Yesterday’s Golden Oldie referenced Jack Welch’s responsibility for the atrocious forced ranking system followed by so many large, and even not-so-large, companies.

… a review process known as “stack ranking” or “rank and yank” in which employees are rated against each other as opposed to how well they meet their job requirements. (…) Using it long-term tends to create a dog-eat-dog kind of culture.

That changed drastically under Jeff Immelt, GE’s current CEO, as described last year.

According to Raghu Krishnamoorthy, the head of GE’s in-house management school,

“Command and control is what Jack was famous for. Now it’s about connection and inspiration.”

But not at Amazon, because Jeff Bezos walked in Welch’s shoes on many levels, including reviews.

… the review process was described like “choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players.” (…) Bezos believed managers needed to raise the performance bar with every new hire so that the only employees that rise through the company would be the ones considered exceptional.

Until last year.

There is nothing like public embarrassment (humiliation?) via the New York Times to encourage rethinking one’s actions.

It took a more than a year, but Amazon is finally changing its review process.

Bezos is slow; Microsoft ditched it in 2015 and Marissa Mayer never managed to implement it, although she did try.

Amazing how it’s only taken 30+ years for management to figure out that setting employee against employee does not foster teamwork.

All I can say is, “Duh.”

Image credit: gorfor

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

This one reminds us that there are as many cultures as there are bosses/managers/supervisors/team leaders in the company. All existing, for better or worse, under the umbrella of the company’s official culture. Read other Golden Oldies here

“That culture is like the air we breathe or the water that fish swim in. It has the potential, for better or worse, to affect everybody in the same way.” –Dr. Linda H. Pololi, a senior scientist at Brandeis University

Dr. Pololi was talking about the culture in academic medicine negatively affecting men as well as women, although the women’s situation has a higher profile.

While the information in the article is interesting, as well as unexpected in part, it’s her comment at the end on which I want to focus.

As a manager you set the culture of your own group; it may closely resemble your company’s culture or may be wildly divergent.

The divergence is not always a bad thing—many managers have created great cultures in the midst of toxic ones.

By the same token, toxic mini cultures have been propagated within good company cultures by managers who believe that approach is the best way to manage.

Companies are much like gardens and the cultures within its main culture are what grow therein.

If you equate good culture to flowers and bad culture to weeds the problem becomes obvious.

Flowers are fragile and require more thought, attention and cultivation for them to spread.

However, with no effort on the part of the gardener, weeds spread quickly and if ignored will take over the garden.

There is an anonymous poem that I do my best to emulate throughout my life,

Your mind is a garden,
Your thoughts are the seeds,
You can grow flowers or
You can grow weeds.

With a bit of tweaking you can use it for your company,

Your company is a garden,
Your cultures are seeds,
You can grow flowers or
You can grow weeds.

It’s always a choice, but this choice will affect your employees, customers, vendors and investors.

Be sure to choose consciously, wisely and well.

Flickr image credit: William Murphy

The only people who aren’t aware of the importance of culture in today’s working world must have been living off planet for the last few decades.

“…a toxic culture can trigger actions that ultimately lead to business failure. When money is viewed as the singular motivator, leaders will not be able to engage the hearts and minds and to get the best out of their people.”

Further, they are aware of what research shows people feel is most important.

For most people what really counts (apart from fair compensation) is respect, recognition, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of belonging, and a feeling of purpose.

Manfred Kets De Vries, the Distinguished Clinical Professor of Leadership Development & Organizational Change at INSEAD has an simple, one-word solution.

Gratitude.

The first and most basic thing is to respect people who work in the organisation. As gratitude evokes cooperative responses, so too it creates mutually supportive relationships, helps neutralise conflict, generates positive energy and fosters a collective “we’re in this together” mentality. It gives people due recognition, fair treatment, a sense of belonging, and a voice.

If gratitude, as displayed in authentic thanks from bosses at whatever levels works, why are there still so many toxic cultures around?

The answer to that is also found in one simple word.

Ego.

Your take-away is also simple.

If you have trouble walking gratitude, as opposed to just talking it, the it’s time to have a real heart-to-heart with the person in your mirror.

Flickr image credit: Wagner Machado Carlos Lemes

Uber’s culture is on view in the news and it hasn’t been pretty.

Current news is focused on the privacy scandal, the compensation and pricing rage of a few weeks ago has fallen off the front page as have the overly-aggressive driver recruiting and efforts to sabotage a competitor’s fundraising while Uber’s pushing subprime loans to its drivers seems to be totally eclipsed.

Many users are deleting their accounts

To Imran Malek, an engineer at DataXu in Boston, it signals a winner-takes-all culture that justifies any behavior so long as everyone is getting rich. “If investors choose to value you for billions, you are untouchable.”

VC Mark Suster wrote a spirited defense of Uber, although I don’t consider it as unbiased as he claims.

He claims that most of Uber’s actions fall in the category of ‘business as usual’, with the exception of employees accessing the so-called god view that tracks users’ movements.

I will tell you that if I were Uber this is the one thing I would plug up immediately and enforcing swift punishment for violations. If the public doesn’t trust you with basic confidentiality as a service you’re toast.

All of the articles offer multiple source links for those of you who want an in-depth picture.

A company’s culture provides an insider’s look at it’s values; a quote from Lisa Abeyta, founder of a tech company in Albuquerque, sums it up nicely,

“There is a difference between being competitive and being dirty. It is bad-boy, jerk culture. And I can’t celebrate that.”

Flickr image credit: Robert Payne

Good mood; weird mood; bad mood; silly mood.

We all have moods and those moods affect everything we do.

Moods are affected by all kinds of stuff, such as the weather.

Good weather = good mood; bad weather = bad mood.

In turn, our actions reflect our mood, rather than reflecting the real world; take online restaurant reviews

“The best reviews are written on sunny days between 70 and 100 degrees,” researcher Saeideh Bakhshi concluded. “A nice day can lead to a nice review. A rainy day can mean a miserable one.”

Likewise, the culture created by each boss actively effects moods, thus having a profound effect on workers creativity, productivity and a slew of other attitudes.

Bad cultures create negative moods.

Negative moods can lead to a procrastination doom loop, in which an individual perpetually delays important tasks while waiting for an angel of inspiration to visit.

When you’re the boss, no matter what you say or how you squirm, the culture that exists in your own organization is a direct result of you.

Flickr image credit: kuhnmi

In 2012 we looked at how a bad judgment and a toxic, dysfunctional culture killed off the 113-year-old premier law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf.

But having read the latest I have to revise what I said.

In addition to bad judgment, think gross stupidity.

I suppose I should say “alleged,” but the evidence leaves little doubt regarding just how stupid these bosses were.

Consider the smoking emails between Steven Davis, Dewey’s former chairman; Stephen DiCarmine, the firm’s former executive director; Joel Sanders, the former chief financial officer; and Zachary Warren, a former client relations manager.

Four men, who were charged by New York prosecutors on Thursday with orchestrating a nearly four-year scheme to manipulate the firm’s books to keep it afloat during the financial crisis, talked openly in emails about “fake income,” “accounting tricks” and their ability to fool the firm’s “clueless auditor,” the prosecutors said.  (…) One of the men even used the phrase “cooking the books” to describe what they were doing to mislead the firm’s lenders and creditors in setting the stage for a $150 million debt offering…  

And ignorance isn’t a viable excuse for lawyers by any stretch of the imagination.

The global number one rule in our post-Enron world is that you do not write anything in emails that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of your newspaper.

In case you aren’t familiar with them, the Darwin Awards “are cautionary tales about people who kill themselves in really stupid ways, and in doing so, significantly improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race.”

Perhaps there should be a special award for people who kill companies through acts of excessive stupidity.

Image credit: Tombstone Generator

How do you describe your culture?

Most bosses describe theirs as more positive and in more glowing terms than their people do.

Which makes sense, given that most people see their own actions in the best light and culture is a reflection-made-real of the boss’s own MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

Is it really a cause for concern if your team describes it differently, more negatively or as downright horrible, especially if their complaints seem nit-picking or sound more like whining to you?

Even if you see nothing wrong with it; even if it reflects most/all your previous managers, you had better pay attention to other opinions if you want to have a strong, productive, high retention/low turnover organization—whether team or the entire company.

Or, in the shortened version of what Douglas Adams so famously said, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it most likely is a duck.

Flickr image credit: USFWS Mountain Prairie

Mortgage originators are rarely great places to be, whichever side of the desk you are on.

The exception is Quicken Loans.

Quicken Loans was rated highest in customer satisfaction among mortgage originators in 2010, 2011 and 2012, according to J. D. Power & Associates. The company has also been ranked in the top 30 of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for 10 consecutive years.

What makes Quicken different?

Founder Dan Gilbert’s and CEO Bill Emerson’s focus on intentional culture—emphasis on ‘intentional’.

“If you don’t create a culture at your company, a culture will create itself,” Mr. Emerson said in a phone interview. “And it won’t be good. I sometimes hear people say ‘We don’t have a culture at our company.’ They have one. But if it hasn’t been nurtured, if no one has spent on any time on it, you can assume it’s the wrong culture.”

Call it Intentional Culture.

Of course, intentional culture comes in two flavors—positive (good) and negative (bad).

Tony Hsieh at Zappos is a master of good culture; Bob Nardelli is a master of the opposite.

If you aren’t sure how (or if) your own culture is intentional you should ask yourself the following questions.

1. What are the primary features of my group’s culture?
2. How did it happen, i.e., who originated it?
3. Does it reflect values in which I believe?
4. Does it drive the actions and attitude I want from my team?
5. Are new people coached in the culture and current people reminded, so it permeates our business every day?

Then ask yourself what you can do to enhance the best parts and realign/correct any parts that have gone astray.

Flickr image credit: Rodney Campbell

How would you feel as a member of a highly respected, world-class organization to hear it described as follows, not by a competitor, but based on an internal investigation.

In all, the documents painted a picture of a highly dysfunctional, top-heavy organization divided into discrete, rival factions, and weighed down by mistrust, poor communication, buck-passing and internecine squabbling.

The article refers to the BBC, but could just as well be describing any on of hundreds of companies ranging from Fortune 50 to tiny mom & pop businesses.

In most cases it happens when bosses takes their eyes off the cultural ball and make seriously erroneous assumptions, such as these,

• Once culture is set it doesn’t change.
• Culture takes care of itself, i.e., it’s self-sustaining
• People will follow my lead, so I don’t need to be culturally proactive.
• What culture?

Toxic culture kills everything in its path, including, eventually, the company itself—IBM nearly died of it.

As Lou Gerstner said, “I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game,” and he’s not the only CEO to feel that way.

The BBC is just one of the latest in a long line to be brought low by a bad culture.

Flickr image credit: Keven Law

“That culture is like the air we breathe or the water that fish swim in. It has the potential, for better or worse, to affect everybody in the same way.” –Dr. Linda H. Pololi, a senior scientist at Brandeis University

Dr. Pololi was talking about the culture in academic medicine negatively affecting men as well as women, although the women’s situation has a higher profile.

While the information in the article is interesting, as well as unexpected in part, it’s her comment at the end on which I want to focus.

As a manager you set the culture of your own group; it may closely resemble your company’s culture or may be wildly divergent.

The divergence is not always a bad thing—many managers have created great cultures in the midst of toxic ones.

By the same token, toxic mini cultures have been propagated within good company cultures by managers who believe that approach is the best way to manage.

Companies are much like gardens and the cultures within its main culture are what grow therein.

If you equate good culture to flowers and bad culture to weeds the problem becomes obvious.

Flowers are fragile and require more thought, attention and cultivation for them to spread.

However, with no effort on the part of the gardener, weeds spread quickly and if ignored will take over the garden.

There is an anonymous poem that I do my best to emulate throughout my life,

Your mind is a garden,
Your thoughts are the seeds,
You can grow flowers or
You can grow weeds.

With a bit of tweaking you can use it for your company,

Your company is a garden,
Your cultures are seeds,
You can grow flowers or
You can grow weeds.

It’s always a choice, but this choice will affect your employees, customers, vendors and investors.

Be sure to choose consciously, wisely and well.

Flickr image credit: William Murphy