If you are struggling with what you think is a work force that isn’t up to your standards, perhaps you should look first to see if the processes and systems you have in place to support them are up to their standards.
Transcript
Steve Rice: I have to think that, around the question of whether self-awareness can be systematized at the corporate and personal level in a company. I have to believe as an experiential, fractional CMO+CTO, that systems do matter and that they also can’t get you all the way there.
I have seen multiple times, outside the realm of just corporate self-awareness but just getting things done in a company, that a really good system or set of systems and processes allows the good people to do really good work, and the bad people to sort of stick out like a sore thumb.
A bad system makes everybody look bad, and makes everybody wonder, “Why do we have a bunch of bad people working for us?”, when that’s usually not true? It’s that something is wrong with the system.
So when I look at companies that I’ve worked with that have more awareness both at the corporate level and the leadership level and even awareness between departments – cross silo awareness – what we’re really talking about is that ability to communicate freely, which comes from what Stephen was mentioning: a comfort level of being yourself and knowing that you could do that.
And so there’s got to be systems – and I think we could probably name a few like ‘Stop, Start, and Continue” – that allow that self-awareness is sort of bubble up and bloom up and give people the right environment, the ability to take take that system, that 80% that the system will get them there. And then there’s probably that 20% where the human factor comes in and they have to work a little harder.