Sometimes corporate leaders forget that businesses are human systems. Revenue, innovation, and growth are all generated by human beings. Employees left Corporate America in droves during The Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022-an important wakeup call. But even when companies try to "fix" or improve their culture, a whopping 85% of these efforts fail. Why is this statistic so dismal? Because you can't put a bandage on a broken culture.
As human systems, companies must heal or align from the inside out-one human at a time and starting at the top. The CEO and leadership team must do foundational work to understand what's driving and shaping behaviors. Only when a culture is intentionally designed can it inspire people to fully engage in strategies and tactics that move the human system forward.
What author Margaret Graziano proposes in Ignite Culture is a fundament shift in leadership's approach to creating an intentional, healthy, high-performance organization. Offering a unique combination of experiential coaching, evidence-based leadership tools, and actionable strategies, Ignite Culture empowers business leaders with the wisdom and insights they need to reshape their company's culture, increase employee engagement, and grow revenue in a supportive, high-performance environment.
Graziano draws on her more than 20 years of experience to pen this detailed guide on how to navigate as a leader in this post-pandemic era. Ignite Culture features anecdotes from successful companies with well-oiled cultures and companies who had to make fixes to produce maximum results throughout the workforce. This guide pushes the company leaders to make the first move in creating change and rectifying systems that may have broken, as company culture is "shaped and determined by the behavioral norms of the leadership team.” The emphasis is on the practical, the creation of “Liberating Structures” and the practice of open communication, with each chapter ending with clear takeaways, pressing follow-up questions, and an exercise in adjusting one's mindset.
Practical advice for managers and others covers active listening, developing and following through with a vision, mastering “generative, future-based language,” and other crucial skills. This engaging, interactive self-help book will benefit leaders with its humanizing approach to changing the way companies do business, while employees will find edification in its persuasive examination of how a healthy work environment should function and how to evaluate if a company is a strong fit for their needs. Here’s a clear-eyed tool-kit for businesses eager to ace the new standards.
Takeaway: Clear-eyed advice for business leaders on creating strong company cultures.
Great for fans of: Ben Horowitz’s What You Do Is Who You Are, Christine Kane’s The Soul Sourced Entrepreneur.
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Marketing copy: A
