Leading Workplace Change™

Economic instability is still with us.  And, we keep hearing it is going to take awhile to work ourselves out of this financial crisis of the new global age.  Consequently, patience and building for the future are tactics driving my actions these days.  In the last three posts, I wrote about differing culture characteristics that allowed certain companies to historically move through hard economic times and to endure.  These characteristics are:

- An optimistic spirit (companies in cyclical industries)

- An ability to adapt (Goldman Sachs)

- A commitment to a long-term vision (UPS)

I realize, reading about organizational culture best practices is easy, but building for the future by engraining new ways of thinking and working is not.  According to recently passed management guru Peter Drucker, “…changing behavior works only if it can be based on the existing culture.” (Don’t Change Corporate Culture–Use It, Wall Street Journal, 3/19/01).  He gave examples in his short article from 1991 about how Japan and Germany re-built their societies after the Second World War through rewarding new habits based on traditional national values.  Today, it is still the most reliable and quickest way to re-direct an organizational culture over time as well.  An important qualifier is that you must believe the traditional values will support future success.

So how does one start for example to build an organizational ability to adapt and to see change as an opportunity?  Drucker had ideas about this as well.  He recommended seeking out individuals or groups within your organization that already exhibit these habits and ask them how they do it.  Once these attitudes and ways of working are specifically defined for your organization, the next task is to shift recognitions, rewards and consequences in support of the new desired habits and behaviors. 

And for those who find analogies helpful, there are similarities in the process of culture re-direction to the best practices for raising children; so as any dedicated parent knows, achieving results will require patience and a willingness by organizational leaders to model new behaviors as much as using rewards and adverse consequences.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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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 by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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Like many of us these days, I woke up this morning craving some positive news in the midst of our current economic instability.  Just as I was sitting down to write, our UPS delivery arrived for the day.  The driver is always friendly and at the same time efficient – never a wasted motion.  I was somehow reassured both by the normalcy of the delivery and also by thinking about the company behind it – United Parcel Service (UPS).  This is a company that does not make it into the news for any spectacular short-term gain, but is known for its steady and consistent growth.

I put on my organizational culture hat and thought that UPS is most likely a company with a strategic cultural driver of commitment to a long-term vision.  With this kind of driver in place, leaders are guided to balance their decisions concerning a possible short-term business gain against how well the decision will help the company achieve its long-term strategies.  Most likely, some portion of profit is re-invested into development of new products or services; and, leaders probably consider the needs of all stakeholders when making strategic decisions.  In the long-run this approach helps the company maintain a stable and committed workforce through good and bad business cycles.

Thus, I was not much surprised when I found the current CEO of UPS, Scott Davis expressing similar views in a recent interview with the Atlanta Journal & Constitution (Q&A / Scott Davis, Chief executive officer of UPS by Rachel Tobin Ramos, 9/20/08)

“We’re not really managing for the next quarter but many years into the future… It sounds folksy, but we really think our job is to leave the company in better shape for the next generation…We all feel very much involved in the outcome of this company (UPS). We still have about 30 percent of the company owned by insiders, both active employees and retirees.”

I do feel more positive about the potential of our country after thinking about UPS and the model it offers future company founders and the leaders of today.  We need to find successful models to guide us in how to transform our short-term gain focus into personal and organizational visions that balance what is good for today with what is good for the long-term.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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The emergence of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin is making us think deeply about which kind of background and training will serve us best in the next leader of our country.  Ms Palin’s background as a mayor and the governor in Alaska seems to be of interest to many people and to me as well.  It may be the fact that the state she lives and governs is in many people’s minds - the last American frontier.  It makes us think about our country’s roots in rugged individualism – surviving alone in a log cabin in the wilderness.  In many people’s minds – rugged individualism is a founding ethos of our country.  And we do know how it plays out, as it is alive and well today in the organizational cultures of many American-based companies.

In organizational culture lingo – rugged individualism translates into valuing people who are “self-starters.”  They are self-motivated with a “can-do” attitude and they are able to figure things out on their own.  Successful people in “self-starter” cultures usually need to seek out their own opportunities and the organization waits for the crème to rise to the top.  There is not much investment in formal career development except for high potential people who have already proven themselves.  It can lead to intense internal competition when people start looking out for themselves more so than for the good of the organization.

So what does this mean for leaders of companies with a “self-starter” culture?  As you can see above, there are positive and not so positive aspects of this kind of culture and balance is again part of the answer.  A leader wants to harness the self-motivation towards meeting company goals; and, force collaboration where it is a requirement through alignment between personal and organizational metrics.  They also need a new and consistent focus on managing and developing people to produce 100% output from everyone.  Leaders will need to muscle these new foci as they go against the grain of “self-starter” cultures.

As a country, we are not alone in the wilderness anymore – we live and work in a complex, inter-related global marketplace.  And, shifting our national belief in a pure form of rugged individualism as represented in the cultures of many of our American-based companies will not be easy, but important for the long-term success of our economy.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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I met up with a friend recently, and in five minutes, he brought me up to date on his job at a residential real estate company.  He started by saying - “we hired a new managing broker from outside the company; she is putting in an electronic marketing system and it is driving us crazy!”  He laughed as he said - ”We never needed a marketing system before.  We put our client names on a PDA rolodex - made sure we kept up with relationships at the country club and every year many of us made the million dollar club.  But the current downturn in the market is making all of us nervous and we know we need to do some things differently.”

I could not help but put on my “corporate culture observer” hat as I heard him use the phrase keeping up with relationships.  It makes sense that being relationship-driven is one of the traditional underlying sources of success in residential real estate.  It is the case in most companies where success in personal selling is the preferred method used to create income. And, from my knowledge of organizational culture it is normal that the primary source of external success is also many times used to guide how people operate within the sales organization.  They probably do not write things down or record how work gets done. They most likely talk to the folks who have been there the longest to find out how to solve a problem.

Utilizing an electronic marketing system is of course driving my friend and his colleagues crazy at his company.  It requires people to input data regularly which takes time away from maintaining relationships.  This is going against the grain of a relationship-driven culture and it will be hard for people to maintain unless people are consistently supported and the system brings in some quick wins.  The managing broker will need to support people in muscling their way through unfamiliar behaviors.

My friend ended his tirade against the new marketing system by noting that he agreed with the new managing broker’s plan about everyone needing to work smarter and build on each other’s success.  I asked him if he thought the new marketing system would help them to do that.  His response was – “Yes, but someone has to be brave enough to take the time and teach me how to work the system first!”

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Workplace Stories by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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How are family-owned companies different from publicly-owned companies?  The major difference we have seen centers on the kind of relationships created over time between employees, company leaders and the organization.  Depending upon the values of the founding family and the success of the business, these relationships many times build a culture where loyalty, respect and caring for people – customers and employees are rewarded.

An example of this kind of culture is clearly illustrated in an article about family-owned construction businesses, based in Georgia who shared the profits from the sale of the companies with their employees.  Employees received $1,000 per year of service with employees receiving checks ranging from $1,000 to $45,000!  (‘We wanted to share our good fortune’ by S.A. Reid, Atlanta Journal & Constitution, 5/5/08)  

The current 2^nd generation family member leader, Doug Walker explained their action in this way.

“You see so many big companies have executives more interested in gaining money for themselves and don’t look after their employees…We believe if you care about employees, they are going to look out for us.  When we sold the business, we wanted to share some of our good fortune with the people who helped us get there.”

As can be expected, a positive aspect of an organizational culture can also bring some unintended consequences.  One of the most difficult consequences in a company where the values of loyalty and caring drive the rules of behavior is that loyalty many times is rewarded over performance.  In this kind of workplace, employees expect their dedication to be rewarded through job security.  If long-term employees do not perform, they are many times not given feedback and simply relegated to jobs of lesser responsibility, but still taken care of.  A culture of entitlement grows and hinders the ability of the company to innovate and execute.  

The key for leaders is to find a way to balance rewards for long-term service to the company and its customers while at the same time putting in systems where performance against goals can be measured and rewarded as well.  Loyalty and performance are not either-or company values; they are requirements for success in a fast-changing marketplace.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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I recently finished two posts about the cultural drivers of the presidential campaign staffs of Mr. Barack Obama and Mrs. Hillary Clinton, so for curiosity sake I was on the look out for research regarding the inner workings of Mr. John McCain’s campaign staff.  I found it in another article by Jim Rutenberg and this time with Adam Nagourney in the New York Times on August 10, 2008.  What struck me from this article was the reminder of how powerful an impact the professional training of a founding leader has on the culture of their organization.

Mr. McCain’s primary professional training is as a Navy attack aircraft pilot and according to the article he “preaches the need to improvise under pressure, subscribing to the military maxim that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.”  This guiding belief makes sense if your work environment is driven by life and death, crisis situations.  It would be important to be constantly gathering information and being comfortable with using this info to adapt plans in order to survive.  It also makes sense that in non-life-threatening situations that this “shoot from the hip” spontaneity might lead to an organizational culture where it is difficult for people to easily stick to a plan and execute as a disciplined team.

Upon reading this article, the unintended consequence does seem to be playing out in the workings of McCain’s campaign staff.  There are a number of examples given of a “big campaign decision” being made and the staff moving to execute and then Mr. McCain suddenly moving in a different direction and not staying on message.  At the same time, there are examples given of how openness to “competing opinions,” flexibility and taking risks serves the McCain campaign staff well.

As a founding leader of an organization, understanding the impact of personal professional training on your own beliefs and how you act is important – there are strengths and weaknesses, and the key is being aware enough to test out what brings success over a broad range of situations.  The ways of acting, based on your professional training may feel more comfortable, natural and other ways of acting will be more difficult.  There will be the need to be mindful and muscle your way through the unfamiliar ways of acting with the help of advisors and friends.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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There has been a growing amount of focus recently on how people can stay healthy - looking at what we eat; how we exercise; and, how we manage stress - asking us to take more personal responsibility for our own health.  During my last annual medical check-up, I started to think more about the role of doctors in helping people to stay healthy.  What expectations should my doctor have of me and what should I have from her?

My next thought was - are doctors trained to help people stay healthy to prevent sickness or is the profession’s focus on identifying and treating disease?  It seems that the focus should be on prevention, but my sense is that the historical training for doctors is more reactive in nature.  So if people are becoming more proactive in thinking about their health rather than waiting for disease to strike, then we need to have doctors trained and rewarded to help us stay healthy as well as treat disease.  This would be a major culture shift for the profession from a focus on disease to health.

Now we can go back to the question of expectations between doctors and their patients, but wait a minute - first I need to think about language.  A patient is defined as - one under medical treatment and when I go in for my annual check-up, I am really a client looking for a health service provider. Let me know if I am sick, but please give me the info I need to stay healthy!

Again, the first step of acting differently is to think differently.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Personal-Ah-Hah Moments by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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As soon as I wrote my last post about the workplace culture of a presidential campaign staff, a friend referred me to Tom Dickinson’s 7/10/08 post in Rollingstone.com called “Obama’s Brain Trust”.  This post explores the ins and outs of Barack Obama’s campaign staff.  Upon reading, it reminded me of a few ah hah’s about how a workplace culture can make or break a leader’s legacy.

Leaders are the primary creators of a culture for their organization – some do it unwittingly, by just acting the way they do.  Others are very mindful and clearly articulate their personal beliefs and model their expectations about how people should act in the organizations they lead.  It appears that Obama’s approach is one of mindfulness as seen in the following quote from Dickinson’s post.

“When I (Obama) started this campaign, “I wasn’t sure that I was going to be the best of candidates. But what I was absolutely positive of was that there was the possibility of creating the best organization. The way great things happen is when people are willing to submerge their own egos and focus on a common task. That’s my old organizing mind-set. It’s not just a gimmick, it’s not just a shtick. I actually believe in it.”  

You can see from this quote that Obama is talking about his expectations about how people should act and he tells them why - based upon past experiences that proved successful and personal beliefs.  What also struck me while reading the post was how mindfully Obama models how he wants others to act in his organization as seen by this quote from one of Obama’s staffers.

“When he (Obama) is running a meeting, he does more listening than talking, asking questions and taking the temperature of everyone in the room. Regardless of wherever you fall in the hierarchy, he listens to you as though you are the campaign manager. He focuses, he prods, he pushes, to make sure that he fully understands your position. That sets an important tone as well: When you go into a meeting expecting to learn and not dictate, it fosters camaraderie.”

Mindfully setting the tone is a primary role for leaders – most focus on the behaviors that enable strategies and for Obama this includes how his campaign team works together to execute.  It is a balanced internal and external focus and usually the make or break practice that allows leaders to create legacies and presidential candidates create political machines.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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The U.S. presidential election is in the news and there have been a number of in-depth articles about the organizational workings of some of the candidates’ campaign staffs.  One such article was by Peter Baker and Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times (6.8.08) called “The Long Road to a Clinton Exit.”  This article is a treasure trove of information about Mrs. Hilary Clinton’s campaign, but what caught my attention were the clues to understanding the culture of her campaign staff.

One of the first cultural clues identified from the article was, as would be expected, a strong drive to win.  But, there are myriad approaches in the world on how to win which in turn create differing ways of working within a staff.  Many of the quotes seemed to point to an offensive or attack approach to winning based on “overwhelming force” and the drive to capitalize on a reputation of past success.  The article authors noted – “…her (Mrs. Clinton’s) campaign represented a back-to-the-future effort to restore the Democratic dynasty of the 1990’s…”

Another cultural theme that jumped off the pages of the article was the strong sense of internal competition among campaign staff members which was noted as distracting them from battling their external opponents.  The following quote gave me an insight to the original source of this way of working - “On election night, Mr. Clinton grew playfully competitive with his wife over who had done more events or had more impact…Mr. Clinton wanted to know exactly what the returns were in the places he had been and Hillary hadn’t been. He kept showing Hillary and she would laugh.” So it appears that one of the sources for why the campaign staff competed so strongly against each other was the modeling of rivalry between Mr. and Mrs. Clinton themselves.

It is my sense that every grouping of people who work together over time with a common purpose develops a set of shared rules of behavior that can be identified as some form of an organizational culture.  These rules are many times not talked about, but primarily people watch how the leader(s) act - who they promote and follow the behaviors rewarded.  If these behaviors produce success in meeting the group’s purpose – a culture is set in place. 

The last sentence above sounds very final, but what happens if the culture does not help a group to achieve their purpose?  In a fast-paced environment, it just may be too late.  The alternative is for leader(s) to pay attention to the rules of behavior within their organization – ask the question if these rules are helping and if not, start first by modeling the behaviors they think will bring success.

Tags: Corporate Culture Observer, Leaders Leading by Terri – older, but wiser white lady
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