One reason I love the NY Times is that it runs great articles on new research about what makes us humans tick.
Most of us are aware that there are different forms of communications. Verbal, i.e., words, is the most common, but nonverbal, tone of voice and facial expressions, are often more potent.
In research with infants, it was shown that gently massaging premature infants three times per day for 15 minutes helped them gain weight, be more alert, and cry less. These infants were released from the hospital sooner than infants who were not massaged.
The latest research confirms the same positive response in adults.
Momentary touches, they say — whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — can communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words.
Two attitudes make this work.
Sincerity; people will know if your actions are manipulative as opposed to authentic.
Appropriateness; to avoid a negative reaction from anyone use your observational skills and common sense; high fives and similar expressions are the safest, while hugs are the most dangerous. An employee who avoids physical contact with her team is unlikely to appreciate being touched by her boss.
There are many ways to inspire and show you care just as there are many clubs in a golf bag; and just as it is a fallacy to play the whole course with just one club, using only one form of communication to motivate your people is to shortchange them—and you.
Yesterday we looked at positive and negative aspects of culture and I said that today we would discuss how to change/create a culture or sub-culture.
Repeating yesterday’s warning: if you want a culture that is fundamentally different from the overall company culutre be sure you’re willing to shield your people and take the heat.
Remembering that culture is a function of your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), here are 7 critical points that you need to think through before starting—whether you are CEO of a startup or a first level supervisor in a large company.
Know who you are: Since this step is strictly between you and yourself you need to be brutally frank as to your attitudes towards people, motivation, what’s important, what’s OK to do, etc., in other words, know your MAP! You need to know exactly what you think, are comfortable with the elements you embrace and understand that you need to hire people who will flourish in the environment you create.
Define your cultural goals: Use the knowledge of your MAP to determine the kind of culture you want and write a description including your vision and the specific infrastructure, processes, practices, etc., that are needed to make it reality. Test the attractiveness of your cultural vision by whether you would want to work in a similar culture. If the answer is yes then you can proceed with it; however, if your response is “no way” then you need to rethink what you want because over the long haul there is no way you can sustain a culture in which you don’t believe. Also, people tend to gravitate to people like themselves (likes really do attract). In other words, you will be hired by, work with and hire those with synergistic MAP.
Know what you have: Honestly assess (warts and all) whatever culture currently exists in your company and department (if you have one or more people you have some kind of culture); without a detailed assessment you won’t know what you need to tweak, change, circumvent, ignore or avoid.
Be aware of the cost of change: Changing culture often results in turnover and turnover can be costly no matter the condition of the labor market. People join companies because they feel comfortable and change is rarely comfortable. If they don’t like the end result (or the direction it’s heading) they are likely to start looking. If you are aware and prepared that isn’t always a bad thing; cultural changes can’t happen if employees aren’t willing to change their mindset; worse, those who won’t change will make every effort to sabotage the emerging culture. By being prepared you can not only circumvent that, but often turn the saboteur into a new culture evangelist.
Don’t assume: The human race functions to a great extent on various sets of unconscious assumptions. In the workplace people tend to assume that people with similar educations, experience levels, positions, etc., have similar mindsets, attitudes and philosophies. The next assumption is that based on those similarities everybody would create similar cultures; the third assumption is that the first 2 guarantee people’s willingness to buy into the vision. Predicating acceptance of cultural change on the assumption of deep, unproven commonality is a recipe for disaster.
Don’t overwhelm the troops: Whether you are changing an entire corporation (Gerstner and IBM), creating a culture for your startup, tweaking it within your department or group, or revamping it in your small business, recognize that you can’t just come in, make an announcement and expect people to buy into the vision. Present it in small bite-size pieces and in such a way that people feel they have input in the process, thus creating a strong feeling of ownership. Better yet, listen to the input and adjust if it makes sense.
Communicate and sell—don’t order and tell! Even if your goal is a truly collaborative, nurturing culture that challenges and then helps people to realize their full potential you can’t just walk in on Monday and announce that that’s the way it will be from then on.
First, it’s unlikely that anybody will believe you (talk’s cheap);
second, if you’re new it’s unlikely they’ll trust you (no track record with them); and
third, whether you’re proposing a radically different culture or just fine tuning the current one they have no reason to get on the bandwagon if it means changing.
In the final analysis what you do will carry far more weight than anything you say about your culture.
It boils down to your having the courage to walk your talk.
An angry email berated me for Saturday’s post, saying in part, “Why don’t you ever choose more typical CEOs and cultures to write about? I read blogs to help me manage more effectively and the stuff you talk about is almost impossible to implement.”
The answer, in a nutshell, is that you can’t implement anything at odds with your own MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™)
Therefore:
If you don’t believe in a happy workplace where people have fun then there is nothing that Tony Hsieh or anybody else can teach you that will help you create one.
If you stand on your dignity and can’t laugh at yourself there is no way you can implement The Levity Effect.
I could keep giving examples, but you get the point.
I, and dozens of other experts, have said over and over that people can’t sell something they don’t believe themselves.
Nor can they implement cultural features that are out of sync with their MAP.
This is especially true for managers because they typically hire in their own image, so that their team has similar MAP—and the same problem.
If you find yourself on this treadmill, rather than write an angry email or complain to your buddies look in the mirror and know that you can change if you want to.
I’m not sure whether it’s amusing or ironic (or both) but breakout companies all seem to be focused on culture. And when they are successful, no matter the business, they are immediately in high demand to tell others how they do it—think Tony Hsieh and Zappos.
Last Saturday I told you about Nick Sarillo, whose two pizza restaurants in Chicago do $7 million a year with 20% turnover vs. the casual dining industry average of 200%. As a result of the Inc magazine profile he is keynote speaker at the Pizza Executive Summit this summer. I’m sure he’ll be in demand other places. I love the title—“Culture 2.0: Branding your company’s way of life;” think about it.
Along with being a culture fanatic I also believe that anyone can lead given the opportunity, challenge and a supportive culture in which the messenger is never killed.
An NYT interview with Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga offers insight into his approach of making all his people CEOs.
“I’d turn people into C.E.O.’s. One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.” And that way, everyone knows whose C.E.O. of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.”
Stories from CEOs of their most life-changing day in their careers. Sometimes the result was promotion to the upper reaches of business, and sometimes a steep fall from grace.
TED has become a phenomenon and it’s on now. Plan to spend some time listening to an eclectic group of creative thinkers.
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.
The annual conferences in Long Beach and Oxford bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
In a final tip of the hat to Valentine’s Day tomorrow, check out substitutes for Viagra that taste great.
Many of this week’s posts will revolve around culture, so it seemed apropos to start the week with some interesting views on culture.
Louis V. Gerstner, former CEO IBM, says,“The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.”
Many experts are coming to that realization—decades after the average employee figured it out.
They didn’t use that term 30 years ago when I was a recruiter, but candidates talked about wanting to work where they “felt comfortable” and “fit in;” where they were listened to and were happy.
Edgar Schein, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, says, “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.” “If you do not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”
Robert Mintz said, “The crimes alleged at Enron were not the acts of a few greedy senior executives, but truly was an indictment of almost the entire corporate culture.”Of course, it was those same greedy execs who fostered that culture.
Jane Howard said, “We believe it’s our responsibility to create a unique corporate culture. If we do that well, we believe we’ll have enthusiastic employees. If we have enthusiastic employees, we’ll have loyal customers, and if we have loyal customers, we’ll have a sustainable business.”
Shades of Tony Hsieh, who built a culture so powerful that other execs pay him to learn how to implement something similar in their companies; “Our No. 1 priority is the company culture. Our whole belief is that if we get the culture right, then everything else, including the customer service, will fall into place.”
Zappos is a long way from fast food, which is often considered the bottom of the cultural heap, but many execs in that industry are hyper aware of culture’s effect. As David A. Brandon, CEO of Domino’s Pizza said, “You can’t overcome a bad culture by paying people a few bucks more,” something that management ought to remember.
Finally, research from Harvard Business School’s John Kotter & James Heskett found that culture has a major effect of the bottom line, “We found that firms with cultures that emphasized all the key managerial constituencies (customers, stockholders, and employees) and leadership from managers at all levels outperformed firms that did not have those cultural traits by a huge margin.”
I think if I read one more op-ed piece saying the path to improving US education is paved with better teachers I’ll scream.
I’m not saying that good teachers aren’t important, but I don’t believe that teachers are the root of the problems.
Before I start with examples, let me ask you this: how well would you perform if you were
terminated for insisting that projects not only be done, but done on time;
poorly compensated in comparison to most people with similar education and experience, but in other industries;
subject to pressure, tirades, insults and having people constantly go over your head to change your decisions; and
shown little respect by your direct reports, indirect reports and management.
Does that sound like an environment that would encourage you to do your utmost? I actually find it surprising that there are as many good, dedicated teachers as there are.
Staying with the current analogy, direct reports = students, indirect reports = parents and management = administrators.
Teaching is like any other form of work—it thrives in a good culture, sags, wilts and gives up in a bad one.
The Dallas Independent School System is a good example of what is happening. DISD is where the teacher was fired at the instigation of parents for being too tough and giving homework—the fact that the kids scored well on tests didn’t count.
It’s DISD that hired new teachers in 2007 with no way to pay them leading to a $64,000,000 budget shortfall that grew to about $84,000,000 in 2008. Their solution was to layoff the teachers—no damage to the administration idiots—maybe they all took math from teachers who passed them rather than lose their jobs.
Her rise in DISD in a span of three years has been frowned upon by some observers. She was making $87,000 as a division manager in 2006 and ended her career grossing around $140,000.
Some DISD trustees had questioned an organizational chart change that left her husband overseeing the department that she worked in. Her boss was reporting to her husband.
Ya think?
And then there is the saga of Taylor Pugh, AKA Tater Tot, who was growing his hair so he could donate it to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients—but his suburban Dallas school saw it as reason for in-school suspension for violating the district dress code.
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Back to our analogy. How engaged, productive and innovative would you be working for a company where management performed similarly?
Dallas isn’t alone; it has plenty of company across the country.
So before ranting and blaming the dismal state of US education on teachers, check out your district and state administrations—and then look in the mirror.
Three weeks ago I told you about Jim’s quandary in supporting his CEO’s approach to layoffs, asked what you would suggest he do and in a follow-up post shared more about the culture, the CEO and ideas I’d given Jim. I also promised to tell you the outcome, it’s just taken longer than we expected.
Jim called yesterday and told me that he started by sending links to both posts to his CEO, “Sue;” when she reacted positively he asked permission to send them to the rest of the executive team.
Sue refused, saying that she wanted to send them herself, thanking Jim publicly for taking the initiative to start an alternative ball rolling and ask her executive team to bring still more ideas to a brainstorming session two days later.
Sue also said that she had been horrified by reader reactions; she had really thought that her approach was a fair one until she saw it through outside eyes.
Jim said that the entire exec team was super excited; all of them had been struggling; trying to decide who to lay off, when and how to maintain morale during and after the process.
Here is an overview of what happened at the meeting;
Sue had already discussed a pay cut with the board, but decided that increasing it to 50% would not just be a good gesture, but would help preserve jobs.
She also asked the executive team to accept a 25% cut, which they all did.
The savings from these two moves would prevent immediate layoffs and give them time to take more creative actions.
They agreed that it was important to level with all the employees simultaneously in order to squelch the rumors that had started flying.
The information would include the size of the cuts that Sue and the executives were taking.
The announcement would be by live webcast instead of email to avoid anyone forwarding it outside the company without thinking.
Each vp would schedule a Town Hall meeting immediately after the webcast for his department, including everybody.
After an open discussion and answering questions as transparently and honestly as possible they would ask their people to come up with every possible idea to increase revenue, save money and avoid layoffs.
They decided to set up a suggestion box on the company intranet to make contributing ideas simpler; they chose to use a wiki so that people could comment and add to other’s ideas, stressing that there were no dumb ideas and people should post anything they thought of.
They started implementing as soon as the meeting was over.
Most of the staff were blown away with the salary cuts they had taken. The meetings went over really well and suggestions are pouring in.
The really great thing is a number of the ideas related to increasing revenue, including new market opportunities. Jim says that the sales team really caught fire and is pushing ahead with these and several others that had been shelved for lack of faith.
Almost everyone agreed that they would rather take salary cuts or rotating furloughs to avoid layoffs.
To date, trust levels have skyrocketed, morale is sky-high and, best of all, the sales pipeline is up 4% and growing.
Sometimes bad stuff is the best stuff that can happen—if it is handled well.
What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?
You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.
In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.
Jack Rooney is as far from a rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.
Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.
The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.
Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.
“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”
And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.
It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.
And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.
I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating. You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.
I have a question for you today and I’ll post my thoughts on the subject Monday.
I had a phone call from an executive today, “Jim.”
In short, Jim said that he understood why his boss was instituting pay cuts across the board, but had found out that the cuts were scaled with those who were young and single taking the biggest hit, older or married less and those with children the smallest.
This isn’t public information and when he asked his boss about the rationale, she said that the company had limited resources and that those with fewer responsibilities should be willing to make a greater sacrifice for the sake of those with greater ones.
Jim believes that this action isn’t legal and will open the company up to a lawsuit and even if it is legal it won’t remain unknown, will destroy employee trust and decimate the company’s culture.
The CEO sees it as the fairest way to deal with the problem.
Jim called looking for ideas on how to convince her that this is a bad idea; further, he would like to offer a better approach.
“Customer loyalty is harder to measure. As we are in this recession, one way to measure this is that I believe when the recession ends, Men’s Wearhouse will have a higher market share than when the recession began. That will be because of our corporate culture, which will be the glue that holds the customer and the employee and the organization, the shareholder, holds it all together.”
Zimmer has infused the culture with trust and authenticity based on 3 principles
Listen carefully and wait at least one second after the other person’s last syllable before responding.
Elevate the other person’s respect – by focusing on the positive before something that needs to improve.
Always ask the subordinate how a problem might be solved.
The willingness to listen proved its value when a lower-level employee presented Zimmer with the idea that the company rent formal wear, now a significant revenue producer.
Beyond these three principles, the culture provides an environment in which employees aren’t afraid to mention problems or own up to a mistake and Zimmer constantly reinforces his desire for feedback and responds to each email.
“I tell people I like primary information, as opposed to information sifted by various levels of management, but I only get five a day on average.” (Many employees have little confidence in their writing skills.)
You hear a lot about trust and authenticity these days, but I’m willing to bet that George Zimmer didn’t think in those terms 30 years ago when he founded Men’s Wearhouse; no matter the words, he built something that followed his own moral compass.
“I consider anything to do with employees or the stores to be my priority. That’s one of the other things, I guess, when it comes back to trust and authenticity. That is my priority. I don’t say that, I don’t pay lip service to that. That is how I run this business and how I live my life. So, I think the people that work in our stores, know that.”
That’s what founders do.
Sadly, when their compass changes so does the culture—think Angelo Mozilo.
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Be sure to check out the great links at the June 7th, 2009 edition of the Leadership Development Carnival, including lots of great management expertise—in case you think that ‘leader’ doesn’t apply to you.
(I’ve finally gotten my act together to participate, which means I’ll know when they’re happening and that means I’ll have the link to share with you:)
One reason I love the NY Times is that it runs great articles on new research about what makes us humans tick.
Many of this week’s posts will revolve around culture, so it seemed apropos to start the week with some interesting views on culture.
Jim called yesterday and told me that he started by sending links to both posts to his CEO, “Sue;” when she reacted positively he asked permission to send them to the rest of the executive team.
What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?
In short, Jim said that he understood why his boss was instituting pay cuts across the board, but had found out that the cuts were scaled with those who were young and single taking the biggest hit, older or married less and those with children the smallest.
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