📚 Meister Book Club: Reinforce Organizational Clarity through Human Systems

@Cornelia Patscheider I like Canva too, how do you like the banner I made for the post above ☝

Have a great week 👋

Andrés.

Unity and Transparency are deeply related and required if you want to implement a good leadership system and achieve organizational health. 

I believe not all the stuff happening at the top has necessarily to distill to the lower ranks because usually that phenomenon creates more noise than anything productive.

This is how I see it: the relationship between Unity and Transparency in a team is rooted in another important word, not present in your question @Miša:

Trust

This is how it works:

Unity requires Trust from all members in the team.

⬆⬇

Transparency provides Trust to all members in the team.

It's a feedback loop, but what most leaders are not prepared for is the price the leader has to pay to achieve Transparency.

Transparency is expensive in terms of:

• Comfort: what a better way to take the whole team out of the comfort zone than to implement new procedures and new tech platforms that require the formation of new habits and acquisition of new skills. Trust me, it's easier said than done! 
• Courage/Confidence: it takes a great deal of courage and self-confidence to put all your titles, badges, six-digit salary on the drawer, and then, hit the field to experience business operations first hand, like one more common worker of your team. Furthermore, the courage and self-confidence it takes to be the first at owning your mistakes, and lead by example.
• Humility: additionally to courage and confidence, it takes a great deal of humility to build real relationships with your team members; then ask them: "how would you solve this and that?" and get an honest response from them. Requesting honest feedback and getting it for real is a quick way of overcoming difficult business challenges. Only true leaders are capable of pulling that off, in my experience.
• Time: this all I've written so far takes time, that's why you don't achieve Transparency overnight. You achieve Transparency by building trust, implementing new habits, and developing better communication and soft skills. 

In summary: Leaders who invest the time needed to get out of their pretty corporate office, and demonstrate to their staff the courage and humility needed to build true relationships with them on the field, will experience this:

1. Team members that start trusting their leader
2. A team united around the core values represented by the leader
3. The achievement of Transparency in the organizational culture of the leader (I call this one the No-BS zone)

Again, the order is the key to success here 😃 Said in another way: Leaders who fail at implementing a transparent leadership usually think the challenge they have to overcome is outside, when in reality, the challenge starts within themselves.

Yes, exactly!

The core principles that guide decision-making at all levels should be short phrases that carry identity within them. In my practice, those core principles should respond "why" questions of the leader's organization.

For example, this is how I illustrate several non-negotiable core principles of BSF.company and the concepts behind them:

Core Principle #1: We treat customers respectfully and kindly, all the time.

Why?: Because the customers will remain loyal not because what we did, but because of how they felt when they came to us in times of stress. This core principle always applies, no matter how stressful the situation is, it always applies. Non-negotiable!

Core Principle #2: All requests go through our Support Help Desk.

Why?: Because we're the masters of follow-up, customer support, and information management. No human being is capable of managing an operation like ours through WhatsApp or Email. It's pretty simple: one request, one unique Ticket ID, one final solution. That's it. Non-negotiable!

Core Principle #3: We respond as quickly as humanly possible.

Why?: Because the time our competitors take to respond is the time it takes us to close the deal. (This one we got it actually from one of our customers, so it wasn't so hard to convince our team of this core truth. They heard it from the customer's mouth, 😁)

Core principles help the leader in finding a good balance between two opposing forces present in any modern business operation:

• The need for standardized procedures (order)
• The need for flexibility to keep going when things don't go according to plan (chaos)

Actually, I was talking precisely about this balance in the recent post titled 10 Tips To Help You Make Better Business Decisions.

So, in summary: yes, core principles are great guidelines and are deeply related to corporate strategy and corporate identity. 

Recommended additional reading on the subject of "corporate strategy"

I recommend a book called The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene.

Especially Strategy #6: Segment Your Forces: The Controlled-Chaos Strategy; where the author describes how Napoleon's troops conquered most of Europe by "understanding" his "core principles" and having the flexibility and freedom to operate according to the requirements of each situation. This is a masterpiece in the category of business management, in my opinion.

Fortunately, I've had the opportunity several times to implement the 4 principles described in this book and much more, but I wouldn't stretch it so far as to affirming "I've mastered any of these principles". That affirmation would void the learning process. 

The truth for me is that every day brings its challenge, I personally:

• Never stop reading
• Never stop learning
• Never stop facing challenges like it's the first time

I thank every customer and every employer who gives me the chance to put all this into practice because it's one more chance for improving upon past achievements. One more chance at the bat, you know, like Baseball ⚾

In summary, for me, there's no such thing as "too much organizational health". We can always improve a little more.

The following screenshot from my MT account is an illustration of the last line… @Miša

15 days have passed since the last time I mentioned within my team the importance of choosing proper comm channels and how crucial it is to promote "Transparency" within the team by "avoiding informational silos". So, it's an everyday battle. It never stops.

I'm uncertain if you would enjoy this so-long response @Miša. I'm not a fan of boring people with long writings, but you asked for it:

I definitely enjoyed writing it 😃

Best regards.

Andrés D'Andrea.

Hi @Martha Camacho, indeed!

Working in any company under good leadership and a great organizational culture is something to feel very lucky about. I've had that experience as well in several places (including Mexico) and I could even categorize it as a blessing.

Thanks for the book recommendation. Looking forward to the Meister Book Club post in March! 😉

☝ That's the kind of blessing I'm talking about!

Agree @Miša, self-improvement is a never-ending process.

I think of brining up kids as the process people in hardware design perform when they program a chip, you know, a microcontroller or something like that.

Instead of code, the input for kids are habits. Good ones, or bad ones. They're always learning something, for sure.

Instead of hours, or days, the process takes years.

There's no such thing as "the perfect parent" though, so mistakes are allowed and those bad habits we all learned can be dismounted and replaced with good ones anyway 😜

When I have kids, I'll teach them how to reprogram themselves to make up for my mistakes 😂

All the best!