Inside Tending to Your Organisation, a Training Guide For All CEOs

A Bountiful Harvest: Promoting Diversified Thinking

Tending to Your Organisation is a training manual for managerial positions and frontline workers alike. It aims to segue a company's cultural competency in its workplace.

Over the course of two months, every team in class was tasked to create a comprehensive manual that'd be graded for an Organizational Communication module. Albeit a school project, professionalism was expected from every work members of the class produced. The individual manuals- based on a list of relevant topics pertaining to the said module- would then be pitched to a class who'd play an imagined audience (i.e. HR managers, CEOs). Its totality would be assessed based on one's understanding on the subject matter.

My team's pick was Cultural Competency, a study in one's aptitude across a cross-cultural setting. By proffering skills to readers to hone their own competency, the challenge was to underscore the manual's objectives and benefits to prospective clients in a presentation.

Challenge:

It's too narrow to limit culture to a language or a skin colour, according to anyone with the common wisdom to know of different races, ethnicities, and genders. The view on culture encompasses a wider set of examples. Personal experiences, values, beliefs, attitudes- culture can be summed as a way of how people lived, in brief. It is a worldview.

The challenge then, was to present its competency as a benefit to our clients' interest. Anyone who cares enough must be informed and persuaded to the benefits of a healthy workplace culture.

Insight:

Cultural competency isn't a bottom line that reaps monetary benefits, once mastered- nobody can guarantee that. Neither is it a problem like workplace conflict, which can be nipped by changing one's methods at absolving conflicted interests. However, if its ambiguous non-referent idea had a strategic posture, it'd be that cultural competency is a value. And like all values, cultural competency cannot be trained. It has to be aspired in people.

By equipping CEOs with an education, the values would, thus, cascade downward to all members of an organization. The objective was to create an open, trusting, and inclusive workplace culture.

Execution:

The manual- which could take on any form of presentation- was marketed as a guidebook.

And like all natural practices, one's company culture needs tending. The guidebook rules out the dogmatic prescriptions of telling CEOs what they should do with their own companies. Instead, it coaches them throughout various organizational phases, from the start- at the importance of a better hiring process- to the tail- once an employee has settled within the company.

Thusly, its title and successive chapters:

Tending to Your Organisation: A Guide to Honing Your Cultural Competency

A Budding Organisation

From Friction to Fruition: Managing Conflict Effectively

My role as team leader and copywriter was not only to materialize all members' ideas into its content, but also to buttress our pitch with copy for the promotional ads. We avoided the cliches of an emotional appeal (that meant no poverty porn or any exploitative tactics at the expense of the minority). Rather, targeted at CEOs, we wanted a strong voice of reason to speak for itself.

As a first part of a trio of simplistic ads, this is a double page spread written, and presented formally, to promote the training guide:

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Next, with an interest directed to our audience, who're all CEOs and leaders in their own stride, my team I made two OOH ads. We wanted the headlines to be concise, yet promising to its reach, with a bare-bone layout and clear message:

Finally, the highest stakeholder for our audience (What do CEOs want?) is, in fact, their own intended audience whereby company growth relies upon those relationships; their customers:

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Cultural competency is an opportunity.

Results:

Tending to Your Organization has earned my team and I high points for the content and its presentation format. We too, leagued amongst the top three of presentations, voted by populist choice. Although we were eventually won out by peers with their leisurely pitches, my team and I believe a pitch doesn't share the same name as a sketch. We leaned our sales message- without the fat.