Over the past couple of days, I have been mulling over issues of what a progressive attitude towards work should be.

I realise that an attitude refers to a response or collection of responses to situation/s. It therefore would make logical sense to understand the situation to be able to have an appropriate response to it.

In the context of corporate governance, the situation I choose to discuss is the business of the organisation.

Thanks to a company I worked for, and a very spirited Chief of Human Resource and Administration who was championing a program called “Understand your Business” I learned a lot about the company and the critical success factors.

We had company wide sensitization programs where each division of the company “pitched” itself to the rest of the employees.

The pitches were carefully crafted to firstly explain what the company was in business to do, secondly who were the stakeholders and their roles and thirdly, what the divisional structures were and how they contributed to the mission, vision and strategic objectives of the company.

This way, each member of the organisation establishment was able to connect their role to the bigger picture and I thought that was amazing!

Another very important event that I experienced during my time at this company, was a team building event that was held for Chief Officers. I particularly remember an exercise where we were asked to be candid to one another with our perceptions of each other and each person was requested to make a pledge to his or her colleagues with a view of forging strong and progressive relationships all focused on achieving our strategic goals.

In my view, the two scenarios above speak to orientation in two ways; collective understanding of the business and understanding each other as individuals.

I would propose that organisation orientation should be given prominence in our quest to drive our organisations to higher heights.

Throwing someone in the deep end should be the exception rather than the norm and equipping the actors with knowledge is one of the ways of ensuring that attitude towards work is aligned to the ethos of our organisations.

After all, some say “attitude is everything” !