I don’t think I’ve ever watched a show on TLC (a unit of Discovery Channel), but I plan to this spring; even more surprising to me is that it’s a reality show.
A reality show about great corporate culture in an industry known for the opposite.
“We were interested in working with Southwest,” said Dustin P. Smith, vice president of communications for TLC, “as it is one of the largest airlines in the country and is known for its exuberant corporate culture and for having refreshing and personal customer service that is regarded as unique in the industry.
I doubt that anyone who travels is surprised at the choice of Southwest; and certainly not Southwest.
Ashley Dillon, a spokesperson for Southwest Airlines, said the airline was chosen also because of its tradition of transparency, which relies heavily on the use of social media, blogs and other media.
In a 2009 post citing the airline’s success even during the height of the recession I linked Southwest’s and Zappos’ success to the same core cultural belief—happy employees (one Southwest flight attendant even rapped about its GAAP results).
They stowed drugs in secret panels inside planes; stole laptops, lobsters and fine clothing flown as freight; and rifled through passengers’ belongings for perfume, liquor and electronics.
Passenger losses in 2009 totaled 5.3 million dollars and for the last eight years American Airlines was the source of more reports than any other airline.
“What percent of American Airlines employees would you say engaged in this conduct?” a federal prosecutor, Patricia E. Notopoulos, asked Matthew James, a defendant in the case who pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution. “About 80 percent,” Mr. James answered.
Of course, management claims it’s just a few bad apples.
Over the years I’ve read about and listened to hundreds of reasons why creating a culture that keeps employees happy just can’t be a priority— productivity and profit are the top priorities.
Obviously, they haven’t found the correlation, in spite of the high-profile examples that abound.
An interesting interview with Ed Schein, a senior professor at MIT and a “pioneer” on the subject of corporate culture, who now believes corporate culture is irrelevant.
The real answer to that is that Corporate Culture is no longer the relevant topic. I think the relevant topic is macro culture, nations, corporations, corporate culture (where all these nationalities and occupations play out), and micro cultures where you have problems in the operating room and in teamwork because you have multi-nationals, people from different occupations that cultures, all interplaying.
OK, I don’t have a PhD and I’m not a brilliant, recognized expert with an international reputation, but my initial reaction to reading the transcript of the interview was ’duh’.
Of course corporate culture is impacted by having multiple nationalities working together, but it was impacted when the workforce were all native-born, but from different regions or even neighborhoods.
As to the micro cultures created by each boss (leader in the accepted jargon), again my reaction is ‘duh.’
Every person is shaped by their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), AKA, values. Every manager (from team leader to department vp) creates a culture in their organization that is based on those values and it can be similar, synergistic or diametrically opposed to the cultures above.
All that said, I think it’s great when recognized experts put shape and definition to the things that most workers know by instinct and they do it with a level of credibility far beyond the reach of someone like me.
Here is the interview or you can read the transcript at the link above.
With all the research and resulting proof, much of it expressed in dollars, why is it so difficult for companies to execute good cultures?
There is no lack of advice and how-to help available and in a variety of ways, from consultants to books, blogs to videos.
Real-world facts show that good culture is still elusive; one of those ‘should’ actions that are frequently talked about, but often not done.
You create the culture in which those subordinate to you work, no matter your level of management, from team leader to CEO,
CEOs set overall company culture, while subordinates then create, intentionally or not, their own culture that either copies it, is synergistic to it or diametrically opposed to it.
The only guarantee is that whatever culture emerges will accurately reflect its creator’s thoughts, values, beliefs—in other words, MAP.
And therein lies the reason and the problem.
All the cultural intelligence focuses on good culture, with touchstones such as fairness, trust, authenticity, merit, etc.
If those attributes aren’t the bedrock of your own MAP then it’s impossible to implement a culture that embraces them.
So if you are looking to change a non-performing culture or improve a mediocre one, be sure to look deep inside yourself first to know what is possible and what won’t stick unless you change first.
I write a lot abut the importance of culture and now and then someone calls or writes asking why I keep harping on it (BTW, I love when readers call, that’s why there’s a toll-free number in the right-hand column.)
I’m not the only one fixated on the role culture plays in everything from acquiring, motivating and retaining employees to creativity, innovation and overall company success.
Booz’ strategy + business annual innovation survey focuses on culture, not money to improve results.
Booz & Company’s annual study shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.
“My turnover was non-existent. Our turnover is only two percent. We also hire the right people almost every time, because we know that core values are more important than skills. We can teach the skills. Now that we’re all aligned for what the vision is and what’s important to us as humans, we have a culture of resilience and efficient productivity.”
Lani Hay, founder/CEO of defense contracting company Lanmark Technology, turned over three COOs in the same year she won a prestigious national women’s entrepreneurship award and quadrupled company revenues.
“I don’t want to let anyone in the corporate culture who’s going to disrupt the culture and isn’t a good fit.” … Hay says she’s learned that she needs to listen to a wider array of Lanmark staffers, and make sure she values effective communications and an ability to work well with her team. She’s also paying more attention to cultural fit in hiring.
Lynn Blodgett, president and C.E.O. of ACS, a Xerox company, believes that all 85,000 ACS employees should think entrepreneurs. He sees a direct correlation between accountability and great the performance—increase the former and the latter goes up. This includes pushing P&L deeply into the organization, which encourages people to spend as if it was their own money.
“So you give people control, hold them accountable, give them control of their resources, and then monitor what they do.”
He also believes the right kind of incentives fuel motivation and engagement.
“I believe that a really important management principle is that if you get the incentives aligned, people will motivate themselves far better than you’ll ever motivate them. But, again, you have to get the incentives right.
It’s not only financial. It’s being able to feel like they have a level of control over their destiny, that they are valued in what they do, that they’re being successful, that they’re contributing. Those things are actually probably more important than the money. But you’ve got to get the money right, too.”
An additional benefit of this approach is that people will “self-select,” i.e., if they can’t/don’t achieve the incentives they will realize much faster that they’re in the wrong type of work.
I especially like this because it is a better career development tool. Being terminated for non-performance allows people to rationalize, whereas missing incentives tied to viable goals offers the insight that they may need to find more fulfilling work and not keep making the same mistake over and over and that’s not a bad thing
Notice I said “viable goals,” which mean feasible, possible, doable; not goals that only one in a hundred can achieve them.
Goals that set people up for failure have a boomerang effect; they’ll return to their place of origin and smash a large hole in that manager’s reputation.
This is also not a bad thing, since “holey” managers seem to align with “holey” companies making it easier to avoid them.
I am a major fan of HBS professor Jim Heskett; I like his thinking and especially like the questions he poses and the responses they draw.
In 1992 Heskett questioned the impact corporate culture had on success, but in his new book, The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force that Transforms Performance he identifies the missing connective link and talks about it here.
But they ultimately found that what really distinguished good and bad performers was the adaptability of cultures. They concluded that organizations need both strong and adaptable cultures to survive over long periods of time.
Not to minimize Heskett’s research, but from where I sit it seems so obvious.
All living things, especially humans, find ways to adapt to their particular situation; they have to or they won’t survive.
Corporate culture is also a living entity and the desire to preserve it by rejecting change is akin to encasing an insect in amber.
Corporate culture must adapt quickly to global, economic and political happenings or it will die.
All that said, it’s great that someone such as Jim Heskett, who has real clout and academic rigor, has proven it.
After all that’s been written and discussed it shouldn’t surprise you to know that most people crave a positive corporate culture and an open-door policy, but would it surprise you that this desire isn’t a product of the US or even the industrialized west?
Yesterday I mentioned I would share a universal truth from an unlikely source.
A positive corporate culture (40% of respondents) and an open-door policy (100%) are the two key elements of an ideal workplace, according to a recent region-wide human resource (HR) survey conducted by IIR Middle East.
Employee engagement and transparency were also found to be essential to enhanced employee performance within an organizational culture.
One of the reasons I find this so intriguing is not so much the desires themselves, but the local in which they are found.
Granted, my knowledge of the Middle East is limited, but the prevailing customs and culture don’t seem particularly conducive to the development of that kind of MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) in management
(And this has nothing to do with an Islamic vs. Judeo-Christian sub-text.)
Workers all seem to want the same thing, whether in the Mid-East, North and South America, Europe, Russia, India or Asia.
Of course, the surface results of implementing those desires might look different, but the basic cravings that drive them are the same, as is the main stumbling block—management.
Changes in transparency, door policy, not killing the messenger, etc. require changes in managers’ MAP and those changes can not be ordered or implemented from the outside in.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
Do clichés annoy you? There’s a good reason some of the tired, old clichés stay around—namely, they work. They say what needs to be said in a way that isn’t left open to interpretation, like ‘walk your talk’ as opposed to ‘authenticity’.
I was reminded of this after listening recently to an entrepreneur.
Here are the salient points of the conversation,
he had built a culture based on fairness, trust and authenticity;
he worked hard to hire the smartest people available;
salary and stock options were based on necessity, i.e., he did what he had to do to land the best candidates.
I asked him what would happen when people learned of the discrepancies between their package and a peer’s; that the approach seemed to fly in the face of his “fairness, trust and authenticity” statements.
He replied that
people trusted him to do what was best for the company;
he was fair to each person based on their individual expectations;
any effort to implement a uniform compensation (salary and/or stock) policy would hobble his ability to hire stars; and
it was a non-event because nobody knew anyone else’s package.
I have to admit, the naiveté of his final point cracked me up (I managed to control my hilarity).
Basically, he seems to believe that fairness, trust and authenticity have flexible meanings and that expediency trumps them all.
What do you believe?
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Eighty percent of respondents who reported a good employee-supervisor relationship claim that the most important thing a boss can do to create a positive working relationship is to both solicit and value their input.
Among respondents who claimed to have a poor relationship with their boss, 42 percent stated that one of the top reasons the relationship was strained was due to their boss’ failure to listen or take their input into account.
Of the managers surveyed, less than 25 percent identified soliciting input as an area in which they wanted to improve.
What many bosses don’t get is that this desire isn’t a demand driven by ego, entitlement or insecurity.
It is simply a display of intellectual self-worth on the part of employees and what they are looking for is an affirmation of the boss’ trust, belief and reason for hiring them.
I got it, maybe because I felt the same way, and focusing on that desire put me in the top 10% of MRI recruiters for 12 years.
Think about it; if the people on your team aren’t capable enough to comment intelligently and offer viable input why in the world did you hire them?
Company cultures are much like the people who create them, unique on the outside, but similar basics on the inside—good like good or bad like bad. It’s how those basics manifest themselves that the world calls culture.
First up from Forbes is a quick overview of the basics; it’s a long way from comprehensive, but it’s a place to start.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how Millennials are demanding/driving change in corporate culture, but when you look at what they want it’s similar to what most people want. The difference is found more in their attitude—as it is in all generations.
Creating culture is an inside out function—what is inside the boss will form the foundation of what is inside the culture—for better or worse—so know the culture and you know the boss and vice versa.
I don’t think I’ve ever watched a show on TLC (a unit of Discovery Channel), but I plan to this spring; even more surprising to me is that it’s a reality show.
After all that’s been written and discussed it shouldn’t surprise you to know that most people crave a positive corporate culture and an open-door policy, but would it surprise you that this desire isn’t a product of the US or even the industrialized west?
Do clichés annoy you? There’s a good reason some of the tired, old clichés stay around—namely, they work. They say what needs to be said in a way that isn’t left open to interpretation, like ‘walk your talk’ as opposed to ‘authenticity’.
Company cultures are much like the people who create them, unique on the outside, but similar basics on the inside—good like good or bad like bad. It’s how those basics manifest themselves that the world calls culture.
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