Starting Over
Plenty has already been written about the sex abuse scandal involving the Penn State football program and its former defensive coordinator, and no doubt lots will continue to be written as more details are revealed and as we all try to come to grips with what took place, what should have happened, and what went so terribly wrong. Regardless of those discoveries and the subsequent soul-searching that will surely follow, one thing seems quite obvious – Penn State clearly needs to start over as they work to build a much stronger foundation for moral and ethical standards. So how does any organization do this – be it a sports team, a university, a non-profit, or a traditional business? The answer is in the notion of “institutionalizing” values.
When I use the word “institutionalizing” in this context I’m referring to a systematic process of driving core values through an organization in such a way that they become an ingrained part of the very fabric of the way the organization functions. When this type of process is followed, you begin to see tremendously consistent behavior in accordance with the stated values. In my observation and experience. there are 8 key steps that great organizations take to institutionalize their values. Here’s my list:
- Defining – you can’t institutionalize your values until you define them clearly. Values should be defined in behavioral terms so that everyone can understand what it looks like to behave in a way that’s consistent with the named value.
- Selecting – you need to be rigorous about selecting the right people to join the team. The right people are those that have both the required talent/skills, and also share the desired set of values. It is never acceptable to compromise on hiring the right values-fit.
- Integrating – with the right people on board, the organization needs to have a focused program to teach values and expected behavior from the very first day.
- Making visible – while alone it’s not sufficient, it’s nevertheless important that statements and pictures of values in action be omnipresent in the organization – on the walls, the website, the literature, etc. These are important reminders to be referred to in real situations.
- Using ritual – great organizations recognize how powerful it is to create rituals around the practice of values. Think of how meaningful rituals like the playing of the national anthem or the reciting of a premeal prayer or the playing of Taps at a funeral can be. Rituals can connect us to our values in powerful ways.
- Coaching – values are only relevant to the extent they’re actually practiced in real situations. Great organizations use these opportunities to coach team members about expected behavior, always using the language of the core values.
- Leading by example – of course, the leaders of organizations serve as the most visible examples of desired/acceptable behavior. Not withstanding everything else he did throughout his storied career, Joe Paterno unfortunately demonstrated for his people a low moral standard of behavior when it came to deciding between the value of protecting the University’s reputation and protecting innocent young children. Nothing speaks louder than the behavior of our leaders.
- Creating accountability – great organizations build in ways of keeping themselves accountable to their values – from performance reviews to surveys to rewards and punishments. Without accountability, values are at risk of being marginalized as unimportant.
In my book, Fundamentally Different, I describe these steps in far greater detail and provide more illustrative stories and examples.
In order to truly institutionalize values, we need to apply a degree of discipline and rigor that’s more often associated with other types of business processes (finance, operations, e.g.). How might the Penn State mess have played out had this type of discipline around values been implemented years ago? Of course, we’ll never know; but we certainly can start over now and (re)build a stronger foundation for the future.
Who’s to Blame?
Have you ever noticed what happens when we get blamed for something? What’s our natural first reaction? If you’re like me (and I suspect just about everyone else), your first reaction is to deflect that blame by explaining all the reasons why the mistake really wasn’t your fault. We naturally want to defend ourselves against what often feels like an attack. Of course, the whole process of pointing fingers and then defending ourselves is such an unproductive exercise. And organizations where this is common are usually pretty unproductive too. So what’s the alternative?
I like to talk about practicing “blameless problem-solving” (Fundamental #6). When we practice blameless problem-solving, we focus our attention on three key questions:
1. How do we solve the problem? Regardless of whose fault it is and how we got into this mess, we’re here now and we have to focus our attention on identifying the possible solutions to our problem, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each avenue, and then moving forward with the best option. Spending time blaming and defending only serves to distract us and slows down the solution process.
2. What did we learn? After the problem is solved, it’s vital that we go back and autopsy the situation to see what we can learn. While pointing fingers and assessing blame have no value, understanding what the contributing factors were that caused the problem is tremendously valuable. I once heard a speech given by the leader of the Blue Angels (the Navy’s elite aerial demonstration pilots) where he talked about the rigorous debriefing process they go through after every single show, analyzing what went right, what went wrong, and what they can do better next time. This is what great organizations do.
3. What will we do differently in the future? It’s nice to take note of lessons learned, but unless we actually change our processes to incorporate that learning, it’s of marginal value. Real wisdom (and effectiveness) comes from implementing new processes or procedures that use the lessons learned in step 2 to reduce the likelihood of repeating the error.
High-performance cultures promote learning over blaming. They create an environment in which everyone is invested in honest intellectual exchange in the pursuit of excellence. Notice the interplay of several key Fundamentals here. In order to have honest exchange, we need to be able to “check our egos at the door” (Fundamental #2). We need to be able to “speak straight” (Fundamental #19), “listen generously” (Fundamental #18), and “be for each other” (Fundamental # 20). Of course, all of this is with an eye toward practicing “A+ness” (Fundamental #3).
Does your work environment look like this? If not, what can you do (take responsibility – Fundamental #23) to encourage and promote these empowering practices?
Don’t Collaborate On Values
When I work with leaders who want to create a high-performance culture, they naturally want to know where to begin. And the answer is—with values.
Values are the cornerstone of organizational culture because our behavior is a reflection of our values. In fact, you can best understand the culture (and operating values) of any organization simply by watching how its people behave. If you want to change behavior, start with values. The highest performing companies know this and they take steps to institutionalize their most important values.
One of the biggest misconceptions about values development is that it should be a collaborative process. Some leaders think that they should survey their people and build consensus around what the organization’s values should be. They try to write mission statements and values that will look good on a poster or in their annual report, but all too often these statements lack any meaningful personal investment. These efforts are, in fact, misguided.
The development and sponsorship of organizational values is one of the essential roles of leadership. It’s the leader’s responsibility to stipulate the values that will drive the organization toward success. Not only is the leader the primary author/architect of the organization’s values, but he/she is also the chief example and cheerleader for those values. This is why it’s so critical that the leader be personally invested in them.
Not surprisingly, many leaders have difficulty articulating the values they want to use to lead their organizations. My counsel is to look inward, rather than looking outward. In other words, think about the values that are most meaningful to you. I’ll often ask leaders, “What do you care most about? What are your strongest beliefs about how people ought to be, or about how work ought to be done, or about what you want your company to be known for?” Chances are there are already many things you’re always telling people along these lines. This is a pretty good starting point when identifying values. The key is to notice the values you already believe strongly in, as opposed to trying to craft a politically correct statement of someone else’s values.
In my book, Fundamentally Different, I share some additional thoughts on how to write your values in a way that is most helpful in the effort to institutionalize them, and ultimately, to create a high-performance culture.
Organizational Culture – New Age Fad or Critical Success Factor?
As I go around the country talking to various audiences about leadership and the keys to developing a high-performance organizational culture, I’m often asked, “Why do so few leaders embrace this? Why don’t they put more attention and focus on creating a great culture?” It’s a question worth considering, so let me share with you here some of my thoughts and observations.
The primary reason that many leaders fail to make their organizational cultures a priority is that they underestimate the critical role that culture plays in success. For many, culture is just one of those New-Age, touchy-feely HR topics that make people feel good but has little to do with bottom-line results. To be sure, culture can be difficult to define and to measure, but my experience tells me that it’s anything but “soft.” In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s the single most important factor that influences organizational success. So what is it and why is it so important?
Whether by intention or by accident, all organizations do have an identifiable culture. I define an organization’s culture as “the commonly-held set of values and principles that shows up in the everyday behavior of its people.” The key part of this definition is that the culture is a behavioral issue, not a theoretical one. In other words, the culture of an organization is not defined by the lists of values and the framed mission statements that are posted on the walls. Rather, it’s how people behave every day that defines the culture that actually exists.
Keeping this definition in mind, let’s examine its impact on success. Think about any organization you know or are a part of, and think about all the various job functions that make up its work. This may include sales people, service folks, people in shipping, clerical staff, finance people, receptionists, etc. Now imagine if every single one of those people felt disconnected to their work, didn’t care about their performance, hated their boss, and wished they were doing something else! Now imagine a different organization with the very same job functions, where every single person was excited, engaged, motivated, enjoyed their work and felt fulfilled. Think of the difference in the company’s performance that we would see! It would no doubt be enormous.
While, I’ve put these two organizations on opposite ends of the spectrum to illustrate a point, and all organizations fall somewhere between these two extremes, remember that a company’s results are simply the sum total of the actual work performed by all of its people every day. Clearly the second company is going to outperform the first one every time. The closer your organization is to the second one, the more successful you’re going to be. And what makes that second company so different, is its organizational culture.
Of course, the best organizations (and their leaders) know this. And it’s why they make their cultures a priority.
Election Fundamentals?
A couple of people have recently commented to me that if candidates running for office followed more of my Fundamentals, we’d have a more civil, positive, and productive political environment. That got me thinking – I wonder how many of the Fundamentals relate very directly to politics?
Without much of a stretch, there are certain very obvious ones:
- Do what’s best for the client (country)
- Check the ego at the door
- Seek to create win/win solutions
- Practice blameless problem solving
- Maintain a solution orientation rather than a problem orientation
- Work from the assumption that people are good, fair, and honest
- Listen generously
- Speak straight
- Honor commitments
- Take responsibility
- Be quick to ask and slow to judge
To comment on just a few of them, imagine if candidates and elected officials truly listened generously, earnestly trying to understand one another and looking for the contribution in what another is saying. How might the debate be different if they were able to listen with a genuine openness to seeing and adopting a new point of view?
How about blameless problem solving? How refreshing would it be to listen to candidates put forth fresh ideas for solutions, without needing to blame the other party for all the country’s current ills? Have you noticed how the tendency to blame causes the debate to sink into arguments and defensiveness, distracting our attention and focus away from building viable solutions?
Doing what’s best for the country and checking the ego at the door both have an emphasis on making decisions that put the country’s needs ahead of personal agendas. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see politicians who were willing and able to submerge their own need for attention and adulation (and re-election!) in favor of making the tough decisions that are required to put the country on the path to greater prosperity?
Of course win/win solutions are at the heart of compromise. With a political landscape that seems more polarized than at any time in recent history, the desire to search for solutions that can help everyone succeed seems to have been lost. Instead, candidates from each party point fingers, posture, and blame, unable (or unwilling) to envision a pathway to compromise — and leaving a stalled and ineffective government in their wake.
It takes strong leaders to stand firmly on a foundation of core values when chaos and anger are swirling around them. But isn’t that just what we want are leaders to do?
How can you win if you don’t know the score?
In my last post, I commented on the feelings of being disenfranchised and powerless that seem to be at the core of the current Occupy movement. And while these feelings have become all too common, I noted that they’re not a necessary byproduct of a capitalist system. In fact, the most successful companies know how to fully engage the hearts and minds of their people to achieve extraordinary results. In this post, I’d like to share with you my experience with Open Book Management (OBM) and its impact on engagement.
Imagine if I said to you that we were going to play a very important game, but I wasn’t going to tell you the rules and I wasn’t going to tell you the score. However, if we win, I’ll give you and all your teammates a big bonus, but if we lose, I might be forced to cut our workforce in half. Would you want to play this game? How likely are you to be able to work effectively toward the goal of winning? How likely are you to be fully engaged? Probably not very. But isn’t this exactly how we run most businesses? We don’t explain to our workers exactly how we make money, we don’t share financial details with them, we don’t give them the information they need to move the business forward, and then we reward or punish them based on a result for which they had little to no connection! It’s little wonder they feel disenfranchised!
When I led my company, RSI, we were part of a growing number of companies that practiced Open Book Management. This meant that we taught our employees everything that they needed and/or wanted to know about our finances, helped them to see their contribution in creating team financial success, shared monthly financial statements with them, and most importantly, shared a piece of the rewards with them based on formulae they all could understand and track.
In order to participate in our OBM program, all employees went through roughly 5-10 hours of basic financial training and then were required to pass a test to demonstrate their understanding. Lest anyone think that finance is too complicated for most employees to understand, remember that nearly all of them are perfectly capable of understanding and managing concepts of income and expenses as it relates to their personal and home budgets. Corporate finance doesn’t need to be made any more complicated than that.
Each month, I shared a simplified set of financial statements called our OBM Scorecard with the entire company. This was distributed with an executive summary highlighting key points. Each month I also led company-wide “huddles” where I reviewed the statements and answered employees’ questions. At the end of each year, we would distribute a share of the profit based on a formula which everyone could understand and follow. We called this money POCLO – which stood for Pile Of Cash Left Over. While this type of transparency was instrumental in building trust and engagement, it also helped to foster a team-first environment and a strong commitment to achieving extraordinary results.
I can’t help but think that if more companies practiced OBM, we wouldn’t be talking about Occupying Wall Street or any other major city. What do you think?
Employee Engagement and the Occupy Movement
It’s pretty hard to open a newspaper or turn on the news today without seeing a story about the “Occupy” movement. In fact, just this morning I read about it spreading not just to other US cities, but to major cities throughout the world. What’s at the heart of this movement and does it have anything to do with organizational culture?
One thing that makes this movement different from many protest movements is its lack of singular focus. Massive populist movements typically come together around a single, clear purpose: end the War in Vietnam, establish equal rights, end apartheid, overthrow a dictator, etc. This one, however, feels different. Rather than being directed toward a single issue, the protests reflect a much broader sense of discontent with the status quo. In fact, this lack of single focus makes it both weaker and stronger at the same time. It’s weaker because it’s difficult to galvanize the effort into a accomplishing a particular goal. At the same time, it’s stronger because the seeds of discontent that have spawned it are felt by such a huge and diverse group of people.
At its core, the Occupy movement is about people feeling disenfranchised — feeling powerless, disconnected, and taken advantage of. They see record corporate profits and extraordinary CEO compensation, and can’t reconcile this with massive layoffs and persistent unemployment. They see a political system that seems too closely tied to economic interests and feel like their vote has little to no impact. So what does any of this have to do with employee engagement and organizational culture?
As I detail in my book, Fundamentally Different, great organizations are able to create high performance cultures that engage the hearts and minds of their people. In these cultures, people work together in powerful ways to accomplish team goals – and everyone shares in the rewards. Leaders, managers, and staff see themselves as belonging to the same team. They recognize that either everyone wins or no one wins.
These types of cultures are not accidental. They’re created, designed, implemented, and nurtured in a very intentional way. In great organizations, people don’t feel powerless and disenfranchised. In fact, it’s just the opposite. They feel empowered and responsible. And the resulting achievements are typically extraordinary.
Is the type of frustration and disillusionment reflected in the Occupy movement simply a necessary byproduct of a capitalist system that rewards companies for making money? My experience as the leader of a highly successful and engaged company, and my observation of other great companies, tells me that the answer is emphatically “no!” Not only can high levels of employee engagement exist alongside extraordinary business success, but one actually leads directly to the other.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how Open Book Management can turn this issue on its head.
How do respect and “Generous Listening” relate?
I’d like to introduce you to a wise friend of mine, Burt Gershater, whom I met through my father. Burt is a speaker, writer, teacher, and therapist in Flagstaff, Arizona. Each Monday, Burt sends out a weekly message based on his current experiences and thoughts. Here’s a link to the one he sent out last Monday.
As I read Burt’s piece about the importance of being able to listen to one another respectfully, I couldn’t help but think about Fundamental #18, Listen generously. Listening generously begins with the notion of listening to understand. When we’re able to stop arguing, to stop trying to prove everyone else wrong so that we can be right, we open up some “space” to begin to understand another’s perspective. Respectfully allowing others to express themselves is just the beginning of generous listening, however.
Sometimes I think of the generosity of our listening as existing on 3 levels:
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The most basic level is simply allowing another to “have their say.” This is certainly better than denying them that chance through combative arguing and posturing. However, we can certainly do more.
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The second level is listening to really understand the other person’s point of view. It’s amazing what can happen when we truly understand each other.
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The third level is listening for the contribution in what another has to say – i.e., hearing them from the most positive perspective.
One of the truest tests of listening generously is the ability to listen with an openness or willingness to change our point of view. How often do we think we’re listening to another when what we’re really doing is “not speaking”? Or what we’re really doing is allowing them to “have their say” but our minds are already made up? Can you truly listen fully, completely, openly, and generously? Try it once or twice tomorrow and let me know what happens. You may be pretty surprised.
Who plays and who gets cut? Checking the ego at the door.
First – my apologies for being remiss in posting more frequent blog updates. That will change beginning today . . .
As the NFL preseason wrapped up and teams prepared to begin the new year, it was fascinating to watch the decisions that were made regarding which players made teams and which were cut. I call this “fascinating” not just from a football standpoint, but also from an ego standpoint. When teams make their final personnel decisions, they’re frequently forced to confront the mistakes they made in the past. For example, they may have drafted a player very high, but he isn’t playing well enough to make the team. Do they keep him, or do they admit their mistake and move on? Or they may have paid a lot of money for a free agent who is a bust. Can the team admit the mistake, let it go, and move on? It truly takes “checking the ego at the door” (Fundamental #2) in order to do this.
Here’s an interesting quote I read from the Philadelphia Eagles’ GM, Howie Roseman, in answer to a question about how tough it is to cut a third round pick in only his second year. He said, “We don’t want to keep guys on the roster just because of where they’re drafted. We always talk about ‘let’s make sure we get the players right.’ So we don’t care where we get them from – whether we get them from waivers, from trades, from the CFL, from the AFL, let’s just make sure we have the players. If you let ego get in the way and you make a decision based on that instead of what’s best for the team, I don’t think that really helps your football team or your organization.”
Those are some wise words from a very young general manager. (Please – no comments about how poorly the Eagles are playing right now!). In my chapter on this Fundamental, I identify a number of behaviors that are indicative of checking the ego at the door. One of them is “being able to admit a mistake and change direction.” What keeps you from being able to do this? For most of us, it’s simply our egos. The best way to overcome this is to focus on the larger goal – i.e., organizational success. As Howie Roseman says, doing “what’s best for the team.” When we check our ego at the door, we put the team/organization goal ahead of our own needs. This is one of the most powerful components of succesful cultures.
Ego and the Family
Last month, my 21-year old son, Ben, left for an 11-month long mission trip to Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Southeast Asia. While it’s an extraordinary opportunity for him, it’s a challenging time for my wife and I. What does this have to do with “checking the ego at the door” (my most recent Featured Fundamental)? Read on and you’ll see.
Over Thanksgiving break last year, Ben started to talk about his interest in “possibly” taking a break from school and doing this trip. Of course, when Ben tells us he’s “thinking” about doing something, it usually means he’s already decided, but is just warming us up to the idea. In any case, by the winter break, Ben had made his decision but wanted to know what I thought about it. My honest answer to him was that I needed a little time to sort out my own thoughts and emotions so that I could better understand them myself. More specifically, I wanted to be able to discern which of my reactions were really about me, and which were about him.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that virtually all of my objections were related to my own issues: how much I’d miss him, how much I’d miss our daily conversations, my own fears for our relationship (however unfounded those fears may be), etc. I noticed that if I “checked my ego at the door” and got out of my “stuff” and just focused on Ben, I could hardly think of any reason why this wouldn’t be an amazing, worthwhile, growth opportunity for him. In fact, I was proud of him for having the courage and showing the initiative to embark on such a journey.
How often as parents do we have issues with our children that really are more about us and our own challenges than about our children? Think about how often we answer the proverbial “Why can’t I?” or “Why do I have to?” questions with answers like “Because I said so!” Of course, sometimes this is just fatigue, and sometimes the full answer may be too complex for them to understand; but I suspect that more often than not, our answer reflects a failure to separate our own issues from the equation by checking our ego at the door.
More than anything, checking our ego at the door is about doing what’s best in a given situation, rather than simply doing what serves our ego needs the most. To do this requires a keen self-awareness and an ability to separate the issues so that we can examine them more closely. Learning to check our ego at the door allows us to make better decision with greater clarity – whether at home or at work.
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