Mindshare South Africa
Analyse MindShare SA's culture and leadership practices and provide recommendations to improve on their existing practices.
Brief Objective
Insight
Effective leadership,
creates a playground for a strong culture.
In this assignment we were required us to work in a group and involved critically examining an organisation’s approaches to leadership and organisational culture.
We selected MindShare South Africa, which is part of the WPP global network and offers a comprehensive and integrated range of communications services.
Simon Sinek, author of ‘Start with Why’ once made the valid point that ‘customers will never love a company until the employees love it first’. In order for this to happen, an organisation needs to have a solid organisational culture that compliments its employees, and this in-turn will encourage them to champion the business’ cause. They will ultimately become leaders in their own right, in an environment that is conducive to growth, excellence and a degree of autonomy. With that in mind, the following document has profiled MindShare South Africa and discussed their approaches to leadership and organisational culture.
The objective of this document is to assess the organisation’s approach to leadership and organisational culture, in the context of organisational behaviour theories, in order to develop strategic recommendations that will allow the organisation to retain their employees, increase productivity; effectiveness and efficiency (Paton, 2015).
Leadership can be defined as the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of a vision or set of goals. The source of this influence may be formal, such as that provided by managerial rank in an organisation (Robbins and Judge, 2013). But it can also be informal, through individuals who have leadership qualities, an intellectual connection to the business and an emotional commitment towards its success. However, not all leaders are managers, and not all managers can lead.
According to a face-to-face interview conducted with the Head of Talent of MindShare South Africa, they have implemented leadership practices developed by Jim Collins, in his book ‘Good to Great’. The leadership approach described in this book refers to leaders as being personally humble while having professional will. These leaders are described as ‘Level 5 Leaders’, people who are able to channel their ego-centric needs away from themselves and place that energy towards the greater goal of building the organisation. This breed of leaders are self-sufficient; reserved and even perceived as shy.
​
This approach to leadership further explain how an organisation is able to develop from a good to great business by having disciplined people as a part of the organisation. They emphasize that in order to become great it is important to remember that the right people need to be on the bus and in the right seats, before figuring where to go from there.
There are seven primary characteristics that capture the essence of an organisation’s culture, which include; innovation and risk-taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness and stability.
​
Due to effective leadership during MindShare’s induction process, 88% of the employees surveyed correctly identified MindShare’s core values. 58% of them also said they were fairly connected to the business and have a fair understanding of what it does, whilst 33% said they were very connected and knew everything about the business.
This indicates how the company’s success is a reflection of employee satisfaction and engagement. This illustrates genuine buy-in from employees and a desire to translate that into excellent work for MindShare’s clients.
The respondents appreciated that fact that MindShare cultivates a challenging and innovation-driven environment, and that it keeps them on their toes with regular training and workshops.
It is evident that MindShare is successfully creating disciplined people, thoughts and actions as its employees feel very positively about the business and its modus operandi.