Healthy culture of young professionals
As you face tomorrow’s uncertainties, are you convinced your organization can survive and thrive? Do you have the know-how and the perseverance to ensure its resilience?
Your task is more than merely fostering a healthy environment that addresses today’s goals and meets employees' needs. To establish true resilience, you must build the capacity for adaptation and growth. Your challenge is to create the foundation for organizational and cultural transformation in the face of the unforeseen.
The real test of your leadership is cultivating a healthy culture for now and sustainability for a future you can’t predict.
Establish a Healthy Culture For Today’s Success
You know that healthy cultures are vital to your organization's current success.
The hallmark of a healthy culture is an organization where team members feel heard, valued, and motivated. You know you are on the right path when you attract and retain engaged and energized employees.
And here are some additional characteristics of a healthy culture for today:
- Open Communication: Transparency isn’t just a buzzword but a daily practice. You are committed to sharing your motivations, values, and decisions. And you welcome hearing others’ perspectives.
- Recognition: You acknowledge your employees’ efforts. As a result, they feel like vital players pursuing a significant purpose. You check with them periodically to ensure they understand their worth to you and the organization.
- Inclusivity: Diverse voices influence your conversations and decisions, thus shaping the company's outcomes. You strive to truly hear and consider the ideas and perspectives of others, even when they differ from yours.
- Work-life Harmony: Employees achieve their professional goals without sacrificing their personal lives. You encourage balance and model a balanced professional and personal life.
These elements make the workplace vibrant and alive. However, this vitality now does not automatically promise longevity.
Sustainable Culture: Engineering Tomorrow’s Legacy
A sustainable culture is like a robust ecosystem that adapts, survives, and thrives as our world inevitably changes. It involves:
- Deeply Embedded Values: Core values drive decisions, and you continuously engage with employees to discuss and demonstrate how these values must manifest in daily and ongoing actions.
- Leadership Cultivation: The organization implements processes and practices for nurturing emerging leaders who will steer it into the future. You commit to assisting with these efforts.
- Adaptive Strategies: You and all associated with the organization remain flexible and responsive to external pressures and internal growth. You accept that your leadership must be dynamic and evolve to meet inevitable changes in the context.
Mere survival is not the only goal. You want your organizations to thrive with a forward-thinking mindset built to last. The following steps will serve as a starting point to simultaneously create a healthy culture today and lay the groundwork for the sustainability your company culture needs to thrive tomorrow.
Steps for Creating a Healthy and Sustainable Culture
Enabling a culture that celebrates the present and secures the future requires thinking and acting on both levels. Here are four critical steps you can take now:
Step 1: Clarify and Communicate Core Values
- Today: Align all team members with the company's core values, ensuring clarity in how they translate into daily actions and decisions.
- Future: Develop regular forums for revisiting and reflecting on the values. As the business landscape shifts, so does the application of these principles. Advance dynamic dialogues around the ethics and choices these principles guide. You must recognize that while the company's values serve as a steadfast foundation, their expressions may evolve with time.
Step 2: Build and Maintain Trust
- Today: Build Trust through honesty, transparency, and reliability.
- Future: Nurture the understanding that authenticity is about something other than forever holding onto the same beliefs. It is dynamic and alive, according to Jason Jay and Gabriel Grant in their book Breaking Through Gridlock. As we grow, we change. Authenticity is about being “true to your growth.” Trust depends on our being transparent in the process.
Step 3: Empower Future Leaders
- Today: Engage employees at all levels, improving morale and commitment.
- Future: Equip employees to uphold and advance the culture with an eye toward inevitable change and transitions. This step is about creating resilience. It depends on your organization’s ability to contribute to a future you desire while understanding what you can’t control yet can adapt to successfully. Develop these capabilities yourself and create opportunities for others to do so.
Step 4: Balance Ambition with Well-being
- Today: Encourage balanced productivity, personal growth, and good health.
- Future: Set in motion a process for reviewing and adapting policies to meet changing employee needs and societal shifts. Balance will always be critical to employees’ well-being and organizational survival.
Leaders, the challenge is clear: You must cultivate a culture that shines today and lay the foundation for one that will endure and adapt for decades.
Your most vital job as a leader is to have the foresight to look beyond the present and establish the processes, practices, and understandings that will ensure your organization and its associates can grow, evolve, and remain resilient.
