Individual Ability vs Organizational Applicability

An authentic and slightly irreverent blog on the applied dimensions of leadership & change...

• My Crap

• Your Crap

• Our Crap

• Everybody’s Crap.

Photo courtesy of Unsplash @luxdamore

You’ve got the stuff, the smarts, the experience, the connections to get the job done. You are right there. They are looking right at you! But they don’t even see you. They get some inexperienced person to do a job well beyond their capacity. Or worse…they hire some outside consultant to do fit or more than twice what they pay you. Sheesh. Enough already!

This is not an uncommon experience. In fact, it has become a disease that is eating away organizational effectiveness, efficiency, financial resources, and worst of all, human resources. It is infecting morale, performance, and organizational reputation. It is a toxic contagion that spreads through organizations like an airborne pathogen. Why? How? Let me take you through the crap…

We’ve talked about being undervalued. That’s the experience you have when your abilities do not have an outlet on the job. You know the feeling.

In order to truly feel valued, we need physical, psychological, emotional, and intellectual evidence that our abilities are acknowledged; are aligned with the organization’s mission, goals, and vision as they are executed via the organization’s culture and management systems; and are accountable somehow, somewhere, by someone within the organization. Why? Because as human beings, we don’t keep giving our best when we feel undervalued and organizations waste their investment in each of us if they don’t allow or encourage us to use our full capacity. No wonder so many struggle with change. We are actively taught to be complacent and unambitious in the same organizations that complain about needing to innovate and increase marketshare. We are not being taught to learn and grow, so how can our organization?

Learning organizations handle complex change the best because they make evolving an everyday standard operation procedure. Okay, so you and I may not work for one of those unicorns. We can, however, cut the crap in our own work processes that keeps us from encouraging ability application in our organization starting with our own.

In what decisions, activities, processes, and procedures do you assume you have all of the answers on your own? Time to get over yourself and get fresh and diverse perspectives from those around you, especially from those you may have overlooked. Cut the crap that’s holding you back.

How can you help your organization lead complex change and let others know their abilities are valuable at the same time?

Always ask questions! Make learning your real job and the results you are tasked to achieve a happy by-product of that learning. Use every interaction with others an opportunity to learn what they have to offer and find ways to use those untapped abilities to help the organization evolve and grow. Cut the crap that’s holding them back.

Groups are collections of other people. They each have additional abilities to offer and together they offer something even more that is nowhere near being adequately leveraged. Ask more questions! Learn what they see and how they think. They are the organization. Let them show you all they can do. Cut the crap that is holding you all back.

Sure your community wants to be valued. They live where you work or with what you produce. But its more than that. Your organization’s existence is to serve others. If not, you’d produce no output to be used by anyone. We’ve forgotten this little bit of organizational history. Time for a refresher by forming a real and sustainable relationship with those you are designed to serve and those you do so inadvertently. When did you last confirm with them that you accurately know what you think you know about your community and their needs? Cut the crap and find out what is holding them back.

© 2019 Stacie L L Morgan. All rights reserved.