An Excerpt from How to Inspire Your Team to “Walk the Talk.”
In their 1997 book, The Power of Alignment[i], George Labovitz and Victor Rosansky set forth the proposition that “growth and profit are ultimately the result of an alignment between people, customers, strategy, and processes.”[ii] And they aren’t the only ones who believe it.
Mike Curran wrote about this recently in his blog post How I Built 3 Successful Companies with 1 Focus. Or as former Netscape CEO, Jim Barksdale says:
“The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing!”
Almost two decades later, the importance of ensuring that employees understand the vision, mission, values, and objectives of any organization is unquestioned. Companies who achieve this objective have dramatically better results than those who do not intentionally manage the culture of an organization. Comparing 200 companies that intentionally managed the corporate culture to similar companies that did not, one study[iv] found:
– Revenue increased 682% vs. 166%
– Net Income increased 756% vs. 1%
– Stock Price increased 901% vs. 74%
So at a time when virtually every employee is connected in one way or another to friends, if not to their co-workers, why do so many employees report that they are unengaged at work. Why do so many employees fail to relate to a company’s values?
When every employee is connected one way or another, why do so many report they are unengaged at work?
In an article entitled “The Attention Economy: Marketing to the Next Generation and the Power of Choice,”[v] the authors at the Aspen Institute noted:
“The relationship of consumers to technology has shifted in fundamental ways, according to Ted Cohen, managing partner of Tag Strategic. Thanks to a variety of new technologies, the “physics of the media world” are changing—from a world in which attention was abundant and content was scarce to a world in which content is superabundant and attention is scarce. With so many competing options, the individual’s attention is now the most valuable commodity….In this world of ever-expanding choices, “quality” of content is no longer the critical factor in determining success. What matters most now is relevance.”
The question facing today’s leaders is this:
