Do you create “invisible glue”?

Drive through any small town in Australia (and other places too) and you can end up scratching your head when you count up the number of churches in towns that have relatively small populations.

On the northwest coast of Tasmania, in a beautiful seaside town called Stanley, I noted at least five churches for a town with a peak population of about 600. The average church attendance rate in Australia is estimated at less than 10% of the population. So that’s potentially only a small number of active church-goers per church.

The believer sees the church as a place of worship; the sinner sees it as a place of redemption; and an investment banker sees it as an under-utilised asset sitting on a lazy balance sheet (boom-tish)!

What the investment banker may not see is the intangible value of the community ties that come with it. In fact we are not limited to churches here at all, sporting and other clubs, schools, the local shopping strip, neighbourhood conversations and regional employers all play a major role in bringing and holding the community together.

This is our social fabric or invisible glue, and it is an under-appreciated asset in our society because it is hard to quantify or measure. Who or what entities bring the community together in your town or suburb?

Helping to create “invisible glue” may be one of your own untapped assets.

Five ways to fine-tune your performance

Managing a business or enterprise is like driving a car: we monitor the road ahead; we deal with the internal environment such as the radio blaring, broken aircon and kids fighting in the backseat; we also check the rear-view mirror regularly.

Without knowing exactly what will happen on the road ahead, we can prepare by observing our current situation, trends and past experiences.

Having sent out 49 weekly newsletters in the past year that analyse the business challenges ahead (and more than 20 that were published in the Leadership Section of the Business Spectator), I picked out five “P”s that drive organisational performance:

1. Partnership power

Partnering is an off-balance sheet way of gaining access to resources. As a solo practitioner, I’ve learned that partnering is powerful. I’ve been able to get two workshop programs from concept to reality within weeks, rather than the months it would have taken me on my own.

One of these programs was designed to help business and community interests partner more effectively, and there has been good demand for capacity building in this area.

A new frontier for the business, non-profit and the public sectors is cross-sector partnering. Technological advances, disruptive change and the shorter product cycles that come with it require higher levels of organisational flexibility.

A vice-president of Xerox recently talked of their use of innovative partnerships. For example, Xerox levered its product energy efficiency efforts by partnering with the US EPA to build the Energy Star program.

Energy Australia is well known for partnering with local communities in order to help balance its technical needs with social and environmental concerns, leading to less disputes and shorter development times.

A long journey is safer and achieved with more reliability if the driving is shared (as long as the partners get on with each other!).

Read more →

Using Shared Value to Retain Top Talent

By guest writer, the leadership, visioning and goal setting practitioner, Paul Vittles.

Picture this: A good practice employer. Great pay and benefits. Progressive workplace health and wellbeing policies. Investing in its people. Great induction training and support. Excellent skills training. Mentoring and coaching programs. Management development provided to proactively support career progression. Leadership development. A wide range of personal development programs, including pioneering spiritual development opportunities.

And then one of the most talented young leaders announces they are going to leave because they want to ‘make a real difference’ and ‘give something back to society’. You might be thinking ‘how bloody selfish is that?’ – what about giving back to the employer that has invested so much in your personal and professional growth?!

But it happens and it will increasingly happen over the coming decades. Even with a global economic slowdown, the war for talent is very much alive and expectations are rising in terms of what a good practice employer will provide. More of our young talented emerging leaders are seeing opportunities to ‘make a difference’ in either their own commercial enterprise, harnessing the low entry cost, fast start up digital world, or in the growing world of social enterprise.

Talented executives see new heroes in entrepreneurs who are not only highly successful commercially but are becoming philanthropists at a much younger age. It is also quite common these days to hear young executives saying they want to make a lot of money fast so they can become a philanthropist or social investor.

Employers must keep evolving their thinking and their practice in line with patterns and trends in what motivates their people.

Read more →

Should business profit from community partnerships?

Microsoft profits from community partnerships. So do Australian companies like Stockland, AMP, NAB and Westpac. Does this sit well with you?

If you have a skerrick of social conscience in your body, then the idea of business profiting from community partnerships may get your back up. On the other hand, if you yearn for business to really care about the community and help make a sustained and positive impact, then I’d argue that it needs to profit from doing so.

To make the case, let’s look at the three basic types of business and community interactions in turn, and consider their motivations and benefits:

1. Corporate philanthropy

I’m talking about business strategies and actions, and not the actions of foundations that sit alongside major companies.

To give is a good thing, and for businesses to donate money is fine. The problem with this form of giving is that both sides may be missing out on opportunities to drive their dollar further, and fall short in terms of potential impact.

Read more →