Leading Workplace Change™

In this time of deep economic turmoil, I am thinking about what kinds of culture characteristics allows one company to survive while others go bankrupt?  Last week, I wrote about one survival characteristic - commitment to a long-term vision.  This characteristic guides leaders to balance short-term business decisions against how well the decision helps the company achieve its long-term strategies.  In my reading about the financial companies that are surviving today’s economic turmoil, other culture best practices are emerging – one is ability to adapt.

On Wall Street, one of the companies surviving recent events as an independent company is Goldman Sachs.  And, in an article in the New York Times, (Wall Street, R.I.P. by Julie Creswell & Ben White 9/28/08) it is possible to identify a few clues on how adaptability is one of the keys to Goldman’s survival.

“They change to fit their environment. When it was good to go public, they went public,” said Michael Mayo, banking analyst at Deutsche Bank. “When it was good to get big in fixed income, they got big in fixed income. When it was good to get into emerging markets, they got into emerging markets. Now that it’s good to be a bank, they became a bank.”

Many companies we work with strive for this ability to adapt as epitomized by Goldman, but it is not easy to engrain in a culture if it is not there naturally.  Goldman, founded in 1869 has survived as an independent company for almost 150 years, starting as a partnership and changing to a public company in 1999.  Some of the common practices that I would expect to find supported in their workplace are: risk taking and creativity if backed up by data or experience; and, expectations for individuals to learn from mistakes and to see change as an opportunity, not as a threat.

The learning for leaders is not straightforward in this example as adaptability is one of the rarest culture characteristics we find naturally engrained in organizations.  It is not easy to take culture best practices and apply them wholesale to another organization, even in the same industry.  The best first step is to include a culture diagnosis of your own organization as part of a strategic planning effort. Next, the leadership team will need to model the attitudes and behaviors they decide are required for the organization to succeed in a time of economic turmoil.  The first new attitude might just be - seeing change as an opportunity and not as a threat!

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading //