With the great resignation in full swing, everyone is struggling to attract and retain top talent, and trying to beat the competition with traditional moves like salary and benefits is harder now, because you’re competing with more organizations across the country who can match or beat what you’re offering. Culture, on the other hand, is not something your competitive organizations can “match” as easily, so it’s a great way to ensure the best people are either staying at or coming to your organization.
That means you need to make your culture one that people don’t want to leave, and that will take some work. The good news is, PROPEL offers culture coaching that can get you moving your culture in the right direction quickly. The coaching starts with the basics of culture management, and in our advanced projects we add on system alignment and people development to improve speed and impact.
Culture Management. We have a proven methodology for designing and changing culture in ways that drive success, and in our core coaching project we coach leaders in implementing whichever parts of that methodology are most needed. Remember, you are either managing your culture, or it is managing you. Leadership today requires intentional culture management, and we’ll set you up with the core systems for doing that. When your people see that you are actively and intentionally managing the culture to make them more successful, they are more likely to stick with you (even if it takes a while for your culture management efforts to pan out).
System Alignment. As an add-on to our culture management work, for some coaching clients we help them make sure the major systems and processes inside their organization are properly aligned with their culture and where it’s headed. For example, I see a lot of organizations wanting to improve their culture in areas like agility or innovation, yet their systems for managing strategy and budgeting is both opaque and only examined once a year. That’s out of alignment. If you want to be more agile, you need more agile processes for strategic review and budgeting. You’ll need to make similar adjustments to your digital transformation journey, your talent/HR systems, your project management system, and even how you design your office. Our coaching will help you improve and fine-tune these systems and processes to make your culture more effective. This work makes it clear to your people that you’re not just giving lip service to improving culture, you’re actually getting your hands dirty and changing things. That confidence also helps to keep them from jumping ship.
People development. A second add-on to our core culture coaching package focuses on the skills and competencies of your people, throughout the organization. The most well-designed culture will fail if your people don’t have the skills and knowledge they need to make it happen. So our coaching includes targeted education and training in areas like conflict resolution, personality style (DiSC), decision-making (RACI), and team-building to make sure that your people are ready to fully live your ideal culture. Your culture lives in the behaviors of all your employees, so our culture coaching supports you in that area as well. In this package, we almost always start with the senior team to make sure they are supporting and living the culture. Remember, everyone looks up when it comes to culture. When your people trust that the senior level is practicing what they preach, they’ll stay with you.
If you want to be a winner in the great resignation, rather than a victim, then contact us about getting started with our Culture Coaching right away. The sooner you start, the more people you’ll keep.