What is Climate?
The ups and downs, the hot and cold.
It’s easier to change than the culture.
The mood of an organisation can be seasonal which fluctuates more than a culture.
Refers to perceptions of organizational practices reported by people who work there (Rousseau 1988). Describes the work setting by those directly involved with it.
- Communication: How open are people?
- Dealing with conflict: Is it constructive or dysfunctional?
- Leadership: dictatorship or servanthood?
Why does it matter?
A positive climates increase motivation, innovation and productivity, encourage extra effort – potentially by 30%. Whereas, a negative climate inhibits it (HayGroup).
What is Culture?
In order to change a culture you first need to understand the environment in which it exists.
Often we think of the different cultural groups we participate in as the language we use, the architecture we create, visual arts, literature, music.
These are just manifestations of what culture really is.
Culture does not exist with only one person, individuals exist within a culture.
Culture rules almost all areas of our lives.
The culture is the values behind the behaviours/manifestations of individuals within a culture.
These values are learned.
Why does it matter?
My primary focus in this post is one of providing maximum benefit to our customers.
Getting the best out of our people and putting the best back into our people is secondary. I’ll explain in a section below why our customers should take primary focus and that if they do, most other aspects will fall into place.
Focusing on the Negative biases
Known as Deficit based management, this happens when businesses are tackling their biggest problems in business. I.E. focussing on the negative and how they can remove the problem or reduce it’s effects. Though this technique can be successful in dealing with impediments, removing/reducing areas of poor performance, it does have side effects causing its people to feel overworked and stressed. It produces a general negative attitude and working environment amongst workers. This actually misses some of the largest opportunities to increase the strengths of the business. Because it has us focusing on how we can remove the problems, we miss the opportunities to increase (build on) our strengths.
Focussing on the Positive
What if we focused on our top three customers and which of our strengths have helped to make them successful. Then focus on these strengths and how we can maximise these and broaden the reach of them to effect our other customers. This can help to realign where the organisation is going and bring clarity to what our goals actually are. In a section below I discuss why we shouldn’t focus on the success of our workers but rather the customer.
Organisational Culture Types
Below are the four commonly accepted organisational culture types. The two dimensional view:
Clan
Focusing on Collaboration, how the members can work together in a family-like manner. Focusing on mentoring, nurturing and working together to achieve the result.
Adhocracy
Dynamic and entrepreneurial, focus on taking risks to achieve optimal result. Innovative. Doing things first… driving your designs out with tests. Reactive, ability to move quickly with changing goals. Often appearing as unmanageable chaos. Empirical. Companies like Google embrace this type of culture in which they utilise the skills of entrepreneurial software engineers, cutting edge processes and technologies (Bruce M. Tharp: Haworth).
Hierarchy
Structured and controlled, focusing on efficiency, stability and doing things “the right way”.
Market
Results oriented. Focused on competition, achievement, getting the job done.
The Third Dimension
The third dimension comprises another three organisational culture types. A culture can be created in which it is giving, taking or matching. Attributed to the organisation and/or people within.
Taking
A taking organisation is one where they try to get the best value out of their workers. Workers will often feel used and burnt out. Workers know that they have to work extra hard to prove that they are worth it. Often the workers come to the organisation as takers as well and this helps to solidify the taking culture even more. I’m here to get what I can and then I’ll leave once I have it.
Often have a high staff turnover.
Primary focus: What am I getting, what will my reward look like? It’s all about me.
Matching
Matchers give as much as they take. They stick to the rules. This is one of the attributes of the Hierarchy culture type. They don’t do any extra work unless they’re paid for it. Don’t show much initiative. Parties take account of what they are owed. Workers often stay for a long time, don’t burn out. Don’t innovate or add value to the relationships within the culture.
Primary focus: What am I getting, what will my reward look like? I’m happy to give so long as I get in return.
Giving
A giving culture is one based around serving others. The focus is on how I can make our clients successful.
In a giving culture, a business measures their success by the satisfaction of their clients, rather than on the quantity of effort our employees are giving.
Focus clearly on the value of pleasing the client rather than measuring the value of their effort.
How can we create more value for our clients.
The motivation is targeted at the customer by all parties of the organisation. The consequence (not the focus) is the law of what goes around comes around. You receive what you give.
The organisations that do very well and at the opposite end of the spectrum do very poorly often fall into the same category of givers.
Successful givers work out how the giving will feedback so that they will be enabled to give more, rather than at the other end of the scale where the unsuccessful organisations that give, just keep giving without working out how they can sustain it.
How to change a culture of giving to one of taking or matching
Start rewarding your workers. Provide bonuses and commissions.
If your a giving culture, your focus is on benefiting your customers.
If you start rewarding your workers, their focus changes to look at whether they have the reward rather than the customers.
Often organisations setup reward systems for their employees. One in which the employees are recognised for doing good things. This moves the focus of the organisation from providing benefit to the customers to providing benefit to the employees.
How to change a culture of taking or matching to a giving culture
Stay focused on the value you are providing to your customers.
Focus on the organisations vision of how you’re making the customers lives better.
The mission statement needs to be centred around your customers not your employees or the organisation. Employ people that have the same vision of serving the organisations customers rather than the organisation itself. Don’t reward your workers, but talk about how your workers effected your customers in a positive way.
Don’t tell your customers what they want, you can tell them what they need if they don’t know, because you are the specialist.
Remember you are in business to serve your customers.
The measure of your organisations success should be your clients feedback. Ask your customers what they want. Gather their feedback and insert it into your organisation.
Share the success of your customers rather than your employees. Fix your vision externally rather than looking inward.
Primary focus: What can I give, how can I give.
Effecting Change
Org charts, in difference, don’t show how influence takes place in a business. In reality businesses don’t function through the organizational hierarchy but through its hidden social networks.
People do not resist change or innovation, but they resist the insecurity created by change beyond their influence.
Have you heard the argument that “the quickest way to introduce a new approach is to mandate its use”?
A level of immediate compliance may be achieved, but the commitment won’t necessarily be (Fearless Change 2010).
If you want to bring change, the most effective way is from the bottom up. In saying that, bottom-up takes longer and is harder. Like anything. No pain, no gain. Or as my wife puts it… it’s the difference between instant coffee and espresso.
Top-down change is imposed on people and tries to make change occur quickly and deals with the problems (rejection, rebellion) only if necessary.
Bottom-up change triggered from a personal level focused on first obtaining trust, loyalty, respect (from serving (servant leadership)), and the right to speak (have you served your time, done the hard yards)?
Because the personal relationship and involvement is not usually present with top-down, people will appear to be doing what you mandated, but secretly, still doing things the way they always have done.
The most effective way to bring change is on a local and personal level once you have built good relationships of trust. Anyone can effect change. The most effective change agents are level 5 leaders. These can be found anywhere in an organisation. Not just at the top. Level 5 leaders are:
- They are very confident in them selves. Actively seek out successors and enable them to take over.
- They are humble, modest and self sacrificing.
- They have “unwavering resolve.”
- They are work horses rather than show ponies.
- They give credit to others for their success and take full responsibility for poor results. They attribute much of their success to ‘good luck’ rather than personal greatness.
- They often don’t step forward when a leader is asked for.
Often I’ve thought that if I have an idea I’m sure is better than the existing way of doing things and I can explain logically why it’s better, then people will buy it. All too often this just isn’t the case. People base their decisions on emotions and then justify them with facts.
What I’ve come to realise is that it doesn’t matter how much power or authority you think you have. There is no reason if your able to build a relationship of trust with your peers or even your bosses, that you can not lead them to accept your ideas. The speed at which this may happen is governed by acts, influences and facts such as:
- Your level of drive tempered with patience
- The quality of your relationships and the level of trust others have in you
- To what level do you hold captive their emotions?
- A genuine appreciation and respect of your people and a belief in them
- Understanding that people and their acceptance levels are different and how they differ
- Gentleness
- Knowing what it means to be a servant leader and being one
- Mastery of Communication
- Ability to work well with others
- A need or problem to be solved
- Realisation that you shouldn’t attempt to solve everything at once
- Have you earnt the right to speak (done the hard yards)?
- The level of support and desire to embrace change that the culture you work within provides
- The people you want to accept your ideas
This post was leveraged in my talk at AgileNZ 2014. Slide deck here.
Binarymist 