🌿🧭🌳 OD03: A leader's map to organizations, Behaviors that enable collaboration, Perspectives on employee retention and The big 9 cultural values
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1. A leader’s map to organizations
The pursuit of understanding how people work together to create something of value is something that has old roots in history. Based on our OD experience, we thought that leaders of organizations could benefit from having a map with all the fields of study and/or practice that contribute to a better functioning of an organization.
Since we didn’t find any such map out there, we took a shot at creating one. You can download below the first version of it.
Have an idea to improve it?
Get in touch, we’re eager to iterate on it and make it more useful for leaders everywhere.
Current ideas on the map backlog
Add definitions for each field
Add links to bodies of knowledge, professional associations, publications, communities, literature that links that specific field to organizations and other resources
Add more relevant fields of study and/or practice
Add relationships between fields (e.g. some current fields are part of other fields)
Keep the map simple to read :-)
Practical ideas
If you look at the 6 key organizational elements, is there any area that needs your leadership in the short term? What about the long term?
You can use the map to identify the fields that you currently master or that you might want to focus on exploring this year
For a specific organizational challenge (e.g. employee retention), you can use the map to identify areas that might contribute to the problem or the solution
If you’re leading other managers, you can use the map to start a conversation about the fields that are covered (both as experience and as expertise) in your management team. Would collaboration with colleagues/partners with different sets of experience and expertise be needed in order to execute your organizational strategy?
You can also use the map to become more deliberate in the management information that you consume on a regular basis. Is it helping you become better in a specific field? Is it giving you a better high-level picture of how different fields interact?
The leadership behaviors that enable collaboration
The new “Nuts and Bolts of Digital Transformation” report from MIT Sloan Management Review has a whole section dedicated to the power of interpersonal collaboration to drive any meaningful change in an organization.
The logic is explained in the screenshot below:
Building trust cultivates purpose that generates energy that improves collaboration.
The most practical takeaway
By using organizational network analysis (ONA) and qualitative research to identify leaders who are good at nurturing collaboration, the authors have found 27(!) leadership behaviors that enable better collaboration by building trust, instilling purpose and generating energy. You can use them as inspiration, share them with your team or even adjust your leadership competency framework.
Perspectives
Short tales & a bit of humor from the life of organizations :-)
The Big 9 cultural values
Out of all the things companies could value, which matters most?
To answer this question, the Culture 500 research team identified the big 9 cultural values (shown below) by looking at what 500 large companies cited the most frequently in the official corporate value statements and by researching which values have the biggest impact on company results.
Even more, the research team has analyzed 1.2M Glassdoor reviews and created a visualization tool that shows how employees at each of the 500 companies rated the company culture across the Big 9 values. See a snapshot for Airbnb below:
You can even compare any two companies in the data set and visualize the differences, based on this research.
Ok, what to do with this info?
If you’re not part of or work with the 500 companies that were studied, we think that the key takeaway is around the 9 cultural values that were identified to have the biggest impact on financial performance nowadays. Food for thought:
Is any subset part of your current culture?
Does your organizational strategy consist of leveraging a key strength of your culture (customer-centricity maybe?) or on improving an area with potential, like diversity?
For a current strategic initiative, like improving agility - are there other company values acted upon by your colleagues that can contribute as enablers?
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as Organizational Development Advisors, helping organizations develop by learning faster what they need and what works for them.
Do you have ideas or tools that could help leaders develop their organizations?