Executive View: Igniting passion inside yourself and everyone in your team

Dr William Holden, chairman of Sewells, provides his latest Executive View sharing insights into people and performance management to help automotive retail leaders to inspire, motivate and guide their dealership teams more effectively.

Corporate culture is the glue that holds every business together. Far too often, however, a company’s strategy, imposed from above, is completely at odds with the ingrained practices, attitudes and inner workings of its culture.

Many leaders and managers continue to underestimate how much the effectiveness of their strategy development depends on cultural alignment and the total engagement and buy-in of everyone in the team.  

The success, or failure, of strategy deployment rests solely on the people that are working to help achieve it. We, at Sewells, see time and time again, how a poor culture eats brilliant strategies for breakfast every day in all organisations, in all sectors.

The following eight characteristics help explain the relationship between these two vitally important aspects of business, and how their synergy ignites a motivation and passion inside everyone in your team which can drive an organisation towards significantly improve bottom-line results so that the competition is left standing:-

1. Strategy is, quite simply, how you’re going to achieve your objectives. Culture needs a clearly understood common language to embrace and tell the story that explains why you do what you do in a way that captures everyone’s hearts and minds for them to come with you and play their full part

2. Strategy, therefore, should drive focus and direction, while culture is the emotional, organic habitat in which a company’s strategy lives or dies

3. Strategy is about intent and ingenuity and culture determines and measures desire, resilience, determination, engagement, brilliant execution and the Grrr!

4. Strategy lays down the rules for playing the game, and culture fuels the spirit for how the game will be played

5. Strategy is imperative for differentiation, and a vibrant culture (i.e. being truly customer centric) delivers the strategic advantage

6. Culture is built or eroded every day. How you climb the hill and whether it’s painful, fun, positive or negative makes the journey heaven or hell

7. When culture wraps around strategy, execution becomes scalable, repeatable, sustainable and enjoyable

8. Culture eats what it kills - strategy, change initiatives, innovation, lean process, efficiency, passion and even the company’s purpose and vision

Can you relate to any of these characteristics, and do you know how to motivate your team to ignite that passion to willingly come with you on the journey and play their full part in “making it happen”?

Developing real motivation, the sort that lasts, is a personal choice people make, based on each individual’s goals and values being fully aligned to achieving the company’s “purpose” and “vision”.

And it’s not a one-off event … it’s a process that is a day to day “doing” that is continuous throughout the year … and it starts with creating unstoppable mindsets and attitudes.

This might not sound as “sexy” and dramatic as the “polished” versions of motivation, but when you get it right it’s shows through in massively improve results – and a terrific team spirit.