A company has a strong corporate mindset when the common patterns of thinking and acting provide a consistent way of interacting with the outside world. The outside world may develop this sense of consistency accross many individual experiences. The people within the company develop the same sense of consistency accross many individual experiences.
So why should leaders, when they reach out to their staff and try to strengthen or orient their mindset, restrict themselves to generalities such as overall strategies, overall principles, and overall rules? Let us instead use the same principle mentioned above, and provide a regular flow of individual stories. Let us open a dialogue over their meaning and how it affects people’s own microcosm. Over time, people develop a sense for the patterns of choice, perspective, context and meaning, and absorb it into their mindset.
In their own way what I thought of as the Friday letters, and what ABB people called the Dormann letters, were a key tool in our transformation.
(Jürgen Dormann, ex CEO ABB)
We help leaders or leadership teams develop the appropriate kind of blog, its form and orientation, and get started with this activity of regular communication.