Razor Learning Blog

Let’s face it, governance is not a sexy concept. If your organization decides to take on a governance initiative and you’re not the one crafting it, your first reaction is likely to be a groan. You no doubt envision more rules, more hoops to jump through, less autonomy and a strong possibility that headquarters will really foul things up and make it more difficult for you to do your job. Sadly, many governance initiatives do turn out that way. But governance is not the problem. Bad governance is the problem. And by bad governance, I mean top-down governance that doesn’t create meaningful connections vertically across levels of the organization or horizontally across divisions, regions and other silos. Bad governance is about compliance. Someone—probably not you—decides what is best for your organization and creates a system to make sure you follow the new rules. Or, perhaps you are the decider and you are trying to get the cooperation of others to implement changes that you believe will be good for the organization. Either way, governance is expressed as power in a win/lose scenario that is nearly certain to breed resistance and make compliance a challenge. Good governance is about alignment. The key to good governance is that it is a two-way street. It’s designed to create win/win situations. Good governance marshals the efforts of employees across the organization in the service of strategic objectives set by executives. But it also aligns executive support and resources to find ways to help employees across the organization do their jobs better and get more impact from their efforts. The top-down and bottom-up goals of effective governance meet in the middle, where governance councils and other formal governance structures turn stakeholder inputs into balanced decisions that genuinely align all interests. If a governance initiative isn’t creating “wins” for all stakeholders, it isn’t good governance. Good governance not only improves enterprise performance, efficiency and sustainability—it improves the work lives of employees and builds a stronger bond between employees and the organization. It eliminates redundancy and waste, which makes more resources available. It simplifies processes and provides shared tools that actually work in the real world. It makes an enterprise more successful. And a more successful enterprise is able to better reward and engage employees. Of course, good governance still requires compromise and sacrifices. In particular, it may require employees to move away from familiar tools and practices to facilitate working more closely with other parts of the organization. It may cause people to be moved from projects that are not strategically important to the enterprise to projects that are. Change—even change for the better—can be uncomfortable. So careful change management comes into play. But good governance pays clear and immediate dividends. When people see governance begin to work, they will get behind it. Once governance processes gain legitimacy and employees trust that their voices are being heard, the threshold for embracing change is much lower. Business units, departments, regions and employees all know there will be something in it for them as well as for the enterprise as a whole. People like to know that their efforts are making a difference. With sound governance practices, some carefully-engineered short-term wins and a little attention to PR, governance will no longer be a dirty word.