Help The Best Bring Out Their Best

Hiring the best in the industry is not the end for your quest for success. Just collecting great minds is not enough; you’ve got to create the culture of excellence in your organization to bring out the best from the best. After all, human abilities are a product of nature and nurture, and the onus of nurturing excellence in your work environment lies largely upon you.

Nowadays, I find a lot of organizations taking the trouble of identifying the potential and existing skills of their employees and encouraging them to hone them up. Organizations are spending huge amounts of money in getting their employees trained in soft skills for working towards a healthy work environment devoid of petty politics and disputes. The other day I visited an organization for imparting lessons on corporate communications. I found that most of the time the executives out there were fighting over petty issues. Their goals were so trivial. They were simply satisfied by being in the good books of the boss. They weren’t really bothered about enhancing their quality of work for the greater goal of company welfare.

Clearly the culture of this organization is negative. The leaders of this organization should introduce the “culture of excellence” in this organization. Standards for excellence should be set and the employees should be asked to meet them. People will automatically develop the behavior, attitude and habits that are necessary for excellence. As some senior officials of most companies opine, no matter how good your strategy for coping with a challenge may be, if you don’t have a culture of excellence in your workplace, you’ll not be able to achieve complete success in your endeavors.

I’ve seen organizations with a culture of excellence remaining unfazed in the toughest of times. In keeping with the expectations of the culture, executives have been trained to cope up with challenges and their mindsets are tuned towards excellence in the toughest of times. People work in unison to achieve the common goal of excellence. You as a leader, should instruct your managers to identify the interests of the people. If you find that a technical recruit has good sales skills, give him a sales job if he’s interested. Don’t bind his creativity to one area of work. Just do anything to bring out the best in this person. Let him use his abilities to the best possible extent and you’ll find him excelling his work amazingly.

Well, you might feel that it is indeed obvious that a person who has abilities should be given the opportunity to hone and use them, but in reality it is not so. Hirers are interested in extracting the maximum from the hired, right from the first day of their employment. They are really not interested in giving them the time to work upon their skills and excel. They think training people in skills is a costly investment with little repayment value. But the opposite is true. It is seen that the investments that are made in training executives have great returns. You save a lot of money that is spent in overcoming crisis and problems arising from petty culture.

One advantage in developing a culture of excellence is that it nurtures a positive culture within the employees. The positive energy flows from the top levels to the bottom levels and every person of the organization is energized. As a leader, if you are positive and vibrant, you’ll set an example and people will follow suit. Your motto should be “be happy and keep others happy”. Within a positive culture, any problems owing to petty mentalities are dealt with at the level of the culture and not on an individual basis. So, most of the problems are kept at bay owing to the mandatory cultural standards.

To star with, here’s a simple exercise for you to establish a great organizational culture. Just pin up messages saying “I’ll work for excellence” on each and every work desk so that people are reminded of their true goals whenever they see that message. You can also announce attractive gifts for those who meet their goals.

You are welcome to share your views on this with me!