Leading managers means actively shaping leadership culture!
Be it in the attraction of talent or the integration of acquisitions: The question of which culture can be experienced in a company is now a competitive factor of growing importance for both multinational corporations and medium-sized companies.
If we consider culture as the sum of the behavior shown and experienced in the daily reality of a company, it becomes clear that culture arises almost automatically in companies. It is always present and cannot be avoided. All managers, who in turn lead other managers, play a decisive role in actively shaping it. This is because the culture of an organization is primarily shaped by leadership actions. The core task of leadership is to ensure successful leadership at the next level. From our experience, it is crucial for the development of a positively effective leadership culture throughout the organization to make managers, who in turn lead managers, aware of the influence their behaviour has not only on the next level, but also on all other levels in the organization.
Leading employees initially requires managers to actively engage with leadership interventions that are suitable for positively influencing the self-organization of the individual and the entire team, which is already taking place. In this environment, the specific answer to the question is: “How do I ensure that my employees are successful in their operational work?”. From a systemic perspective, this is primarily about creating an optimal framework in which employees can act in a self-organized manner. To achieve this, it is crucial that the manager reflects on their own leadership actions and develops a common understanding of goals and forms of cooperation with the team, on the basis of which feedback can be given on the respective performance and behavior. It goes without saying that these challenges also apply to managers at different hierarchical levels.
“The culture of an organization is primarily shaped by leadership actions.”
However, when leading a team of managers, the focus is then on effectively supporting these employees in their own leadership actions and also developing a shared vision of leadership. The question that needs to be answered here is therefore: “How do I ensure that my managers support their employees in being successful in their operational work?” Accordingly, it is important to make leadership in general and leadership actions in everyday life an explicit topic and thus work towards a successful synchronization of joint leadership behaviour.
In our experience, successful leadership requires the targeted development of further leadership skills. These include, above all, the ability to reflect on one’s own leadership actions and strategies to make leadership a constant and explicit topic. The management development programs designed by Movendo Consulting therefore always differ according to the challenges of the respective management level. We approach the specifics of leadership in a variety of ways: from simulations of leadership across two levels, to exercises for explicit disclosure and shaping the understanding of leadership, to making leadership behaviour measurable and establishing routines that anchor leadership behaviour sustainably in organizations.
