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Here’s the real power that drives your business, and how to harness it

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The most important resource a business has is its employees. Picture: iStock/Gallo Images
The most important resource a business has is its employees. Picture: iStock/Gallo Images

A company’s strategic success is wholly dependent on its acceptance and enthusiastic implementation by its employees.

“Even the most successful companies in the world subscribe to the most dangerous strategic myth: That strategy has to be planned well for it to be successful, whereas it actually has to be implemented well,” consultant Stan Slap told a Gibs forum.

Implementation begins with enrolling your employee culture in ferocious support of the strategic performance goal, as the success of any goal depends on the hardcore support of that particular group, he explained.

Slap is an international consultant and thought leader in gaining commitment from management, employee and customer cultures.

He has consulted to the likes of Google, Facebook and HSBC on how to achieve maximum commitment from cultures.

Companies bet their success and sometimes even their very existence on their ability to roll out new strategies to the market – ahead of budget, ahead of schedule and ahead of their competitors.

Yet, “most strategies in most companies don’t really work,” Slap argued.

“The problem causing chronic ills of business today is the focus on symptoms and not on the sickness. The problems which continue to baffle business owners and managers in every company in every country, are not really new problems, and the solutions are not really solutions.”

There is an irrefutable logic in corporate strategies, he said, whether the purpose of a strategic plan is to increase revenue, improve operating margin, better customer relationships, innovate products or to take and hold market share.

“In a perfect world employees would grasp this immediately and devote themselves whole heartedly towards achieving the goal.

"But in the real world, no management authority or business logic will cause an employee culture to adopt a corporate cause as if it were its own.”

In order to achieve buy-in, managers must learn how to sell to an employee culture: “To do this, you have to know how and why a culture buys and to always remember that you are not informing your employees about anything, it is about inspiring them.

"The company who wins the game is the first one who understands that you can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.”

Communicating new strategic ideas to employees was not a matter of logic, but rather of creating a vision and appealing to the right kind of values in order to achieve a stirring deep response.

Slap advised managers to “pick what’s important to you and do something provocative. Do something to you prove you mean what you say.”

Maximising the commitment of your employee culture

How an employee culture works and how to maximise its commitment is a complex, nuanced subject, Slap said.

He explained that a culture, whether corporate or otherwise, was a set of commonly accepted behaviours and commonly practiced rituals, which in turn communicate rules.

Culture remains the most over used but least understood concept in business, he argued.

“If the success of your career and your company depend on you achieving success through other people who happen to work for you, understanding the true motivations of an employee culture is the most critical information you can have to be successful.”

Employee culture is chiefly concerned with what is takes to survive, and what it takes to get rewarded.

Cultures communicate by telling stories, and it is the combined power of stories which dictate what people will or won’t do.

An employee culture is an information-gathering organism, designed to ensure its own survival, he explained.

“It is obsessed with confirming the known rules for emotional prosperity in an environment it cannot control or anticipate. More than anything a culture is rational – it is simply concerned with confirming rules.”

Slap advised managers not to think of culture and performance as separate, but rather as parallel paths which should be merged.

“Culture is not subordinate to performance,” he added.

Slap’s message for managers

Management stands outside employee culture, trying to sell it something, and won’t have access to its stories and rules.

Slap said that companies sometimes overestimate the importance employee cultures place on money: “It is not about money; but rather gaining a sense of increased safety and of recognition for performance.”

Understanding the true motivations of an employee culture can mean the difference between your career success and failure, or that of your company, he added.

The definition of a great employee culture is one that is committed.

“My most urgent recommendation to managers is that any strategic success rests in the discretionary effort of your human organisation.

"Be human first and a manager second: Extend your own humanity to the people you are closest to, including your employees and customers.

"It isn’t just about your career and your company, as a manager you have a deep and lingering impact on the lives of the members of your employee culture.

“Treating your employees with dignity, grace, and empathy, regardless of their circumstances outside of the job is not simply a performance tactic,” he concluded.

  • City Press is a media partner of the Gibs forums.
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