Strategic Planning and Management Insights

Organizational culture is the system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs from your team.

As a leader you shape the culture in your organization from your words and your actions. The culture is also shaped by your employees and the environment that everyone creates on a day to day basis.

I was recently at someone's house and saw a great example of how they are using culture to teach their kids. (More on that later..) 

At SME Strategy, we explain organizational culture as: "the way we do things around here".

How would you describe the way you do things at your organization? 

What are the ways of being and acting that your team exemplifies everyday?

That's your organizational culture.

Image from the public domain 

How often do you sit and write every day while you’re at work? The chances are that it’s probably more than you think.

Whether you’re writing text messages, instant messages, blog content, emails, sales reports, employee performance reviews, invoices, disciplinary notices,

hand-over notes and project status updates, writing is a core part of your everyday life, so have you ever thought about the quality of your writing is affecting your performance?

By proactively improving your writing skills, you can take your ability to communicate and to send engaging, comprehensive and accurate messages to the next level, helping you to streamline your days, increase productivity and dramatically improve the leadership qualities you already have.

Here are seven methods on how to do just that:

Image from public domain via Pixabay

A few months ago, I was talking to some friends about the importance of soft skills over hard skills. We discussed whether emotional intelligence, presentation, coordination and negotiation skills trump hard, numerical, quantitative skills. Naturally, if you put together a bunch of college kids that are wildly insecure about their independent inadequacies, a conversation like that is bound to lose its substance and end up a painful ego match.                                                        

You and your team have gone through the process of creating a strategic plan, and now you need a communication strategy for how you're going to share the message and the plan with your team.

Communicating your strategic plan and vision just one time is not going to be enough. You need to constantly and consistently engage your team in the direction of the organization, and continuously communicate why and how you (the people and the organization) are wanting to go there.

Lorie Corcuera is co-founder and culture creator at SPARK Creations, an organization that helps other businesses build (or re-build) their cultures around their people. Lori explains that SPARK helps to humanize work by putting the focus on people, to help them understand who they are, and how they can live their most effective life, both in their personal lives and at work.

 Image: Public Domain Pixbay

Looking to add to your reading list this fall? We’ve reviewed 10 books on strategy and leadership, and here are our favorites (in no particular order):

The first step that any effective strategy facilitator takes is to understand their problems. Every company’s problems are unique, and we always take that into account. However, we’ve gathered data on 500 people and their biggest strategy roadblocks. Over 75% fall into three key buckets: Understanding the process, getting alignment and setting and keeping strategic goals. As understanding the problem is the first step to productive problem solving, this post highlights them and offers tips to help.