3 Best Practices to Create a Solutions-Focused Culture
By Tara Albritton, senior vice president of HCM services, ADP
The ability to innovate and solve problems efficiently provides a significant advantage, especially in today's fast-paced world of work. By cultivating an environment that encourages real-time feedback, promotes radical candor and ensures everyone understands their contribution to the organization's success, you'll help boost creativity and critical thinking within your team.
As a people leader, I am intentional in my efforts to create environments where employees are motivated and supported by an open-feedback culture. Similarly, as a leader responsible for the delivery of HCM services, the act of curiosity in seeking to understand our client's experience is at the core of how we do business. The insights they provide are integral to designing a service experience that meets their current and future needs.
We host forums with our client advisory boards and intentionally foster an environment in which we actively pursue radical candor. Once we've identified processes where we can improve, we go back and ask again for that same degree of candor to make sure we got it right.
In one example, a client advisory board of executive leaders told us they were unhappy with a process my team was executing. Clients shared that the process was slow and inefficient. While that feedback was hard to hear, it resulted in my team building a new process that was simple, agile, fast and consultative. The new process was a direct result of the feedback provided.
After implementing the first round of changes, we went back to the clients to pressure-check the results. Once they told us we were on the right track, we continued the process and provided updates to capture and incorporate additional feedback. As a result of this new process, and other models like it, our clients trust that we are genuinely trying to get it right. We are true partners, willing to work with them to achieve mutual goals. This exercise of trust and candor has consistently driven stronger outcomes for both parties.
Let's deconstruct these best practices and explore how they can ignite innovation across your organization.
1. Foster a culture of trust where people share ideas
True collaboration demands an environment of trust. Trust is a highly valued commodity in business and beyond. For many leaders, the underlying question is: What's the formula to create that kind of trust within your organization?
- Foster psychological safety around sharing ideas. It's important to both articulate and model behaviors so your team knows you'll allow them to be creative.
- Demonstrate curiosity. Show your desire to ask questions and listen to the responses from your team.
- Welcome a wide range of ideas and approach discussions with the mindset that all opinions are valued and there are no bad questions or ideas.
Over time, employees can learn to embrace smart failure through seeing experiments in practice, alongside realistic expectations that not every idea or project fully succeeds. When employees see that innovation and creativity are celebrated, they're more likely to trust you with their best ideas.
2. Embrace radical candor with authenticity
Are you allowing for radical candor, where employees can share difficult truths about a problem or process? Do employees feel supported by their leaders to get them to that point? Think about the last time an employee brought a difficult subject to your attention. Did you listen with interest to explore the potential for problem-solving in the workplace, or did you go on the defensive?
Cultivating a healthy environment for candor can be helped by framing the value of radical candor, which is about being able to share where problems exist and give constructive feedback on how to make the most of opportunities. Leaders can demonstrate how to have hard conversations and show that when employees take risks to share difficult feedback, their perspectives are heard and considered.
Fostering this level of openness can be difficult, but it's how organizations move forward and get to the root of the issues faster. In competitive environments, moving fast and innovating effectively is paramount to the success of the business.
3. Establish a unified message as the north star
Communication plays a critical role in bringing people together to solve your most important problems. Often, this begins with establishing a clear, unified message of purpose and intent that employees can use as a north star. Within the larger messaging strategy, take time to ensure everyone knows their role and how to work together effectively.
When thinking about the message that brings your workforce together, it's critical for every employee, manager and leader to understand the role they play in your organization's success. It's key to highlight that from the entry-level employee interfacing with clients to your C-suite's strategic perspective, each employee has a unique and important vantage point to contribute. Everyone has different roles and responsibilities, but each contributes to the success of the larger ecosystem.
When you create an environment where radical candor and real-time feedback are supported, you can get to the root cause of challenges and effective solutions much faster. By building trust you'll have the authenticity and accountability for a winning formula that delivers an innovative, solutions-focused culture that drives success well into the future.
Learn how to design a people-centered workplace. Visit ADP.com/ItsPersonal
