Building a 12,000-employee corporation's leadership culture through best practices

Building a Leadership Culture in a Company

Good leadership is an important aspect of organizational success and effectiveness with regards to productivity and growth. Some of the major things that emerge from good leadership include development of good corporate culture, open communication channels, understanding of company vision and goals, and effective decision-making (Anderson, 2013). For this global corporation with 12,000 employees, the establishment of good leadership will help improve productivity across organizational operations. Each member of this leadership team needs to significantly enhance his/her leadership skills to improve the efficiency with which employees, procedures, and strategies respond to market and regulatory changes. This will require identifying and adopting best practices utilized by organizations to establish good leadership.

Analysis of the Current Leadership Culture and Practices

Most of the leadership team members at the company do not know how to improve their leadership skills in order to improve the efficiency of employees, processes and strategies with regards to regulatory and market changes. This challenge has been compounded by the fact that the corporation\'s 12,000 employees work in multiple, diverse business units. Based on analyses of qualitative data from interviews of one of the company\'s leaders and follower, there are two major reasons why the leadership team do not know how to enhance their leadership skills.

First, there is lack of a sense of urgency that would provoke action towards improvement of strategies. While the top management has demonstrated the significance of improved leadership skills to enhanced operations and response to regulatory and market changes, it has not created a sense of urgency that will provoke action towards achieving this goal. According to Kotter (2007), one of the reasons for failure of transformational efforts in a company is the management\'s failure to establish a great sense of urgency that is enough to provoke action from leaders and employees (p.97). Currently, the top management or executives have not driven members of the leadership team out of their comfort zones towards improving their leadership skills and achieving desired efficiency goals.

Secondly, there is lack of proper communication, especially top-down communication that will help in improvement of leadership skills and organizational efficiency. There is need for improved communication between the company\'s executives and other internal stakeholders to not only create a sense of urgency but also promote concerted efforts towards achieving desired leadership and productivity goals. Moreover, the company has failed to adopt strategies that reflect best practices in improving leadership skills in order to develop good leadership and establish a suitable corporate culture.

Recommendations for Building an Agile Leadership Culture

In light of this analysis and the significance of good leadership to organizational productivity and efficiency, it\'s important for the company to adopt suitable practices and strategies that help improve leadership skills of leadership team members. This can be achieved through implementing several recommendations that reflect best practices for establishing good leadership in an organization.

First, every member of the leadership team should be required to develop operational and strategic plans based on their respective responsibilities, department, and work goals (Kouzes & Posner, 2010, p.16). Personalized operational and strategic plans by every leader help him/her to improve his/her leadership skills since they are used as the basis of examining his/her performance as well as the performance of his/her department. Operational and strategic plans created by every leader also help in improving efficiency with which employees, processes and strategies respond to changes through provoking relentless efforts, attention to detail, and steadfastness. As part of achieving the desired goals, these leaders should not only develop the plans but also model the way for their followers or departments through direct involvement and action in implementing those plans (Taylor, 2016).

Every leader in the company\'s leadership team should develop operational and strategic plans at the beginning of every month. This process would entail monthly meetings with the company\'s executives to discuss performance and develop performance goals for the month. After meeting company executives, each leader should proceed to develop operational and strategic plans based on the overall goals of the company for that month. The next step would be to communicate with the relevant department and employees the specific goals and strategies for achieving them as well as model the way through direct involvement. At the end of the month, every leader\'s performance will be reviewed based on his/her strategic and operational plans. This will help in creating a sense of urgency and ensuring effective communication, which is crucial towards promoting the success of transformational initiatives in an organization.

Secondly, an organization culture where work is carried out in self-organizing team should be established within the next 3 months. Every leader should manage a self-organizing team through which work is not reported from an individual basis but from a team basis. As opposed to work reporting as individuals, the creation of self-organizing team helps improve leadership skills and efficiency through encouraging every employee to make significant contributions to work processes. Actually, self-organizing teams enable employees who perform to contribute to their level best and remove any obstacles that could hinder maximum employee contribution to work processes (Denning, 2015). The creation of such teams will help leaders develop their management skills through focusing on ensuring maximum employee contribution rather than simply checking whether desired work activities have been accomplished. In this case, leaders will examine employees\' performance based on their potential level of contribution rather than act as supervisors who compare work done with what was desired to be achieved. The three-month period for establishing self-organizing teams in the company is required because the process entails role definitions and establishment of measurement and control systems, which require time.