Organizations continue to worry about building a culture that supports performance and emotional intelligence.
Academics call for the need for best practices. Practitioners propose models. Common sense people propose common
practices. What are these? Steve Harrison writing in the HR magazine talks about examples of best practices that he
calls as decencies.

Effective leaders use decencies to build great workforces one gesture at a time. You can mould a company culture by
adopting small decencies. In my own experience, I have either experienced some of these decencies with the people
who I worked for or tried them out. It is about the way leaders choose to behave – the actions leaders embrace –
every day, especially during the quite quiet moments when we think no one is watching. Some of the ten decencies
suggested are:

• Be sure that nothing important or creative is perceived as the leader’s idea.
• Walk an employee or a customer to the door.
• Always greet people in a sincere way.
• Make as many allies as you can within the organization all the time.
• Talk about disagreements in private personally and try to resolve them or at least agree to disagree.

They do not seem very difficult, do they?
Decencies need to be actionable, tangible, practical, affordable, replicable and sustainable.

By: Tan Sri Dr. R Palan