Organisational Awareness Can Improve your Team's Productivity

Increasing productivity in any organisation is a challenging thing to do especially for a leader. As a leader you may have thought and may have come up with different ideas and projects to engage your team and to make them more productive.

One of the most effective ways to improve your team’s productivity is increasing their organizational awareness.

What is Organisational Awareness?

Organisational Awareness is reading social and political currents in organisations, on teams, in their businesses, their communities, their schools, and their neighborhoods. A team who has organisational awareness, will be able to:

• Accurately read key power relationships.
• Detect crucial social networks.
• Understand the political forces at work in an organisation, the forces that shape views and actions of clients, customers, or competitors.
• Accurately read the guiding values and unspoken rules that operate in an organisation.
• Accurately read the external forces and realities operating on that organisation.
• Be aware of power relationships, and can make use of both formal and informal power structures and dynamics.
• Become very effective at influencing organisational events.
• Not violate organisational norms.

How does this affect their productivity?

When your team members have organisational awareness, they’ll be able to understand the vision of the organisation, their roles and their responsibilities. This will result to them becoming more engaged, productive and effective with their respective roles

So how do you develop Organisational Awareness in your team? Here are some developmental tips that could help develop Organisational Awareness in your team and organisation:

• Make your team see the value of paying attention to what’s going on in your organisation; make them understand that to be successful and get things done, they need to be tuned in.

• Help your team identify the characteristics and behaviours of individuals who are successful in the organisation so they could learn from them.

• Engage them to have informal conversations with their co-workers to get their perspective on how things get done so they could apply those that could help them increase their productivity.

• Make your team recognise the informal structures, procedures and practices that support getting things done.

• Encourage your team to identify people who have risen rapidly through the organisation to get to know them. Make them visit these people to learn how they become successful.

Remember: This competency is empathy on an organisational scale. Truly listen to what goes on at the organisatonal level, and demonstrate your commitment to organisational success.

You can lead your organisation to greater heights if you help your team understand and become more aware of your organisation.

Vince Lombard says it best: 

”Individual commitment to a group effort – that is what makes a team workm a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”

At People Builders we have a team of expert trainers and coaches who can help you and your team develop Organisational Awareness. Contact us today for a quick chat to see how we can partner with you to train and coach you and your team.