6 Tips To Consider for Enhancing Your Corporate Structure
Corporate structure is straightforward at this point but using that structure to your advantage requires a keen sense of how to build morale through steady leadership. If you’re looking for ways to help your middle management set the culture for your workers, you need to know how to use the structure of your company to empower employees at every level.
The first step is to increase ownership. This happens when there is buy-in to the culture from the ground up, so everyone is invested in the same goal and sees themselves as the beneficiary of reaching it. This can be accomplished through material incentives like company stock, but literal ownership isn’t all. Increasing ownership is about increasing the input lower level employees have into processes, so they feel they have some control over guiding the company forward, even if it’s limited to one or two processes in one department.
The next step is to expand borders. You define the organizational functions of each member of your structure, so feel free to rearrange responsibilities and consolidate operations in ways that make sense for your business and your clients. Along with that and increasing ownership, you’ll also want to think laterally. Organizing employees and managing a company with facilitation instead of top-down supervision and hierarchy will empower workers to do more when they see opportunities and it will also synergistically improve your efforts in the other areas of corporate structure already discussed.
You’ll also need to built trust and find common ground. Those are steps four and five. If your workers don’t believe you are building toward the same goals they are or that you really mean to empower them to enact long-term change, none of your other efforts will work. Enhancing your structure through these methods requires you genuinely surrender some of your control to make the company as a whole work better.
That’s the last step. You need to surrender—total control is a stifling factor for companies, and it’s much better to create an environment where people work together toward shared goals they all see as priorities. If you’re still obsessed with being the genius who understands and guides the company forward alone, you’re missing the point of these techniques—many minds are better than one. Focus on setting the culture and maintaining an organizational commitment to it, not on controlling everything about how the company runs. Then, your work force will be able to build the corporate structure that supports your business’s long-term growth.
