Employee Needs vs. Organizational Needs

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, @andybeales

Have you ever felt like your organization or your employer only care about money—making money, saving money, making even more money? Have you ever felt like you are expected to keep giving more and more of your time and energy, but aren’t given the opportunity to provide input on how to better utilize that time and energy? Huh! Well I think many of us have had this experience, too.

What strikes me as funny is that organizations are made of people—they can’t exist or make money without their people. But people are treated/led to believe that it is the other way around! (More on organizational power another day!) My point is, an organization that can balance employee needs with organizational needs can actually make more money by being more effective and efficient. How? It is quite simple. When employees’ needs are addressed they are able and more willing to give their best. Why do so many organizations struggle with this concept and its execution? (Shout it out so I can hear you…) Crap!

Let’s break it down…

As individuals, we need to feel secure and safe before we are even close to giving you our best. You can’t scare or bully us into working hard for you. Oh sure, we’ll keep busy with our heads down but we are saying not-nice-things in our head and just doing enough for you not to notice how irked we are. We also know what we need to do our job well and to do it in an expedient manner. But we don’t always feel safe enough to speak up and let anyone know or when we do, our supervisor doesn’t often listen or act to support us.

Here’s a monkey wrench…YOU are the supervisor and you are trying to meet your prescribed objectives. Yep, you still feel this way about your colleagues and supervisor and you have to achieve results through all of the people who work for you and have the same crap you do and a dash of their own on top of that. Oy!

To get anything done with or through others you need to cut your own crap first. This means acknowledging and learning from it without reacting to it or projecting it onto your employees.

Not so easy, I know. The most important step, however, is just realizing what’s going on. A solid next step is to take a beat, a breath, or a Twix bar before interacting with anyone if you suspect your crap is not in check. If you want your employees to fulfill your organization’s needs, you best make sure you do everything you can to fulfill their needs.

Although it is never safe to assume you know what the other person’s crap is, you can be sure they have some and it’s probably in play. We all struggle dealing with our crap as all who are honest with themselves know. But since you’re the boss, you are supposed to be better at it. That’s what leadership is all about; leading yourself so you can meet people where they are and therefore be able to lead others and organizations. Unfortunately most of us can only pull off managing…and we’re just managing to get by. So here’s how you can step it up.

First, acknowledge that others have needs that pertain to the job that you may not know about. Letting them know that you recognize this helps them feel you care, but it goes beyond that. Their needs, if shared in time, help the organization improve. They are valuable indicators of your organization’s ability to deliver cost-effective value that will satisfy your customers.

Individual needs, when aligned with organizational needs, increase efficiency and effectiveness. Like learning, our needs, when aligned with processes, policies, and procedures, increase our motivation to give our best on the job. Often we learn that something doesn’t work or work well because it doesn’t meet our needs. Organizations need certain things done, but the needs of the doers must be factored into achieving them.

Second, don’t let your own crap (wanting things done in a way that makes YOU comfortable) get in the way of making sure those that actually do the jobs can do them well. Make sure you align employee needs with organizational processes, policies, and procedures.

Third, making sure you and your organization are accountable for balancing employee and organizational needs is critical to the cut-the-crap-process.

If organizations are not assessing how well they uncover and address employee needs, they are not being accountable for the organization’s needs. Organizations assess their needs to grow, earn, blah, blah, blah; the deal is that achieving these is dependent on balancing them with the needs of their employees so they are effective and efficient at fulfilling those organizational needs. Most organizations are only tapping into half of what employees have to offer because organizational needs are not accounting for employee needs. But you don’t need a committee to look into this, or a fancy program. Just start asking your people what they need to be effective and efficient on a frequent and regular basis. They will tell you! Build a section into your existing assessments to make sure this doesn’t fall back into the organizational cracks. Everybody wants this respect—your employees, your community of stakeholders as well as your shareholders. I’m sure you do, too.

© 2019 Stacie L L Morgan. All rights reserved.