Change Management | Teik Oh

Do you live up to your “Brand”?

Apr 24 2015

What is your “Brand”? Do you live up to it?

Branding is not about your logo, or corporate colours, it is about the way your team behaves in front of customers and other stakeholders. Your brand emanates from your Vision. Your Vision should provide a clear and distinctive picture about what you aspire to be, and it should have inherent in it the types of values you uphold – this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is who we are.

Instilling your brand culture into your people is as much about leadership as it is about marketing. If your people believe in the vision, and behave in a way as if they are already there, then they will display to the inside and outside world what kind of business you are. If you talk about the “quality” of your business but your people can’t deal with customers in a quality way, you are being hypocritical about your brand. If you talk about “customer service” but your people don’t return phone calls, who will believe what you say?

I was facilitating a planning session for a Not-For-Profit recently when it struck me how similar “branding” is with For-Profit companies. Are you doing what you do best? Do you do it as if you were living your Vision?

As usual, the best comes after the viewing – come to the website https://teikoh.com and tell me what your brand is. Tell me how you live it (or not!).

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The New Way of Working

Apr 17 2015

Once upon a time (I’m a Baby-Boomer) when my boss said jump I asked “how high”. This just isn’t true anymore. With Gen X and Gen Y you need to really engage your workforce – and if you do, you will reap the effective and optimal performance that comes from an engaged and motivated workforce.

So what is “engagement”? It’s not just about liking where you work, it’s about being invested in the time you spend there, believing so much in the value of what you do that you provide discretionary effort – in other words, you jump before you are asked because you see that it is needed. Engagement is about making people believe that the business’ success helps them, helps others, and is worthwhile, and that its success is their success.

This week’s video lays out this “new” way of working.

So how do you engage people? Read More

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Building Better Leaders at Work

Apr 06 2015

A 2014 Gallup survey found that more than 70% of Australians were disengaged at work. At the same time we know that Australian businesses invest billions in annual leadership training and leadership development initiatives. So why are trained leaders failing to engage their people?

While I only have information from this survey of Australian businesses, I have worked in other countries around the world and I can assure you that while the quanta may be different, the truth is that the vast majority of people at work feel disengaged. If this is a worldwide trend, then businesses are investing significant resources into something that is not providing them with anything like the desired outcome.

First of all, let’s look at what benefits employee engagement can bring to your company. These benefits are true whether or not you have several tens of people working for you or several hundreds, or even if you only have 2 or 3 employees. True engagement isn’t just “happy” or “satisfied”. True employee engagement means that the employee has an emotional commitment to the employer and its goals that will result in more discretionary effort. It is the difference between someone doing their job as expected or even well, and someone providing discretionary effort to do their jobs as if it enriched their own lives. In terms of service and sales, customers know the difference between someone loving what they do and someone who is competent at it, and it brings extra customer satisfaction.

Engaged employees are more productive, going the extra mile because they see the success of the company as having meaning to them. Their motivation leads to higher productivity. Studies show that offices with engaged employees were up to 46% more productive. Engaged employees lower the risk of employee turnover because they are more invested in the long term success of the company, thus avoiding loss of experience and decreasing costs of retraining and recruitment.

And if you think that’s only biting around the edges, Standard Chartered Bank found that branches with increased levels of employee engagement had a 16% higher profit margin growth than branches with decreased levels of engagement.. It actually affects your bottom line.

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20 Year Vision, 5 Year Plan, 1 Year Action

Mar 30 2015

In an earlier article I wrote about the difference between a strategic plan and a business plan, and I discussed the different timeframes for each.

Kath wrote to me and asked how far ahead she should look in her strategic plan.

I have seen strategic plans as short as 5 years, I have also seen others that encompass 20 years’ strategic direction. The most practical is probably a timeframe over 10 years.

Firstly let’s remember what a strategic plan is for. It is a document that provides the overall (hence strategic) direction for an organisation, that is based on working towards that organisation’s vision. As such it is necessarily short on detail, generally because it takes a number of years to achieve a vision, particularly if it is intently aspirational and a bit of a reach. If the real timeframe for the achievement of the vision is 10 to 20 years, you cannot possibly predict any detail of what the world and therefore your response will be over that time. The strategic plan provides strategy, not detailed operational action plans, which come from implementing the strategy over a shorter period.

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How to Implement Change in your Business

Mar 27 2015

What do they say about only two things being constant – death and taxes? Well I have news for you – in today’s world horrible people find new ways to cause death, and governments change taxes all the time! There’s only one thing that’s constant – change is constant!

The problem is people hate change. Whether you want to introduce a small change such as your price list, or something bigger like a new process for doing something in your business, or something really stressful like a merger or opening a new branch, people will hate it and voice the question “why?”

Whenever you want to introduce change, you need to bring people with you. Implementing change is all about leadership, leadership that puts in front of people a desirable and inspirational future picture of the company. Leadership is required in communicating the desirability of that future and therefore why people need to embrace the change that is necessary. Leaders need to explain the why’s, what’s, who’s and how’s of change.

This video discusses what you need to do:-

Come over to the website https://teikoh.com to get your valuable but free resources on creating a vision and leading change.

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Category - Change Management

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Do you live up to your “Brand”?

The New Way of Working

Building Better Leaders at Work

20 Year Vision, 5 Year Plan, 1 Year Action

How to Implement Change in your Business