Which One Are YOU!

In most organisations, permission is required for employees to do things, particularly if this is outside of their daily routine.  In most organisations there are limited options for employees to function and there are inflexible structures. Once you are for example in ‘Marketing’ you cannot escape, unless you move organisation! Policies, rules, and guidelines tend to 'control' staff. Indeed my Dean who is pushing this thing called ‘Social Innovation’, recently stated in an email that she was appointed as Dean knowing the School was a bureaucracy and therefore she had to ensure the procedures, policy and rules were followed. How then can we have ‘Social Innovation’ as a core theme in the Business School if this is not practiced by the ‘leader’ or at least challenge the bureaucracy above?  

You see, in my organisations, people are treated and seen as individual who are, fluid and dynamic and who’s interest change over time. In my organisations, no permission is needed to do things, only responsibility to ensure the customers are satisfied within the core values/boundaries. The structures we are in, are changeable, emergent and fluid, with individuals who have unlimited options to do what ever it takes. The focus on boundaries the values become the guidance. Life becomes the main understanding of organisations, not the machine doctrine, which mirror clocks not nature.

We need to establish the simple yet difficult principle that we are buying talent not time. Everyone in the organisation needs to be a personnel manager, operational manager, finance manager, strategist, marketing manager…..and anything else needed at the point of contact with service users/needs of customers.  This new 'manager-throughout' means everyone needs to talk, but above all, listen to ALL employees, staff, competitors, non-users etc. on a minute by minute, hour by hour basis. How else do we maintain a Competitive advantage in this fast changing 21st century, if not via change through the people who actually deliver the service/product.

However, this is not easy as anyone leading people will know. Many issues impact on the organization but the biggest is the one of trust. Without trust nothing else works in the organization. With trust we have creativity, risk taking throughout and within our values as boundaries and we have customer as well as intelligent satisfaction. With trust we create simple but effective flexible performance. By this, I mean the product or service is delivered to the customer’s independent individual satisfaction. The employees with trust count the decision makers not just the implementers for the system. Great companies understand this, live this through their actions and it pays dividends. Great companies don't strive for efficiency they strive to be effective (efficiency follows).

For lots of employees, work means a daily torture, within a boring, arduous, energy-sapping , eight hours of wasted life. Yet in my organisation work becomes interesting,  fun, energising, creative, exciting, with life merging without any hours attached. If work is completed in six hours or a ten hours, no one cares, staff or leaders, as long as the customers are satisfied.

Impossible!!! You only have to ask the Recycling Teams at Blaenau Gwent Council, Environmental Services how its done. Why? Well as an example, some of the frontline crews, after a shift collecting waste are going out in the evening (when most people are home!) to ask if the homes they collect from, could recycle more to save the planet.

This is true ownership and empowerment in action….in a council…without job losses…making a saving in financial terms and still increasing a service to the public….. WELL DONE BGCBC!