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.

I wrote this in 2015, but when it comes to company culture five years is a blink of the eye. The boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that drives the actions that create culture, whether the result is good or bad, has been developing since they were born, although it’s not set in concrete and can change — but only if they choose to.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.

Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.

Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.  In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:

• • Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
  • Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
  • Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
  • Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?

He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”

While I agree with everything he says, I believe he left out a most critical component.

In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.

It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.

To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.

Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.

What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.

Flickr image credit: Eirik Newth

What do the companies with the best customer service have in common?

Engaged employees.

Engaging workers isn’t dependent on salary and perks, if it was, Chick-fil-A, Trader Joes and Aldi (TJ’s parent company) wouldn’t hold the top three spaces on  the Forbes Best Customer Service List.

While there are many things that can drive engagement, good management is probably at the top of the list.

And while the executive team impacts engagement, it’s the individual’s own manager who really makes the difference.

A bad manager will taint the best corporate culture, while a really good one will offset bad culture by acting sheltering their team from the impact.

Back in 2008 I listed four points needed to engage your team, and they are just as true, if not more so, a decade later.

• The guideline is the same thread that has run through every major philosophy and religion for thousands of years—treat your people as you want to be treated, whether your boss treats you that way or not.

• Authenticity is the current buzz word, but it translates simply to be honest, open and do what you say; never fudge, let alone lie, intentionally or otherwise.

• There are absolutely no circumstances that warrant or excuse the messenger being killed. None. Because if you do, there’s no going back—ever.

• If your company doesn’t have an engaging culture then you must be an umbrella for your people, because you can create one below you, even if you can’t change it above.

Truly great customer service requires engaged employees, because they are the only ones who can provide customers with the best experience possible.

Image credit: mikeg44311

Poking through 11+ 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.

Have you ever thought about what makes a great comic? By and large they are timeless, because their subject is people and human emotions and actions are (often unfortunately) steady through time. This is especially true when it comes to bad management as witnessed by the continued popularity of Born Loser, Dilbert and many others.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Does your newspaper carry The Born Loser by Chip Sansom? Actually, I don’t find Brutus, the main character, to be a loser—just a slightly naive guy who works for an arrogant bully who constantly belittles him.

In the July 26, 2007 panel the dialog is as follows:

Boss: I am looking for a unique spin to put on our new ad campaign—do you have any ideas?

Brutus: Gee, Chief, I’m not sure—are there any ideas you think I should think of?

Boss: Brutus Thornapple, master of thinking inside the box.

it reminded me of managers I’ve known, who, no matter what happened or what feedback they received, never could understand that it was their MAP and their actions, not their people’s, that was the root cause of their under-performing groups.

After all, if you

• ask for input and ridicule those who offer it, why be surprised when you stop receiving input;
• claim that you want to solve problems while they’re still molehills, yet kill the messengers who bring the news, you should expect to grapple with mountainous problems requiring substantially more resources;
• tell people their ideas are stupid, whether directly or circumspectly, or, worse, that they are for thinking of them, why should they offer themselves up for another smack with the verbal two-by-four?

So, before you start ranting or whining about your group’s lack of initiative and innovation, try really listening to yourself and the feedback you get and then look in the mirror—chances are the real culprit will be looking straight back at you.

Image credit: Kleefeld on Comics

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.

During his time at GE, Jack Welch was lauded and crowned as a god of leadership and management— How times have changed. Welch’s success was dominantly a function of GE’s financial services and he created one of the harshest cultures around—which would have failed miserably with today’s workforce.

Immelt sold off the financial stuff, totally changed the culture from one of suspicion to one of trust,  dumped the forced rankings, just issued a directive that all new hires learn to code and has responded to the current worldwide protectionist mindset by moving from globalization to localization.

Immelt is a worthy role model.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

There is a sizable difference between accepting positional leadership when a company is at the bottom and there is no place to go but up and taking over when its at its height—even more so when what was the growth engine and source of extraordinary profits disappears from the economic landscape.

It is one thing to maximize what you have, wringing out every last possible dollar, and investing in innovation for sustainable growth in the future.

It is one thing to create a culture where public shame and the likelihood of termination for missing your numbers rules and changing that to a culture that encourages appropriate risk-taking and never kills the messenger when the risk doesn’t pan out; a culture that understands not every innovation will be a home run, but encourages and applauds the effort anyway.

These are the differences between Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt.

Welch had taken over when the company was in the bottom of an economic cycle. He took over GE in a recession, not at the height of a bubble.

Immelt got the job right after the end of the high-flying 1990s, an era which crowned CEOs with mythical, God-like crowns, and Welch was bestowed the biggest of them all.

Immelt had known before the meltdown the company needed to wean off the leveraged risk from finance that was begun under Welch. … He admitted mistakes, as any good leader must do, and GE more quietly if not humbly went about its business in making the company a 21st century sustainable and reliable profit engine.

The differences are worth noting.

Flickr image credit: laurita13

There’s a lot of talk these days from consultants, academics and executives about the importance of transparency, AKA being totally open and honest.

And many of those in the business world, from team leaders through CEOs, are actually walking the talk.

Or believe they are.

The problem lies in the fact that even those executives who have opened operations, especially financials, to the internal scrutiny of their people don’t recognize that true transparency needs to be a two-way street.

One-way transparency is open to spin — whether intentional or not.

Which, if you stop to think about it, should come as no surprise. It is a normal, human characteristic to put the best face on even the most negative thing.

So how is true, two-way transparency achieved?

By opening yourself to a no-holds-barred Q&A with everybody and forcing yourself to provide the A no matter how uncomfortable.

Harley Finkelstein, COO at Shopify and a new “Dragon” on CBC’s Next Gen Den, among other things, is the perfect role model of what should be called AMA transparency.

The AMA idea has been around for a while.

President Obama broke with convention back in 2012 when he agreed to do an Ask Me Anything — AMA — on the Internet forum Reddit.

But if you think it takes guts to expose yourself to a half hour of inquiries from strangers on the web, try fielding regular sessions of no-holds-barred questions from your own employees — live and on camera. Welcome to our normal routine: the internal AMA.

… While facing questions from my team is tough when I’m in the hot seat, it’s become a crucial tool for building trust as we’ve scaled from hundreds to more than a thousand employees.

I doubt you’ll find a lot of executives willing to do it, because a true AMA isn’t exactly fun for those in the hot seat, as Finkelstein freely admits, but it’s a great way to build trust, ownership/engagement, eliminate fear, etc.

There are plenty of times when I’ve been caught entirely off-guard. But that’s precisely the point. The element of surprise is the secret ingredient that makes the internal AMA such a valuable tool. (…)

Creating a culture where it’s safe to ask literally anything can lead to some awkward moments, but just taking that step helps instill a sense of ownership at every level. Sitting in that hot seat might make you sweat, but that just means you’re doing it right.

Do you have what it takes to “do it right?”

Image credit: Shopify

PS: Shopify is the first site I’ve seen that offers a “download” link next to all their leadership team.

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over 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.

I wrote Verbal Avoidance in 2011, not because it was new, but because it was so prevalent — and since them it’s gotten more so in spite of all the talk about honesty and authenticity. Read other Golden Oldies here

There’s a bad habit I see sweeping through companies. It’s not really new, but it has gotten much worse in recent years.

This particular habit used to be more the province of arguing couples, relationship counselors and divorce courts.

Always more of a guy thing, I now find it on the rise among women.

I call it “verbal avoidance” and it is irritating to say the least.

It occurs when something happens, or is supposed to happen, and person A needs to communicate that to person B.

And doesn’t.

A doesn’t because

• what happened is going to upset B and A either doesn’t want to be the messenger, since messengers are sometimes killed or deal with the fallout if/when B gets upset.
• B is waiting for A to notify him of good news, but B doesn’t have the information yet, so rather than saying that, he doesn’t call.

Of course there are dozens of variations, but they all boil down to the same thing—A does not communicate with B as expected.

When B does reach A, A offers a variety of reasons why the contact didn’t happen, but reasons don’t excuse anything.

B feels frustrated/disappointed/disgusted/angry/betrayed.

Verbal avoidance for any reason breaks trust.

And trust is the basis for any kind of relationship, whether at work, at home or in the world at large.

Silence isn’t always golden.

Stock.xchng image credit: Sigurd Decroos

Steve Blank wrote a great post about changing culture in larger organizations. It’s a must-read for anyone in business, government or non-profit who is looking to juice innovation in their organization.

Blank agrees that there are four components to culture.

Two McKinsey consultants, Terry Deal and Arthur Kennedy wrote a book called Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life.  In it they pointed that every company has a culture – and that culture was shorthand for “the way we do things at our company.” Company culture has four essential ingredients:

• Values/beliefs – set the philosophy for everything a company does, essentially what it stands for
• Stories/myths – stories are about how founders/employees get over obstacles, win new orders…
• Heroes – what gets rewarded and celebrated, how do you become a hero in the organization?
• Rituals – what and how does a company celebrate?

He goes on to explain what needs to be done for “innovation to happen by design not by exception.”

While I agree with everything he says, I believe he left out a most critical component.

In reality it should be a subset of values/beliefs, but it is rarely thought about by bosses — they either do it or do the opposite automatically.

It can be summed up in four words, don’t kill the messenger—Pete Carroll, coach of the Seattle Seahawks, is a master of this mindset.

To be truly innovative means trying new stuff and a part of trying new stuff is accepting that it won’t always work.

Corporate culture in general and many bosses individually can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that some things will fail — it’s the dark side of the ‘but me mindset’ at work.

What they, and anybody setting out to change culture and encourage innovation, need to understand is that it only takes killing the messenger, i.e., responding negatively to the person who brings bad news, once to negate whatever progress had been made and put the effort back to square one.

Flickr image credit: Eirik Newth

Staying relevant is crucial for every functional group in today’s business landscape.

Relevance has nothing to do with being outsourced and everything to do with being necessary to the operations of the enterprise.

Customer service is often outsourced, but no one questions whether it’s relevant to the company’s success.

IT has been outsourced, but now its very relevance is under attack.

This fight is different.

It’s called devops (a contraction of development and operations)

It’s the hardest kind of fight to win, because winning means a major change to both IT process and its cultural DNA; a totally different way of thinking that is based on what has always been anathema to traditional IT — breaking the system.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst explains.

“It’s not a market. It’s a culture and process, in the same way Kaizen or lean manufacturing is process. The problem is that vendors are making it into a market by saying ‘Here’s my devops product.’ But there are no devops products,” Whitehurst says. (…) “If you make a lot of changes, you’ll have to accept a few failures along the way. Throw out planning. Try little things and if they work, do more of them and if not, do less of them.”

So, no devops products, no new markets for vendors to exploit and no definitely no outside experts to do the heavy lifting — although there will be plenty claiming to de devops gurus.

But if there is anything to be learned from companies like Microsoft it’s that cultural change doesn’t come from the outside nor is it changed by edict.

“You start with small, iterative improvements. You release [changes] early and you release them often. That’s what devops is about. It’s a cultural shift. You recognize that big change is hard but little changes are easy. But a whole lot of little changes add up to bigger changes.”

Change is hard, but in this case, change equals survival.

Image credit: N@ncy N@nce

Surprise Industries is founded on an interesting mission.

The idea is to help these companies create silly and weird, but professional cultures where people aren’t afraid to make mistakes, Luna says.

Their focus is tech firms, such as Google, Etsy, and Bit.ly, where most of the management already understands that mistakes are a sign of success, not failure—i.e., nothing ventured nothing gained.

Managers at any level can add elements of surprise to their microculture to draw people out of their comfort zone and open them to more creativity.

But first you need to evaluate your current culture (and yourself) knowing that surprises won’t work under any manager (you) where failure hurts advancement opportunity or the messenger is killed.
Flickr image credit: Simon Cocks

According to brothers Tom and David Kelley, founders of the iconic design firm IDEO, everybody is creative no matter what their background or career path.

“…early failures, defeats and setbacks can lead otherwise creative people to shut down their own best ideas.”

If you accept their reasoning and your team isn’t as creative as you would like the fault most likely lies with you.

The “early” in the above quote can refer to early in life, but also early in tenure.

How often have you hired someone with a track record of creativity only to find them carefully coloring within the lines?

That’s usually the result of having creative ideas rejected, arbitrarily shot down or, worse, ridiculed—not once, but over and over.

Even when those negative responses are from a team member, it’s still your responsibility, since the culture that makes acts like that acceptable is either sourced from or condoned by you.

Flickr image credit: liz west