Leading a Team to Success:
Passionate Mission. Clear Shared Vision. Agile Disciplined Execution.
A major challenge facing CEOs is to build and expand a team that delivers the results that lead to sustainable growth and prosperity. A key factor that helps overcome this challenge is to create a culture that inspires and empowers the team, enhances their creativity, and delivers the must do results in a collaborative environment. This culture creates a unique bond amongst the people within the company, and extends into all of its relationships including customers, suppliers, communities, the world at large, and becomes the foundation of building a strong company Brand.
Culture is important in all companies from startups to major enterprises. Culture exists in different forms in different businesses. Some businesses are seeded by families and culture, like Walmart, which was created in Bentonville, AK, by Sam Walton, and others by entrepreneurs in their garages or sheds, like Jeff Bezos did with Amazon, and others spun off from existing companies. In some cases, culture is developed over time, in others, they are seeded and developed in larger companies, and enterprises and are addressed and practiced formally.
What CEOs should remember is that every employee has their own culture — each individual connects with each other creating a corporate culture that is accepted and nurtured.
Weaving that culture into the activities and business processes, creates trust, a sense of belonging, excitement, respect towards each other, and commitment to do what it takes to deliver results. Successful cultures define, practice, and make it a natural part of their business life.
To achieve this, CEOs must be the principal leaders in building the culture and must include the leaders and potential leaders in the organization to build and sustain the culture. The leadership team must be a model for others to follow, and they should visibly behave what they preach.
What are the critical components of the culture?
A clear and well-articulated company mission, vision, and objectives.
Companies should encourage leadership throughout the organization irrespective of their position. It is best to encourage acceptance of ownership over delegation. People should feel ownership, and people must only make commitments they believe they can deliver. The culture should encourage people to want to get things done and accept the responsibility to get it done. The commitment and delivery processes must be conducted in a collaborative manner to manage and overcome issues that arise. This avoids long, boring meetings, and must include the most knowledgeable people in making decisions.
Companies must have effective communication channels to continuously keep everyone updated for necessary, common knowledge that affects what they do. The organizational structure of the company should not create silos or bureaucracy that hampers execution. All deliverables and projects must be in sync throughout the process to eliminate “I didn’t know.” This will help multi-disciplined and interdependent projects, operate highly efficiently and with less cost. This will help create and maintain an environment of creativity, innovation, and collaboration that eliminates organizational silos and wasted resources.
The culture will encourage people to act and behave with common disciplines and processes. If you see something, you should bring it forward, so it gets resolved quickly enough so as not to cause damage. Rather than Monday morning quarterbacks, we need leaders who solve problems and deliver results!
It is easy to get blinded by technology and forget the value of people. There are so many advanced technologies and tools for collaboration, and communication, including tools like virtual meetings and instant messaging, that it is very viable to define, develop, and practice using these in every facet of the company, and these should be used to create a better culture going forward. Companies need to establish a clear operating infrastructure that is agile and disciplined with checks and balances in a collaborative environment. Despite the technological advances in information technology, AI, and the cloud, every aspect of the company includes people. Companies still need talented and informed people to create and develop products and services, during which they can make good judgment calls, informed decisions, and interactions with other people rather than machines. People are the principal asset of the company. Culture will enhance productivity, efficiency, and the value of human resources.
Startups companies have the opportunity to plant the seed of building their culture early on and continue to build on it throughout their journey.
We are all faced with significant challenges today due to COVID-19, but American ingenuity and entrepreneurship are rampant and are creating many opportunities. This is the time to create new companies, create jobs, and lift the economy.
At RNOX we are practicing what we preach. We launched our new tech accelerator this year (yes in the middle of a pandemic) because we believe in our future, and we want to help build strong agile companies. We’re only months old, and already we have seen significant interest and new companies who have signed on. We are excited to help and develop companies of the future.
