Innatepolicy

The more effortlessly you can align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors such as policy, process, culture inside an organization, the closer you can solve crucial problems and accelerate performance.

Generally speaking, the policy is a set of principles for decision making or guidelines to drive behaviors. Policies need to serve a purpose. Top leaders are both policy makers and followers. The corporate board needs to clarify whether the organization ensures policy coherence across the portfolio; or whether the policy-making and governance are effective enough to improve multifaceted value creation of the company.

Leadership mindset and commitment make policy effective: Setting and monitoring policy compliance is a governance activity. Strong board leaders set good policies to inspire transformative change and incremental improvement accordingly. Effective policies shouldn’t enhance “we always do things like that” mentality and stifle change or innovative problem-solving. Good policies lubricate the business value chain and streamline business logic, so people crossing the boundaries will pull in the same direction to drive progressive change.

Just because policy exists, it doesn't mean they will be effective or followed smoothly. There are some organizations out there that have a plethora of policies and many of them are nothing more than that, just a policy, it takes leadership and commitment to improve policy effectiveness. Change in rules or policy will only become sustainable if leadership, especially at the senior level out there, changes his or her mindset.

There are correlations between policy-making, culture, and performance: Purpose and policy clearly understood, articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. Good policies encourage desired behaviors and nurture needed culture. the Board of Directors and “policy committee” co-set policies, oversee and monitor the varying alignment and progress against strategy, policy, and culture, help the business make progress and fulfill the purpose.

Good policies are “shareware,” all parties should benefit from following them, to make the working environment more open and fairer. People in high performance organizations follow good policies voluntarily for their own benefit, to shape a set of desired culture or accelerate performance. Also, a creative workplace reduces the number of policies to inspire free thinking, break down conventional wisdom and achieve innovation performance.

Do the policies say, if needed, update policies to encourage change timely: In the knowledge society we live in,  the management intends to follow their rational scenario to handle varying situations. In reality, there are ecosystem uncertainty and human factors such as irrational, cognitive, or behavioral aspects increasing the risk of achieving business performance. Highly effective boards set good policies for encouraging great things to happen and letting the capability shine to achieve higher than expected business results.

Policies are communication from the top. When circumstances change, policies need to be updated to ensure people continue to do the right things. By following a right set of policies with flexible management disciplines, the digital workplace can be provocative, passionate, from letting go of the current reality to allowing an unknown future state to emerge, and solve problems proactively.

The more effortlessly you can align, integrate, and optimize the important business factors such as policy, process, culture inside an organization, the closer you can solve crucial problems and accelerate performance. With a set of good policies and strong governance discipline, business management can translate strategy into operational terms aligning the organizational processes and structures to create synergies and synchronize organizational thoughts, actions or behaviors to mobilize changes consistently.

Posted in: Future of Leadership,Leadership Master,Principle/Practice