The responsibilities of leaders are complex and dynamic. You catch the signal of what really matters from the noise of emerging ideas and market conditions. One recurring drum beat—from hard-nosed capitalists to Nobel prize winning economic and behavioral psychologists—is that work relations need reinventing. Tomten would like to talk with you about what that means and why it’s important.
Reinventing work relations may sound like marketing puffery, but it actually captures some significant and important shifts in how organizations communicate with and value individuals. When the janitor in your hospital feels like she is doing invisible, meaningless labor, everyone in the facility is at risk. When your customers feel that your mission statement isn’t much more than a marketing tactic, you can’t expect the kind of fans who will be loyal to your products and talk about your work. How your workers, customers, partners and fans relate to your organization, both emotionally and logically, has consequences.
Organizations bring humans together to realize common goals. But unlike, sports games or even human lives, organizations plan to go on forever. If your organization is larger than life, move people with larger-than-life goals that resonate with their values. Leaders can use more than carrots and sticks to inspire and retain talent, gain allies, and motivate evangelists. Give them long-term reasons to care. Common business practices—transactional, defined by cost-benefit analysis—fail at a strategic level to account for the human emotional needs for connection, for relationship. For everyone to choose to contribute and share in your largest and dearest ambitions.
How will you steer your organization into the highly ambiguous and uncertain future? How can your organization relate in meaningful ways to your clients and each other? How do you take care of your people?
Tomten’s work is an interactive process to guide you as you examine where you are right now and as you design a living narrative for change that can emerge from your organization’s deepest and most valued beliefs. Tomten teams are your creative partners as you articulate a framework of overarching and operational principles that can provide coherent, flexible and adaptive guidance for decision-making and behavior. Tomten results help build organizational self-awareness through iterative practices for reflection and evaluation. As you work and grow, create a way to see your investment in time, resources and effort result in a practical, measurable change.
How does your work make you feel? Do people feel strongly about your company’s highest aspirations? Will they make sacrifices and speak earnestly on its behalf?
These are the kinds of questions that Tomten will help you answer. We would love to start a conversation. Please reach out.
TOMTEN is a network of highly seasoned creative, operations and research-based executives reared in agencies, corporations, academia, politics, and social change movements. We have guided organizations as they’ve moved toward aligning human-centered practices with pragmatic management design.
TOMTEN was founded to confront the need of the hour.
We don’t simply analyze or talk about the work; we have done it. We have been in the weeds, on deadlines and been the managers in major crises and systemic culture shifts. We lift the human dimensions off the spreadsheets and org charts.
We appreciate the essential aspects of proactive leadership in critical moments and couple our values-based orientation with a Swiss-army knife team approach.
