Running Businesses or Running over them?

Stemming from his belief in leadership as a coaching and mentoring process, nurtured with the enthusiasm to unpretentiously support the organization and its workforce, and driven by the tenacity to make it thrive, Max de Pree, a former, prominent CEO of Herman Miller, Inc., once stated, ”The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you.” However, when senior management bodies conceitedly dash into business, success becomes far-fetched, and if it was there, it would be severely injured!

How do CEOs or business owners run over businesses, causing “broken” organizational culture and structure?

1. Clinging to old “successful” practices: Organizations that have been running for years and that could prove successful among competitors, prosper by the notion, deservedly so. However, as new systems have to be implemented and procedures updated, some senior managers find it very difficult to relinquish the familiar and adopt the modern. The old practices become the only correct ones and whatever new practices simply become “rejected”. Implementing new regulations, utilizing updated resources, executing certain tasks in a modern fashion are not approved, resulting in one of the most threatening climate for business growth: frustration of staff members and the abortion of innovation.

2. Pop-up Decisions: Round tables are not evident in many institutions, though physically they are. They are not used by the board of management figures. Instead of complete numbers of managers and leaders, each representing his/her area of responsibilities, meeting, giving feedback and discussing according to reports and data, one of them at a time meets the Chiefs without any written agendas. Discussions are conducted unsystematically, each projecting his/her own perspective about certain topics, extending analysis without any research-based notions. Within the span of minutes or half an hour, decisions about problems or suggestions are born, and if such climates are to be simply described, they would be described as – unreliable and biased!

3. “Work Policy” Justification: A litany of complaints fall unto some organizations from customers, stakeholders, or clients at the notion of the recent pop-up decisions, of which circumstances conveyed above. It is obvious that the second to suffer from such hasty decisions are the employees, who were notified of those decisions over the phone or via emails at the end of hectic days. Everyone knows that it is futile to discuss or attempt at a modification. Therefore, and since these decisions have become “real”, they must be carried out despite the consequences explained and the spectra illustrated. Staff members have to reply to the complaints with what they were told to say, “It is the organization’s policy!” The policies that were born overnight with no correlation to any visions, objectives, or values.

4. “The “Other Organizations do that” Justification: It is incomprehensible when some organizations attempt at making the wrong decisions on the pretext that other organizations “do that”. The perception of status and conditions is remarkably narrow that it fails at projecting the fact that each organization is fairly governed by its own environment and capacities, making comparison, replicating, or even exemplifying another organization that does not meet in terms of capacities, substantially unwise!

5. Seeing “half” of the achievers: In relation to the old “successful” regimes, there are the old “successful” members in institutions, who constantly gain the attention. Their glorious past is always reiterated. The new employees, on the other hand, who strive and work with ultimate enthusiasm and cohesive commitment towards growth are always “good” but not excellent, “are doing well” but “are not implementing strategies and guidelines as desired”.

6. Hire to Possess: Managers, CEOs, or owners are sometimes deeply engrossed in their organizations’ “Rights” and their employees’ ”Duties” to the extent that the employees become “owned”, even professional development opportunities, which is the right of the employees to benefit from and consequently benefit the organization, are not allowed – restrictions are broadly evident, strict, unnecessary rules prevail, doubting employees’ causes widen, resulting in lack of trust, negativity, and a predictable tendency for some employees to resign at the earliest opportunity, for a justifiable reason- revulsion and insecurity!

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”, Peter F. Drucker, the American educator writes. Organizations are investment structures, which to be fruitful, their strategies need to encompass major elements of success: research-based measures, clear set of goals and objectives, vivid vision, continuous effort for improvement, openness for new ideas and pulses, innovation, appreciation, trust, and empathy!

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer” and to be able to do that, the working place needs to stay healthy. Culture and structure in organizations are what keeps them intact and sturdy. Failing to maintain those means lesions, ruptures, and fractures …in other words, immobility, stagnation, or even severe injuries!