Inspire Me
the occasional news sheetSummer 2007
Agenda OverloadToday's leaders not only have to do their job, they have to battle stress every day - their own, and everyone else's. Stress is a major root cause of lost working hours and reduced efficiencies, yet seems inevitable. Some of our clients are finding, through their own personal exploration, that much of the stress they experience and see around them is caused by conflicting agendas - not just between one person and another, or between Sales and Customer Service Divisions - but within themselves. They are under so much pressure to satisfy everyone - the shareholders, the Unions, their families, and often finally - themselves. These apparently conflicting agendas drive leaders to work round the clock seeking ever cleverer ways to meet everyone's expectations, which often causes exhaustion, reduced functioning ability, more stress and ironically, the very inability to satisfy everyone that was feared at the beginning. We've been helping clients re-evaluate the various agendas and find intelligent and intuitive ways to synthesise them into meaningful integrated objectives, which can be achieved and celebrated. Seize Control - or - Go With The Flow?British industry has traditionally been run on a command:control basis, which was fine until the recent popularity of a more intuitive, responsive and caring approach. Add to this the emergence of gender equality in the workplace, and the associated valuing of the feminine principle (Yin to go with the Yang), and many senior executives are finding themselves grappling with uncertainty about which approach to take. It's not safe to let go of control entirely, yet with all the urging to 'go with the flow', how does one get the right balance? In rational moments, we all probably realise that both styles are needed - knowing when to choose which one, however, and more than that, being able to switch and use them both equally well, is a competency in itself. This is a key theme for many of our clients right now. |
Hearts & MindsA Board we're working with is part way through a major organisational change, and is about to devolve decision making power downline quite significantly. Their concern is that without some tangible and resilient guidance, management may have difficulty grasping the new responsibility and making balanced decisions quickly enough. So as part of their preparation they have formulated a starter-set of principles for balanced decision making, which they are using to prompt discussions in informal groups of managers over a three month period - during these discussions managers are invited to formulate their own sets of principles, based on their insights and understanding generated through dialogue. One of the foremost points in the starter-set is a reminder to keep a balance between head (rational, analytical, contractual, logical) and heart (intuitive, emotional, relational, responsive). The Much Bigger PictureThe two key global issues of poverty and the environment are in everyone's minds. One of our clients has been exploring the question of whether, and how, to better incorporate an awareness of the 'world need', as she calls it, into corporate objectives. So far she has modified her personal objectives to include improving the environment within which her people work every day, while reducing her organisation's carbon footprint; and improving the financial well-being of her managers and staff. She now wants to explore issues of community within the organisation - how people relate to and support one another - and between the organisation and the wider community; and is working on a plan to encourage senior management to begin to incorporate this kind of thinking into their planning process. The work she's doing sprang from an investigation she's making into ways to introduce a greater sense of meaning and social fulfilment into the organisation, which she feels is a more relevant way to address the question than the traditional method of drawing up a set of corporate values and cascading it downline. |
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