Keep your culture upbeat and your organization thriving by avoiding these top culture mistakes, including putting employee development on the back burner.
Few things are more important in a successful organization than forming and upholding a positive company culture. All it takes is one dreadful hire or one ignored conflict to create a ripple effect that can cause productivity and camaraderie to take a nosedive.
As a leader, you are uniquely positioned to directly impact and steer the culture of your organization. You can steer the culture ship to Utopia: a place where everyone feels included, connected, and engaged, where productivity and collaboration peak, and employees feel empowered to bring their true, authentic selves to work. Conversely, poor communication and ineffective conflict management skills can create a culture shipwreck that will take a lot of hard work and dedication to repair–while suffering the collateral damage of losing good people along the way.
Avoid these top culture mistakes to keep your employees happy, healthy, and hardworking on your watch.
The 4 Biggest Culture Mistakes Leaders Can Make
1. Avoiding acknowledging/fixing toxic culture
As the saying goes, “You can’t correct what you don’t confront.” Depending on your Conflict Management Style, you may be prone to avoiding conflict or just letting everything fly because you detest the idea of upsetting anyone. Maybe you didn’t cause the culture to spiral, but if you are part of the organization, and a leader, it’s your job to help fix it.
Don’t know where to start? Consider first accepting the task at hand, bringing in a third party for help, and cultivating a safe, healthy environment for your employees as you implement new, healthier policies that keep everyone’s well-being and happiness top of mind.
2. Not staying on top of employee engagement as you scale
Employee engagement surveys are meant to gauge the level of connection employees have to their work, their teams, and the organization at large. A hallmark of a positive culture is leadership which not only takes employee feedback into consideration but acts on it. Ignoring your employees’ valuable feedback can be detrimental to your company culture and even contribute to high turnover rates within the organization. Don’t underestimate the insights you can gain from listening to your employees’ feedback.
Maybe you don’t have direct oversight into the organizational employee engagement survey process or maybe your company hasn’t yet implemented a company-wide process yet. That’s okay—you can start showing your employees you value their contributions by asking questions that incite thoughtful dialogue in your own team meetings or one-on-ones. Ask what they enjoy about their role, what they don’t enjoy, what the biggest obstacles are to doing their job well, and what they would change about their role if they could. But don’t stop there—make sure you act and help your team overcome any obstacles preventing them from achieving their goals or business objectives.
3. Emphasis on qualifications over culture fit when hiring
Process-heavy interview procedures and pressure to quickly backfill positions make it easy to emphasize a prospect’s qualifications over whether or not they are a culture fit, resulting in new hires that don’t acclimate to—or adversely affect—the culture you worked so hard to build.
To better qualify your prospects, ensure your website has a clear set of company values and include them in the job requisition as well. Further, be sure to connect the company values and how they translate to the role you’re specifically hiring for during the interview, obtaining prospects’ clear buy-in before extending any employment offers.
4. Putting employee development on the back burner
Here’s the reality: Nothing accelerates employee burnout or makes job satisfaction descend down into the abyss faster than an organization that shows no interest in employee development.
Employee development is integral to a successful, cutting-edge organization. Robust employee development ensures your team has the skills they need to improve in their current and future roles, molds them into distinguished leaders, and boosts your bottom line. On the other hand, ignoring employee development means within a few years, you’ll have an organization heavily staffed with people who do their jobs poorly and a culture that leaves much to be desired.
Simply put, employee development improves output and enhances company culture. Employees invest in companies who invest in them. As such, make sure there is a process in place that helps individuals refine their skills for their current roles and enables them to acquire knowledge and skills for new roles and responsibilities in an organization.
Create a Winning Culture Today
Culture mistakes can be detrimental to your organization. If you want to build a culture that makes your employees happy to come to work each day or want to reach peak performance as a forward-thinking innovator in Corporate America today, ExecTrek™ can help.
Discover how to zero in on behaviors that can impact business and propel you forward. From communication and time management to decision-making and image optics, RC3 Partners provides transformational Executive Coaching and Leadership Development to leaders seeking their competitive edge. Contact us today to learn more.
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