The most intuitive IT leader discovered the link between work culture and growth a long time ago. As simple as it may sound, if the morale of your team is high and the culture is focused towards guidance, mentoring and turning mistakes into learning opportunities, the chances are you will create a positive culture. Understanding the value of people as an asset is critical to setting this in place, the rest is empowering them towards driving business success. You cannot have one without the other and the savvy IT leader will take advantage of this. Despite this there are still business leaders and therefore team leaders who consider this notion a thorn in the side. The mistake they have made is to think all employees were made equal. There is no one size fits all approach and the astute IT leader will know who is good at what and how to maximize that intrinsic talent. Prioritize people and work culture and you won’t go far wrong in expanding in all the right directions. What can be done to foster the ‘people are power’ attitude?
“Corporate culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage that is completely within the control of the entrepreneur.”
Look To your Organizational Governance
By this I refer to the leadership of an organization taking accountability and having strong awareness of what trickles below into the organizational chart. This is not just limited to the core business functions but includes people as part of process and values them as much as you would any other vital cog in the machine. To get into the correct mindset the leadership has to drive culture and really believe in a cohesive and shared mentality. Once they understand the success of the organization depends on company culture being positive, open and transparent, growth can often occur. Remember everybody from upper management down wants the best for the company. Strong communication and transparency regardless of what the conversation might be, is essential to growing together.
The companies who want to take a more official line will implement a standard such as BS 13500 Code of Practice for delivering effective governance of organizations. It is a first of its kind but can be the guide that is needed to formalize not just people but accountability from leadership in all aspects of running the organization. According to BSI (British Standards Organization) it offers “more control to owners, offers employees a clear idea of their role, while those outside the organization have a better informed view of how it operates. This standard has been created to raise the bar in terms of how your organization is governed by offering a framework that continuously improves and assesses its development.” When leadership rubs shoulders with employees on issues and projects that matter, that philosophy of culture matters is strengthened. Appreciating and thanking people for the work they do can go a long way towards making them work harder and better. Recognition is essential and empowering the innate culture leaders to spread the message is even more effective.
“The way I think about culture is that modern humans have radically changed the way that they work and the way that they live. Companies need to change the way they manage and lead to match the way that modern humans actually work and live.”
Continuous improvement is an attitude
Just because strong work culture pillars have been set in place, it cannot be assumed that you can now take your eye off the ball and everything will take care of itself. Like anything that requires growth, work culture too needs to be nourished and pruned in a healthy manner. As such the investment that has been put in by everyone (including leadership) within that system needs to be honored with a constant vigilance and desire to keep improving. Complacency and assumption will kill this culture dead because it is then that the focus has shifted from nurture, mentor and guide to relying on chance. The benefits of forever adapting are clear, since the companies who adopt this attitude are a walking metaphor for their business as a whole. They are practicing what they preach and when that message gets across to the corporate community, it speaks volumes about a companies integrity. It demonstrates good practice, values and behaviors that are not just some attractive blurb on your marketing material. Enhanced business reputation is just one by product, the other is staff retention, high productivity and an ability to scale fast. After all the mentality at the top of the corporate governance food chain is precisely what gets replicated down. Get it wrong at the top and the likelihood is that you are not able to keep staff. And in this day and age, nothing will harm a company faster.
Get to know the people you work with
Quite often members of teams feel like a faceless entity simply sitting in the shadows being the stealth operator who does the work and nobody notices. Strong IT leaders strike this concept down the minute they get in the door. This is particularly crucial within IT departments who are constantly dealing with the rest of the business and often all of the business. In my example, our DevOps team alone is working collaboratively with colleagues to solve critical business demands from Marketing, Operations, Finance, Professional Services, Sales, and of course Business Technology.
With this in mind it is crucial to get out there and show your face. Creating a rapport and finding a connection with individuals might be one of the best moves you make because quite often the climate can get demanding, tense, urgent and emotions must not get in the way. The best way to show work is not a personal attack is to know the person you are dealing with. Ensure they are confident that you have theirs and the organization’s best interests at heart. This can be particularly challenging for IT leaders who have by nature been charged with saying no and slapping hands from hot stoves.
The bottom line here is to get talking and as this might not be feasible due to location or proximity, it is crucial to establishing rapport from the outset. Just as you might go out to meet a vendor, a staff member is no different. Incumbent team members need to get to know you so the best business interactions can occur. Regular induction days can help at the start where staff from all areas of the business get to talk about their roles and challenges and how you can help each other. For IT this insight is vital due to the spread IT has. Inductions are excellent ways to relate the work culture to new starters and instill them with a sense of care that can boost them from the outset. Quite often the culture is not obvious and pointing out the traditions and typical behaviors is useful as it demonstrates a unified approach and a sense of fun and engagement. Work needs to be a place you want to be especially if your focus is to grow.
Other day to day methods encourage more face to face interaction and if this is not possible then strong chat tools are key. Many organizations use video meetings to add the human factor to the interaction enabling body language and verbal nuances and context to be read without confusion.
What have you done for me lately?
The successful business leader knows the importance of investment after all they are dealing with the ebb and flow of revenues all day long. This can go one of both ways, they tighten their pockets and don’t reinvest in staff or they open the purse and do just that. The good IT leader is aware that investment is essential especially as a large part of the mechanics of success for business lie in their remit. Without the tech-reliant functions the business would wither in days. They know better than most that it is not just about a salary or team building morale exercises. It is about growth of the individual and enabling them to have a future beyond where they currently are. That is not to be confused with equipping them with skills to get them out but creating the cream of the crop for the IT industry as a whole. What are we talking about here? For starters certifications and e-learning to demonstrate your commitment. Learning encourages so much and has in my experience the opposite effect of staff jumping ship once they get something from the company. And after teaching, mentoring and providing your staff with educations, make sure they have a chance to use what they have learned. If you have staff who have learned Ansible, give them an Ansible project.
Sometimes the business needs convincing if there is an added outlay. An exercise I use to show the monetary value of an employee is to quantify them as a contractor working on a daily or hourly rate. It has two benefits it can justify the extra hours they put in (aside from their business rate) and why they are due a windfall in the form of learning a course or gaining a license. And it can be an effective time management tool to show what happens when time the employee’s time is wasted on a vanity or low priority project. Another method I like to employ is the weekly tutorial, it is certainly a more than having a line of developers or operations people queuing at my desk to work through a problem! Again the benefits are many and it deepens the positive work culture. Apart from costing in time, this a free gift I am happy to give.