The importance of compliance needs to come from the top down in order for businesses to avoid white-collar crime, corruption and other missteps.
From time to time, every leader has to deliver news that is hard for employees to hear. Even when businesses are doing well, organizational and structural change is to be expected, and acquisitions, reorganizations, or policy changes can affect people’s jobs in ways that create feelings of fear, anger, or sorrow. Each employee wonders, “How will this change affect me?” or assumes, “Oh, this won’t be good! How am I going to get my work done?”
Increasingly, companies are recognizing that by creating and maintaining a culture of continuous process improvement, they can fuel efficiency, engagement and innovation in the workplace. Just as importantly, a process improvement culture can set the stage for greater profitability and corporate growth.
“Talent developers are depending more on online learning solutions to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse, multi-generational workforce,” officials wrote in the LinkedIn report.
Every organization has a pool of change agents that usually goes untapped.
If you’ve ever had a boss who was more worried about protecting their position and avoiding all risk than in supporting new ideas or forging new ground, you’ll know how demoralizing it can be.
Ask yourself: When was the last time someone seriously “dropped some knowledge” on you? Something that really grabbed your attention? Your imagination? Made you laugh, shed a tear, both? Something that possibly inspired you to, as Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford speech, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Hopefully it wasn’t as far back as your college graduation. But, chances are, it wasn’t at work.
Modern companies often strive to be more customer-centric. The more aware you are of customer needs and the more empathy you have toward their motivations, the easier it is to build a great product.
Cultural differences in leadership styles often create unexpected misunderstandings. Americans, for example, are used to thinking of the Japanese as hierarchical while considering themselves egalitarian. Yet the Japanese find Americans confusing to deal with. Although American bosses are outwardly egalitarian—encouraging subordinates to use first names and to speak up in meetings—they seem to the Japanese to be extremely autocratic in the way they make decisions. As a Japanese manager living in the United States and working for Mitsubishi put it: “I couldn’t figure out how to adapt my approach from one day to the next, because the culture was so contradictory and puzzling.”
Embrace change, contended Greek philosopher Heraclitus, because it is “the only constant in life.”
In today’s workplace, companies are in a nearly constant state of organization change – whether it’s a large-scale makeover or a shakeup of departments or geographies – McKinsey research finds. And if they aren’t continual, the redesigns emerge in faster and faster intervals.
