The Performance Improvement Blog

Culture and Creativity

Workplace culture is the "what", "why", and "how" of organization. It is what work is being done and what resources the organization has to do that work, why that work is being done and how those reasons are communicated to employees, and how people work together and make decisions. Meghan Biro, in a blog post for Forbes titled "Your Employees Are Engaged...REALLY?", makes a distinction between the "what" and "why" of workplace culture. While I agree that employee engagement is heightened when employees know why things are done the way they are done (for example, work environment, benefits, promotions), managers must also pay attention to how things are done. Dov Seidman explains this concept in his book, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything. He says, for example, in a self-governance culture: 

People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

Examples of "how" are offered in Marla Gottschalk's blog post How to Develop a More Creative Workplace. She gives some excellent suggestions for how managers can promote creativity. For example, she recommends giving employees a notebook for recording their thoughts and ideas about customers, products, and processes. By doing the things she suggests and making the time and space for these activities, management is communicating the message that they value everyone and need everyone's input in order to be a successful organization. This is powerful. In addition to collecting creative ideas for new products, improving customer service, and solving problems, it is likely that employees will feel more valued and be more motivated to work hard and do their best in that culture. Soon the expectation is set and nurtured that this is a company in which everyone works hard and does their best. 

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a software development company that has aligned its culture with its business goals. They have found that to produce creative, useful solutions for their customers, they need to support a particular kind of work environment. They describe that culture in this way:

The Menlo Way^TM is defined by JOY through the following practices:

• pairing; no one works alone
• High-Tech Anthropology^R
• open and collaborative workspace
• high speed voice technology^TM
• daily stand up
• 40 hour work weeks
• pets and babies at work
• making mistakes faster
• doing the simplest thing that could possibly work
• origami project management
• work authorization boards; storycards, yarn, and stickers
• estimation without fear
• integrated quality advocacy
• test-driven development

Clearly, how people work together and support each other is considered to be essential to the success of Menlo. They value collaboration and creativity and nurture a culture that communicates these values. 

In an interview that Dave Summers did with fomer Corning Glass exec Lina Echeverría, she is quoted as saying:

I was reading a website that was talking about the different rules for innovation. Many people have said "You should do this, you should do that, you should expect, you should choose from, you should know how to select", but if you do not have the culture that believes that innovation is everybody's role...not only that..that innovation is accessible to everybody. If you do not have that culture that says "I am also creative and I'm empowered to use that creativity as part of the overall goals of the organization, then you don't have much.

Processes can be wonderful, but they are not the real driver. The real driver is that culture that says "Let's make it happen!"

This is why I think culture is so important to an engaged, creative workforce. How you do your work says volumes about what leaders value. It's not "pets and babies at work" or jelly beans on every desk or shuffleboard in the employee lounge. What matters is the message that the culture communicates to employees. When done right, employees feel like management cares what they think and that what they do matters to the success of the company.

Lifelong Employee Learning

The Evolllution, in a report titled, Lifelong Education and Labor Market Needs, presents findings that support a key role for post-secondary institutions in educating workers for jobs that have gone unfilled while unemployment remains high, and in continually improving the position of workers within companies. The report’s conclusion states:

Many North Americans have trouble keeping pace with the changes occurring in today’s workplace. Despite the existence of 9.3 million unemployed Americans, the country experienced a shortage of 7 million skilled workers in 2010, a shortage that is expected to climb to 21 million by 2020. A lack of educational attainment sits at the root of the issue. So much so, that unless more North Americans strive to achieve a higher level of education, average income per capita is going to decline within the next decade.

Much of this unemployment is structural. Employers just don’t need as many employees today as they did a few years ago to do the same jobs. Technology and automation have made companies much more efficient. The only hope for workers is to continually upgrade their skills. Alvin Toffler, the futurist, has been quoted as saying, “The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Colleges and universities will remain one key resource for this learning, unlearning, and relearning.

However, let’s not put all colleges and universities into the same pot. They have different missions, structures, and cultures. For example, large universities are not adept at making quick and timely changes in their curricula to respond to changing needs in a company’s workforce. In my region of the U.S. there is a severe shortage of IT engineers. Companies do not need people with four-year computer science degrees nor do they necessarily need people with two-year, community college degrees. They need people who have had enough education to be able to do the job and solve problems for customers. Some employees might only need a class or two. For others, a two-week “bootcamp” might be all that is necessary. Universities tend not to look at education this way. They are oriented towards the academic year, academic terms, and academic requirements.  These programs are often designed around the intellectual interests of faculty, not around the needs of students and their employers. That’s fine, but this is not what employees need in order to be successful in their work places.

Community colleges, by virtue of their mandates, can be more responsive to the development of workers. Living up to their name, these institutions strive to meet the needs of employers and learners in the communities that they serve. They can add and subtract courses and programs from term to term, and sometimes in shorter time spans, as long as there is a demand from students and there are available instructors (full-time or part-time) to teach the courses.

Universities often have to go through a much longer process to change curricula, sometimes taking several years with required approvals from departments, central administration, and state-level committees. These institutions can be effective partners in employee learning and development, but employers and learners should not assume that every institution can be responsive. Their mission and culture will dictate whether or not they can meet the needs of employees.

For these partnerships between employers and post-secondary institutions to work, employers must demand more cooperation from colleges and universities. And employers must be prepared to encourage and support employees who want to take advantage of this kind of resource.  

Sports and Business Are Not Analogous

As the 2012 London Olympics goes into its final weekend, I feel compelled to write about sports and leadership. For the past few weeks it seems like all we’ve heard from the news media are analogies between sports and business. These are stories about perseverance, commitment, being single focused, working hard, and, of course, a desire to win. All admirable traits but it’s very different having these traits as an athlete and having them as a leader in an organization.  

We do love our sports, whether player or spectator. Billions of people around the world watch the Olympics every four years. They express exaltation in winning and pain in loss. The usual explanation for this enthursiasm is loyalty to team and country, as well as admiration for the athletes. I think it’s more than that.

Sports give us the respect, control, and membership that we don’t get from our work organizations and life in general. With sports the rules are simple, the goals are clear, what we have to do to reach those goals is known to all, feedback is immediate, and there is a beginning and an end to the competition. With sports we feel a sense of belonging (membership) to something bigger than ourselves, win or lose. How else can you explain Chicago Cubs fans?

Our work lives are chaotic, unpredictable, and filled with disappointments. We know that we have little influence over many aspects of what happens to us day to day. We have no simple way of keeping score or knowing how well we’re doing. Feedback on our performance is rare. There is no beginning, middle, and end, it just keeps going.

As human beings, we need more than this. We need respect, control, and membership. Those qualities are not readily available in our organizations, so we turn to playing and participating in sports. We play and watch sports, not because they are analogous to our organizational lives, but because they are so different.  

David Waltz alerts us to this false analogy. He cites five ways in which the Olympics (and sports in general) do not teach us about business. He writes:

1. In business, winners and losers are not easy to determine.
2. In business, more than one person or team or organization can win.
3. In business, not every “player” is the best at what they do.
4. In business, the work never ends; there is no time to stop, rest, and rejuvenate.
5. In business, there are no permanent successes (Gold Medal); success is fleeting and “champions” can become has-beens overnight.

I love sports. I love competing and I enjoy watching my favorite sports. But I don’t think I learn much about leading an organization from this pastime. That’s okay. What I get instead is an experience that I can’t get from my business or my work consulting in organizations. I get a feeling of respect (from others and from self), a sense of control over events (real or imagined), and a belief that I belong to something bigger than myself (real or imagined). 

 

Culture Change Can Stick

Lasting culture change is possible in organizations that have lost their way if they focus on current successes and start small. This is the message of an HBR article by by Jon R. Katzenbach, Ilona Steffen, and Caroline Kronley titled, Cultural Change That Sticks: Start With What’s Already Working. They write:

It’s tempting to dwell on the negative traits of your culture, but any corporate culture is a product of good intentions that evolved in unexpected ways and will have many strengths. They might include a deep commitment to customer service (which could manifest itself as a reluctance to cut costs) or a predisposition toward innovation (which sometimes leads to “not invented here” syndrome). If you can find ways to demonstrate the relevance of the original values and share stories that illustrate why people believe in them, they can still serve your company well. Acknowledging the existing culture’s assets will also make major change feel less like a top-down imposition and more like a shared evolution.

I’ve written before about the reasons why it is better to focus on success than failure. Organizations like JPMorgan Chase, Penn State University, and the U.S. Congress, were founded on the basis of a strong sense of ethics and commitment to their customers. Somewhere along the way, they lost their moral compass but they still have departments and individuals who are committed to doing the right thing every day.

That’s where the learning starts. Find those examples of exemplary behavior, people and practices that are aligned with the aspirational values of the organization, and help others learn from them. This is likely to gain greater acceptance from the wider organization than hearing a directive from on high. This is especially true in power-diffused organizations, such as hospitals and universities, where passive-aggressive behavior will block any mandated culture change, especially without input from those who will be affected most by doing things differently. All of us do best when we feel like we have a say in our own change.

And don’t try to change everything at once. Ford Motor Company started to become a more open and trusting environment when the CEO encouraged honesty in his management meetings. Invest your energy in pockets of success that will spread throughout the organization. As co-workers see what is possible and how the change will make their lives better in the long run, they will begin to support a different culture. 

 

Why Learn?

Why should you keep on learning? You have a college degree, maybe a terminal degree such as MBA or Ph.D. You have a job that you know how to do and you’re good at it. You get a regular paycheck, and, if you’re lucky, have a long-term contract and stock options. Other than your supplier’s new products and services, what is there left to learn?

Learning and work have merged. Izzy Justice, founder and CEO of EQMentor, Inc. writes: “…the successful working professional will not be the one who has accomplished a lot in the past, but the one who is constantly learning.” Whether it’s learning something new, unlearning something old, or learning how to learn, all employees, from front-line technicians to C-suite executives, need to make learning part of their jobs.

You know the trends. Technology is changing the way we work and putting information literally at our fingertips. Globalization is changing where we work and who are our competitors; they could be anywhere in the world and could crop up overnight. A demand for transparency in all institutions has made a high degree of ethics and compliance an essential part of doing business. Expectations of corporate leaders is to do more with less which means that employees need to be smarter about their jobs and how they do them.  Networking using social media is breaking down silos and building options for sharing information and know-how but it also is a capability that needs to be developed.

These trends are putting pressure on all employees for continually acquiring new knowledge and skills. Tim Hoff, of American Trainco, offers these eight reasons for continuous learning:

1. To enhance skills, especially those not fully developed in school or prior experience.

2. To provide job security by increasing value to company

3. To increase career options within and outside current employer

4. To improve adaptability to changes in organization and industry

5. To achieve more professional success

6. To have higher job satisfaction

7. To increase income

8. To stay current with industry trends and best practices

Vincent Belliveau, general manager at Cornerstone OnDemand, links continuous learning to employee engagement, which, he argues, results in greater productivity, reduced turnover, and a better company reputation. This link between employee engagement and company success appears to be supported by research.

Andres Fortino of DeVry College of New York, writing in The Evolllution, makes the distinction between training and education. Learners will benefit from both training and education. He writes: “To keep up and to advance it is imperative that professionals engage in some form of continuing education or they will soon find themselves less in demand.”

The solution is creating a culture of learning in organizations that utilizes external education courses, workplace formal training, workplace informal training, and opportunities for feedback and reflection that help employees learn from their workplace activity. Organizations need to support continuous learning continuously. The key to this is having managers who encourage, facilitate, and reward learning by their direct reports.

 

How to Create a Learning Culture in Organizations

Several excellent blog posts have recently come to my attention that, when combined, provide a how-to for creating a learning culture in organizations. One of these posts appears in Jane Hart’s blog, Learning in the Social Workplace. In this post, she writes that workplace learning is:

1. Structured learning experiences (e.g., training) and informal learning experiences (e.g., communities of practice)
2. Helping workers learn continuously on the job
3. Peer-to-peer learning that is “lite on content and rich in interaction”
4. An integral part of everything that is done in the organization, supported by technology and social networks
5. Managed by learning professionals who facilitate both formal and informal learning experiences

Hart writes further that learning professionals should, therefore, take on a new role, that of “Enterprise Learning Community Managers.” I see this role a little differently. I think we need this role but learning professionals should teach all managers how to serve in this capacity. A learning culture needs every manager encouraging, facilitating, and holding people accountable for learning.

In another post titled, How to create sustainable behaviour change, Tom Quayle writes “learning and development needs to move away from the fixation that the way to grow the capability of your staff and improve performance is through training.” He explains that training doesn’t change long-term behavior. Employees must be motivated to change. This is done by managers communicating a compelling reason for the change, measuring the new behavior and giving feedback to employees, creating “triggers” in the work environment that remind employees what needs to be done, and building communities of employees that support shared learning.

Quayle offers some specific ideas for sustaining learning and change, such as:

Do your homework on your employees. If they're sales people and they're out on the road, how can you bring development directly to them? Is there an app or social networking forum you can communicate through? And what type of individuals are they? Are they likely to respond to emails or do they prefer face to face interactions?

In this suggestion, he is imploring managers to adapt the method of learning that they use to how particular individuals and networks learn best given the content. Use the ways they tend to communicate when conveying information to them.

In a blog carnival started by Enterprise Collaborative, Harold Jarche contributed a post titled, The learning organization: an often described, but seldom observed phenomenon. In this post, he writes that we need to:

move learning away from training and HR, as some external band-aid solution that gets called in from time to time. Learning must be an essential part of doing business in the network age. Learning has to be owned by the workers and learning support has to be a business function.

Jarche observes that learning organizations have these three characteristics:

• People at all levels are narrating their work in a transparent environment
• The daily routine supports social learning
• Time is made available for reflection and sharing stories

What I think Jarche is saying and what I think is missing in most discussions of organizational learning, is an organizational routine of feedback, reflection, and active social learning. That is, organizational learning is not about training. Rather, it's about a community of workers sharing in a process of constantly seeking improvement through new knowledge, new skills, and new applications of knowledge and skills to achieving the goals of the organization. They examine what they do, compare that to what needs to be done, reflect on what they have learned, and make the needed change in the organization.

 

Harry Levinson 1922-2012

For many managers, motivation and manipulation mean one and the same thing; but employees know the difference. –Harry Levinson

We lost one of the giants in the study of organizational learning and performance this week. Harry Levinson died at the age of 90 after a long and productive career making organizational leaders aware of the importance of psychological dynamics to their employees and themselves. Every leader and manager should take heed of Levinson's thought-provoking theories and practice.

Levinson made us aware of the psychological contract between employer and employee. This is the implicit understanding of what is expected and how they will act toward one another. Acting contrary to this contract causes a great deal of stress for both and can be detrimental to the working relationship and productivity of employees.

Levinson was one of the first to speak about the impact of organizational culture on worker performance. In his article for Organizational & Social Dynamics titled “Organizational Immersion and Diagnosis: The Work of Harry Levinson”, Michael A. Diamond writes:

For Levinson, the informal and affectionate bonds between workers and their foremen (supervisors) helped to explain effective, physically safe and emotional[ly] healthy, management performance in the workplace. The study [of Kansas Power and Light Company] also pre-dated much of the popular enthusiasm several decades later with organizational culture.

Regarding Levinson’s notions about performance review, Diamond writes:

…he emphasized the human compassion inherent in and necessary for providing subordinates with unambiguous, direct, and honest feedback in performance evaluation.

Regarding Levinson’s thoughts about mentoring, Diamond writes:

Executives and their management must become better mentors, he argued, and to do so they must become more knowledgeable about what motivates their employees.

Levinson had some strong words for organizational consultants. He believed that they should do assessments (diagnosis) before recommending interventions. He didn’t seem to have much patience for consultants who are ready with a solution prior to fully understanding the problem. This belief became the cornerstone of Levinson’s advice to consultants and clients. In an interview that Diamond conducted with the consultant’s consultant, Levinson is quoted as saying:  

Clients and consultants prefer the `quick fix' approach to organizations. This approach assumes the consultant somehow magically knows what the client and client system require without organizational assessment and diagnosis. Moreover, it is this impatience and short sightedness that has led to the acceleration and popularity of more prescriptive approaches that promise more than they can possibly deliver. These approaches include executive coaching as practiced by many non-psychoanalytic consultants. Furthermore, these practices tend to focus on a part of or member of the system rather than the system as a whole and that contradicts the spirit of organizational diagnosis. One can imagine how this sort of orientation would leave consultants vulnerable to counterproductive collusions with the executive client…

Levinson blamed the psychological dynamics of leaders, more than business and economic factors, for the failure of large companies. In an article for the journal, American Psychologist, titled: “Why the behemoths fell: Psychological roots of corporate failure”, Levinson writes:

The failure of many American corporations to adapt to changed economic circumstances has become a major social concern. Many reasons have been alleged for those catastrophes. These allegations describe the ostensible reasons, but they do not explain adequately. The explanations are fundamentally psychological, significantly having to do with individual and organizational narcissism, unconscious recapitulation of family dynamics in the organization, exacerbating dependency, psychologically illogical organization structure and compensation schemes, inadequate management of change, and inability to recognize and manage cognitive complexity. To deal more effectively with such problems calls for greater psychological sophistication among boards of directors and senior executives.

That article was published in 1994. I wonder what Levinson would say today about captains of industry who are leading companies that are “too big to fail”. What would he say about the demise of some giant financial services companies over the past few years?

Much of what Levinson theorized and applied in his consulting has now become mainstream thinking among organizational psychologists and consultants. However, at the same time, much work still needs to be done to create psychologically safe cultures for employees and employers.

 

Does Employee Engagement Predict Market Value?

Evidence suggests that highly engaged employees are, as the Madison Performance Group would say, “brand ambassadors,” who contribute to selling the products and services of a company. Madison implies a causal link between employee engagement and market value, profit, and ROI. Their reasoning is that engaged employees speak positively about the products and services of their companies which increases sales. This thinking is represented in very concise form by the elegant infographic brought to my attention by a TLNT blog post and shown below.

I would introduce a couple of caveats to this picture. First, Madison’s business is “employee engagement and sales incentive marketing” so they have a self-serving interest in portraying a causal link between programs that increase engagement and bottom-line results. The other caveat is that although it makes sense, we should be very cautious in assuming a one-way causal link between happy employees and financial performance. It could be that high quality products and strong sales cause employee engagement, not the other way around. Or it could be that a third factor, such as reputation in the marketplace causes both high employee engagement (e.g., company attracts enthusiastic job applicants) and increased sales.  Prius owners probably recycle more than non-Prius owners; that doesn’t mean that buying a Prius causes people to recycle, or that recycling causes people to buy a Prius.

In any case, the infographic is a useful tool for having a conversation in your organization about workplace culture. Anyway you draw it, studies support the notion that employee engagement is probably a significant contributing factor to company performance.  My point is simply: don’t assume that if you energize workers you will energize sales, but also don’t assume that you can have a successful company over the long run without high levels of employee engagement.

Organizational Learning Tools

What are the tools of organizational learning? As I’ve stated in a previous blog post, a high performing organization needs a comprehensive approach to learning and a set of tools to facilitate learning. A training program, or an educational event, or even a CEO’s speech about the importance of learning is not enough. Continuous learning requires continuous learning interventions that encourage and facilitate knowledge acquisition and application to the workplace. An online leadership course is nice but it will have little to no effect if not integrated with a long-term learning and performance improvement plan and an organization-wide culture of learning.

One way to think about organizational learning is to consider who are the learners (hint: everyone) and what kinds of tools would help them learn.  Learners are: 1) individual employees/members/volunteers; 2) work teams; 3) the enterprise as a whole (company, nonprofit, government agency); and 4) the communities in which the organization lives and interacts. Types of tools that can be used for learning are: 1) assessments of level of functioning; 2) models of organizational systems; and 3) solutions to deficiencies in individual, team, organization, and community performance.

These categories of learners and tools translate into a four by three matrix of learners and learning tools. In the left-hand column are the targets of learning interventions and in the row across the top are the types of tools for learning. A true learning culture is constantly considering what tools to apply in order to enhance learning in every cell of this matrix. I’ve inserted examples of tools in the matrix below.

Learners	Assessments	Models	Solutions
Individuals	Interview questions to Identify causes of performance problems	Chart of the learning process in organizations	How to have a learning conversation between manager and learner
Teams	Survey of team readiness for high-performance	Table of characteristics of high-performing teams	How to apply action-learning to teams
Whole organization	Survey of employee engagement	Chart of process for achieving strategic goals	How to overcome barriers to organizational learning
Community	Survey of community's capacity to support organization	Chart of community pressures on organization	How to engage external community in mutual learning and change

 

Each tool in this matrix is intended to be used in a reflective environment. To ensure learning from each tool, participants must be willing to collect information and feedback and then have conversations with others about what the data mean to the organization and what can be learned from this data. It’s the feedback and reflection that results in learning, not simply the application of a tool. For example, assessing team readiness for high-performance isn’t useful unless the team looks at that assessment data, reflects on its meaning, and intentionally learns from the information. 

 

Ethical Leadership and Organizational Success

Dov Seidman argues that principled leadership is a determining factor in developing and sustaining a successful organization. In the new edition of his book, How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything, he reports the findings from his company’s survey of 36,280 employees in 18 countries. In an interview with Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of strategy+business, Seidman is quoted as saying:

We found that all the companies fit into one of three general categories. Companies in the first group, called “blind obedience,” rely on coercion, formal authority, policing, and top-down command-and-control leadership. The second group, “informed acquiescence” organizations, have clear-cut rules and policies, well-established procedures, and performance-based rewards and punishments — the standards of high-quality 20^th-century management. The third group, organizations with “self-governance,” are the most farsighted organizations, best positioned to thrive in an interdependent world. People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

Seidman suggests that "self-governance" organizations are the most successful over the long term. While I think the most they can really say, given the method of the research, is that employees who report that their companies are ethical and trusting and supportive of individual initiative are more likely to report that their companies are successful, I think the findings are thought-provoking.  

Seidman says that  “shared purpose and common values” are the keys to business success. Relying on rules and regulations (i.e., “blind obedience” and “informed acquiescence”) to ensure that people do the right thing doesn’t work. I see this in companies like Enron, BP, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase. They are in (past tense in Enron’s case) heavily regulated industries yet they ran into trouble when they, seemingly, were more intent on working around the rules than in doing the right thing. The rules and regulations, rather than encouraging the right behavior, had the opposite effect. Seidman says:

In a blind obedience system, there is a great deal of misconduct, compounded by the fact that it’s invisible; no one talks about it. In an informed acquiescence system, there is less misconduct, but people still tolerate it. In a self-governance system, when there is misconduct, people talk about it and consciously set up practices to address it.

In a live interview with Art Kleiner for the Carnegie Council, Seidman says managers tell their direct reports, “Just get it done, I don’t care how…Instead, we need an ethic of human endeavor that allows us to manifest our values and create value from values.” In other words, we need leaders who have a strong sense of right and wrong and are willing to let that ethic guide their words and their actions and organizations need to be willing to stand by these leaders.