Building A Winning Culture In Government. Patrick R. Leddin
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Five Key Practices to Success
The common ways of thinking are often reactive and counterproductive. Consider. What kind of leader would you be if…
No one but you felt a sense of responsibility for results?
You didn’t understand the combined power of your team?
You failed to execute your most important goals?
You didn’t fully leverage the genius, talent, and skill of your team?
There was a lack of trust in you, each other, or the organization?
Your internal and external customers had no clear idea what kind of value you brought to them?
There was little loyalty on your team to you, each other, or the organization?
FranklinCovey has over three decades of experience with hundreds of thousands of people in international organizations, small schools, and whole departments of government. They come to us to become highly effective organizations. We have five practices that show them how to do this, but it always begins with changed mindsets—paradigms—that will enable them to thrive. We have shown in this chapter that the first shift is seeing that your people are your ultimate competitive advantage and that you must engage them before you can successfully move forward. To do this, it is not your job to simply be the leader, but to make everyone a leader. Once this shift has occurred, it is time for you to shift your thinking in five key areas:
Common Practices | Highly Effective Practices |
Create and post the mission statement in all public areas. | 1. Find the Voice of the organization and connect and align accordingly (a.k.a. Lead With Purpose). |
Develop a great strategy. | 2. Execute your strategy with excellence. |
Do more with less. | 3. Unleash and engage people to do infinitely more than you imagined they could. |
Become the provider/employer of choice in your industry. | 4. Be the most trusted provider/employer in your sector. |
Satisfy customers. | 5. Create fervent loyalty with customers. |
Why these five practices? Each one is based on fundamental principles that never change. The principles of proactivity, execution, productivity, and trust underlie every great achievement: nothing has ever been accomplished in human history without them. People who live by the opposite values—reactivity, aimless activity, waste, mistrust—contribute little to the success of the organization. Similarly, the principles of mutual benefit and loyalty underlie every successful relationship. People who live by the opposite values—indifference to others and disloyalty—create no goodwill and work against the organization. The common ways of thinking are often reactive and counterproductive. We need this new model.
You can see for yourself why these Paradigm Shifts and new practices are vital. You can come up with many other success factors, but these five are inviolable. Leaders must be able to (1) find the “voice” of the organization, (2) execute with excellence, (3) unleash the productivity of people, (4) inspire trust, and (5) engender loyalty with all stakeholders.
A paradigm is like an operating system for a computer. The machine will only do what the operating system allows it to do. If your paradigms are from the past, you’ll be using obsolete applications that aren’t up to the requirements of today.
As the graphic below shows, you need an overarching “leadership operating system,” like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, to run today’s applications—the Paradigm Shifts we’ve listed. In this book, we’re going to invite you to adopt a new leadership operating system and to “download” the Paradigm Shifts to your own mind.
You will discover the key to a culture like the one that keeps the Bakerloo Line on track. By instilling The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People along with our other behavior-change solutions, we helped them build a culture of proactivity and resourcefulness. Around 100 million passengers ride the Bakerloo Line each year. The Bakerloo team succeeds in their increasingly demanding environment because of the kind of people they are, which is a reflection of the kind of leaders they have. The Bakerloo Line’s highly effective leadership produced highly engaged people, and you can’t calculate the value of that kind of engagement.
These Paradigm Shifts, practices, and operating system are absolutely fundamental to success now. Each requires changing people’s hearts and minds in fundamental ways. Changing behavior is about the hardest challenge anyone ever faces. (If you don’t think so, just consider how hard it is for you to change your behavior.) It’s a great challenge, but the shift must be made. This book will show you how. The paradigms of the past might have been good for the times, but you can’t afford to live by them now. In the face of the public sector’s growing competitive cauldron, you will lose the ultimate mission essential: people who bring talent, passion, determination, and focus to the success of your organization and its mission.
The Need for Leaders at Every Level
The importance of releasing the potential of every person
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“In the Industrial Age, leadership was a position. In the Knowledge Age,
leadership is a choice.”
–Stephen R. Covey
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The most highly motivated people in any organization tend to be its leaders.
Leaders are the people who are responsible for results. They “own” the results, good or bad, so they’re highly committed to producing the best results possible. Leaders are far more likely to take initiative and care about their goals than “followers” are. After all, followers are not responsible.
People who own things take care of them. They wash their cars, repair their homes, tend their gardens. They take care because they care. On the other hand, non-owners care little, if at all:
Who washes a rental car? No one.
Why? The person doesn’t own it.
In government organizations, the leaders are owners; they own goals, projects, initiatives, and systems. A big challenge for leaders is to get other people—the non-owners—to care about those things. Many in government contend they are hindered in driving results because they cannot provide performance incentives or “fire” a poor performer like those in the private sector. There may be some truth to that argument; however, the reality is that followers—no matter the compensation; no matter the promises, benefits, or opportunities for advancement—simply don’t care in the same way leaders do. Followers don’t own anything.
A Brief History of Leadership and Management
Ever since the founding of the first government organization (whatever it was), leaders have struggled with this problem: How do you motivate people to give their best? Age after age of autocratic leaders used fear as the primary lever for engagement. Compliance was key. In the last century, scientific