Pros and Cons of Guidepoint’s Organizational Culture
As I mentioned in a previous post on organizational culture, I think Guidepoint and its employees have a very universal comprehension of its value and mission. Everyone understands the importance of inter-team communication, the roles of employees in the human capital intensive work, and of the importance of balance and unity amongst all. The leadership team collectively, and across all the different teams, make an effort to embody both the physical and emotional appearance of their followers through matching attire and workload. All in all, values and attitudes of Guidepoint are defined and in order.
However, one problem I have noticed with Guidepoint’s organizational culture is its negative affects during the summer work schedule- where productivity is slower and the human capital seems to halt and stall occasionally. As great as Guidepoint’s well embodied values are when work is busy and productive, I have noticed the same trend when times are slow. Naturally, the summer time is a vacation time for lots of people, which makes the work of Guidepoint and its services more difficult. As a result, I notice the close relationship amongst leadership and team members to be a reason to embrace the slow tenure of the summer rather than take a proactive, innovative approach to recruit new clients or advisors. If team leaders are continuing as business as usual in slow times, employees rationalize such behavior and follow suit.
As a result, I think that the great organizational culture can have its downsides, especially in the slow, summer months. This is not to single out Guidepoint specifically- I think this problem is universal no matter the company. With such unification and comprehension comes the similar lack of motivation when everybody just embraces and accepts the decline in productivity in a slow period. I think such a change comes from the leadership team to be more attentive to such a common problem and make sure to divulge from their embodiment to their employees. Then, such change will cause the employees to raise their productivity to match those of their leaders. Unification and embodiment of values and missions is only as productive as the success of the work. When a change is needed to elevate the motivation and productivity of employees, it must come from the top leaders who can inspire such change.
There will always be pros and cons of a certain organizational culture. The key to combatting such cons is to make sure leaders within a culture can first recognize such cons- then having the intuition and power to correct such errors. I think Guidepoint and its leaders can work on combatting such cons to make the summer even more productive than it already currently is.
So I think what you are saying here is that if the leadership embraces the slower, summer pace and productivity then others follow and that perhaps leadership might consider whether they want to actually do this and be ‘approving’ a less productive environment? If the leaders embrace the slower pace and their employees follow, then productivity slows down. Whereas leaders embracing and ‘living’ other things (other values) and employees following is good, embracing and ‘living’ the slower summer pace and employees following has negative consequences, right?