Owning the WHY

2 January, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Great organisations have a Purpose (a WHY) that is beyond just making money, and it is this Purpose that provides the organisation’s motivational power to make things happen.

Successful leaders understand they have two key responsibilities: 1) Developing the WHY (the purpose of the organisation) that everyone in the organisation can “OWN”, and 2) Enabling the Culture that will embrace the WHY and keep it alive every day within the people in the organisation.

You could say that successful leaders are the WHY people, and you can think of the CEO, not as the Chief Executive Officer, but as the Chief Explaining Officer…their job is the Explain the WHY.

Successful leaders Explain the WHY with such power that everyone in the organisation OWNS IT.

Filed Under: Blog, Communications, Culture, Influence

Owning our Behaviour

2 November, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Successful teams are born when they develop together a set of values and principles.

These values and principles provide a framework for everyone’s behaviour, and a way to challenge people when their behaviour becomes bad.   Teams without agreed values and principles have no way to challenge bad behaviour…there’s no established framework or norm to compare the bad behaviour to.

Teams without this framework view a challenge on bad behaviour as a personal attack, which usually only helps in increasing and making more permanent the bad behaviour.

Teams with a framework of agreed values and principles have a way to compare the bad behaviour to the framework, and have a constructive way to challenge the bad behaviour.

Values and principles are powerful in guiding the right behaviour and providing a way for fellow team members to constructively challenge each other.  What’s also interesting is that teams that create their own values and principles (i.e. not defined by the leader) will often create tougher and more strict principles (rules) than the leader would define.

Remember, values & principles provide the framework to align good behaviour within the team, and to constructively challenge bad behaviour.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Culture, Teamwork