Ethics moving up the agenda
Where organisations are striving to achieve excellence in performance, they are increasingly required to be ethically excellent too. This can be from an employee’s perspective, that of customers and stakeholders.
This does not mean a high profile, well publicised corporate fund raising effort for charity one day and a low profile, unpublicised tax evasion project the next.
Culture in any organisation, without exception, always stems from the top. Leadership by example, transparent communication and ongoing learning and development for all is a prerequisite. The common factor where ethics is either partial or absent altogether, is the desire of one or more people to achieve personal gain at the expense of others.
Discussing this with a CEO group recently we concluded that as a leader:
‘Everything that we think, do or say, every day, matters’. And that is tough.
U turn OK
Sometimes the carefully conceived, extensively discussed and finally agreed upon way forward, may simply be the wrong decision.
It is reassuring to make decisions. We make them all the time in the Board Room. Once we have made a decision we can delete all the thought processes, all the information in the inbox, because we have pressed ‘send and receive’. It’s gone, it’s over and we can move on to the next issue.
Trouble is when the decision is wrong, we have to row back upstream, we have to dig out all the stuff from deleted items, we have to engage with people that we have already told one thing, and now we have to tell them something else.
As my sixteen year old would say, “It’s all OK, get over it”
Changing state
Sometimes there is a compelling need to change the individual and collective state of people in a Board Room.
One of the most powerful ways to do this is for an external facilitator to invite members to discuss, debate and finally to agree on the answers to four very simple questions. These concern the ‘what’, the ‘how much’, the ‘who’ and the ‘when by’ of business activities. The result is a Bull’s Eye measurable statement of excellence for the organisation that can be understood by everyone on the payroll.
We are all familiar with the process of changing state because we consciously do it all the time. The pub, the church, the mountains, the football match, the art gallery, these are all places we may deliberately choose to go to deliberately change our state.
A change of state can enable us to see, hear, feel and think differently. That is why it is such a vitally important thing to be able to do in the Board Room.
The CEO, the brand
Increasingly the top person is being asked to become the face of the business. This is not just big company stuff; it applies to the smallest SME. It doesn’t have to be the CEO that does it but it is best if it is.
The issue is how to differentiate your business in the market place. It doesn’t matter whether you make award winning real ale, have a retail / internet super business on the high street or have the best holiday home park in the UK. Products on their own are not enough and all the latest IT will not do it. Only people can consistently and continuously deliver excellence from a customer perspective and this excellence always starts at the top.
That’s why the leader has to be seen to be doing the internet marketing, be seen to speak at networking and trade events, be seen to be constantly trying to position the organisation in the market place.
Oh yes and they have to run the business too.
