I was recently working with one of my San Francisco Bay Area executive coaching clients - a senior executive in a professional services firm. We discussed how the right culture needed to be designed to create a desired future state.
My client’s firm is led by a leadership team that doesn’t like marketing and even more so sales, and is resistant to change. My client and I further discussed how the culture that got them to where they are won’t get them to where they need to be. I am coaching my client on how to shift the mindset of his leaders to embrace change and harness the power of a new culture.
Manage Your Culture
In Change the Culture, Change the Game, Tom Smith and Roger Connors write: “Either you manage your culture, or it will manage you.”
In simple terms, “culture” refers to how people think, act and get things done in your company. It is comprised of three components:
1. Experiences, which foster beliefs
2. Beliefs, which influence actions
3. Actions, which produce results
Few managers excel at optimizing culture. While they’re aware of surveys that reveal two-thirds of employees are disengaged, they don’t know how to break down culture into readily identifiable components. They get lost in emotions, feelings, beliefs, soft skills and fuzzy thinking.
Optimizing your culture should command as much attention as performance metrics, operations, finances, sales and every other organizational discipline.
By harnessing the power of culture, you can change the game by growing faster than your competitors, surviving a bad economy, improving your value proposition and outperforming all previous metrics.
Are you working in a professional services firm or other organization where executive coaches provide leadership development to grow emotionally intelligent leaders? Does your organization provide executive coaching for leaders who need to create a more successful culture? Enlightened leaders tap into their emotional intelligence and social intelligence skills to create a high performance culture.
One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself is “Do we need to shift our company culture to achieve a sustainable future?” Emotionally intelligent and socially intelligent organizations provide executive coaching as part of their peak performance leadership development program.