One of the most crucial things for a business to do is to identify where their business is suffering. It takes humility to admit your mistakes and adopt new, more optimal policies. Sticking with the same, tired, dull, and uninventive business policies/people practices is utterly detrimental to your organization.
Sometimes your business structure will be in an immediate need for a renovation, and you need to make sure that you can recognize the signs and manage through it! The problem might be with your employee culture, the policies, or the business structure.
In this article, we’ll be looking at ways to improve your leadership development. Let’s discuss the symptoms which will help you identify the problem and will tell you if your business needs an overhaul or not.
1. Your Team Doesn’t Share Enough Insight
Silo departments have many benefits, they can form special bonds and team rituals among co-workers as independent groups, but they can become huge barriers that obstruct the sharing of knowledge and insight.
Your business growth is dependent on the free sharing of knowledge and insight. And we also know that companies with a strong leadership team, philosophies, and development also see increases in productivity, revenue, retention, and recruiting efficiencies.
No matter what business type you have, you need to make sure that the methods with which your employees communicate with each other are optimal. The cause might be an overactive grapevine, which you need to eliminate. How are you communicating to your leaders? At what cadence? With what medium? How often are you bringing leaders together to develop their skills?
2. False Promises
It’s another tendency of departments to hire new employees with promises they know they won’t be able to keep; this luring of new employees is detrimental to your company’s performance and reputation.
Sooner or later, the employee will find out that the leaders can’t keep their promises, and it will seriously discourage them from contributing their best and will this, in turn, will kill their motivation. As an executive coach, my job is to be transparent with the company’s condition so you can eliminate this and turn this around quickly!
3. The Roles Are Rigid & There Isn’t a Focus on Strengths
Another problem that your company might have is that your department forces employees to adhere to fixed roles even when each employee’s needs and skills are not compatible with that rigid role.
This ends up in an overall lack of flexibility among employees as your employees’ individual capacities are ignored. Research shows that when leaders are aligned to their strengths, you create a culture that is super charged with driven, motivated employees who sky rocket and over deliver on KPIs. You need to make sure that your exec team pays attention to your employees’ needs and not only adopt flexible policies to manage the work, but also create a culture that helps align people to work in their strengths!
4. Employee Opinions Are Ignored
Employee Surveys (or engagement surveys) are carried out in some companies, but a recent study I read showed that for 60% of them, the advice employees put forward is not acted upon. Can you believe this? This defeats the whole purpose of taking surveys. When employees’ opinions and advice are ignored, they don’t feel visible enough as employees, and it’s another factor that kills their motivation to contribute at their best.
You need to make sure that the employees’ opinions are represented in the company, show progress in things you identify that need work and should be debated formally.
We hope that the blog was helpful for you; feel free to discuss in the comments.
