Organisational Culture

We conducted a Q&A interview with Shea Heaver, Founder at OptimaWork, around employee engagement and business transformation.

Could you introduce yourself and what you do?

Although most organizations and management understand the need for Employee Engagement, most still struggle to create it.

Why is that?

Well in most cases it is simply down to the fact that it is still viewed as a Management and/or Human Resources function....or burden depending on where you stand.  

The old (and very time-consuming) method of seeking staff feedback via a lengthy opinion survey and then digging through all the data looking for a golden nugget is still widely used and seen as the only option in many circles.

Hijackers are those people who try to take over your meeting and change the direction.  Let’s unpack why people hijack, take a look at the different types of hijackers, and then get some tips on what we can do about it.

Why do people hijack?  The most important thing I’ve learned is that people aren’t hijacking your meeting to piss you off.  They really aren’t. They also aren’t doing it because they are control freaks who want to be in charge, or want to make you look bad.   

There are a lot of reasons someone might hijack your meeting.  Here are a few:

Technology has given us the ability to measure everything, and we’ve become hooked like addicts.  Is all this measuring helping us or hurting us?  The paradox in measuring is that you can see measured improvement when you stop measuring.  But how will you know?

One of the things that makes leadership such a tricky subject is that it is all about behaviour. It is about what you do every single day.

What you say matters but if it is undermined by your behaviour it becomes irrelevant.

This is why I am a strong believer in the concept of leadership by example.

It is the behaviour that is demonstrated by the leadership and the behaviour that they tolerate amongst their people that creates the organisation’s culture.

Would you rather have an employee move internally or move out of the organization?

In today’s complex, interconnected and rapidly changing environment, it is more important than ever that organisations can respond quickly whilst still achieving efficiencies of scale. A key enabler of this is having the right organisational design, and recognising that the design of yesterday (designed for efficiency and assuming predictable patterns) will no longer work in the digital age, where agility and speed of response is key.

Matrix working – please click to enlarge the image