Your Strategy And Your Team
Culture doesn’t eat your strategy for breakfast. People do.
Organization – what does it mean?
It means some people (more than two) who gathered together to do what non of them can do on their own. One person, however smart she is, is unable to create a computer, or a car. An individual can’t build a factory or a railroad system. We need many people acting together to create complex, big things or systems.
But what makes people work together?
Many years ago the answer was simple. People needed money to support their families, and the easiest way to earn it was joining an organisation. But this answer doesn’t seem that simple and obvious anymore.
Meaning of life
The times, they are a-changing
Bob Dylan
Even 30 or 40 years ago only few people saw the meaning of their life in their work. For others work was a necessity, a burden, a place where they exchanged their lifetime for money and an ability to buy things.
A couple of years ago, I had a debate with my father (who's retired now). For him, work used to be an action he had to do to support his family. But his REAL LIFE (as he called it) was lived outside of work, with his books, exhibitions, films.
People looked for the meaning of their lives in family, religion, social activities, etc. Major religions also didn’t consider work as an independent value. People had to work hard to please their gods, to become decent citizens and society members. So, the concept of work went hand in hand with the idea of humility.
But we live in a different world now. And the world we will be living in the future will be even further from the past then the current one.
Religions play a less significant role in our lives. And people start looking for the meaning of their work. They don’t want to spend days doing what their bosses tell them to do anymore. And bosses seem to dislike it.
A fundamental conflict
In 2020, the world went online. We learned that many companies might stay efficient even when their workers stopped going to the offices every day. And lots of people loved the idea of remote work. They didn’t want to waste hours for commuting anymore. Some of them moved to the places that were, for some reason, more convenient for them or their family members.
But at the beginning of 2023 some major companies (and lots of small and average) had to lay off many staffers due to weak economic conditions. And almost all of them began to insist that staffers had to return to their offices.
And they faced severe pushback from some of their employees. As far as we can tell now, companies are winning. But this is not just a conflict over RTO policies. Along with the Great Resignation that we observed in 2021, it indicates that the company-employee relations change. And this is not only a change – it is a massive paradigm shift.
Employees don’t want to be puppets anymore. They want to love what they do and do what they love. They want to work when they feel like working, and, if their job allows them to work remotely, they don’t want to go to an office daily. But employers seem to act as they’ve always done, and insist that “do what you’re said” approach is still relevant.
Redefining the organisation principles will be a major strategic task for many leaders worldwide.
Redefining the organisation principles
As a leader of an organisation, you need to make (somehow) many people to do what you want. It was a relatively simple task in the past. People were more obedient. But the time is changing.
My friend, and English language teacher in an ordinary school, complained recently that her students started to challenge her and to question what she said. She told me she had never thought that she would have to PROOVE what she said to teenagers. But they became very demanding, and don’t take everything she tells them for granted.
If you’re a business leader, you need to be even more persuasive to retain the best people in your team. And strategy may be of much help.
I have always believed that strategy is not a document. First and foremost, it is an agreement among all the people who work for an organisation. This is the agreement about what we do and what we don’t, about what’s good and what’s bad.
So, strategic discussions are more important than a strategy itself. We can use them to talk to our workers and to hear from them. And to give them a meaning of their work.
Some experts believe that a mission statement isn’t a part of a company strategy. But whenever I start a new strategic project, I always begin with mission.
What do we do?
Why do we do it?
What would we like to change for the better in this world?
Of a company has a mission statement and a vision that can inspire people and provide a meaning, it’s strategy has a lot of chance to be implemented. If a company has only a strategy as a “to-do plan,” chances are it will remain only on paper.