The Hidden Leader by Scott K. Edinger & Laurie Sain

Author:Scott K. Edinger & Laurie Sain
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814434000
Publisher: AMACOM

ASSESSMENT: YOUR ORGANIZATION’S CULTURE

How functional is your company’s relational culture? This assessment will help you understand areas where your culture may be making success difficult. Read each of the statements and assign a value to each. The lower the score in each area, the more that area may be negatively affecting your organization’s culture. The online worksheet calculates the assessment for you.

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BUILDING ESSENTIAL RELATIONAL SKILLS WITHIN YOUR CULTURE

Not all hidden leaders—nor all leaders—will be 100 percent competent at all essential relational skills. We have seen entire corporate cultures where one or more of these skills was lacking. Some of these companies had been very successful. But the lack of essential relational skills made them less flexible; they were often unable to deal with changes in the marketplace. For example, we have helped whole companies develop essential skills—such as crediting others, effective conflict resolution, and face-to-face communication—to help them capture larger market share after conditions made their old way of doing business untenable.

That is the good news about essential relational skills: They are observable, teachable, and coachable. For potential hidden leaders lacking in one or more of these skills, this is very good news. For those leaders’ managers, it means that essential relational skills can be developed both individually and culturally.

While it is simple to identify, define, and train people in relational leadership skills, it doesn’t mean the skills are easy to learn and use. The process to enable these skills in a culture is straightforward and clear, but having the cultural discipline to implement this approach—especially if it entails a cultural change—often poses a challenge.

Creating cultural support for relational skills is similar to a person sticking to a diet. Most of us know that to get in shape or lose weight we need to eat less of the food that is bad for us (such as pizza or ice cream) and eat more of the food that is good for us (fresh broccoli or grilled fish). This highlights the difference between knowing what to do and doing it. When doing it requires a change of habits, it is usually hard to do.

We believe there is a clear path to the goal, however. To develop the potential of hidden leaders’ relational skills, an organization needs a clear objective. Why are relational skills important to the business? What is the vision for the ideal future state? What cultural changes do leaders want to implement? Without a clear vision of the impact on the business, any skill development quickly devolves into an exercise to keep training departments busy and check off the box that says, “Employees trained.”

Knowing how you will evaluate success will help you measure your progress. In our view, business objectives with related measures of success are the foundation of any performance-improvement effort.

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