Anything supported by three pillars is inherently weak; lose one and everything comes crashing down.
Organizational culture is no different. Whether you own a small company, run a non-profit, or lead a team of hundreds, your organizational well-being rests upon these three pillars:
- Hiring Right
- Training Right
- Treating Right
Unfortunately, most organizations fail at one, or more, of these three cultural pillars.
Hiring Right: Hiring and promoting the wrong people is like purposely planting weeds in your garden. Yet, far too many organizations fail to support this pillar. I constantly see two flawed approaches that guarantee failure:
- Ineffective interview strategies. “Tell me about yourself.” “How have you handled this problem in the past?” “Why do you want this job?’” Yuck. Boring. Ineffective.
- Promoting technically qualified people who are not prepared to lead.
Haphazardly filling open positions plagues many. What’s one solution? Implement behavior-based interview strategies that reveal an applicant’s true self. Hint. Include role-plays in your interviews.
Training Right: Employee development is never-ending and needn’t be costly nor time-consuming. Consider these quotes from Disney University visionaries, and then eliminate the baseless excuses you might have for not training your team:
“Budgets might be tight, creativity is free.” Van France, Disney University founder
“Training is not an ‘employee car wash.’” (one-and-done always fails) Tom Eastman, Retired Director, Disney Unversity
Treating Right: Cultures of respect and honesty attract the right employees and customers. Even the strongest, well trained new-hires will fail when thrown into a dysfunctional team.
Arguably, the post-Pandemic norm of attracting and holding on to qualified employees further heightens the urgency of maintaining each of these pillars.
Which do you need to reinforce?