5 Steps to Become an Effective Leader of a Culture-Driven Organization

Author: Frank Hamilton

Having a culture-driven organization is nothing if you do not have practical leadership skills to keep workplace performance culture alive. Although some people might be born to lead, great leadership happens due to hard work, experience, continuous growth, high performing culture, and the willingness to learn. Such leaders have communicative and transparent values. They expect that the workers under them are accountable for their performance and actions.

With time you realize that organizational culture and leadership are very fluid, so you must always stay on top of things to keep the culture relevant for your business, staff, customers, and stakeholders. If you are thinking of how you can pull this off, in this article, we will look at five steps how you can become an effective leader in a culture-drive organization.

Know What Your Organization Stands For

The first step is to examine your organization’s values and, more importantly, whether as a culture leader, you are living up to them. Most often, the case is that the leadership style and the organizational culture is not a par with one another. For example, if the company culture of a custom writing reviews company like Online Writers Rating is customer satisfaction, a leader in this set up should create channels to empower employees to meet this vision. But whereby the leader focuses on micromanaging the employees, then the organizational culture suffers.

The disparity doesn’t only make a leader ineffective, but it can also be detrimental to employee morale. So as a leader whose objective is to create a high-performance culture, it would help if you had a profound and clear understanding of what drives the culture within your organization. It is the only way that you will be able to map out strategies to lead your team for success and cultivate organizational culture and leadership.

Practice self-awareness

As a leader, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses so you can determine where you need to make changes. It entails the ability to be self-aware and be organizationally and culturally aware of the impact of your actions and decisions on your employee and the business. Your organization can only get transformed and grow if you are willing to change first as a leader. When you are a self-aware leader, it’s easier to communicate organizational values and vision in a manner that rallies everyone towards achieving the company vision.

Know when you need to stamp your authority, but likewise bear in mind that you need to listen to others’ opinions. It would be of help if you also learned how to accept the critique of ideas that are different from yours. Although constructive criticism might be challenging to take, it can help you in becoming an effective culture leader as you grow individually and professionally.

Learn to Focus on the Social Good of Your Staff and Customers

As an effective leader, you also need to understand that your employees are the most valuable resource within the organization. You must groom and invest in them as they slowly develop their leadership capacity. Leaders in organizational culture often have a genuine desire to empower others to achieve their corporate and personal success.

Create channels of investing in your staff’s professional development, make flexible policies, and encourage socialization among teams. When your staff feels fulfilled at their current job, reports show that 81% are more likely to stay than find a new job. As a leader who can manage his or her staff and make them feel like they are a part of a dynamic and caring work culture, you get more productivity out of them. Also, issues are resolved quicker, and their loyalty and performance culture will skyrocket.  

Furthermore, a leader should be able to interact with clients and resolve their issues in a way that resonates with the organization’s culture. You need to develop different strategies to address the needs of each client from various points of view. And likewise, ensure that your employees are with you each step of the way. Remember that as an effective leader, you should be attuned to the needs of those you cater to because it is the driving force behind the elements of demand and supply in life and business.

Reinforce a Culture of Accountability

Accountability is another vital aspect where leaders can influence culture. When leaders in organizational culture can hold their employees accountable, it brings transparency and a high performing culture amongst staff. Your team should know that business internal processes and systems, and your organizational culture are all in place for a reason.

For staff to fully understand accountability as a part of your culture, you can provide detailed job descriptions and established Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as an increase in sales, customer retention, better customer satisfaction ratings, etc. These indicators should be reviewed each year with specific deliverables as part of your organization’s performance management plan. With every change you make within the organization, your organizational culture also changes. So should your leadership influence and actions if you want to achieve the desired results from your employees.

Incorporate Feedback and Keep Learning 

Although it is vital to have an organization that carries out culture surveys and asks what could be done better, it is even more critical when the organizational leadership acts on the information gathered from the study. If, as a leader, you get feedback and choose not to address them, your workers will begin to distrust your leadership. When collecting feedback, make sure it’s not just to monitor how your employees feel. The input should be received with positive intentions and an action plan to improve your organizational culture and staff welfare.

Lastly, as a leader, you can never stop learning because you have attained the leadership position. Irrespective of who your staff is, whether at entry-level or senior-level, you can always learn sometime from them. Organizational culture and leadership are a space that desires for you to thirst to learn more and explore. The more you seek to grow as a leader, the easier it will be for you to create a natural atmosphere of collaboration, creativity productivity aligned with fun, and enhanced high-performance culture.

Having a distinct culture within your organization is essential because it plays a significant role in creating a happy and healthy environment for business growth, workers’ improvement, and customer satisfaction. However, an even more essential element is leadership, which entails communicating and promoting the organizational culture to employees.

It would go a long way if you could also learn how to help them understand and accept the culture and leadership to influence their work attitudes, productivity, and overall performance culture.   

Frank Hamilton has been working as an editor at essay review service Best Writers Online. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.