Audience: Leaders
Overview: The third of a four-part series on the four factors that can devastate a culture
when left unaddressed
By: Cynthia Kyriazis, Chief Experience Officer, The Culture Think Tank
If employees have expressed what they need from their leaders, what happens next?
When I first started working with leaders to help understand and improve their culture’s strength, one of the things they loved the most was the data we call Leadership
Development Needs. This is when employees identify what they need from their leaders.
Over the years, a few leaders would see this data for their organization and remark, ‘At least now I know and don’t need to guess.’
Then I asked how their guessing fared. In most instances, they said it was incorrect. The result? Money, time and focus were put into areas that did not address the real need or actual challenge. They just didn’t have the data they needed and weren’t sure how to gather it other than a once-in-a-while survey or poll. Here’s what I’ve experienced.
Failure to Ask
Let’s face it. When we want to know what someone needs, sometimes we simply ask them. And sometimes we don’t because we feel we might not be able to help. Yet the act of just asking helps move someone from what they think they know to uncovering what is actually needed. It removes the guessing.
The sheer act of asking opens the leader’s ability to begin to learn what its employees consider a priority or core issue at that moment.
It stops the guessing game leaders’ experience and helps them see where or how their own opinions and thoughts played a role in their decision-making.
We perform over 3,600 calculations per respondent to learn this exact thing in order to provide a leader with useful information. The value of this can’t be underestimated.
Failure to Accept
We ask employees to express their needs for three specific areas. What do they want leaders to continue, stop and start doing. They may select answers from a list of normalized needs or they may fill in a blank. Sometimes the resulting data looks ‘off’ and sometimes the data might be questioned….even by me.
One organization’s results demonstrated that 100% of their staff felt distanced from the organization and each other...100%!
So I took a minute and reached out to our technical staff asking them to please check the numbers again because I’d never seen this before.
Our great tech staff reviewed the data, came back and reminded me…”Cynthia the numbers are the numbers. They don’t lie.” Lesson learned.
Providing a platform for employees to share thoughts and needs and then distilling this information into next steps and specific actionable plans is what leaders need to move forward on a path to building a healthy, high-performing culture that people want to work within and join.
Meanwhile, here are some steps can you take to uncover needs within your own organization or team.
Ask
Ask employees what they need. Assure that responses will be anonymous. Do it regularly.
Listen to the Data
Metrics take the information and convert it into data. Use the data you receive and not only the opinions or biases of others.
Discuss Possibilities
First there’s diagnosis, then discussion among senior leadership to review findings and begin to formulate possible next steps. The final step is to open a dialogue with employees. T
The responsibility of leaders is to ask employees what they need and then demonstrate a willingness to respond to those needs and I’ll cover this more in depth in my final post.
Please join me for my fourth and final post in this series about how leaders can develop action plans to move forward.
Four Factors That Impact Company Culture: Factor 1 – AnxietyFour Factors That Impact Company Culture: Factor 2 – Lack of Staff ConnectednessFour Factors that Impact Company Culture: Factor 4 – Failure to Ask & Accept Staff Requested Needs
Cynthia Kyriazis is the Chief Experience Officer at The Culture Think Tank. Her experience includes executive coaching, consulting, and training. Book a 15-minute chat to discuss your people, performance or profit challenges.