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Did you do your homework from Saturday?

I asked you to read Heather Clancy’s take on great culture and said that I’d explain today why I disagree.

The problem I have is with the idea of culture as a cult.

The definition of cult is given as “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work,” and culture as “set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices;” Heather sees ‘devotion’ and ‘shared’ as interchangeable—and that makes me very uncomfortable.

Another definition for cult is “obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.”

The examples she uses, Apple, Google and Salesforce.com, are superb companies.

But when someone says ‘cult’ to me I think of Jim Jones, whose followers had great devotion, so much that they followed Jones to the death—literally.

Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street banking houses had/have strong cult cultures as does AIG. Their people had great devotion and passion to cultures that were focused on winning no matter what and we all know where that got us. Another enterprise that comes to mind is Enron.

The point I’m making is that cult culture, like most concepts, cuts both ways.

When culture becomes a cult it can lose its flexibility and willingness to grow and change—necessities in today’s fast-changing world.

It’s always tempting to choose examples that highlight the positive view of a business (or any) concept, but it is imperative to avoid assumptions and remember that there are two sides to everything.

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Last Monday I said that leadership was another word for initiative and that meant it had to be spread like fertilizer to every level and person if the company wanted to thrive.

Tuesday I followed up saying that leadership fertilizer was better composted than taught.

That thinking made me realize that the best cultures are also composted.

Cultural development follows a Y-shaped path.

Initially, the raw ingredients from the top person’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) form the basic building blocks of the culture.

At that point the culture moves along one of two divergent routes—one akin to the controlled manufacturing approach of synthetic fertilizer and the other to composting.

Bosses who opt for the former build out the company’s (or their organization’s) culture with little-to-no input from others. They define it, shape it and present the whole as a set piece that is unlikely to change unless they do the changing.

Bosses who opt for the latter use the basic blocks to create a framework that encourages ideas from all levels and positions within the company. The framework acts as a composter with the ideas being processed by various people. One of the most prominent examples of a composting culture was the development of ROWE at Best Buy.

Manufactured cultures have little flexibility, are limited to their creator’s world-view and often defeat initiative and the spread of leadership; even those that are positive are slower, less empowering, and less welcoming to initiative.

Composted cultures are enabling; they encourage people to have initiative, take risks, step out of their comfort zone, grow, and, above all, think—all without worrying that they will be stomped for doing so.

Manufactured culture makes bosses feel safe; they are non-threatening and within their comfort zone.

Composted culture takes bosses out of their comfort zones, often challenges their world-view and shakes up their MAP—not for the faint-of-heart.

Are you a manufacturer or a composter?

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One of the greatest mistakes that managers make is buying into the belief that being in charge means being in control.

Both views start before that first promotion and are influenced by how they are managed and their reaction to it.

As with kids who are raised by a compulsive neat nick, they typically grow up either emulating that trait or totally rebel and become slobs.

Being in charge means taking responsibility for the myriad of things needed to accomplish the goals assigned to their group. That includes the actual goals, acquisition of new talent, care, feeding and professional growth of the team, maintenance and improvement of the physical environment, culture and anything else that comes up.

Control leads down a different path—one geared to power, restriction, manipulation, domination and even oppression.

Yes, the managers you had before promotion influence you, but it is your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that makes the choice of which road to follow—just because you work for Attila The Hun doesn’t mean you have to do it the same way.

And even if you did head down the control path that doesn’t mean you have to stay on it the rest of your days.

You can change; you can always change; like an alcoholic who chooses sobriety you can choose to go from controlling your team to being in charge of it.

If you do make that choice expect to find yourself working less and accomplishing more; having more fun and achieving greater personal satisfaction; having less turnover and receiving better reviews and being the manager for whom everyone wants to work.

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Dan Erwin has a great guest post about delegation over at Slacker Manager. I strongly urge you to take a moment and click over, read it, print out his Three Keys to Effective Delegating and use them.

Dan accurately touched on one kind of control issue in his post, but my reference is in terms of politics,  MAP and abuse.

Political power stems from control.

The only two things worth controlling are money (obvious) or information (not so obvious).

Managers frequently control both, whereas non-managers are limited to information.

It’s pretty obvious how controlling of money gives someone power, but what about information? These stories are true—

The new engineering VP didn’t like a top performing manager. He cut the manager’s budget, but didn’t reduce his objectives. The manager was forced to lay-off, couldn’t meet his objectives and was fired for poor performance at his next review.

The damage from controlling information is more insidious and in some ways worse. It’s the ultimate micromanagement and destroys people a little at a time by undermining and tearing them down.

A VP of Marketing forced his marcom manager to come to him each time she needed competitive or marketing information, but worse, he berated her constantly for being over budget—but wouldn’t tell her what the budget was. He also complained to the rest of the senior staff about her “neediness” and how she couldn’t manage her budget to the point that they all lost confidence in her. She finally resigned, but not before a lot of damage had been done.

Although it’s more common for managers to use to on their people, I’ve seen non-managerial people wield it against their colleagues, often with devastating effect.

X has information that Y, or even the whole team, needs to do their share of a project. Y asks for the info, but rather than giving it all X gives as little as possible forcing Y to return over and over. Often when responding X uses the opportunity to make subtle comments about Y’s ability, undermining his confidence; X might even start rumors about Y’s competency to do the work.

Over the years I’ve used these and other examples with managers guilty of their own version of information control; some were horrified and worked hard to change their own action—and usually succeeded, but others saw nothing wrong.

It didn’t happen often, but it happened enough that it made me realize information control isn’t always an overt political move or even subconscious insecurities coming to the fore.

Sometimes information control is based in a malicious attitude that permeates the person’s MAP.

MAP can change, but the individual has to desire it and they don’t.

The fact that they spread pain and destruction every place they work doesn’t preclude them from promotions and if they find a position in a dysfunctional culture they thrive.

I call them destroyers.

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Recently, the conversation at Slacker Manager turned to how a manager bounces back from a bad hiring. Although the five steps Barry Moltz listed are good, I commented that they didn’t include making hiring a priority and core competency, which would do much to alleviate bad hires. (Barry agreed:)

In most instances, the key to a bad hire is poor synergy between the candidate and the corporate culture. Culture is also the culprit in most screwed up M&A.

There’s actually not a lot of difference between hiring one person and acquiring/merging two companies. No matter how complementary the skills, technology and experience, cultural incompatibility usually leads to disaster.

There are dozens of examples to choose from—Alcatel-Lucent is one that’s happening right now.

Good technical synergies, but light-years apart culturally.

“But the cultures could hardly have been more different. One was hierarchical and centrally controlled, the other entrepreneurial and flexible.”

Don’t assume that the first description is Alcatel, it’s not.

[Lucent] retained a command-and-control style, and after years of restructuring, executives were so obsessed with cost-cutting that even the smallest purchase had to be logged into a central accounting system… “It was a slow-moving ship with an entitlement mentality,” says John Wright, a former Lucent vice-president…”

While it may be that the candidate is the ship, it’s just as possible that she’s a speedboat. Either way synergy is unlikely and conflict almost inevitable.

While culture may not be obvious when acquiring or hiring, due diligence/interviewing is able to identify and explore it. The problem is that managers often ignore culture, because they believe they that theirs is ‘right’ and the other will change. It’s not a case of you/your company being right and ‘her/them’ being wrong, it’s a case of the pieces don’t fit—and 98% of the time you should see it coming.

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The best way to guarantee lots of media exposure is to be successful and in some way on the bleeding edge of your market—two feats that Google has managed since its inception.

Although it recently blew away its financial nay-sayers the media seems to grab for anything that looks like a weakness and pundits love nothing better than taking a poke at a high-flyer.

This is expecially true when high-profile employees leave, which they do no matter how great the company—it’s a personal thing—people get restless, annoyed, bored, follow their friends. Then there’s change—change that messes with people’s comfort zones because stuff is different.

CEO Eric Schmidt’s comment when asked about those leaving helps put things in perspective, “Let’s do some math. We have 18,000 people. What is 1% turnover [per month]? 180. Do you think 1% turnover is reasonable? In this area, it’s quite low. Ours is some small percent, 1, 2, 3%.

What bothers me is that some people write: “So-and-so left the company.” Well, they don’t also write that we hired 120 people that week, five of whom have Nobel prizes, three of whom have PhDs, and so on, who are beginning their career here now.”

Whereas most companies tightly control IT, Google keeps it’s people happy by giving them as much choice as possible in technology.

CIO Douglas Merrillsays, “Google’s model is choice. We let employees choose from a bunch of different machines and different operating systems, and [my support group] supports all of them. It’s a little bit less cost-efficient — but on the other hand, I get slightly more productivity from my [Google’s] employees.”

Other companies, not just technology, take heed. A wave of that could easily turn into a tusami fueled by Millennials and iPod lovers are agitating for and getting Macs in the workplace—an effort not instigated by Apple.

Considering how much money companies spend on incresing productivity and improving retention catering a bit on tech issues seems like a no-brainer.

How open are you/your company to choice?

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Yesterday, I wondered if the adoption of social media tools would parallel the spread, or lack thereof, of telecommuting and asked, “Is the problem truly generational? Age-related? A function of company size? Corporate culture?”

I believe that fear is the underlying, driving force behind not being willing to share, which, in turn, is the number one barrier to widespread use of social media tools.

People who fear often seek an antidote that doesn’t require them to change.

They see the antidote as power.

The source of power is control.

The only things worth controlling are money and information.

Money speaks for itself, whereas people at all levels, not just managers, alleviate their fear by finding ways to control the flow of information and they do this with little personal effort and at no perceived cost to themselves.

But fear is like a cancer in MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) and will continue to grow unless addressed directly.

It may seem more difficult to make changes to your MAP, but the end result of changing it is far more valuable and lasting then the short-term fix offered by power—which is ethereal at best and imaginary at worst.

I can help if you or someone you know is dealing with fear and wants a lasting solution, feel free to call me at 866.265.7267