Deliberate acts of decency for a new organisational culture

Effective leaders use decencies to build great workforces one gesture at a time. Steve Harrison writing in the HR magazine talks about examples of best practices that he calls as decencies. You can mould a company culture by adopting small decencies. In my own experience, I have either experienced some of these decencies with the people who I worked for or tried them out. It is about the way leaders choose to behave – the actions leaders embrace – every day, especially during the quite moments when we think no one is watching. Some of them are:

1. Be sure that nothing important or creative is perceived as the leader’s idea,
2. Write personal notes to employees and customers,
3. Walk an employee or a customer to the door,
4. Always greet people in a sincere way,
5. Make as many allies as you can within the organisation all the time,
6. Talk about disagreements in private personally and try to resolve them or atleast agree to disagree,
7. Let every employee have a sense of ownership – give them a business card,
8. Mix with people from other departments,
9. Praise in public and reprimand in private, and
10. Be accessible to people.

They do not seem very difficult, do they?

Decencies need to be actionable, tangible, practical, affordable, replicable and sustainable. Once leaders practice the decencies regularly, employees start taking it seriously. Pretty soon, as a leader, you would have developed a new organisational culture.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Dr. Palan,

You are right, this is very important that what we learn about leadership we must practice those in our day to day life. This means we don't separate our daily life with corporate life. If we practice these decencies in our daily life then these will reflect into corporate practices easily. Leadership is all about living your practices.This will help us to live a normal life and we don't have to pose a dual character i.e. one face in office other in daily life. Let's try to live these decencies and our life and organization culture will change.
2:59 PM
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