It’s time to pay attention to the road
Getting the right people on the bus was our mantra on the recruitment team of Teach For America (TFA) circa early 2000s. And we were filling lots of buses. We were recruiting 1000s of teachers across the country, which meant 100s of staff working for the organization. We were convinced, if you found the right people, kids would learn. Yet, as TFA grew, it became clear we weren’t paying enough attention to the map, the road and how the buses were getting from point a to point b. We needed more than a recruitment strategy. It was time to get proactive about becoming a people-centric place, where belonging was paramount, to understand how it felt to our people on the bus.
As a consultant, I worked with countless organizations that came to us once something was wrong. The culture felt toxic, staff members were leaving, or worse yet, staff members were not leaving, but they didn’t feel connected to the organization anymore, they didn’t feel like they belonged. Usually a particular event encouraged senior leadership or the board to say they needed to bring someone in to help. However, the companies that started thinking about their culture, and creating a people-centric operation before some event, were the ones that had people flocking to join and making their careers there. And often those organizations started early thinking about their talent strategy, knowing one day they would be bigger, they started playing bigger earlier. They developed their road map early.
Developing a sense of belonging starts with your people. What are they saying about working for your organization? Do they feel heard? Do they understand decisions that are made? Do they understand how their work connects to the larger mission? Does it feel like there is a commitment to equity? Do they see a focus on transparency? What are the people that are leaving saying about the leadership of the organization?
Once you understand your current state you can start to dig into the places that feel the most critical to your people. And if you haven’t done so before, this is the perfect moment to start including your staff in prioritizing the most important strategies. If you have the information and are making all the decisions at the cabinet, you are only going to reinforce a culture of mistrust, decreasing any feelings of belonging, and likely not getting the best answers. By bringing in your team you are going to start with what is the most important to them.
Then comes the clarity of roles. Who is responsible for which strategy and what is the timeline? It’s much easier coming up with the strategy than figuring out how to implement it. Which roads are you taking? Where are there potholes? What are the other ways to get there?
If you are starting to panic, take a breath. Everything doesn’t need to happen in the next few months. Being proactive, thinking about people first, being people-centric in your decision making will better position your organization to be a place where people feel a deep sense of belonging and this belonging is a pre-determinate of having a truly high-functioning, high-engagement workplace. And if you need support not just getting the right people on the bus, but developing your map, setting a course, and focusing on the journey, it may be time for an embedded, fractional, Chief People Officer.
