Jul 23 You Need to Utilize a Proven New Business DNA Strategy
A significant part of my work lately is to illuminate the corners of businesses both large and small, to assess their DNA. Where are the areas of untapped strength, and what are the camouflaged vulnerabilities? There is a common human element supporting or undermining every area of an organization. Focus on enhancing the culture in a way that influences and reflects the vital and valuable human ingredients. You’ll stimulate healthy DNA growth that will permeate every level.
Enhance Your Organizational DNA
- Visualize
Before you can reach your destination, you have to identify it on the map. In terms of organizational success, this means visualizing the kind of cultural DNA you want your company to nurture and reflect.
- Organize
Take an inventory. What DNA-level skills and attributes are needed to solidify teamwork, without redundancy and too much overlap of talent? Where are there opportunities to ignite cross-collaboration?
- Inoculate
Create a profile of the kind of candidate or leader who is not a good fit, too. What infectious traits will introduce or perpetuate the wrong kind of attitude, chemistry, and working environment? Until you recognize them, you won’t be able to strategically eliminate them.
- Replenish
Doing this kind of analysis will also help you to self-evaluate your organization, your team, and yourself. Dig deep, be honest, and get rid of the negative baggage. Then replace it with the kind of DNA you want to foster within your organization or yourself.
Actively hire, inspire, and promote people who are not like you. Diversity helps organizations embrace global ideas. Share on XHire People Who Are Unlike You
You don’t learn much, and don’t learn to accept change, by continuing to brainstorm inside an echo chamber. Plus you do not know what you do not know. Only someone with a different lens, experience, and viewpoint can help you detect your blind spots.
Actively hire, inspire, and promote people who are not like you. Diversity helps organizations embrace global ideas. You grow faster with diverse perspectives to stimulate creativity, cross-pollination of ideas, and innovation.
Embrace a bold, open-minded entrepreneurial spirit when you recruit people for your teams. Encourage ideas that are not the same as yours. By doing so you will encourage rich diversity and be richly rewarded.
Develop Cultural Ambassadors
Companies often hire me to coach, support, and develop their high-level executives, either individually or as a small group. I shadow and observe them in real-time, within the workplace environment.
Then I work with them to strengthen their leadership in areas such as enhanced communication and persuasive presentation skills, high performance team design, mindset management, and brand development.
Strengthening organizational DNA in this top-down way ensures that leaders become visible role models and active internal and external ambassadors for your organization’s culture of excellence. Their influence affects everyone in a positive way.
Evaluate/Elevate Your Corporate DNA
That, in turn, creates a healthy success dynamic that works from the bottom-up. Now you have a self-perpetuating loop, that keeps cycling through every layer of the company. The outcome is a pervasive culture of performance, productivity, and employee retention that is tangible and measurable.
Sometimes just by conducting an initial interview with an executive or chatting with their team members I find the root of the problem. These conversations reveal negative symptoms and deeply-seated patterns. I’ve observed them in one form or another across hundreds of organizations, in different industries, around the world.
Insiders are generally too close to the forest to see the trees, much less the cellular-level disease infecting the trees. I bring to them the unique advantage of an outside observer trained to spot the symptoms and diagnose the core deficiencies. Then I collaborate with them as their success partner to offer the appropriate cures and create the ideal culture.
Takeaway Questions
Before you recruit, hire, and promote, ask yourself these questions:
- What DNA does your organization need, and what elements do you need to add, incentivize, and celebrate to make that happen?
- Are you strategic and selective in terms of not just the individuals and their talent, but the overall culture you want them to help to develop?
- Do you take this culture-shaping approach when designing departmental or individual teams and selecting vendors and partners?
Get it right and your entire organizational DNA can be dramatically and sustainably strengthened, uplifted, and invigorated.
- About the Author
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Sarah Hathorn, CEO of Hathorn Consulting Group, is the go-to-expert in working with leaders and companies to create successful corporate DNA. As an executive coach, consultant and speaker she collaborates globally with clients and brands such as Deloitte, McKesson, Kimberly-Clark, Sherwin-Williams, Home Depot and other leading organizations.
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