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Why customers feel bullied

A recent study cited in the New York Times has shown that school children, if left without influence, tend towards bullying and other selfish behavior. And conversely, that it is quite possible to instil in a school values of teamwork, tolerance and support for each other. This study concluded that values have to be, and can, be taught. Fast forward 20 years and the child takes his or her place in the organization. How many organizations take responsibility for instilling the important values in their employees?

I have often wondered why it is that basically good, constructive individuals can become rude, unattentive and often bullies themselves when placed into the world of their organization. Unguided, organizational culture tends towards the lowest common demoninator. Some individuals are actively offensive, and most of the rest, lacking support to be otherwise, take steps down that same path in order to survive.

Instilling the right values is a key role of leaders. Some education occurs explictly through conversation, induction and training. Much occurs through role modelling. The rest occurs through the process of encouraging and discouraging behaviors when they are displayed in others. This process forms the foundation on which a culture is built naturally and over time. It is particularly obvious in companies with strong cultures in which they are proud. But there are many others which remind me of the school yard. Lots of focus on technical development, but very little on the development of values. And in these environments, the lowest common demoninator behavior tends to prevail. Selfish behavior inside the organization spills out to the outside world. The consequence is that customers and other stakeholders are bullied. The techniques used become more sophisticated, but the experience of the customer remains similar – helpless, co-erced, ignored, unappreciated.

When an organization wants to introduce new behavior and a new value, the natural evolutionary process is usually not enough. The leaders themselves need to change, as well as everyone else in the organization. In these circumstances a more proactive plan to build the desired culture is necessary to speed the process along. The same challenge occurs when, as an organization grows rapidly, the established, natural process of values instillation becomes strained by the sheer speed of growth.

Some techniques can help improve the values instillation process

Explicit expression of what the important values are
Explicitly link a good behavior to the value of which it is an example – (eg. “The way you are asking questions is exactly what I mean when I say we need to become an organization which challenges status quo”)
Setting standards and sticking to them – (eg.”We will not speak badly of someone behind their back unless we have also spoken to them directly”).

Why do leaders engage in culture?

If you are reading this blog you are probably already convinced that building the right culture can add value to the organization. I imagine you do not find that same passion in all of your colleagues, or your clients. Yet you need their advocacy in order to create substantial momentum. How can you successfully influence others, and engage their hearts and minds in this process?

I have found two reasons for leaders to become advocates of building the right culture.

Culture will help fulfill their future vision

Culture will remove their present pain

Each requires a different engagement strategy. But both require the same basic ingredients: Why, what and how.

Why culture will facilitate the vision, or alleviate the current problem. This builds the business case. For example, a vision of global expansion requires a culture of global collaboration. A problem with poor customer satisfaction will be reduced by a culture where individuals take responsibility for solving problems, rather than trying to pass the buck.

What is required to change a culture. To answer this question requires a knowledge of the elements which make up a culture business plan, covering changes to behavior, to symbols and to business systems. Most leaders become much more comfortable, and willing to invest what it takes, when they can see a well constructed path which demonstrates that this is a hard business opportunity with a rigorous process.

How the process has to be led. A successful culture process requires strong leadership. A leader’s confidence builds when they can see the types of activities, and personal change, that will be needed. Meeting peers who have taken these steps can have a powerful influence, and I recommend encouraging these wherever possible.

Those of us who advise, and those of us who follow, leaders have a responsibility to help them be successful. Our influencing skills contribute to their success. When your leader does not respond the way you hoped, ask yourself how you need to change to influence successfully, rather than being tempted to ‘blame’ the leader for not getting it. There are always ways in which we can improve.

It's now…and it's us

The ’00s marked the rise of talent management as a serious enabler of business performance. In the ’60s-’70s it was marketing and brand management, with the corresponding rise in the importance of the marketing professionals. The ’80s-’90s marked the emergence of technology as the key enabler, and the development of the CIO role. Now it is the turn of talent management and the HR manager is turning from the old ‘personal manager’ role into a key strategic partner in the business with a seat at the top table.

There are some symbols of this trend:

Every major consulting firm, including those who would previously have turned up their nose at HR, now have a ‘human capital’ business. McKinsey, PWC, Accenture, etc. etc. It has been their growth engine in recent years.
CEOs and companies who emphasize people and culture are getting more media coverage. Jack Walsh at GE was one of the first, think now of Starbucks, SouthWest Airlines, Google, Zappos, etc. People want to work for and buy from companies that put people and culture first.
Spend on leadership development is increasing rapidly. According to the ASTD, in the US alone, companies spent $109 billion in 2005, increasing to $134 billion in 2007. Of this latter figure, $29.5 billion was spent on external resources.

I see a number of factors that have combined to cause this rise in the importance of talent management

Culture has been identified as the cause of many corporate woes, from merger failures, to unethical practices bringing whole businesses down (Enron, etc), to the recent financial crisis. Leadership behavior is the key driver of corporate culture. Quote Alan Greenspan: ‘The prime factor in predicting whether a company will be honest or not is the character of its CEO. If the CEO countenances managing reported earnings, that attitude will drive the entire accounting regime of the firm. If he or she instead insists on an objective representation of a company’s business dealings, that standard will govern recordkeeping and due diligence”.
Changes in demographics mean that top talent will become a scarcer resource. With the aging of the Baby Boomers there are fewer people available to fill leadership roles. A 2007 Bersin Associates study showed that 53% of organizations face leadership shortages, most of which are at the mid-management and director level.
Gen X & Y have no problem leaving their company if they are not getting what they want. The age of employee loyalty and desire for security is gone.
Rise of service industries means that the brand experience and customer satisfaction levels are much more closely linked to employees.
Technology driven changes in work practices and decision making (e.g., global teams, quality of management information, complexity of decision making, speed of competitive change) place higher demands on leaders. The old ‘command & control’ style is just not going to work, and leaders need a higher order of emotional intelligence, self awareness, communication and relationship building skills. These skills are all learnable.
The rise of women in the workplace has moved the balance more towards the more collaborative and reflective elements of management
Aggressive and well informed recruitment firms approach an organization’s best talent every day, and these people need to feel very engaged with their employer to resist the temptations they receive. Leaders who are receiving coaching increase their level of engagement by learning to more successfully address the challenges which frustrate them.
Outside of work, there has been a massive rise in personal development activity (think of the self help book sector alone) and many leaders come to work already aware that there is a link between how they think, how they behave and the outcomes they produce. These people want development support, including coaching, to help them perform to a higher level.

I am excited! All of us – consultants, HR professsionals, business leaders – have a role to contribute to and gain from this trend, and perhaps a responsibility to build higher standards for the behavior in corporations. I look forward to exploring with you how we can pursue this goal.

From burning platform to burning ambition

There is a feature which I notice seems to be common to all CEOs who successfully change the culture of their organization. A change occurs at the BE level, and the journey becomes personal as well as organizational. The BE level refers to what goes on inside our heads and hearts – the values, beliefs, feelings and mental models which determine our behavior. Once a change occurs at this level, it is transformational in the sense that one never goes back to the original state. For example,

a leader who had a mental model that pushing sales will produce results shifts their belief system to one which considers remarkable service to be the key to success
a leader who had all the answers has a realization that the input from others adds rich new dimensions.

Most leaders would say that they already agree that remarkable service matters and input from others is important. But their behavior indicates that this is not true. Only when the behavior is consistent with the expoused belief has a shift occurred at the BE level.

These shifts are personally transformational. They are so exciting that they lead to a passion to learn more and pursue a path of personal development. The culture journey usually commences because of a burning platform at the business level. If leaders go through the development journey usually associated with culture change (coaching, training, feedback, etc) with an open mind and an open heart, they enable a change at the BE level. With this, the burning platform becomes a burning ambition.

Here is a CEO I work with describing one of those ah-ah BE level moments for him. Check out the clip.

Peter Fuda hosting a recent Human Synergistics conference, gave insight into burning platform, burning ambition in relation to his doctorate research on leadership transformation.

How to set the right cultural goals

When I studied the Achievement motivation described in David McKelland’s work, I researched how successful people set and used goals. I concluded that effective goals actually facilitated their own achievement. The level of stretch, the degree of ownership, the clarity of expression and ease of measurement are strong factors which actually trigger the achievement motivation inside us, driving us to higher dedication. A goal with the right level of stretch (challenging, but do-able) will produce performance enhancing activities way in excess of a goal that is too high. The former is likely to deliver a bigger actual result than the later.

So, as at the time of year when many of us are taking this time to set goals for ourselves let’s include some which facilitate the achievement of a culture closer to your ideal. Here are some guidelines.

Start with personal goals related to your own behavior. Focus on the one leadership behavior where the gap is greatest between your walk and the talk (the organization’s cultural aspirations or your own personal leadership vision). If you don’t know what that behavior is, make it your goal to find out, to accept what you find, and to take action. (AWARENESS, ACCEPTANCE, ACTION).

Measure culture in the smallest available chunks. If you are measuring culture at the organizational level, ask for and provide data at the level of individual teams. Ask for and provide new data annually. Longer intervals between measurements make it difficult to stay personally focused on goal achievement. Smaller temperature checks between data points provide even better feedback to allow course correction if necessary. This allows you to set measurable goals with your team.

Treat your culture initiatives with rigor as any other business project. Deadlines, milestones, reporting. The rigor of holding yourself and others to account forces you to make culture tangible.

Share your goals. Even the personal ones related to behavior. Talking about your goals increases the stakes (there is an expectation that you will walk your talk). It also enrolls others in helping you. When I told people that I have a goal to become a better listener, and asked them to point out to me when they felt I was not doing that, they became my helpers rather than my critics.

I want 2010 provide you with the opportunity to set and achieve your cultural goals. I won’t sign off with “good luck” because my mission is to take the ‘luck, chance and magic’ out of cultural aspirations. As you know, it is not about luck!

Thanks from Australia & 2010 plans

This will be the final blog that I post for 2009. I write it from Australia, the country where I spent 20 years of my career, and the home place of many of the people I consider part of my core tribe. I have a special love for this vast country.

Many companies in Australia have dedicated a lot of effort to changing their culture over many years. Some of the most pioneering work on culture and personal development has occurred here. Symbolically, when I typed in ‘culture’ in the People section of LinkedIn, I found that many of the HR people who have ‘Culture’ in their job title are based in Australia. It has been a privilege for me to be a part of this community and to contribute to building the frameworks for leaders to manage this process. A big pat on the back to Human Synergistics Australia who have done a fantastic job of lifting the profile of culture in the business community – 4000 people attended their Leadership & Culture conferences this year. (If you are familiar with the HS tools, you will smile at their Xmas card).

In Australia and across the world the gap that I find is the knowledge of how to systematically go about changing a culture, or building one from stratch. Culure development plans often lack the rigor common in other business plans, language can be fuzzy, business benefits not tightly defined.

In early 2010 I will be launching my new business ventures, which will be dedicated to providing tools for HR people, leaders and consultants to build the cultures they need. I want to make the Walking the Talk methodologies the standard for managing culture, and easily available across the world. Culture can be planned, implemented and measured. It is not magic. It requires leaders who will walk their own talk, and who are supported by others who can help them execute a process which is scalable, sustainable and transferable.

Thank you for supporting me this year through reading this blog, through your comments and emails of encouragement and insight. I have more to offer next year, so stay tuned.

How we can build a culture for sustainability

Every country comes to Copenhagen with their own agenda, seeking to influence the agreement so that it favors their particular situation and demands less of them. What a challenge to create sufficient shared purpose and sense of one-team to facilitate the willingness to sacrifice personal short term gain with group longer term sustainability. As I watch them struggle to reach agreement, I realize how much easier it makes things in a corporate structure when there is one overall boss who has the authority to pull most of the strings that influence culture. For changed behavior on climate change we need enough trust to develop that everyone is prepared to give something. The PM of Australia was quoted yesterday saying that ‘he would not give anything unless everyone does’. Hmm…

The Oxford Leadership Academy has started a journal with the wonderfully aspirational goals of “changing the trajectory of civilization” in which I wrote an article about building a culture which supports sustainability. Take a look here.

BA: Why you need to manage your culture EVERY year

In the 1980s, under the leadership of Lord King and Sir Colin Marshall, the British Airways undertook a culture change programme which was most advanced and successful in the corporate world. Here is a paper from HBR you can buy on how they did it. Under the banner of ‘World’s Favorite Airline’ they transformed themselves from a government owned British airline to one of the very best airlines ever. Every staff member was retrained, all of their service practices changed, and, as a customer, excellent service became a reality in the airline industry. Anyone who worked on that program, internal BA staff or consultant, was hot property for hiring to do the same thing for other companies. We were all so in admiration of what they achieved.

Yesterday, their cabin crew voted to go on a 12 day strike which will ground all flights over the busy Christmas period and ruin the holiday plans of approximately one million customers. They were already losing GBP1.6m a day. This could be a fatal blow. What happened?

Culture is hard to change. BA achieved it. It is also hard to kill. Once staff experience what it is like to work in a great, customer centric culture, no-one wants to loose that. High standards, strong values, become a personal passion. But culture is sustained by the messages people receive about what is important. New leaders bring new messages. Existing leaders, when under pressure, can revert to old behaviours. Eventually, different messages will produce different behaviour in others. At its worst, the relationship between management and staff becomes so mistrustful that a strike like this one is possible. What a tragic failure of leadership.

Culture, like brand, has to be actively managed every year. It cannot be taken for granted. It has to remain conscious, the links between culture and performance continually emphasised, the planned activities revisited annually, and budget assigned. Without this, you wake up one year looking like British Airways.

Analysis of the Australian culture market

I arrived in Australia to work and to spend Christmas. Culture has a much higher profile in this country than I have found in the rest of the world. Whereas in other countries I often find culture as a bullet point filed under leadership or talent management, in Australia the prevaling view is that culture is a critical driver and one which can be managed and measured. Most organizations are measuring their culture using Human Synergistics tool OCI. 4000 people attended the HS Conference in September, and Human Synergistics have done a great job at lifting the profile of culture as a management tool. Many companies give their most senior HR person the title ‘People & Culture’. A few organizations have successfully changed their culture in a relatively short time frame and delivered good business performance. Some have run programs but not seen real change. Some find themselves trapped in a framework which they have communicated but are now not sure how to execute.

The OCI tool is an effective measure of the basics characteristics valuable for every culture – responsibility, open-ness and a lack of defensiveness. But it is a very complicated tool to communicate, and can lead to a dependence on the OCI language which actually disconnects leaders from their own expression of values. Work is required to continually link the OCI language to the strategy and aspirations of the individual company. Yes, cultures need to be ‘more blue’ but how does a leader easily link this to what is needed in day-to-day execution of strategy.

My suggestions to Australian companies who are using OCI and looking for a next step

Introduce a much simpler tool in parallel to OCI, and use some qualitative work to support. Use qualitative work to understand the specifics of the behaviours, symbols and systems which underpin your current culture. Human Synergistics OEI tool does not give the specificity required to really prepare a culture plan.
Reconnect your culture efforts to your own strategic direction, focussing on the few behaviors which are most critical for your business. Safety, or teamwork, or customer centricity.
Create the feedback loop for leaders to define the critical changes to their own behavior that will send the message that they want things to change. Make this personal again, and worded in personal lanuage, not OCI terms. Listen more. Spend time with customers. Have difficult conversations.

I encourage Australian leaders and consultants to take pride in what has been achieved and have confidence in themselves. The groundwork has been set. Leaders need to take charge and enfuse their efforts with their own language, their own expectations and their own humanity. And, if they do not feel that this is the top priority for them right now, to have the courage to walk away. Going through the motions, or turning this into a task for HR, would be the worst possible outcome.

Why a single message is important

In Chapter 15 of Walking the Talk I profile Lion Nathan, one of the most successful culture change processes in which I have been participated. Bob Barbour, the head of HR there was extremely tight on the importance of single, clear culture messages. I remember a time when an outside consultancy were found to be running a leadership training company in one of the outer regions of the company. They were teaching about the “performance culture”. They had a proprietory material centred around this concept. Bob found out about it and hit the roof. Lion Nathan’s single message was the “achievement culture”. People argued that the two were the same thing, and it was just a languaging issue. He disagreed. He understood the power of language. If their culture message was “achievement”, language of “performance” was confusing. Gradually the message would get diluted. Cynics would accuse the leadership team of using superficial slogans, not deep consistency. The opportunities for frequent repetition and linkages would be lost. The consulting firm did not get it. Attached to their proprietory material, they did not understand why Bob was making such a big deal about this. They did not last as an supplier to the company.

I learnt from Bob that changing culture needed a clear communication strategy that was consistent. Similar to an external brand campaigns. The top team were really committed, their challenge was to keep the pressure on with a clear message until there was a shift in behavior. Culture is all about messages, and many of these are non-verbal. Achieving consistency is difficult. The absolute minimum standard is the the verbal messages (‘the talk’) need to be consistent, these are the bedrock on which the changes in visible actions (‘the walk’) behaviors, symbols and systems can be observed.

My Walking the Talk methodology describes five cultural archetypes: Achievement, One-Team, Customer Centric, Innovation and People-First. When I ask clients to describe their desired culture, most list at least four of these. I strongly encourage people to focus on these sequentially, rather than all at once. Take a year or two to really focus on Innovation, and you give yourself the best chance to achieve traction. Go for all four at once and you confuse your message. All can form a part of your core values statement, but your culture planning is best done with one priority focus for the year. Having chosen it, and named it, take Lion Nathan’s approach and stay consistent with both the intent and the language.

It makes a difference.

Walking the Talk

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