Your Deeper Dive Continues

In my last post, we discussed the importance of examining the mindsets and underlying issues within a corporate culture to understand “why” things are the way they are—particularly when you’re dissatisfied with the speed of transformation within your company. If you’ve made significant investments in diversity training and leadership development initiatives yet the results are still lackluster, you may need to take a “deeper dive” to find out what’s really happening beneath the surface.

Let’s revisit the conversation I had with a CEO who was concerned about these issues and wanted to have a better understanding of his organization’s “executive conscience.” While he’d had some breakthrough thinking about how bias toward traditionally male decision-making styles could be holding women back in his company, the CEO asked for another example of the influence that mindsets have on corporate culture.

I asked him to think about employee engagement in his company. He admitted that opinion surveys suggested many of his executives and managers weren’t really listening to their employees, leading to widespread disengagement. This was key to the CEO understanding the executive conscience of his company. If he failed to examine his executives’ underlying assumptions and mindsets around engagement, all of the training in the world would not lead to the organizational transformation he desired.

The CEO was eager to know how to rid his company of the poisonous mindsets that were crippling the entire organization’s potential for transformation. My answer was simple: he needed to identify the less productive mindsets and assumptions, examine them, and have his senior leadership reject or revise them. Clearly, a first step in combating the type of disengagement that the CEO had recognized would be to have his managers start listening to their teams better, and help them feel more involved in important actions and decisions.

There’s a lesson for every executive here. What you and your company espouse might not always reflect the reality of what’s happening in your organization. An examination of executive conscience through a “deep dive” is the best way to ensure that the right talent surfaces, training programs stay afloat, and transformational initiatives deliver the desired ROI.

As a next step, take the time to reexamine your own organization’s mindset and culture. Here are a few questions for you to explore:

• Have you articulated a new vision, changed policies, or replaced key positions yet can’t seem to get much traction for the desired corporate transformation?
• Are you relying on leadership models and beliefs of the past to achieve success in the future?
• Have employee opinion surveys revealed widespread disengagement among staff, prompted in part by managers failing to listen to their teams?
• Do senior leaders who have the most influence in promoting candidates reward only linear thinking, rather than a more relational approach to decision-making?
• Are high-potential women leaders failing to advance to executive positions despite the fact that your organization has strong diversity policies and procedures on paper?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, it suggests that your company needs to take a deeper dive into understanding what’s holding things back before the organization can move forward. Only by examining executive conscience in this way can you reap the full benefits of your investment in diversity and team-development initiatives, and move away from self-limiting corporate mindsets.

To find out how organizations can eliminate outdated assumptions and move toward true cultural transformation, visit www.shambaughleadership.com and learn more about SHAMBAUGH’s Managing Gender Differences Offerings, Integrated Leadership consulting and programs, as well as Executive Coaching, Leadership Programs, Keynote Offerings, Sponsorship Consulting and our signature Women In Leadership and Learning Program (WILL). A SHAMBAUGH consultant can help your company take a “deeper dive” on this critical issue.

Author, best selling books: "It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor," “Leadership Secrets of Hillary Clinton,” and “Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results”

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