often found to be wanting and the view from the outside is that the leaders are weak or out of touch with the world.
This affects not only the share price and consumer confidence (as these stories inevitably make it into the media) but also an organisation's ability to attract or retain the very people that it needs in order to address the challenges that it has.
This cycle of relevance is occurring almost annually. In previous generations, whilst the world may have been unstable - in its politics or conflicts - the expectations that we had as employees of our businesses were relatively stable. Not any more.
The organisations that will thrive are those that are led by contemporary leadership teams. Those that are mindful of continuing social change, how it materially affects our psychology, such that they can co-operatively build a business that attracts the right investment, the right people and that ultimately delivers the right results.
