Steavens Partnerships Inc

The purpose of a company culture is simply to embrace and support the managers as persons, not simply to uphold job titles. As companies struggle to attract, retain, and develop the talent they need to thrive in the modern economy, effective recruiting practices will be instrumental to achieving strategic, operational, and economic profit. As the executive ranks become increasingly sophisticated, successful management requires not only a strong system of teamwork but also the ability to adapt quickly, fluidly, and creatively.

If anything, the executive talent management landscape is almost a perfect storm. Gone are the days when executives needed to be organized into tight-knit teams focused on specific strategic outcomes. In today’s executive talent environment, organizations have adopted a culture of “teamwork” among their most senior managers. Managers have come to expect it, and so have their employees. That’s why the real challenge of the human resource process is learning to accommodate these new arrangements.

My hope is that by sharing insights from their own experience in this field, our readers will find that such traditional organizational approaches, which often take an organization’s most important asset—its people—and attempt to manage the staff to comply with this value, can lead to a company culture that addresses strategic profitability, which requires the use of talent in a continuous and adaptive way through the organization’s supply chain.

Employer-Induced Management Friction

Regardless of what an organization produces to support its people, most organizations find that if the people performing the work are not involved in the day-to-day business issues, or if they are less integrated into the team, the work and performance are too slow and limited. This is exactly the opposite of what a CEO and his team ideally want and should expect for their most valuable asset.

This friction at the corporate level stems from two sources, which I will explain in separate paragraphs:

An employer-induced culture of managerial autonomy where managers can choose their own people, leading to chaos in the workplace. The so-called “work-environment chaos” refers to the idea that human relationships are not such that company as a whole can manage and manage effectively within them without their managers engaging them in dialogue. In reality, the chaos issue is exacerbated when managers are able to choose or override the managers’ own goals and values for team members.