Command & Control … Alive and Well
We recently started a culture project with an organization that was once part of the federal government and became “privatized” in the last 10 years. This organization is also very safety conscious and rightly so, as they deal in hazardous materials. So as you might expect guidelines on how work gets done are specific – expectations are that you follow all process steps.
As in many companies, they wanted their culture results in time for a big management meeting – two months away. We were told, “don’t worry, we can get this project done quickly, we are a top-down kind of place. We can send out notices today and people will be at a meeting tomorrow! This sounded like a nice break from some of the companies, we had been working with where work gets done through relationships, and scheduling meetings can take forever.
Planning moved along quickly, but we came up with a few snags that are also part of top-down cultures. We got push back on some of our culture questions as being “too vague and employees would never understand them.” We are used to these kind of “level conscious” comments from managers and were able to help them realize that the openness was on purpose to enable line employees as well as managers to express in their own way how work gets done in their company.
The major barrier turned out to be waiting for the CEO to sign off on an introductory letter explaining the purpose of the culture project. In a top-down culture, this is very important and the right process step to adhere to. But, here we are – four weeks later, waiting for the CEO to return from a trip to Asia; attend a son’s graduation; and leave time for a long holiday weekend. Yes, the command and control culture is alive and well. You have to wait for the commander’s OK.
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