Two steps to heaven

"Do your people execute your strategy?’ AND ‘Do your people love your business?’

If you can answer ‘YES’ to these two questions, congratulations, you have given yourself a great chance of success. However, if you read these two questions and think ‘if only’ then do not despair!

Success in today’s fast-moving technological age, where ‘millennials are different’ and ‘competition is fierce’ is not easy, especially if you operate in a ‘results needed now’ environment. Thirty-five years ago, when I embarked on my business career, my boss told me we were operating in a ‘new world’ where technology was ‘moving fast’, and competitors were becoming more and more capable and ‘aggressive’. He observed that the younger generation seemed to be more opinionated and purposeful than his, but reminded me that it was ‘results that mattered’

Nothing has changed.

Today bosses are telling their young talent the same thing. It was true then and it’s true today but the two most important aspects of coping with these challenges are also the same:

Build an aligned business that executes your strategic plan

and…

Create a culture whereby you people love your business and ‘go the extra mile’

Leaders of successful businesses get this. They invest in not only creating a strategic plan but communicating it constantly and consistently until everyone understands their role and how they contribute; they listen to feedback and are agile enough to adapt to new insights or competitive threats or new opportunities. They build a culture, top-down, that enables the execution of this strategy and then they engage their people by talking to them, consulting them and acknowledging them. They treat everyone the same unless given a good reason not to and promote people on merit. They recruit people based primarily on their values because competence can be taught and teach it they do!

Twelve months ago, we observed that organisations were spending a small fortune engaging consultants to help them achieve some of these things. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not but what was clear was that not every business can afford consultants to learn their business, diagnose their business and then find a way of applying their pre-defined solutions to fix the problem, because that’s what the majority of consultants do; they pretend to listen but inevitably present their familiar solution as their recommendation. Organisations adopt this solution and guess what, they are now doing exactly the same as everyone else who went through the same process.

So, how about you becoming your own internal consultant using a tool customized to you?

The HR toolkit from redpill consulting provides you with a ‘Culture profile’ which then integrates with an employee engagement tool, a recruitment tool and a competence building tool; all with a loose framework that can be adapted and designed to suit your specific needs. The system will provoke your thinking but not lock you into a solution; it will guide you through a process of placing people at the heart of your business and align them with your strategy but not simply make you look like everyone else.

Your issues require your solutions, not something created in another country far far away!

Get your people aligned and executing your strategy! Build a culture they love and feel emotionally attached to!