The highly competitive and changing marketplace demands a new kind of workplace culture where leaders and employees alike embrace the six characteristics mentioned in the article, Create Your Corporate Values by Design, Not by Accident. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so – and while you’re at it - take the assessment at the end of the article that measures your organization’s proficiency level of each of the six characteristics.
The article prompted several readers to ask about first steps and the requirements for leaders to transform corporate cultures to support emerging business needs dictated by a rapidly evolving marketplace. Upon reflection, this concern made me realize just how much underlying tension exists in today’s workplace; how much uncertainty people have about their organizations’ futures (let alone their own job security); and how much leaders must change their mindset if their organizations are going to reinvent themselves and get back on track.
For leaders now being faced with the challenge of transforming their organization’s culture, this prompts the question: Are you an operations-driven or market-driven leader?
In other words, are you the type of leader whose focus is on the here and now or is it on the short and long-term future? Do you spend too much time rolling up your sleeves to do the work others could be doing, or are you thinking about and driving the requirements to create and sustain competitive advantage?
The creation of a strong corporate culture is the byproduct of an organization with a strong leadership identity fueled by shared values operating in perfect alignment. Some may think that being in perfect alignment is utopian, but I believe that to grow and compete in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, it is a fundamental necessity across all industries.
There is an old saying that we are three leaders: the leader we think we are, the leader others think we are, and the leader we really are. How leaders see themselves depends on many factors, but one in particular is the feedback they receive from their peers and employees. When leaders become too dependent on what their colleagues say about them or think they should be, it can disrupt their ability to contribute in ways that are in the best interests of the organizations they serve.
The result: a leadership identity crisis that makes it difficult for an organization to establish momentum or solidify a strong enough corporate culture to continuously enable growth, innovation and opportunity. Instead, this leadership identity crisis fuels a workplace environment where employees are disengaged and dissatisfied; misrepresented and misunderstood; underutilized and underperforming.
When your organization loses its leadership identity, the corporate culture weakens along with it, making the organization vulnerable to the demands of the workplace and marketplace and undermining its competitive advantages.
So let’s get back to the core question to determine whether or not your leadership is experiencing an identity crisis: Are you an operations-driven or a market-driven leader? The same question should be asked of all the leaders in your organization. Do they have more of an operations-driven mindset or is it a market-driven one?
Here are a few deeper dive questions to help you objectively reach a conclusion:
- Do your leaders have more of a desire to do front line work (operations-driven) – or are they focused on maximizing the full potential of people (market-driven)?
- Do they lead with the big picture and corresponding implications in mind (market-driven) – or are they trapped in task management and buried in the details (operations-driven)?
- Do leaders value the manner in which you attain results (market-driven) – or do they only care about the fact that you achieved the results (operations-driven)?
- Do they lead their employees and departments in support of the organization’s goals and objectives (market-driven) – or do they spend a majority of their time micromanaging issues that support their own agendas (operations-driven)?
- Are your leaders doers (operations-driven) – or are they thinkers (market-driven)?
- Are your leaders entrepreneurial and forward-thinking (market-driven) – or do they focus on incremental improvements to the current ways of doing things (operations-driven)?
- Do your leaders spend a lot of their time focused on establishing a political foothold in the company (operations-driven) – or are they more focused on breakthrough ideas and ideals (market-driven).
- Do your leaders compete against their employees (operations-driven) – or do they leverage each employee’s strengths to make the organization more competitive (market-driven)?
Having spent more than 30 years in leadership roles, I have seen how the operations-driven company is high-volume, lower margin, manufactured-centric, and commodity-based, while the market-driven company is higher-margin, sustainable growth, innovation-minded, premium brand focused, and consumer-centric.
Though each type of company can breed highly successful businesses, you must design a corporate culture to support the mindset that drives it – and that means knowing whether your organization’s leadership identity is operations-driven or market-driven. To solidify the best culture fueled by shared values, that in turn fuels momentum, you must support one or the other. It’s when you attempt to support both that silos form, identity-crises abound, and employee engagement and satisfaction wane.
Given the importance of this topic, what do you think your organization’s leadership as well as your own peers would say about this article? Together, let’s start a constructive dialogue that challenges us all to think differently about how we lead, why we lead, and how others perceive our leadership.
Follow me on Twitter @GlennLlopis. Learn more about an Executive Summit my organization will be hosting for market-driven leaders on June 11th in Irvine, CA.
