The Four Most Common Organizational Challenges
As leaders, it’s important to recognize the issues your organization faces that hinder it from becoming more successful. In doing so, you’ll be able to get ahead of the curve and create a strong and efficient environment for your employees, members, and consumers.
In a recent article from John Spence, he uncovers the four biggest fundamental challenges that leaders deal with in their organizations. These include:
1. Communicating vision
Communicating your organizational vision proves to be a significant problem for organizations as it can be difficult to articulate and regurgitate for every single employee to understand the big picture. Spence highlights a time where the president of a company asked him, “When do you know you have communicated the vision well enough?” Spence responded, “When you have said it so many times, you are getting sick to your stomach; the lowest person in your organization just heard it for the first time.”
2. Openly addressing challenges
To get anything noteworthy accomplished, you are going to need to create a healthy atmosphere for employees to openly discuss organizational challenges and create a conversation around how to fix them. In doing so, your employees will feel safe to share their ideas if you open the floor for them.
3. Enabling mediocrity
When Spence leads a class of senior executives, he tells them to picture the lowest-performing person in their organization. He then follows with “realize that that person sets the standard of excellence for your entire business. By keeping that person on the team you tell everyone else that that level of performance is acceptable.” You are only as strong as your weakest link, so work to ensure that even your weakest link is performing to the standards you’ve set for your organization.
4. Following through on plans
Accountability remains a huge challenge for many organizations today. This does not mean that you’re lacking a strong number of intelligent people in the organization is lacking, but rather the ability to turn ideas into action and capitalize on set goals in real time.
Because these four challenges are the most common among all types of organizations, by addressing them sooner rather than later you will be able to take your organization to the next level and help it become a well-oiled machine in the process.