Tap Into Your Intrinsic Nature, Further Your Business
The intrinsic nature of women is to nurture, harmonize and align, wanting to make good everything we do. This is possible, of course, only if you have the requisite confidence to engage in self-reflection, acknowledge and accept your weaknesses, and are ready to embark on developing and trusting your intrinsic female skills and competencies.
If it is true in the general sense, that women nurture, harmonize and align, then doesn’t it follow that the way we work should enable us to create organizations and businesses that have the muscle to withstand all weather storms? The critical success factor of business is customer satisfaction, which includes both the internal and external customer. If you treat your staff as internal customers, you’re likely to build a culture of good customer service, problem solving and innovation. Ultimately, if the internal customer is happy then the external customers should experience the same effect. Right?
So what makes it difficult for organizations and businesses to prosper as we would like them to?
What impacts the growth or decreases revenue? What brings about the discontentment of both the internal and external customers? Why is it that we cannot seem to get internal meetings starting and ending on time? Why are we repeating the same concerns and issues at work? Whatever happened to getting things done, what happened to passion, what happened to self-governing and self-rule on engagement that got us to a position of doing it right the first time?
I believe that the solution is creating a culture that is less robotic in nature and not too procedural in terms of service delivery processes and customer service solutions. Problem solving can be a function of innovation. However, in order to achieve this, management and leadership styles have to be more engaged, interactive, nurturing, open and forgiving, as well as mindful of the human connection that we all must respect including other people’s opinions and divergent views. This is a style that women naturally excel at.
In order to build and sustain a successful business, we need to develop the internal workings of the company. We must refine the systems, structures and our leadership styles and ensure that we are ‘human’ in our actions. Above all I think that exercising flexibility in our approach is a key element of leadership and management, so that our actions and responses are tailored to ever-changing personalities and circumstances, as they are in our lives and as is our nature.
Are you tapping into your intrinsic nature as a woman to further your business or profession?
Visit Njeri’s website and check out the Scaling Your Buisness Upwards Summit, to take place in Nairobi on 18-19 September, put on by Ignite Consulting. Read her interview with Forbes and follow her on Twitter.