Add Caring to Add Strength

I named my company Strong Point Strategy to emphasize the fact that I and my colleagues help companies strengthen their strengths and minimize and work on their weaknesses. The visual metaphor in my marketing materials resembles lattice ironwork. Ironwork to me is beautiful AND strong.

How does beauty add to strength you ask? It's a good question and one that I often get. So here's the answer: Beauty shows me you care. Walk into a beautiful lobby of a prospective customer and the messages you get are "We care about your first impression of us"., "We care about our working environment and we want it to wow you as much as our work.", "We care about our employees and we want them to feel good about their working environment." Enter a meeting where everyone's on time and has the information and materials to conduct an effective meeting and the messages you get are "We care about our time with you.", "We care about what you have to say.", "We care about our working partnership." This is a beautiful thing.

Start the first day on a new job and arrive at your office to find your new phone and your new computer are both present AND operational and your name plate is on the door and the messages you receive are" "We are glad you are here.", "We care about the productivity of your first day.", "We care that you feel welcomed." Show me a beautiful place or a beautiful thing and I can see and sometimes even feel all the love, care, effort, patience and discipline that went into making it so.

Strong Point is about making companies STRONG and building strength is not a one-and-done endeavor. Strength needs to be sustainable. Sustainability is today's vernacular for STAYING strong. This begs the question: "How do companies stay strong?".  "How can people and teams stay strong?"

The core ingredient to strength, in my opinion, is caring. Caring is not just about caring whether employees are productive and high-performing. There's always a need for that. Productivity and high-performance are the outcomes of people and teams who care about their work and the value and impact they bring to an organization.

The kind of caring I'm talking about is the kind of caring that takes the utter frustration and disappointment generated by an important customer's complaint and makes a leader schedule time with the interface team to deeply understand the root causes of  the team's failure to meet expectations. Caring in this instance charges a leader to attentively listen, offer help and support and reduce barriers to greatness instead of emphatically expressing disapproval.

Caring that adds strength builds time, space and resources into employee schedules that allows them to regularly learn new skills, practice new abilities by leading special projects. Strength building caring allows employees to have regular access to key executives to showcase new ideas, propose solutions to recurring challenges or offer services to other business units in a safe and supportive company-wide forum.

A culture of caring lets professionals who've just worked weeks or months of 10 to 12 hour days to meet a key deadline or deliverable enjoy an afternoon movie together on company time- or receive a celebration picnic in the company cafeteria that broadcasts and returns their caring. It might even include a bonus day-off so employees can reward their families with the time they've sacrificed in supporting the company and them.

I've worked in and have worked to improve many operating environments. Many of them are strong. Too few of them are caring. Like anything else, corporate cultures give off a first impression. In my recent experiences, I, more often than not, have felt a sense of harshness rather than a deep sense of caring and humanity. This trend is worrisome to me.

In some cultures you get the sense that if an exhausted employee chooses to take the day off to rest or to spend time feeding their soul and creativity by trying to learn something new or cares enough to introduce a new tool, process or way of working that would make his or her life easier, they'd get shut down, turned down or otherwise "bricked-over" in the name of productivity.

Strength without caring turns operating cultures into dungeons of drudgery. Professionals who work without caring act more like prisoners or slaves rather than servants of the company, each other and the greater good.

I suggest that companies need to define their own "Caring Performance Indicator" or CPI as a key performance indicator (KPI) of strength and sustainability. Dr. Philip Gardiner's Recent Blog called Mind Map: The Caring Quotient  shows an interesting  mind map relating the factors that influence caring. This is a a good place to start thinking about how to increase caring and to create a Caring Performance Indicator for your own culture.   Source =  http://www.philipgardiner.me.uk

Remember the psychological axiom that states: "Under Stress We All Regress."                       

Increasing the level of caring in your corporate culture is not a trivial pursuit.  Adding caring means adding time, energy and ACTION to the things that matter to people and teams. Think of adding caring as adding capacity. If professionals feel they are cared for, they have increased capacity to care in return. If employees are under skilled, add the time, energy and action to thoughtfully and thoroughly train them so they can advance their skills. If teams are experiencing friction, conflict and discord and are underperforming as a result; add time, energy and ACTIONS that allow the team to spend more time working on themselves, smoothing their interactions and strengthening their style of collaboration.  If your results as a whole seem disjointed, unpredictable and show pockets of both high and poor performance; then add the time, energy and ACTIONS to systematize and standardize how you communicate, support and scale important initiatives and work.

If you think there’s room to improve the Caring Performance Indicator in your operating environment, then you’re not as strong as you think.