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.

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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.

• A personal tragedy drove Jay Steinfeld, founder and CEO of Blinds.com, to re-evaluate himself and his values, which caused him to move from a culture of fear and micromanaging to one of trust and delegation.

“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.

And for those looking to improve hiring there is no better screening tool than culture.

The biggest complaint I hear is that “culture stuff takes so much time” and I suppose that’s true when culture is applied like paint instead of stain.

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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.

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It’s always surprising how often different sources address the same problems offering similar solutions, but in such different ways that at first glance you wouldn’t notice.

Within days of each other, both Fortune/CNN and BNET offered up good information on employee motivation. Fortune/CNN article was science-based, while BNET was experience-based, with a leavening of humor.

They both said essentially the same thing with one exception, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Motivating employees means providing real purpose in their work; it requires challenging them and encouraging them to learn and grow; and it requires clear communications, including well-defined plans, roles and responsibilities.

Pretty standard stuff.

Now for the exception; the science offered up a new twist that just might help your implementation.

Removing obstacles is not the flip side of providing purpose, challenge and clear communications.

In other words, this is not one of those times that removing the negative means the positive will automatically rush in to fill the void or vice versa, that having the positives will overcome the negatives.

In this case you need to address the two as totally separate subjects.

First, remove any obvious negatives.

Next, start implementing the positives.

Third, be on the lookout for new obstacles.

Fourth, and most important, be sure that you on the side of the angels and not one of the obstacles.

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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.

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Does promotion cause deafness? Is that why it’s so difficult for bosses to hear?

Does it erase memory, so that new bosses forget the desires and aspirations of their pre-boss days?

These questions aren’t meant as a joke; decades of studies and surveys indicate there is some basis in fact.

How else do you explain findings such as these,

• 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?

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“Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to.” –Henry James (The Ambassadors)

Want to boost productivity? Ramp up innovation? Reduce turnover? Attract better candidates?

Live all you can.

As true as this is for life in general, it is even truer for the sub-sector called work-life and you should make a point of embedding the wisdom in your company/group’s DNA.

For your people, living all you can at work means

• having multiple opportunities to expand on all fronts;
• taking on unfamiliar roles;
• doing things outside their comfort zone; and
• understanding the “big picture” and how their efforts fit, affect and support it.

For you, living all you can at work means

• providing the above opportunities to everyone;
• encouraging them to go for it even when they resist; and
• providing the training, coaching and mentorship needed for them to expand successfully.

Doing so is the most critical part of your job description and all but guarantees you’ll accomplish the rest of it.

Live all you can—a worthy mantra as long as you’re willing to back it up with your own actions.

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Much has been written about Gen Y, AKA, Millennials, in the workforce—the difficulty hiring them, the problems managing them and the much greater problems of retaining them.

What makes them so different?

“When they get to the workplace, they have a sense of entitlement, a need for validation, difficulty in really discerning what to do because their whole lives were managed,” –Christine Hassler, Gen Y career expert and consultant.

Not only managing them, but also fighting their fights—even at the office.

There are eighty million Gen Y, but not all of them fit this description; millions of them are ‘aMillennials‘.

The funny thing (as I’ve said before) is that when you look at a list of what turns Gen Y off you’ll find the same traits that turn off 90+% of the workforce.

• Inflexibility.
• Judgmental attitudes.
• Close-mindedness.
• Unwillingness to listen to and respect Gen Y’s opinions, ideas and views.
• Intimidation.

Yuk! Nobody wants to work for someone like that; the difference is that Gen Y may less patient and quicker to leave—at least until they have a mortgage and kids to consider.

Ryan Healy, co-founder and COO of Brazen Careerist, attributes companies’ success to culture.

“The companies that are doing it well and right know that it’s really about the culture you create.”

Tony Hsieh is well known for creating a culture that both attracts and retains and it’s not just for Millennials.

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Do metaphors fly free at your workplace? Do you find yourself using them in order to be heard?

According to Ceri Roderick, emeritus partner at business psychologists Pearn Kandola, while metaphors can be a kind of expressive shortcut, they can also have a detrimental effect.

“The language you use can affect your corporate culture.” Thus, if you spend long enough talking about “cutting the competition off at knees”, he says you are going to have a workplace where a kind of Nietzschean ethic rules and the weak are meat for bullies.”

I admit to using metaphors, although far less than I did a few decades ago. I find some are good ways to achieve focus, such as “the elephant in the room;” I may be guilty of the occasional 500 pound canary, but not of 800 pound gorillas. (Science writer Richard Conniff notes that “gorillas are vegetarians, not predators and the average alpha male spends most of his time passing gas, picking his nose and yawning; not the image a hard-charging executive wants to present to the public,” but actually a valid description of many executives.)

And while I know good culture fosters innovation, thinking outside the box has little to do with it, since it’s not possible.

The biggest problem with metaphors is that they are boring and limit people’s ability to effectively communicate.

If you don’t believe me play the metaphor game at your next meeting as follows:

• choose a scorekeeper;
• explain that the point of the game is to NOT use any metaphors;
• attendees listen for metaphors and call the speaker on them by shouting ‘metaphor’;
• the person who used the metaphor then restates their comment/point;
• using a metaphor scores one point;
• the person with the lowest score wins and
• gets the prize (candy bar, lunch coupon, etc.)

It’s surprising how difficult it is for many people to discuss anything sans metaphors.

Jamie Jauncey, a business language trainer and author, says, “Business is ultimately about people and connecting and relationships. It should be using the real language of human exchange, not some Orwellian bizpeak.”

This is true whether you are in sales, engineering, finance or whatever. You and your people need to connect with each other and with ‘them’, wherever and whomever ‘them’ may be.

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Tony Hsieh Has been beating the drum that happy employees provide the best customer experience and help assure success and sharing his wisdom on how to do it.

The other question I keep getting asked is how do you do it when you

• aren’t the CEO or even a senior manager;
• don’t have the budget for great perks; or
• aren’t the touchy-feely rah-rah type (direct quote).

The short answer is in five words, you take time to care.

Why should you care?

The how is nicely summed up in this article about new research from Harvard Business School.

Gallup estimates the cost of America’s disengagement crisis at a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity annually.

$300 billion is a number that should get anyone’s attention.

The engagement issue is relatively simple and definitely cheap to solve.

The problem is that, as usual, employees and managers aren’t on the same page.

The research shows that for employees “the single most important [event] — by far — is simply making progress in meaningful work.”
Managers are another story.

“When we asked 669 managers from companies around the world to rank five employee motivators in terms of importance, they ranked “supporting progress” dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failed to recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary motivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.”

What constitutes supporting progress isn’t rocket science, either.

• Autonomy, meaning no micromanagement;
• sufficient resources, meaning valid scheduling and enough of whatever to get the job done without having to beg or being left to fail without them; and
• learning from problems, meaning understanding the why and how, not just the what.

If you find any of the three difficult to provide you need to look in the mirror.

The problem isn’t about having time to support progress; the problem is that your MAP doesn’t support the concept.

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