The world today is not the same as before as a result of a variety of factors and the intense effect of covid 19. Also, organizations have had external factors that have shaped their culture and performance.
Some organisations have obtained great results and others have suffered during this pandemic.
There is fatigue caused by the pandemic that is affecting organizations and employees right now. Besides, there is a massive economic crisis, widespread social unrest and technological forces that are reshaping and causing business model disruption and workforce automation.
This means that companies culture has been forced to change, while some leaders remain the same. However, they acknowledge the importance of how a new culture can improve and improve results in this challenging new world. Certain dysfunctional patterns of cultural behaviour are common by this fatigue.
There is an increasing number of unproductive meetings that are causing micromanagement, team burnout and lack of motivation. Employees are working more hours now than before.
They spend more hours in unproductive virtual meetings. There is a lack of trust from some managers and a sense of insecurity that it is affecting employees. Tackle this directly is the best way to solve it.
Leaders need to listen to their employee’s needs and give clarity of what is expected from their roles in this challenging moment.
Due to the increase of virtual meetings and tasks, managers and supervisors don´t have enough time to listen to their teams and their priorities.
A team loses confidence in the leaders as a result of poor communication. Leaders lose confidence in their employees due to lack of results, coordination and accountability. The negativity energy increases rumours that create dysfunctional habits and therefore affect productivity and morale.
The negativity energy affects a few employees, who create rumours against the organisation and its leaders; As a result, they resist any action towards a cultural transformation.
Furthermore, these employees influence other members of the team who are currently in need of clarity and leadership. A cultural change is based on the execution needed to achieve business outcomes. It is based on the real habits of collective execution and these habits of collective execution reflect the real culture of the organisation.
Therefore, there are critical questions that leaders can rise to recognise if their culture is helping achieve the expected results.
1. What dysfunctional collective habits are affecting the business and why? One example could be unproductive meetings.
2. What new habits of collective execution can leaders create that can help achieve better results in a better way?
3. What other barriers are affecting culture and productivity, both at the same time?
4. What kind of support is needed to facilitate the changes in the culture?
Lastly, leaders must align results with the type of culture needed.
Furthermore, they must facilitate and track the cultural transition through habits of execution aligned with the priorities of the organization.
Nowadays, leaders want rapid and effective results but using the same mindset. This means that the results are really fragmented and with a very low impact on the clients and the organization. Cultural Transformation by Leaders is possible?
When I refer to the same mindset is just pushing the results instead of creating and promoting a new environment where there is a different sense of purpose and a new way of collective performance towards better results.
The beginning of each year is a time where leaders have to be open-minded in order to rethink how they lead their teams, what lessons learned were in place and what new opportunities arise in the horizon.
Creating an agile culture means developing three main focus that are very important for the client and the expected outcomes.
1. The first focus is related to having a sense of direction for the organisation.
Having a sense of direction means getting clarity and alignment about what the client needs and the organization priorities. Leaders can lose a sense of direction by adding too many priorities dispersing the focus toward the client.
Leaders have to demonstrate a new level of excellence with creative ideas of how to exceed client´s expectations from the beginning till the end.
Design thinking is a very useful approach because it develops and promotes critical thinking skills within the teams and the clients so that there is a significant improvement in the product and service as well as the picture of the success of the organization.
2. The second focus is related to getting a sense of connection between the middle-level managers, their teams with the clients.
Having a sense of connection requires creating and developing new habits of execution among different teams in an environment of mutual support and collaboration.
For this second focus is necessary to implement a cultural transformation project at the strategic and middle management level so that an environment of cross-functional accountability gets in place and allows the breaking of silos, eliminating waste of time, rework and conflicts among the different functions and concentrate the work toward the needs of the client.
On the other hand, Agile helps concentrate on the achievement of the milestone of the client’s needs in a very rapid and consistent way especially at the middle manager level and their cross-functional team.
The sprint review and the team retrospective are scrum artefacts that, if done in a consistent and effective way, develop a set of two excellent habits of execution that accelerates the course of the project.
3. The third focus has to deal with the sense of continuity.
The organization has to create the conditions for sustaining the results and develop a productive cycle each year. In order to be consistent, the leader must execute certain key factors such as
1. Updating their picture of success and client’s expectation in a periodic way.
2. Measure and prioritise all habits of execution.
3. Eliminate major barriers that can interfere with the continuous improvement of execution and team interactions. In this case, the theory of restrictions can work as an excellent approach .
4. Lastly, the leaders have to develop competencies and new habits for creating self-development teams in a constant way and recognize their efforts.
This moment humanity is going through can now be seen as a portal and as a hole. The decision to fall into the hole or go through the portal is up to you. Lessons from Indigenous to resist the crisis.
If you repent of the problem and consume the news 24 hours a day, with little energy, nervous all the time, with pessimism, you will fall into the hole. But if you take this opportunity to look at yourself, rethink life and death, take care of yourself and others, you will cross the portal. Take care of your homes, take care of your body. Connect with your spiritual House.
When you are taking care of yourselves, you are taking care of everything else. Do not lose the spiritual dimension of this crisis; have the eagle aspect from above and see the whole; see more broadly.
There is a social demand in this crisis, but there is also a spiritual demand — the two go hand in hand. Without the social dimension, we fall into fanaticism. But without the spiritual dimension, we fall into pessimism and lack of meaning.
You were prepared to go through this crisis. Take your toolbox and use all the tools available to you.
This is a resistance strategy. In shamanism, there is a rite of passage called the quest for vision. You spend a few days alone in the forest, without water, without food, without protection. When you cross this portal, you get a new vision of the world, because you have faced your fears, your difficulties.
This is what is asked of you: Allow yourself to take advantage of this time to perform your vision-seeking rituals.
What world do you want to build for you? For now, this is what you can do, serenity in the storm. Calm down, pray every day. Establish a routine to meet the sacred every day. Good things emanate; what you emanate now is the most important thing. And sing, dance, resist through art, joy, faith, and love.
Learn about the resistance of the indigenous and African peoples; we have always been, and continue to be, exterminated. But we still haven’t stopped singing, dancing, lighting a fire, and having fun. Don’t feel guilty about being happy during this difficult time. You do not help at all being sad and without energy.
You help if good things emanate from the Universe now. It is through joy that one resists. Also, when the storm passes, each of you will be very important in the reconstruction of this new world. You need to be well and strong.
And for that, there is no other way than to maintain a beautiful, happy, and bright vibration. This has nothing to do with alienation.
White Eagle, Hopi indigenous: Lessons from Indigenous to resist the crisis
White Eagle is the name given to the wise teacher and philosopher who guided the
formation of the White Eagle Lodge. The name White Eagle in the Native American
tradition is symbolic and means a spiritual teacher.
The white eagle soars far into the heavens above the emotions and turmoils of the earth and sees things from a different perspective.
No true spiritual teacher ever makes claims about themselves – they come in simplicity and humility.
Coursera, the popular platform of online education, just released the Global Skills 2020 Index (GSI). The index compares the mastery of skills in ten industries and eleven areas of study in 60 countries worldwide, turning Switzerland, Finland and Austria the Cutting Edge Global Skills learners in the world. Tech vs Mindfulness, where should you invest your time and money?
The GSI aims to develop a timely study of the changes that occurred in virtual learning from the consequences generated by the global pandemic. It states that the recovery in a post-pandemic world will rely on broad reskilling.
The report displays global rankings that were developed in core skills in business, technology, and data science. It shows that Switzerland, Finland, Austria, and Russia were the most consistent in the top five countries in the three ranking categories.
By contrast, countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Peru, Pakistan, and Nigeria are among the most lagging in essential skills in business, technology, and data science.
Top five innovative countries in essential skills
BUSINESS
1. Switzerland
2. Austria
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. United Arab Emirates
TECHNOLOGY
1. Russia
2. Belarus
3. Switzerland
4. Ukraine
5. Finland
DATA SCIENCE
1. Russia
2. Switzerland
3. Belgium
4. Austria
5. Finland
In addition to this global ranking of essential skills, the report highlighted the following key ideas:
1. Countries with higher skill proficiencies are also those with higher labour force participation rates. A country’s skill proficiency across domains is positively correlated (56%), with the fraction of its working-age population active in its labour force. (Secondary data: World Bank)
2.Countries with equal internet access rates are also those of higher skill proficiencies. There is a significant and positive correlation (65%) between a country’s skill proficiency across domains and the percentage of its population using the internet. (Secondary data: World Bank).
3. The with more highly skilled talent, especially in technology skills, see higher stock returns and less disruption from COVID-19. The correlation between an industry’s skill proficiency and its stock performance in the United States in one year was 43% across all the domains of skills and 39% in the fields of technology. (Secondary data: Fidelity)
4. Of the 200 million higher education students whose studies were interrupted by COVID-19, 80% are located in countries with emerging or lagging skills. 80 % of the students enrolled in tertiary education are in countries that have closed schools due to COVID-19 and are listed in the bottom half of the world rankings for business, technology, and data science skills. (Secondary data: UNESCO)
Beyond Hard Skills.
In contrast, the same report shows that the demand for personal development skills such as confidence, stress management, and mindfulness has grown by 1200% among individual learners. People are turning to courses like Yale University’s Science of Well-Being to mitigate mental and emotional distress caused by the pandemic.
I know, there is a looooonngg and passionate discussion on how important humanities will become the most relevant field of study when the AI starts coding and engineering better than humans,
Vs
We should be teaching our toddlers how to code, build robots and develop apps.
However, we will save that conversation for another post. Right now, When we talk about job satisfaction, the same countries rank different, according to the Global Employee Engagement Index.
2. South-America: Chile (7.8/10), Perú (7.6 / 10), Brazil (7.6 / 10), Argentina (7.5 / 10)
3. Europe: Romania (7.9 / 10), Austria (7.7 / 10), Swtizerland (7.4 / 10), Turkey (7.4 / 10)
4. Africa: Nigeria (7.7 / 10), Kenya (7.4 / 10), South Africa (7.3 / 10)
5. Asia: India (7.9 / 10), Thailand (7.6 / 10), Indonesia (7.4 / 10).
Several surveys of across the world acknowledge the imperative of pack the workforce with more than hard skills. Even some employers identify lack of soft skills as the area where young job-seekers have the largest deficiency, with growing evidence that non-cognitive or soft skills are important for a range of life outcomes.
As a result, a growing number of youth programs have incorporated a soft skills training component – examples include the entra 21 program in 18 Latin American countries, or the Jordan NOW program.
But how do we measure what soft skills youth have? Let us share with you 5 tools that can help you out:
1. The World Bank STEP skills measurement exercise employs such an approach in multiple countries, measuring personality traits, grit, and behavior skills.
2.The 16 personalities test is a funny and interactive tool to explore more about yourself and what drives you.
3.Social Style Matrix. An effective method to understand how both you, and the people you need to work with, think and make decisions.
4. The Global Talent Trends series of post by Linkedin invited experts on. the topic Soft Skills, Dr John Sulivan summarizes 12 ways of assessing soft skills.
Tech vs Mindfulness? Instead: Mind, Body Soul.
At The Global School for Social Leaders, we use a great tool called “Purpose-Driven Leader Self-Assessment”, a holistic approach on personal leadership and impact beyond work or professional purpose, it´s more about what really balance your life-purpose as a leader.
Roberto A. Arrucha
I work with Purpose-Driven Organizations & Entrepreneurs in 3 main challenges: 1. Powerful & Meaningful Communication, 2. Income Generation & Marketing, 3. Holistic Leadership.
“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of selected and optimized activities that strongly support things that you value, and then happy miss out on everything else” (p. 28).
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