Organizational Culture Insights to Strengthen Leadership and Drive Change

As we’ve mentioned in this space before regarding the leaders need to define the playing field, a few years ago I watched my kids play a pick up soccer game with their neighborhood friends. No one bothered to define the field boundaries; they just started playing. After a minute or two, someone kicked the ball up the street: GOAL! The team celebrated. The other team, though, said it wasn’t a goal. They argued for a while and started again. The ball went into the bushes. Out of bounds, one side said. No it’s not, said the other. The kids wound up spending more time arguing than playing, and everyone soon just gave up and quit the game. Even in a pick-up, neighborhood soccer game, the players need to know the rules of the game. In this post and in Part 2 later this week, we’ll talk more about how organizations define the rules of the game. For organizations, the “rules” are their values, guiding principles and beliefs. When the organization defines them clearly, the leader’s roles are clear: ensure the values get applied in all decision-making situations, and teach them to new employees, peers and everyone who does business with the company. Many organizations, though, have not established a clear, concise set of values. That can produce fatal results, no matter how talented the employees might be. I worked with a manager as part of an engagement with a large utility. Chris inherited a tough situation after being promoted into a division manager position. Quality and productivity had fallen within the division. Financial performance was getting worse. Customers were upset, and the morale of the work group was taking a significant hit. Chris found that he had a very experienced and capable work group. Many of the people had worked for the company for more than 20 years. They were absolute pros and understood far more about the inner workings of the company than he ever could. But they were frustrated by their complete lack of autonomy. Every decision had to be checked with their manager. Chris wanted to change that. But he knew that autonomy without boundaries would lead to anarchy. So he gave his team members the latitude to solve, on the spot, any problem that they encountered with the customer. He just told them to consider four questions while making their decisions: • Is this the right thing for the customer? • Is this the right thing for the short- and long-term financial performance of the company? • Is this the right thing for my coworkers? • Will this action help us be a better company tomorrow than we are today? Within days of implementing these values, performance on every dimension improved dramatically. Let me leave you with two questions: Why do you think this simple change yielded such quick, pronounced results? This story leaves out a key part of a manager’s job when it comes to communicating an organization’s values. What do you think is the missing element? Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

Every organization, including yours, has a set of core values. Values, and the cultural fit that result, help drive strategy execution. From one organization to another, many of those values, such as teamwork, inclusion, respect and integrity, might overlap. But each one has its own unique way of prioritizing and emphasizing the most important values to the enterprise. In our white paper “ Strategy to Execution (S2X) ,” we outline the seven Levers of Execution, the factors we’ve identified over the years that make up the critical framework to connect strategy and execution. The first of these is “Right, Right, Right: The Right People in the Right Roles with the Right Capabilities.” A critical part of putting the right people with the right capabilities in the right roles is a cultural fit – matching the organization’s people with its values and strategy. Perhaps you’re nodding along at this point. Of course, your organization wants to fill itself with people who share its core values. But many continue to recruit, tolerate and even promote people who don’t fit, because those people “deliver results.” It’s understandable. Let’s say a team leader has determined the top sales person in her group is not a team player. (I’ll give you a real-life example of this in the next post.) If the team leader lets this top performer go, she can’t be certain exactly how things will shake out. But she knows that sales are almost certain to decline next month. Why rock the boat when your reward is almost certain to be poorer performance? One reason is it’s not always easy to balance the benefits of keeping a high performer with the harm. The benefits are easy to measure: our sales are rising; our output is up. The harm is harder to calculate. Maybe your team members aren’t cooperating with each other as much as they should, because they don’t trust that top performer. They think, with good reason, that he might hog the credit (and bonuses). Exactly how much is that costing your organization? The short answer is you don’t know. But often, it’s more than you think. Sooner or later, a poor cultural fit almost certainly will hurt your results. In business, as in many other endeavors, you’re often faced with a trade-off between short-term and long-term results. It’s almost always easier to choose the short-term and vaguely hope that the long-term will sort itself out. It rarely does. A bad cultural fit can happen any time. You might hire someone with a great resume who had a great interview, but after a few months on the job, it’s clear she can’t get along with other workers. A dispute might erupt between two people that starts a cycle of behavior that hurts the organization. There are often stages in an organization’s life cycle when it’s especially vulnerable to problems with cultural fit. Can you think of when that might be? That will be the topic for the next post. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

In my last post, I told you the story of Chris, a manager who upon his promotion restored the performance of a talented team by giving the workers autonomy – but autonomy guided by four critical questions that Chris used to communicate the company’s values: • Is this the right thing for the customer? • Is this the right thing for the short- and long-term financial performance of the company? • Is this the right thing for my coworkers? • Will this action help us be a better company tomorrow than we are today? At the end of the story, I asked you two questions: Why did it work so well, and what else did Chris need to do to communicate those values successfully? To answer the first question, consider the frustration of operating without a clear understanding of an organization’s values. To use a sports analogy, imagine you’re a running back on an unmarked field. On first down, you take the hand-off and move four steps to your left. The referee blows the whistle and says you went out of bounds. The next play, you go two steps to the right, and you get whistled again. How completely demotivating is that? After a few more plays like that, you’re going to start running straight into the line, because it seems futile to try to go around. You’re going to go nowhere, but you know you won’t get into trouble, either. You’re going to do the minimum to keep your job. That’s what the pros on Chris’s team had been reduced to before he joined them. They felt they couldn’t make a move without the “ref” blowing the whistle on them. After a while, they gave up and did the minimum to keep their jobs. Chris restored their motivation by giving them his trust. But he gave them trust with accountability, guided by the company’s values, translated into four questions that could guide their daily work. The four questions were well thought out. You might use similar questions for your organization. But Chris knew they weren’t enough, and here’s why: We like to think of values as a black and white, clearly drawn lines. But in the real world, sometimes the line is gray. Before you make that decision, you should ask somebody else. What if, for example, the commitment I’m making to this customer – doing the right thing for her – has a negative impact on somebody else in my organization? What if the special discount I offer makes the company better today (because I made the sale) but might make it worse off tomorrow (because word might get around that other customers can demand the same discount, cutting our profit margins)? When the line is gray, before you make that decision, you have to ask somebody else. A manager has to navigate these gray lines and communicate the thinking process behind them to the rest of the team. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

In our last post, we discussed cultural fit and the importance of hiring and supporting people who fit in well with your organization’s culture, values and strategy. That’s advice most of us heartily agree with but don’t always follow, and we explored the reasons why. Now I want to talk about “when.” Sometimes, a bad culture fit is obvious. Your teammate is selfish, doesn’t always tell the truth, doesn’t support others. In short, he’s a jerk, but the company tolerates him because his numbers look good. But often, the cause of a bad culture fit is subtler. Someone who has been a good cultural fit and has reflected the organization’s strategy and values for years is now out of step. What happened? In many cases, the person didn’t change; the organization did. Your organization might be facing a new business environment – a new competitor, a new technology, a new opportunity – that forces everyone to adjust. And a few of your teammates, for all their good qualities, can’t or won’t make the necessary adjustment. They aren’t bad people. But, they are still causing the team and the organization to under-perform. And like it or not, if they can’t get back in step with the organization’s direction and evolving culture, you have to make the tough choice that they must go. These critical moments are inevitable in successful organizations. Market and customer preferences change, the competitive landscape changes, technology changes. These changes force the organization to change to stay relevant. I worked with a consumer products company in the US that faced one of these moments. To this point, its sales force had been a “team,” to use the term very loosely, of cowboys. Each one had her own territory and was told to sign up as many customers as possible, plain and simple. If a customer just outside a sales person’s territory had a problem, she had zero incentive to help her teammate – that was just time wasted that could have been spent selling to one of her customers. Customer turnover was huge. At some point, it became clear that the company’s sales people had successfully sold the product to just about every potential customer in the area. Sales people were paid entirely on commission, based on selling the product to the customer, whether the customer was using it or not. Customers were winding up with a backlog of product they didn’t want and likely would never exhaust. What now? The company realized it had to change its approach. The focus could no longer be about getting new customers. It became, “How do we keep the customers we have, and make each customer relationship more satisfying and more profitable?” Accordingly, compensation for sales people changed from straight commission to a mix of salary and bonuses based on team results and dramatically improving the customer experience. One sales person was resistant to the change. He was a cowboy, and a good one. He had been a sales leader, and a lot of his peers respected him. But now, he was holding the organization back. He saw the new compensation system as a threat, and he didn’t change his approach. The group’s performance was being held hostage by this one guy. We had conversations with that company’s leadership team about this salesman several times. They agreed he was holding the organization back, but chose not to act. Maybe they thought they could rehabilitate him over time. Months went by. Other divisions were making the transformation much more effectively. Finally, after a year, the division leadership terminated the salesman. How do you think the team responded? First, a striking the number of people the very next day told the divisions managers a version of, “Wow, it’s about time. We thought you were never going to make the change.” As for team performance, it was like flipping a switch. Within days, the performance improvement was noticeable. We drew two critical lessons from this experience, which have been confirmed on many other occasions: You can’t hide a bad cultural fit. Your team members know if someone isn’t playing by the rules, and they expect you to do something about it. You might focus on the sales or productivity that walks out the door with the person you just let go. But your team’s performance is likely to rebound, perhaps more quickly than you expect. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

Understanding: Custom Training & Development WWCG provides a wide-range of training and development services to ensure our clients attract, develop and retain the talent necessary to be successful. We provide turnkey training management services; conduct training needs assessments; design, develop and deliver the necessary curriculum; and measure the effectiveness our clients’ training efforts to ensure they optimize the return on their training investment. No one would take a whitewater kayak through Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon without the proper skills and training necessary to navigate through the rapids. The skills can take years of hard work and effort to develop. Hence, we firmly believe that successfully executing the rapids and turbulence in business today is a direct result of an organization’s ability to recruit, select, engage, develop and retain the talented people necessary to execute effectively, in real time, at the speed of light. The ability to develop people is key. Few people who walk through the doors of their employers have all the skills necessary to be effective. They need the right developmental opportunities, at the right time, in the right place, delivered the right way. Many people in organizations believe that training is a waste of time, energy and money. And, frankly, it often is…when the audience is wrong or the timing, content, place or delivery of the developmental activity is off-the-mark. This wastes resources that should be targeted toward productive tasks. Fortunately, education and development in most organizations can be much more effective. Our process for doing so includes: Fully understanding the organization’s business goals and strategies. Understanding how these business goals and strategies tie directly to the skills and competencies to be developed by individuals and groups of people. Building, buying, acquiring etc. appropriate courseware or making other developmental efforts that best build the needed skills and competencies while cutting out wasted material. Helping clients effectively implement their People Development strategy. Rigorously evaluating the outcomes of your learning efforts to ensure they contribute to business objectives set out in the first step. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it. Custom training and development .