Forethoughtful BoDs need to gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise in order to be an insightful culture navigator, a credible actor in the strategic dialogue and steer the organization in the right direction.
BoDs enthusiastically design, navigate and advocate a set of cohesive digital culture as a pathway to change: Culture is about how people think and do things in the organization. Every organization exhibits a culture. The departments within the organization have a culture. Anytime people work together for an extended period of time, a culture is formed. The corporate board’s role, in large part, is to make good decisions that enhance the value creation for the organization. Organizational culture needs to be first shaped at the boards, C-suite, and executives need to become culture masters first. “Culture” is invisible but a Big Talk. Accountability and oversight are all part of the game changes that boards must address.
Leadership should be thought of in terms of empowering others. The Corporate Board sets the tone for making good policies to navigate culture in the right direction. Organizations need to do what their policies say or have the policies say what they do. In practice, aligning a workforce toward intentional cultural shifts can be quite complex, understand the culture and its essential first. Building a performance culture starts with leadership advocate and management of organizational change, something that is rarely successful when driven from the bottom up. It’s important to cultivate culture change champions who can instill drive, passion, and enthusiasm, expand knowledge, harness skills, build capabilities, for the whole organization and direct that to a unifying and shared goal and sustain changes consistently.
BoD leaders can influence/enhance the culture via empowerment and delegation: Envision and advocate the new culture and understand the inertia of old one. The digital corporate board is diversified, cognitive, proactive, and instrumental. Their leadership effectiveness is based on the leadership substances such as vision and purpose with digital leadership styles such as participation, coaching or delegation to influence corporate cultures. They need to evaluate the degree of empowerment by asking: How much delegation is permitted. What is the decision-making freedom at various levels of hierarchy? They can give full empowerment to a matured management team, but not to a team that is not mature enough. To give empowerment blindly is dangerous. Unclear or ambiguous delegation inevitably leads to unsatisfactory results.
Nowadays, innovation is the most critical business competency. Boards should understand that innovation is not one individual's or even a department's responsibility, it is a cultural issue. It could be a challenge to change the culture without top board leadership guidance and empowerment. It falls into the hands of leadership to enable, manage and lead with guidelines, systems and processes to achieve desired results. Great boards are heterogeneous, inquisitive, intelligent, effective, innovative and influential. Navigate and make cultural influence based on open leadership, creativity, sound judgment and inclusiveness.
Deal with cultural conflict and overcome negativity wisely: A company may have its own unique set of cultures. There can be diverse and sometimes conflicting cultures that coexist due to sub divisional culture and different characteristics of the management team. The negative culture has many causes such as uninspiring homogeneous leadership, destructive office politics, bureaucracy, or myopic goal setting, etc. The right way to deal with conflict is to identify them right at the start, find the root causes, and handle them wisely.
As experience between positive performing cultures and mediocre or negative cultures is that they evolve from the platform of trust and respect that cascades from the top. Effective boards will, for the most part, go through a learning process, relationship building and understanding of what it takes to get cross-cultural agreements. They should avoid the pitfalls such as misleading simplistic views of corporate culture or the misinformation that the problems of the organization are. They are responsible for setting principle guidelines, grounding rules and policies to shape the positive culture. But in mind, the overly restrictive policies will lead to micromanagement or too much controlling which leads to business bureaucracy,
Digital workforce in organizations today are multi-generational, multicultural and multi-tasking. Those that have the most effective organizational culture are where the senior team really lives the vision, values, and ethos of the organization - and don't just pay lip-service to it. Thus, forethoughtful BoDs need to gain a deeper understanding of the enterprise in order to be an insightful culture navigator, a credible actor in the strategic dialogue to steer the organization in the right direction.
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