Sunday, July 5, 2020

The “Rules & Signs” of a Happy Organization

Business leaders need to seek fresh perspectives on making changes, setting rules, and catching signs for reinventing a “happy organization.”

The digital paradigm means hyperconnectivity, innovation, and people-centricity. The paradox is that we have already developed so much that mere survival is the shadow perception of the human world.

Organizational development could regain some of the reputations if focusing on improving employee engagement fully - concerning all sorts of things like thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc. Business leaders need to seek fresh perspectives on making changes, setting rules, and catching signs for reinventing a “happy organization.”




We are all different - with different gifts and skills: Every individual is unique, not just because we look different, but because we think differently and have different gifts and skills. The "mind" represents our consciousness and awareness. Each organization must be able to articulate clearly what constitutes “talent.” There are many indicators to assess the intrinsic capacity of individuals such as cognitive competency (growth mindset, logic, creativity, plasticity, decisiveness, etc), interdisciplinary skills, openness to experience, tolerance of ambiguity, creative problem-solving. It’s also important to set up teams with cognitive differences, and the team members can proactively stimulate the new energy of fresh thinking and enjoy collective insight, bring in out-of-box ideas and unique perspectives to make new creations and build a better future together, to shape a creative and happy organization,

To learn constantly so we continually improve: Human beings are self-evidently conscious, have the great power of choice, and have the extensive ability to control and direct other causes. Talent development is a continuous effort to groom the right talent for a business’s long-term prosperity. The responsibility to grow professional expertise has always largely fallen on the individual employee; albeit it is great when the organization provides empowerment and support. Identify areas where individuals can make their own efforts, as well as areas where individuals will need help from organizations. Digital leaders need to be the talent master, they guide, coach, suggest, set expectations, motivate, develop, and they find ways to ensure that the team members can align their personal goals with the business goal, and perform at their best for the future. Methodologically, continuous improvement is more likely to be sustained if there is a framework and takes a whole systematic approach.

In order to accomplish the impossible, one must be able to see the invisible: With a mixed bag of physical and virtual, old and new, visible and invisible today, organizational development needs to manage the conflict between classic style and digital style of management. Traditional leaders expect command-control, digital professionals demand engagement. Traditional leaders view the performance from behavioral compliance to norms world, digital professionals view performance as a thinking-experimenting-doing continuum. Dig through the “invisible” - how things get done in the organization and search for the signs of organizational fitness such as the business culture -how failures are perceived and handled; how customers are defined and handled, how communication between different organizational entities are, whether the organization believes in long term success and growth, how individuals feel recognized for their contribution, how positions are filled and candidates selected, etc. A happy organization cannot be dictated from all above but has to be developed and nurtured across all dimensions of the company.

Encourage people to discover that “there are always alternative solutions”: With ever-evolving digital new normal, if you don’t have a sound solution to each newly created problem, you’ll have very little chance to successfully run a high-performance digital business. For those who are trying to solve problems, they may find the problems evolving as they try different solutions. Always be careful in examining the potential points of engagement, rather than saying "first we'll fix this." Ask "WHAT IF" we do things in a different way or figure out an alternative solution. Innovation can occur anywhere in the organization, and it has to occur in every aspect of the organization. Deepen the understanding of the issues, accumulate interdisciplinary knowledge or unique insight, and leverage creativity tools (exploring, divergence, convergence) to arrive at a useful new box and figure out the best possible implementable alternatives.

It is the “design” as a critical enabling factor for forming quality products to be pleasing and preferred by humans: Forward-thinking leaders and professionals today believe that tomorrow will be better or at least as good as today, figure out what will be considered aesthetically pleasing tomorrow rather than today. Happy organizations create happy customers and employees. Delight is in fact, a high stage of the business maturity achieved through creating the synergy of collaboration, experimenting with initial concepts, advocating aesthetics as trends in public taste, and making practical implementations. It’s important to create space for open dialogues and design brainstorming, developing a common understanding of innovation effort, creating the necessity and motivation for it, getting the management buy-in. Collaboratively, harness innovative and creative ideas to produce quality products or services to delight customers by connecting the dots between science and arts, functioning, and delight.

Rule-breaking and rule-setting demand insight, understanding, patience, persistence, and courage: To build a creative workforce, it's important to develop a working environment in which talented people keep their curiosity, dare to challenge the status quo, break outdated rules, show flexibility, and present resilience. To disrupt, you must hear the whispers of customers, contexts, inner worlds, or outside worlds. In fact, constructive disruption is a healthy cycle as the rule should be outdated, people can broaden thoughts, feel happier to express and provide feedback, and connect wider dots for coming up with new ideas. A healthy business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole, for accelerating business performance.

On an adventure, there is no risk:
One very important thing to encourage innovation is also the ability to enable the employees to envision, take risks, and above all, have the ability to tolerate mistakes and the courage to see the spade as a spade. Many leaders 'say' that they are OK with the new way to do the things but exhibit the contrary. Great leaders have balanced viewpoints to perceive success and failure objectively, showing respect - even in failure - must be an expectation at all levels. Those who do not demonstrate respect for others' failure will eventually undermine the culture of creativity. It is very important that employees not only 'hear,' but also 'see' that they can actually take risks, question the status quo without any fear of being put down or let down. In fact, the management has the right dose of risk appetite and demonstrates great risk intelligence to take an adventure of innovation.

As society expands, it becomes more complex, hence, the struggle for survival becomes more intense. In happy organizations, the business change objectives depend on the human objective, self-awareness is inspired and self-management is encouraged. Either individually or collectively, people must adapt themselves, from mindset, attitude, to behavior faster to changing circumstances by learning, exploring, and achieving continuously.




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