Healthy working environment leads to corporate success

LAHORE: Success of corporate sector depends more on a company’s competitive challenges, legacies and shifting forces than the traits of any of its executives. A healthy working culture is more important as it spreads all over and is independent of individual brilliance.

This does not in any way to lower the importance of corporate leaders. We expect these leaders to possess normal qualities and be sensitive to the concern of workers and present the critical prospective of the organisation. However, other important elements of growth include the task of bringing out the best from others and keeping the different groups in the organisation positively engaged.

It has been observed that healthy organisations last long and unhealthy ones give way to better challengers. The large scale failure of corporations in Pakistan is because corporate leaders generally have no accurate sense of how healthy their organisations are.  Mostly, the corporate leaders overestimate the health of their organisations and the effectiveness of their leadership. 

Making an organisation healthy and sturdy is a difficult job. Those at the helm of affairs make an organisation healthy if they forego some of their powers; they have to be receptive to ideas, which may be different from their views. The reason that majority of the surviving organisations have medium line of organisational health is that the leaders are not deeply studying their companies. Compared with leading executives, line workers have more realistic view of the health of the company.

Experts agree that in-depth analysis of the health of a company is not always possible unless there are some glaring flaws. They said there are some rules of thumb that should be studied. In organisations that are not healthy the top management relies on detailed instructions and monitoring. This very tight administrative control strangles the smooth functioning of organisation. In healthier organisations, the leaders tend to support their colleagues and subordinates and are sensitive to their needs. The successful leaders give challenging tasks to their workers and facilitate them in achieving those tasks by exploiting their full potential.  It is not possible to improve the health of a dysfunctional organisation overnight. Improving health will take some time as the culture of the entire organisation has to be changed. Prudent executives set goals that are systematically achieved. The behaviors that need to be changed include making collaboration effective. The executives show concern for workers and lead from the front to bring the desired change. They engage with them in discussions where ideas and plans are approved after constructive criticism.

The unhealthy companies have low level of innovation. Their customer loyalty is very low and morale of their workers is rather extremely low and talented employees leave the organisation or are on the lookout for jobs. Cash constraints in such circumstances exuberate. Under these adverse circumstances, the effective leaders take fact-based decisions. They make efforts to prudently solve problems, keeping their focus on recovery. However, this seldom happens with the leaders in distressed organisations. They actually get panic and do the opposite. There is no quick-fix as improvement will come gradually. Replacing executives frequently would not resolve the problem they have to for a granular change by doing fact-based analysis and devise deep-rooted strategies or be ready for winding up.

Transforming failing organisation is painstaking job the leaders. Special emphasis is laid on keeping groups on task and orienting them towards well-defined results.

One thing that corporate leaders should realise is that except for few basics the process of change in culture would be different for every organisation. The healthy state of the company would be attained on the behaviour of a top management. The leaders who are committed to develop vibrant business should look inward and asses the organisation’s health objectively. Then they should ensure that leadership behaviour is strong. Different sets of actions are required in different situation.