Corporate Comfort Zone vs Leadership
Organizations have as their goal becoming mature, well managed companies delivering consistently on the service or products for which they are or wish to become known. They use branding and taglines to assist them with that figuring that customers will come back time and time again for the what these lines advertise. Consider the following as a few examples:
- “All the News that’s Fit to Print” , (New York Times)
- “ It takes a licking and keeps on ticking” (Timex)
- “Where vision gets built”. (Lehman Brothers)
Wait! Time and time again? Times have changed. You can now read the NY Times online, “print” hmmm not. Our watches are digital or on our phone. “Ticking” if you have the app. And Lehman Brothers is gone having declared bankruptcy.
If a company has an entrenched hierarchy, an HR director without vision and a passion for their people (Only “20% of workers are passionate about their jobs”… The Deloitte Center for the Edge: The Shift Index”), you can bet in time they’ll be experiencing high turnover of good management talent, a loss of intellectual capital a loss in consumer/client trust and a brand image that is passe.
In the past it took fifty years or more to get to this point in an organization’s life cycle, now it is taking less then ten years for companies to find out that they are no longer relevant, that their products or services are not answering the needs of the public, and that their brand slogans no longer create the progressive images intended.
Somewhere along the road to becoming a less innovative customer adverse organization, companies stuck with their top down directives rather than adapt “interactive communication” as pointed out by Stephen Denning in “Radical Management. Often the answer to how an organization can manage the future and changing times is an employee “sitting in the room”, not being listen to and asked about what they see. Why? Generational differences, non-inclusive staid corporate culture, lack of engagement, lack of leadership and vision. And maybe the complaint “I just don’t have the time.”
In today’s environment buying in to the plan falls well short of owning plan. Owning the plan can only occur when there is totally openness and everyone has the opportunity to contribute.