We work with companies who constantly tout "empowered" environments and trust in employees. Yet, invariably, we will always find a ton of cultural evidence that suggests the opposite. Things like complicated approval processes or sign-offs.
No matter how empowered the execs think the org is, the proof is in the culture. Its funny how even as we are going through the proposal phase with a client for new business that we keep getting held up because the "empowered" person we have been dealing with this whole time still needs his boss' and her boss' approval before moving forward. (actually, we have gotten pretty good at keeping this from happening now.)
Most companies have cultures of "titles". who you are and what power you have and how I should treat you is based on your title. I remember my time in corporate as a COO. I would always give me card out with my personal cell phone number to employee and tell them to contact me if they needed anything. I really meant it. But how many calls do you think I got? You are right. All they saw was COO, they never saw the person. This was something we had to change in our culture and we went to work on it and did.
But here is my thought for the day. Imagine if you will, a place where when you ask someone what they do instead of answering "I am the Director for Planning and Inventory for a big firm in Austin" they would answer "I am responsible for making sure the sales team in our company has the inventory they need in stock and ready to ship when they sell it."
See the difference?
We'll talk more about this in our next post.
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