Three Winning Organizational Changes
In the last few issues, we have been discussing ways that you can greatly improve your organization by creating a more supportive environment for your staff. In this issue, we look at 3 organization changes that you can make -- right now -- to improve the self-esteem and success of your team.
Make no mistake about it. The most valuable assets your organization has walks in the door in the morning, and out at night!
Make everybody an owner.
The surest way to make the people you work with feel that it is there organization is to make it their organization. After all, it is mostly the owners who drive organizations. So figure out a way in which everybody who has been their at least eight months becomes an owner. That way, you'll have an organization that's owner driven. Of course you can do it. Hundreds or organizations have. So can you. Be creative.
Keep it small.
When an organization has twenty-five or thirty people, people feel connected and tend to more easily help each other. As the organization grows (and this goes for profit-making companies as well), people too often tend to pull apart and become strangers. There seems to be something about the law of 35 -- 35 people are about as big as you can get before you cease to care about the people with whom you directly work. Your job is to keep people caring for one another, to keep them together, to maintain that sense of fellowship that helped fuel the growth in the first place. One of the ways to do this is to organize your organization so that it becomes not big and stranger-filled, but a bigger company combined of small units. This means, of course, giving more and more authority and responsibility to more and more people. And the more you do that, the more you raise your staffs' self-images.
Tell them everything about their organization.
If you expect the people you work with to come up with great ideas, they must (a) know the problems facing your organization, or the opportunities that have to be taken advantage of, and (b) have the information they need to solve those problems, to take advantage of those opportunities.
So keep nothing secret, nothing for top management's eyes only. Open up the books to them. Keep them posted on negotiations and pending opportunities. Tell them of your constituents' concerns. Brief them at a weekly staff meeting on the state of the organization. Answer their questions fully and honestly. Tell them everything. After all, they are the organization. They have the right to know.
This article was based on information from: The Six Fundamentals of Success: The Rules for Getting It Right for Yourself and Your Organization. Stuard R. Levine. New York: Doubleday. 2004.
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