Our Mission at People Centric is to create healthy organizations where people can be empowered and aligned. What does it mean to be a healthy organization?
Don’t think that a healthy organization is without problems. A healthy organization is resilient to issues and challenges, but they aren’t immune from them.
I worked with a business owner once who had worked hard on building a strong culture for his organization. One day, he called me upset because one of his key employees had told him that he was taking another job. The employee had been offered a significantly higher salary and a big promotion. His comment was “I thought we weren’t going to have to deal with crap like this anymore!”.
His healthy company wasn’t immune to these types of challenges, but what happened in the following weeks was a great example of health.
The leadership team immediately met to put together a contingency plan to cover the responsibilities of the person leaving. They talked about internal impact and impact on customers. They immediately posted a new job opening and started interviewing new candidates. In the following weeks, everyone picked up the slack. The hiring team was patient and didn’t do a rush hire choosing instead to wait for the right candidate, who came after several weeks. Within a few months, the team had fully recovered and actually saw a boost to morale within the team for solving such a difficult problem.
Organizational leaders should work on culture not to avoid problems, but to become more resilient and more scrappy in addressing them.
