I’d like to share a couple of examples I’ve seen over the last week, that reinforce what effective business leadership is all about. They’re absolutely core to Value-Driven Business and Value-Driven Manufacturing. The first is from a Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog post – “Do your people trust you?”(http://blogs.hbr.org/hill-lineback/2012/03/do-your-people-trust-you.html) . “…your ability to eilicit people’s best efforts depends on their trust in you – their confidence that they can count on you to do the right thing”. Tnat trust has two elements. Firstly, your competence – put simply, you know what you’re doing! Secondly, your character – “your intentions – what you’re trying to do, your goals and values as a boss”; whether you act in your own self-interest or you care about them, the group and the work.
At least the good news is that competence is learned. Character, on the other hand…
The second is from “The 100 Best Companies to work for” in today’s UK Sunday Times newspaper (www.http://bestcompanies.co.uk/). They picked out “some common ingredients shared by all the organisations with the most engaged workforces”, which include:
- Having confidence in the leadership skills of your manager
- Having senior managers who listen rather than just tell people what to do
- Having faith in the leader of the company / being inspired by them
- Having senior managers who truly live the company values
- Managers who support their team members and help them to fulfil their potential
- Having middle manager role models who care how satisfied team members are in their jobs
And remember, these are not theoretical – all of these examples are based on current research of real businesses.
In my next blog post I’ll show you how to take these principles and build them into your Value-Driven Business System.
You can find other blog posts about Value-Driven Manufacturing here on the Manufacturing Times blog (helpfully categorised under “Value-Driven Manufacturing”!), and you can find out more about Value-Driven Business at www.ValueDrivenBusiness. co.uk.