As you probably know there are hundreds of ways to mess up a culture and a lack of authenticity is one of the big ones.

There’s a lot about written about authenticity, but are you aware that one of the quickest ways to announce your lack of authenticity is to issue ultimatums?

Thousands of times a day, day after day, bosses in every industry, in companies both large and small, issue “or else” ultimatums, sometimes without even realizing it.

These threats aren’t always direct (Do it or start looking.), more often, they are subtle (“I expect employees who work here to be team players.”), but the threat is there: Do X if you want to keep your job.

Obviously, this is not only atrocious management, since

• threats are tremendously debilitating to those receiving them, often costing them the confidence to do their job; but
• the manger who uses threats loses the most—the credibility to run the organization.

Bad enough, but beyond the direct effect of the threats, there is a ripple effect that is far worse—the seeding of a self-propagating culture of intimidation—as with hazing people start thinking, “I’ll do it to you because the person above did it to me [and I want to get even].”

Ultimatums kill creativity, innovation, motivation, caring, ownership, in fact, everything it takes to create a culture that allows a company to successfully compete in today’s economy.

If intentional you need to look long and hard at your MAP and decide if that’s who are and how you want to be, then change—or not.

When not intentional, ultimatums are often the result of poor communications but they can be stopped—the choice is yours and yours alone.

If you do it you can change it.

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Years ago I watched a 40 story office tower being built in San Francisco’s Financial District across the street from where I worked. I learned that when building in earthquake country enormous pilings are pounded down into the fill and the building goes on top of them. It’s all about flexibility; the pilings act like giant springs so the tower can sway during an earthquake instead of cracking because it’s rigid.

And I’m here to tell you that sway they do; I know having several years in an office on the 35th floor of 50 California Street (and in the bar on the floor above).

Your culture needs the same flexibility if it’s going to survive the quakes and storms implicit in the business world.

A few weeks ago I offered a list of what I call IBBs that provide structural support to culture and the stressed the importance of not allowing them to morph into bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy shouldn’t be confused with process.

• Process is good—it helps get things done smoothly and efficiently;
• bureaucracy is bad—it’s process calcified, convoluted, politically corrupted, or just plain unnecessary and it feeds on people’s fear of change.

Of the three categories of IBBs, philosophy, attitude/style and policy, the first shouldn’t change at all; the second may morph to take advantage of new technology or show different styles; the third, policy, is the most likely to cause problems.

Here are five actions you can implement to avoid those problems.

1. Watch out for dozens of variations of “because we’ve always done it that way…” attitude in you and in others—some are very convincing, so pay attention.
2. Review and revamp your IBBs regularly.
3. Encourage input and take suggestions from all levels of the company and act on them.
4. Understand, and make sure that your people understand, things will change based on company growth, the economy, etc., but that the really important stuff, such as fairness, open communications, etc., will be preserved.
5. Communicate any/all changes to everyone.

Culture is a living entity and IBBs are its limbs and organs. Every living organism requires TLC and feeding—culture is no different.

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The list of basic cultural IBBs prompted a phone call from a reader asking for more information on the dual career ladder. When we were done, he suggested that I put that information on the blog this week. Who am I to argue with a reader?

I’m not an historian, but I think that the need for the ladder was seen first in the technical world at least 40 years ago and although they may not have been the first, IBM and the original Bell Labs were two of the highest profile early adopters.

People work to improve their situation, but companies need only so many managers and only so many people want to manage. This is especially true in tech companies where many people are ill-suited to management roles, yet that was the only road to a raise.

So the two driving facts behind the dual ladder were

• a limited number of management positions—the number is still shrinking as corporate structures keep flattening; and
• recognition that not everyone is suited to management.

Enter the Dual Career Ladder; it’s simple, logical and most easily explained with this graphic

IBM Called their highest level Sr. Fellow, Bell Labs used Principal Engineer. Both positions were more than just an honor for which people strove, since they carried with them the same compensation and status as a director or vice president.

My caller asked why the model wasn’t in wider use if it was so effective.

That’s easy, ego and culture.

Accepting, for example, that a software architect is of equal value to the company as a vice president and should be compensated accordingly is hard to swallow. Few executives are comfortable with the idea that people who do hands-on work are as valuable to the organization as they are. This plays out at every level of management from team leader up.

And it’s not just in tech that this happens. I still remember when the top salesman in a certain industry had his commissioned cut because he had sold so much product that his earnings were more than the company president’s salary. That was deemed “unseemly” and so the decision to cut his commission. His reaction was what you would expect and he gave his notice less than a week later.

Because of that ego, the ladder needs to be deeply embedded in the company’s culture so it can be implemented fairly and evenly throughout the organization.

It’s the egos that prevent that from happening.

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Image credit: flickr; graphic courtesy of RampUp Solutions

When you build an edifice that you want to withstand the stresses of everyday living as well as crisis and catastrophe it’s important to include structural supports in the design.

The same is true for corporate culture and I call them “infrastructure building blocks” or IBBs.

There are three categories of IBBs—philosophy, attitude/style, and policy. There are many things that can be included, but here is a list of the most basic ones, some are fairly self-explanatory, others include commentary and links where possible.

The philosophy category includes

• Fairness: pay parity, merit promotions, egalitarian policies,
• Open communications: not a technology function, but a part of MAP.
• Business 101: basic information to reduce/eliminate naiveté, fuzzy or rose-colored views of the company’s business.
• No surprises
• Pragmatism

The attitude/style category includes:

• Manager vigilance: a constant awareness of what is going on and a willingness to deal with the reality of it immediately.
• Management-by-walking-around

The policy category is the concrete expression of the Philosophy and Attitude/Style IBBs. Just as the Preamble to the Constitution delineates the doctrines underlying it, each Policy IBB supports one or more of the IBBs described above.

Policy IBBs should be reasonably broad—macro rather than micro—since they support a flexible process, not ossified bureaucracy. They are your most potent infrastructure—the most tangible and, therefore, the hardest to corrupt or ignore, but also the most dangerous, because they can turn into bureaucracy in the blink of an eye if you’re not careful.

• Business Mission Statement (BMS)
• Cultural Mission Statement (CMS)
• Dual Mission Statement (DMS)
• Open-door
• Management by Box: actually a way to set your people free
• Dual Ladder Career Path: a series of hands-on positions that equate straight across the board with management positions.
• Hiring process: transparent and painless and easy to use for both candidates and hiring managers.
• Stock bonus plan (or similar)
• Sales incentives
• Reviews: Done correctly, they encourage personal growth, make negative behavior much harder to conceal and can even act as a screening tool during interviews.
• Surveys: useful for discovering problems, attitudes, product directions, company standing, etc. as perceived by employees and selected outsiders.

One caveat when implementing these and other approaches: lead by example; both managers and workers will do as you do, not as you say.

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Yesterday I said, “…there’s a lot of latitude in what one chooses to know,” and listed four barriers; I also said that we’d talk about

I promised to offer up some ideas on how to hear past the four barriers to knowing, but you need to recognize that no matter how many tools you have, hearing is still a part of your MAP and you may find it necessary to modify your MAP in order to these or any other tool.

Barrier 1 Information disagrees with your ideology or world-view: Probably the best example of this barrier is found in the US Supreme Court. To perform their duties correctly the justices are supposed to interpret the US Constitution without reference to their personal philosophy. If you’ve ever followed the confirmation hearings you know how unlikely this is to happen.

To overcome it, or at least be aware of your prejudices, you need to take a step backwards and really listen to those around you. Seek out people whose ideologies are different than yours and get their interpretation. Yes, theirs will also be biased, but by putting all of them together you’ll start to see a full 360 degree view.

Barrier 2 Information is presented by the opposition, someone you dislike or with whom you disagree: Remember the common advice when someone says something mean to you? “Consider the source of the comment before you consider what was actually said.” Good advice, but dangerous to do unconsciously.

That’s the key to avoiding this barrier—banish unconscious and replace it with hyper-conscious, which is easier than you might think. Typically people know when someone meets any of these criteria, but in the interest of ‘getting along’ they bury the feeling and teach themselves to ignore it. The problem is that it doesn’t go away and continues to color any interactions. But if you embrace the feeling consciously and then separate it from the information received you are far more likely to be able to evaluate it objectively.

Barrier 3 Information conflicts with your personal agenda/goals: The most obvious example of this is the Wall Street meltdown. Business was driven strictly be a goal to raise profit thereby increasing bonuses; any information that derailed that was ignored.

On one level this one is easy; you need to be brutally honest with yourself regarding exactly what you’re after, although you don’t need to share the information with anyone else. Along with a brutally honest vision of your goal, you need to determine to what lengths you’ll go to achieve it. Finally, you need to decide whether all of that agrees with your ethical structure, the persona you want to project and the legacy you want to leave behind you.

Barrier 4 information is inconvenient or annoying: Remember the old saying, “don’t confuse me with facts?” When things are going well, or a decision has been made, it’s very tempting to ignore anything that might upset the applecart. In part, this is what happened in the sub prime fiasco.

Overcoming it means forcing yourself to keep an open mind, always accepting and evaluating new information as if the decision hasn’t yet been made and then integrating it into your model. If the result is substantially different from the prior result, then you need to look for additional information that either confirms or refutes the need for modification or outright change.

Cultivating these tool will prove useful in all parts of your life. They can even help you build a reputation for achieving where others fail.

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A couple of weeks ago, Steven Pearlstein said, “Their leadership failure was a big part of the story of how we got into this mess…a number of executives have complained that this indictment is both too broad and too harsh. Given what was known at the time and the competitive and legal pressures that come to bear in these situations, they believe their actions and judgments were reasonable.”

“I didn’t know…” is America’s favorite excuse, although it won’t hold up in a court of law; ignorantia legis neminem excusat (ignorance of the law excuses no one) dates back to Roman times.

The operative word is ‘know’ and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of latitude in what one chooses to know.

People don’t know anything that

• disagrees with their ideology or world-view;
• is presented by the opposition or those with whom they disagree;
• conflicts with their personal goals/agenda; or is
• inconvenient or annoying.

The irony is that Wall Street’s leaders really didn’t know—for all the above reasons.

If you truly want to lead—yourself, your family, a company or any other organization—than it’s your responsibility to not just listen, but also to hear past all those reasons.

We’ll talk more about how to do this in tomorrow’s Ducks In A Row post.

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