Do you manage your organization culture, or does it manage you?

Toyota has recently been under fire due to its recalls and quality issues. It is drawing additional attention because the Toyota brand used to represent quality. What happened? Quality and industry experts suggest that Toyota management veered away from its own corporate culture based on respect for people and continuous improvement – the Toyota Way – and it’s now paying the price.

Organization culture is such a nebulous concept. The visible parts are quite obvious for the new comer, such as the dress code, how punctually meetings start, or how fast paced the work is. But the invisible norms and values you have to learn over time, e.g. how people work together, how they share information, and what the level of trust is between people and departments.

Every organization has a culture, whether it’s stated or not. Sometimes the articulated culture in printed brochures can be in conflict with the actual informal culture. When this happens, leadership efforts to manage the culture lose credibility. It’s fine to be aspirational in culture statements, but it’s not OK to be totally clueless.

These are the steps to manage organization culture:

1. Assess the current culture. Know the baseline. A combination of focus groups and surveys typically accomplish this task most efficiently.

2. Articulate the desired culture. This should have a connection with the organization’s vision, with respect to its past. The desired culture is often a mixture between realistic description of the actual culture and the description of the ideal culture the organization is striving for.

3. Weave the culture into everyday actions and decisions. Start with the selection and promotion criteria. Reinforce it in all training and development. When people are recognized, it is done based on cultural values. In any organization, employees note that resources are allocated to the most important priorities. Thus, resource allocation should also be true to the cultural values.

4. Measure the culture development. Do frequent checks on how your workforce perceives the culture. Annual surveys are a good yardstick to create trending data. At the launch, you may even measure the culture twice a year, as long as you are prepared to act on the survey feedback.

Equally as important as strengthening the culture is to be aware of actions and decisions that are counterproductive. Every time a decision is made where the cultural values were not used, it puts into question the organization culture. For example, if a company declares that work life balance is one of its core values but frequently recognizes employees who put in long hours, it contradicts its own values. Or, if a company who promotes a customer-focused culture cuts customer service resources before touching other departments, it may have to rethink its priorities.

Usually, compromises and tough times bring out the true colors. Those that are true to their values will have a guiding star for their decision making and will be able to make consistent decisions and strengthen their external brand as well as their employment brand.

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Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.
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Meaningful relationships at work

One of the Gallup’s Q12 questions is whether you have a best friend at work. At first glance, this seems like a strange question to have risen to the top 12 questions to ask, but Gallup has proven that having a best friend at work correlates with retention, engagement and profit generation.

Meaningful relationships at work build trust. Where you find trust, you will also find accountability. Smart employers will create a work environment that nurtures relationship building. Leadership style is the most critical in creating the right environment. A participative style that engages the team members and values everyone’s input is more likely to create deeper relationships than a top-down directive leadership style.

The overall company culture will clearly impact the work environment. If the culture is very fast paced and task oriented, and relationship building is not valued, the employees will feel discouraged to take any time away from their tasks to get to know their coworkers. This will make the relationships transactional. A sign of a task oriented culture may be that the employees prefer to send a thread of e-mails instead of simply picking up the phone to resolve an issue.

Another organizational mechanism that may complicate trust and relationship building is the forced ranking process. By its nature, it has a risk of promoting an individualistic and competitive culture, unless the process is managed with care, and the managers are highly trained about the performance standards and knowledgeable about potential rating biases.

To build more relationships, the company may just create more opportunities to do so. It can happen in team meetings, happy hours or more elaborate team building events. Eventually, it boils down to a chain of small moments when people get to know and trust each other. They come out of their cubicles, or look around in their production lines.

At the personal level, most of us spend more time at work than at home. It should be time that we enjoy, with people whom we appreciate. Challenge yourself to find out one new unique thing about your coworker. Make a real connection.

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Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.
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How big of a chunk of your company’s talent is underutilized?

The CBS post-Super Bowl show Undercover Boss thrilled or further jaded over 38 million viewers. The Waste Management President and COO Larry O’Donnell spent five days on the ground learning the ropes of the basic operations from the first line employees. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching a corporate big wig scrubbing latrines?

The outcome of the show was that Mr. O’Donnell ordered some changes in the local practices and a task force to look into their productivity policies that seemed to override all other company values. Having worked side by side with five employees, he also ended up promoting three of them. Now, three out of five makes 60%. It took the company President to notice that 60% of the employees he met did not work to their fullest potential.

Waste Management has 45,000 employees. With O’Donnell’s quick sample, 60% of talent being underutilized would make 27,000 missed opportunities. Yikes! Something to talk about with Jay Romans, Senior Vice President, People.

When a company grows past 400-500 employees, the CEO can’t know every employee. The VP of HR can’t know every employee. It is time to put in place talent management mechanisms that ensure that the CEO’s eyes reach all the way to the front lines to recognize and move the right people to the right opportunities.

The selection process should reflect the qualities that make the company culture successful. Sometimes, the culture is not quite there yet, so the management must find the pockets of excellence, and start building the desired culture by replicating the top performers’ attitudes and aptitudes, starting with hiring.

With the talent already in the organization, it is important not to let it go stale. The company loses opportunities, the employees lose motivation. There must be a process in place that frequently checks where the opportunities are, and where opportunities can be created. You also must create visibility into the strengths and talents of your existing employees. How else can you match talent to opportunities? The market provides many options for skill inventory software, or better yet, integrated talent management software.

And even with the fanciest software, keep this age-old rule in mind: garbage in – garbage out. It applies even at Waste Management. If the managers and employees don’t take the talent management process seriously, your software is not worth a byte.

Managers a the key to spotting talent are the managers. If they are only interested in and rewarded for getting today’s tasks done, there will be no talent management. They must have the skills and confidence to have in-depth conversations with their employees about their motivations, strengths and career goals. The company culture must also promote resource development and allocation beyond one’s own turf.

Many employees don’t even realize that they have opportunities beyond their current position. With a supportive company culture and a manager who knows how to develop their skills and coach their careers, they can look beyond the dead-end job, even if the President doesn’t come for a visit.

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Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.
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Crystal clear goal setting

If you haven’t done so already, hurry up and huddle up with your team to clarify this year’s priorities and set goals. Goals give direction. Goals give purpose. Goals improve productivity. Managers are absolutely critical in goal setting. Their role is to create a crystal clear line of sight between the company strategy and the individual team member’s daily work. This not only ensures that company resources are aligned to drive the highest priorities, but it also improves employee engagement.

After the company has announced its top priorities for the year, it is the business units’ and functions’ turn to align their key strategies to make sure that the company goals will be achieved. Once the business unit goals are clear, the department or the team gets together to decide how they can best rally behind the unit goals. The team meeting should include robust debate and discussion on how to best use the existing resources. With the leadership of the team manager, the team will come up with their own goals. The team goals must drive the achievement of the higher level goals.

Now, the team members should see the alignment all the way to the top. They should understand why these particular team goals were selected as the highest priorities. Individual goals are needed to execute the team goals. If the roles in the team are similar, it is possible that all team members set the same goals. If the talents are different, the goals will vary.

Let’s review SMART goal setting: It is Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. Specific goals drive performance better than “do your best” goals. If the employee can describe the success, it is more likely to happen. Measurable and Time-Bound refer to your agreement on how and when or how often you will review the goal completion. If you are not prepared to review, don’t make it a goal. To have goals that drive performance and motivate, they must be challenging. Employees find intrinsic motivation in work that has clear and challenging goals, sometimes so much that they can get in the Flow. Goals that are perceived as unrealistic disillusion employees from trying to meet them. Goals will be Relevant, when you use the cascade process to align them.

As a rule of thumb, basic job expectations should not be goals. A goal is a part of a company priority to take it to the next level. Everybody just doing the bare minimum is not going to cut it. To set a goal is raising the bar. When you meet your goal, it’s an accomplishment. Set the goals accordingly. Don’t set them to fail. Set them to be proud.

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Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.
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