A few months ago a good friend of mine had a business that went into administration. It was only three years ago we celebrated over lunch that he had 35 employees and impressive revenue and profit. Then, the perfect storm happened. Poor strategic execution and decreased sales saw his business decimated in a tough industry. Underlying all of the obvious issues was a CFO who fraudulently stole $1 million dollars. Together, it brought the company down and it not longer exists in its previous form.
Over the last decades, marketers have gradually learnt that selling products by promoting rational features doesn’t work. People buy based on their emotions. Research has found that rational features only account for 15% of the decisions we make. Subconsciously, the majority of the decision process is dominated by our emotions. In the words of Brian Carroll, an experienced marketer, “People often buy on emotion and backfill with logic.”
The bigger an organisation becomes the more likely it is to fracture into fiefdoms and turf wars. An important challenge for leaders is to create a strong, shared culture where people are unified, to avoid a political and potentially adverse environment.
The world of work is changing and soon we will have five generations in the workforce. Younger generations refuse to accept the “command and control” leadership models of the past. They want to do work that has meaning and provides value to the world at large. They want more than just a pay cheque, unlike baby boomers and the generations before them.
In the pressure cooker business world we live in, change and uncertainty have become commonplace. No longer can organisations rest on their laurels. Plans must be put together quickly, decisions made and deadlines met.
A few months ago, I caught up with a CEO from a midsize firm for lunch. He was keen to tell me that people only care about money. His business that he had successfully co-founded, was built purely to enable himself, his co-founders and employees to support their families financially. He made out that was quite noble. Yet, there was no focus on how his organisation created value for their clients. The value was all inward. When I asked him what his company stood for, his brand proposition, he told me it was to enable his employees to feed their families.
Years ago, an aspiring general manager had the misguided idea that reducing biscuit purchases would enable a hospital to save around $3,000 a year. The thinking was that nurses had two biscuits during morning tea and they could change to one biscuit in the morning and one in the afternoon. Alternatively, they could just skip afternoon biscuits. After all, wasn’t it enough to just have biscuits in the morning?
Measuring and improving employee engagement is often revered as the holy grail to improving business performance. Moderate employee engagement results encourage the C-Suite to pat themselves on the back. But ask the CEO some truth-seeking questions and they confess that despite good employee engagement levels there are a few problems that are still impacting performance – employees not being fully challenged, certain leaders unable to harness the collective intelligence of their teams and frustration around constrained expansion plans.
One of the common attributes of companies that have high performance workplace cultures is that they have a clear, well-specified purpose that states both how and why the company makes a positive impact to the world. It’s their fundamental reason for existence beyond just making money.