A healthy culture to face disruption
Your company needs every advantage to survive and thrive, and having a healthy organizational culture is a prime competitive advantage. It’s hard to imagine but your organization’s success, and perhaps its very survival, will be determined in large part by its culture. A healthy culture provides a stable platform for employees to be productive, while they learn what is required of them to prepare for the tsunami changes ahead.
Dramatic change is on the business horizon. Not just change that is visible, but change that is beyond the field of vision. Leadership’s responsibility includes preparing the organization for continuous and disruptive change. While the precise impact is difficult to predict, disruption on a large scale is clearly expected.
Advancement in technology is a prime cause of change, but not the only one. Technology is upending the relative value of the various skills of your employees. Skills valued yesterday may not be valued or needed today or in the future.
Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, is changing the contours of the modern workplace, and it is often fundamental to modern innovation. For example, consider that Google is exploring ways to respond to a shortage of AI experts through a goal to have a few experts help many other non-AI-experts build their own AI software. It is exploring artificially intelligent machines that can develop other artificially intelligent devices in an effort to expand the reach of AI. The result would be a lot fewer expert human resources needed in this advanced field. Imagine the disruption as AI becomes more ubiquitous. What impact will this advance have on today’s skilled and unskilled jobs? And on your entire organization?
One can envision countless alternative futures for which your organization must prepare. Effective leaders rethink disruption through the lens of opportunity. They seek ways to engage the workforce to use the tools of technology in alignment with organizational strategy. But to really work, the organizational culture must support the effort.
A healthy culture is a learning culture, in which the entire organization has clarity of values. The expected behaviors are defined and well communicated, especially the value of adaptive learning, to give your people the tools needed to develop and grow. The tools may include in-person and digital learning platforms, mentoring and coaching, employee time that is specifically and directly allocated to learning new skills and achieving new capabilities – with a focus on skills and abilities to prepare the organization for the future. These actions lead to more engaged, loyal, and satisfied employees, who are more creative, innovative and productive.
Those organizations that focus on creating this type of culture have significantly lower turnover and are evangelists for recruiting the best talent. Organizations with healthy cultures outperform the competition, experience higher earnings, and surpass industry benchmarks for return on investment.
Effective leaders integrate culture into their management and board conversations about strategy, risk, and performance. When management implements strategies with conscious attention to the effect on employees and the organizational culture, it creates the employee engagement and loyalty that is so critical for value creation. To quote a recent NACD Report, Culture as a Corporate Asset, “if led and managed well, culture is the rocket fuel for delivering value.”
