The Soul of a Company
by Miki Saxon
Does your company have soul?
Or is it so focused on profit that there is no room for anything else?
What does it mean for a company to have soul?
That question is addressed by a Belgium, Frederic Laloux, who quit McKinsey when he found himself miserable and out of touch with his clients.
“The work I had loved so much was work I simply couldn’t do any longer. I came to the realization that I was in a very different place than the executive teams of the large corporations with whom I had been working. I just couldn’t work with these big organizations anymore. They felt too soulless and unhealthy to me, too trapped in a rat race of just trying to eke out more profits.”
Wondering what gave a company soul fueled two years of research that resulted in Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness.
Not surprisingly, Laloux found that trust ranked at the top of managerial attitudes that create soul.
Trust, Mr. Laloux found, is perhaps the most powerful common denominator in the companies he studied. “If you view people with mistrust and subject them to all sorts of controls, rules and punishments,” he writes, “they will try to game the system, and you will feel your thinking is validated. Meet people with practices based on trust, and they will return your trust with responsible behavior. Again, you will feel your assumptions were validated.”
In other words, bosses (like most others) get what they expect.
While trust can’t be faked, it is trust a function of individual bosses, from the most junior all the way up to the CEO.
That means that even if you are working in a soulless situation you can run your own organization with trust, integrity and soul.
Flickr image credit: Lars Plougmann
