Poking through 14+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Focus on culture isn’t new, but it used to be a lot more positive. These days I see more about toxic cultures than about good ones, but what hasn’t changed is culture’s effect on performance, productivity and staffing. For better or worse, culture is still the most potent factor for any company.
Shawn Parr, whose company works with large corporations, such as Starbucks and MTV, on innovation wrote a meaty post called Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch.
It reminded me of something I wrote back in 2008, because the title is from a quote by Dick Clark, CEO of Merk and after rereading it I decided it’s worth reposting, so here it is.
Culture Trumps All
A post on Dave Brock’s blog led me to an article at IMD’s site called “An Unpopular Corporate Culture” and, as Dave said, it’s a must read for anyone who still thinks that corporate culture is some ephemeral concept with no real impact that consultants use to sell their services.
And a double-must for those who talk about culture’s importance, but don’t walk very well when it comes to creating a great corporate culture.
For those who prefer to put their faith in plans and strategy, hear the words of Dick Clark when he took over as CEO of Merck in 2005 and was asked about his strategy for restoring the pharmaceutical company to its former glory. “His strategy, he said, was to put strategy second and focus on changing the company’s insular, academic culture.” The fact is, culture eats strategy for lunch,” Clark explained. “You can have a good strategy in place, but if you don’t have the culture and the enabling systems that allow you to successfully implement it… the culture of the organization will defeat the strategy.””
If you’re looking for a best practice corporate culture silver bullet forget it—one size doesn’t fit all.
Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, describes that company’s top-down command and control culture of consistency and discipline as “the source of our competitive advantage,” and has made it a priority to reinforce it.
Meanwhile, Robert Iger and Steve Jobs, in their discussions about the acquisition of Pixar by Disney, have been concerned with avoiding an Exxon style command and control culture. Jobs says that, “Most of the time that Bob and I have spent talking about this hasn’t been about economics, it’s been about preserving the Pixar culture because we all know that’s the thing that’s going to determine the success here in the long run.””
It took Lou Gerstner a decade to remake IBM.
The key lesson Gerstner learned in his time with IBM, as he later reflected, was the importance of culture.”Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success—along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game—it is the game.”
The article is more than just additional proof for my favorite hobby horse.
The analysis of the role of employee complaints/negativity play in culture and the importance of what to keep when setting out to change a culture as opposed to what to jettison will give you new insight on your own company’s culture.
In case you still doubt the power and value of culture I hope that Dick Clark, Rex Tillerson, Robert Iger, Steve Jobs and Lou Gerstner combined with the articles in Fast Company and IMD have finally changed your mind.
I wrote yesterday’s Oldie back in 2007; it ended with this comment,
Corporate responsibility is a major buzzword these days, but it’s hard to tell whether it’s tied more closely to
doing what’s right;
doing what you can get away with; or
not getting caught.
It’s taken 13 years for practitioners of the second and third approaches to even consider changing.
The pressure they face to take such steps is real; the industry’s years of reliance on hypocrisy, lobbying, and misleading public relations tactics is eerily reminiscent of the approach taken by tobacco companies, and its litigation risks are set to follow a similar trajectory, with lawyers and activists framing failure to address climate change as a human-rights violation.
The changes certainly aren’t being driven by the Feds (consider the EPA’s decision to limit scientific research when drafting environmental and public health regulations), but by people.
The corporate responsibility façade is—finally, thankfully—crumbling. Activist investors and angry citizens have forced a reckoning. The Conference Board views the upcoming 2020 proxy season as a tipping point for disclosure of corporate political activity.
Even more potent are Gen Z’s and many Millennial’s attitude on choosing a place to work.
Young graduates evaluating prospective employers know that the true narrative of a corporation’s purpose can be found by reviewing who it does business with and which politicians it backs [emphasis mine].
There is no company that can survive without an adequate workforce and there is no Generation in history as suspicious and downright cynical about corporate America, including Big Tech, unicorns and startups in general than Gen Z — an attitude already infecting other generational segments.
Amazon employee reaction to CEO Jeff Bezos’ climate change initiative is a good example.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice responded to Jeff Bezos’s recent $10 billion commitment to fight climate change by reminding their CEO that “one hand cannot give what the other is taking away.”
That two-faced approach isn’t unusual; in fact, it’s common practice — more plainly described as talk the talk, but screw the walk.
It will be difficult for that approach to continue working when it seriously limits recruiting efforts, not to mention paying customers.
Or founders who plan to walk their talk even after them become successful, unlike the “don’t be evil” guys.
More entrepreneurs are pursuing social or environmental goals, said Greg Brown, a professor of finance at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina.
Companies like Toms, Warby Parker and Uncommon Goods have pushed this concept into the mainstream by creating successful business models built around helping others. This trend has led to the rise of B Corporations, a certification for companies that meet high standards of social responsibility. The program started in 2007, and now more than 2,500 companies have been certified in more than 50 countries.
Not all these startups make it and many are choosing to do it sans investors who often start pushing for growth and revenue, social mission be dammed.
And they are slowly succeeding.
Companies like Moka are a reflection of how consumers think as well, Professor Brown said. As people’s wealth increases, they think more about quality and less about quantity. They also consider the social context of what they’re buying.
The “bracelet of silence” is not the first device invented by researchers to stuff up digital assistants’ ears. In 2018, two designers created Project Alias, an appendage that can be placed over a smart speaker to deafen it. But Ms. Zheng argues that a jammer should be portable to protect people as they move through different environments, given that you don’t always know where a microphone is lurking.
These may not be the solution, assuming there is one, but this definitely isn’t.
Rather than building individual defenses, Mr. Hartzog believes, we need policymakers to pass laws that more effectively guard our privacy and give us control over our data.
You have on to consider tech’s actions in Europe to know that laws don’t stop tech.
There’s another potential positive brewing in tech — actually a disruption of sorts.
As brilliant as young coders are, though, the industry can’t survive on technical chops alone. Last year, Harvard Business Review shared that the average age of a successful startup founder isn’t 25 or 30—it’s 45 years old.
Call it a miracle, but investors, the majority over 40, are starting to value the experience that comes with age.
Hopefully, in the long-run, the potential for success will outweigh the hang-up on age.
As a whole, entrepreneurial communities also need to do more to bring diverse groups to meet-ups, panels and speaking engagements. The importance of having more voices at the table can’t be diminished.
Algorithms actually do a lousy job of screening resumes and companies that rely on them miss a lot of great hires.
Why?
Because the only thing an algorithm can do is match key words and experience descriptions. Based on 13 years of tech recruiter experience I can tell you that rarely does anyone change jobs in order to do the same thing somewhere else, unless they hate their manager or the culture.
Not things that an algorithm is going to pick up on. Nor will the initial phone call usually made not by the hiring manager, but by someone who know little about the job other than to match the candidates responses to a list of “preferred” answers.
No discretionary knowledge based on the manager’s experience or the candidate’s potential.
We all know that management loves to save money and many of them feel that AI will allow them to reduce the most expensive item of their fixed costs, people — including managers.
Imagine an app giving you a quarterly evaluation—without a manager or HR rep in sight—and you have an idea of where this is potentially going.
What management forgets is that a company isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people, with shared values, all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.
It exists only as long as people are willing to join and are happy enough to stay — excessive turnover does not foster success.
So what do workers think about the use of AI/algorithms?
However, workers don’t necessarily like the idea of code taking over management functions—or hiring, for that matter. Pew research shows 57 percent of respondents think using algorithms for résumé screening is “unacceptable,” and 58 percent believe that bots taught by humans will always contain some bias. Nearly half (48 percent) of workers between the ages of 18 and 29 have some distrust of A.I. in hiring, showing that this negative perception isn’t going away anytime soon.
This is bad news for companies looking to “increase efficiency,” but great news for companies that recognize they aren’t hiring “resources” or “talent,” but people, with their infinite potential and inherent messiness.
“Kindness is cool” according to Amanda Giese, Founder/President of Panda Paws Rescue, in the opening credits of her show on Animal Planet.
Kindness is a lot more than cool; in fact, kindness can save lives according to new research.
And that applies to work, as well as the world at large.
Old research
A 1978 study looking at the link between high cholesterol and heart health in rabbits determined that kindness made the difference between a healthy heart and a heart attack.
New research
Just to give you an example — because I know that there are probably a lot of CEOs or managers listening to this — but studies have shown that the strongest predictor of a man’s death from heart disease isn’t cholesterol or blood pressure. It’s his job. Or her job. Everyone knows it’s important to have a good doctor, but it’s also important to have a good manager and to give people the skills that they need to be good managers. –Kelli Harding, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of The Rabbit Effect: Live Longer, Happier, and Healthier with the Groundbreaking Science of Kindness.
Kindness starts with empathy, the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference…
The key here is “their frame of reference.”
This is why it’s so difficult for a man to truly understand what women go through or for a Caucasian to walk in the shoes of a person of color.
So while kindness may start with empathy, it’s also what takes over when empathy can go no further.
It spelled out the idiocy of believing that only the best were hired by startups, let alone unicorns, and everyone else was second caliber. As I said then, what a crock.
Throughout a long career as a recruiter and since I’ve said the same thing and it hasn’t changed.
The right place for you to work is the one that satisfies what you want — whether that’s the opportunity to work on bleeding edge technology, build a network, upgrade your resume or even plain, old curiosity.
The wrong place is the one you join with an eye to getting rich quick or for bragging rights.
For some people those reasons still stand, but a lot has changed.
That’s understandable, considering the cost of living, but when you add the aspirations so many consider “necessities” then salary becomes even more important.
The problem, for both employers and employees is the same.
Money is not and never has been a source of loyalty — in either direction.
When companies feel the necessity to lower their burn rate the highly paid are often the first to go.
And my old adage that people who join for money/stock/perks will leave for more money/stock/perks still holds true.
Loyalty is the result of managers and companies giving a damn and employees invested in a mission that has meaning beyond money.
Silicon Valley is big on smoke and mirrors; the two biggest are
Startups, including unicorns (think WeWork), will make you rich is the smoke.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
80 years ago Dave Packard commented that good management was “marked by personal involvement, good listening skills and the recognition that “everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.” That belief developed into a management technique called MWBA and it’s just as powerful now as it was then — if not more so. 13 years ago I wrote a four-part series about it. The second post talks about why to do it, the third about uncovering problems and the fourth about using MWBA to crosscheck what you hear.
And yes, you do have time.
Author John le Carré, of Bond fame, said it best.
“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”
Remember Management By Walking Around (MWBA)? It’s an oldie, but a goodie.
Great managers work to spend at least 25% (or more) of their time wandering around chatting and building trust with their people.
Don’t have time? Maybe that’s because you never really thought abut the benefits. Getting to know your people this way helps you to
spot high-potential workers;
raise your trust quotient with employees;
improve retention;
attract talent;
discover molehills before they’re mountains, and, most importantly, it’s the best, if not only, way to
know what’s really going on.
To work it must be the norm—that means it needs to be done constantly, not just when there’s a problem.
Consistent, casual visits make people feel comfortable and encourages them to chat—saying what they are thinking without editing it. To pass on information, rumors, and the like without wondering or worrying that it will boomerang and hurt them.
While wandering, you’ll hear enough to validate or repudiate what you heard from somewhere else. It lets you protect your sources—which means they’ll continue to pass on information—and it helps you avoid acting on erroneous information.
The higher you rise in the organization the more important this intelligence becomes. One of the greatest dangers for any manager is getting isolated and hearing only a sanitized or slanted version of what’s going on within the group, department or company. This is especially true for the CEO and senior staff.
Bottom-line—get off your duff, out of your office, wander around, say hi, listen, be a sponge and soak it all up.
Invest the time—that’s what managers do—and it will pay off handsomely!
A year later GE scrapped its notorious rank and yank review system as implemented by then-CEO Jack Welch. A year after that Amazon followed suit. There are still plenty of companies that use the system — whether they admit it or just change the name. Individual managers are also guilty of it no matter their company’s attitude. Be it company wide or individually the effect is the same — higher turnover, lower productivity, decreased engagement, and increasing recruiting costs.
Years ago I wrote about how to make annual reviews painless and effective — more a review of the year’s accomplishments and setting goals for the coming year than a critique of work past.
It worked because mini-reviews, coaching and conversations during the year were frequent.
Typical annual reviews were fraught with fear and loathing.
For decades, General Electric practiced (and proselytized) a rigid system, championed by then-CEO Jack Welch, of ranking employees. Formally known as the “vitality curve” but frequently called “rank and yank,” the system hinged on the annual performance review, and boiled the employees’ performance down to a number on which they were judged and ranked against peers. A bottom percentage (10% in GE’s case) of underperformers were then fired.
Jack Welch championed a lot of very bad stuff (e.g., work/life balance, HR), but the negativity of rank and yank is near the top, if not number one.
(As for GE’s stellar results keep under Welch keep in mind that businesses like GE Financial practically printed money until it all blew up.)
But times are changing.
According to Raghu Krishnamoorthy, the longtime GE exec in charge of Crotonville (GE’s in-house management school) “Command and control is what Jack was famous for. Now it’s about connection and inspiration.”
And to that end, GE has developed a new in-house app that basically does what I and others evangelized a decade and more ago.
The new app is called “PD@GE” for “performance development at GE” There’s an emphasis on coaching throughout, and the tone is unrelentingly positive. The app forces users to categorize feedback in one of two forms: To continue doing something, or to consider changing something.
If you don’t have the luxury of an app you can simplify it even further.
Care about your people.
Interact with your people.
Talk with your people.
Challenge your people.
Help them grow and advance — even when that means they leave for a better opportunity that you can’t provide.
Read what GE is doing and adapt it to your own group — whether your company does of not.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
